“Shuhe, if this is the superposition state you were talking about, then I wish I could remain trapped in this superposed space with you forever, where every possibility, every romantic possibility, is happening at the same time.” Lu Chenjue whispered softly, his low, hoarse voice filled with a primal, fierce affection—and an immeasurable tenderness.
Shen Shuhe did not pull his hand away. He felt the warmth from Lu Chenjue’s palm flowing into his own, and his refined face flushed faintly beneath the warm golden light. He gently tightened his fingers, returning the other man’s steady grip. The corners of his lips curved into a breathtaking smile, carrying boundless indulgence and tenderness. “Chen-jue, do you know that among the tens of thousands of possibilities in quantum mechanics, drinking this cup of ginger tea together after the storm is the state with the most stable and comforting energy?”
The torrential autumn rain in Beijing had retreated into the distance, giving way to the dry winds of early winter. They swept across the sky above the central Zhongguancun district, turning it a murky gray. The ginkgo trees lining both sides of the road to the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences shed their leaves in a rustling cascade, spreading a brittle golden carpet across the freezing asphalt. Outside, the capital’s rhythm of life continued rushing by beneath a hazy veil of mist. But inside Lu Chenjue’s office, time seemed to have frozen completely.
The room was submerged in a dim, half-lit gloom. The curtains were drawn tightly shut, leaving only a narrow gap through which the pale rays of the setting sun entered, shining directly onto the enormous glass board standing in the middle of the room. Across its surface, complex mathematical equations written in black and red marker intertwined like a chaotic spiderweb. They represented the entirety of Lu Chenjue’s research into the wave function of the early universe, the work he had poured his heart into for the past three years—a painstaking attempt to establish a complete model describing the state of all things before the Big Bang in the language of quantum mechanics.
Yet the peer-review letter sent two days earlier by the editorial board of the prestigious journal *Physical Review Letters* had shattered the steadfast confidence he had maintained for so long. The anonymous reviewer, one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists, had identified a fatal flaw: Lu Chenjue’s model was missing a decisive boundary parameter needed to stabilize the wave function in configuration space. Without that parameter, the entire elegant system of equations was nothing more than a mathematical castle built on sand, an illusory state that would collapse in on itself before it could ever touch physical reality.
Lu Chenjue sat motionless in his leather chair, his hands clasped tightly beneath his chin, red veins streaking his eyes from lack of sleep. He had locked himself in the room for the past forty-eight hours, severing all contact with the outside world. His cell phone lay facedown on the wooden desk, occasionally vibrating through long, lonely bursts before falling silent again. Half-finished paper cups of coffee stood in a long row across the tabletop, the black liquid inside long gone cold and covered with a thin film. For a theoretical physicist, realizing that one’s work contained a fracture was like a believer discovering that the god he had worshiped for years was nothing more than a lifeless clay statue. His mathematical faith was trembling violently, and in this silent emptiness, he felt like an elementary particle isolated completely within an infinitely deep potential well, unable to find any tunneling probability that might let him escape.
At the same time, in the ancient-texts archive of the Ancient Texts Library at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shen Shuhe stood before a ceiling-high shelf made of nanmu wood. The ancient books here always carried a distinctive scent of xuan paper, sandalwood, and the solemn fragrance of time itself. Usually, this silence brought him a sense of peaceful ease. But today, his mind could not focus on the woodblock-printed lines from the Song dynasty in front of him.