Autumn afternoon sunlight streamed through the old glass windows, spilling across the mottled wooden tables in National Taiwan University's Physics Department lecture hall. The air was thick with chalk dust and the distinctive smell of adolescent sweat.
The man at the front was around thirty-five. He wore a neatly trimmed buzz cut and a dark gray shirt washed pale with age, its sleeves folded precisely twice. He was Chen Po-han, an associate professor in the Department of Applied Physics and Materials Science, famous across campus for his rigor, his cutting tongue, and his near-fanatical zero tolerance for “pseudoscience.”
“…So, at its core, humanity’s fear of the unknown is an evolutionary flaw.”
Chen Po-han didn’t look at his notes. One hand was in his pocket while the other held a laser pointer, its red dot drawing a razor-sharp line across the blackboard behind him.
“In ancient times, our ancestors heard the wind in the darkness and guessed it was a wild beast, so they ran and survived. That gene for seeing threats in shadows is etched into our DNA. So when modern people once again encounter a phenomenon they can’t immediately explain, the amygdala takes over from reason, forcibly writing a script for random events and turning them into ghosts and gods, feng shui, and…”
He turned around. With a whiteboard marker, he pressed two bold characters onto the blackboard:
“The Curse.”
A ripple of laughter rose from the students.
“Professor, don’t be so sure!” shouted a male student in the third row who was always looking for an argument. “Then what about the videotape from The Seven-Night Curse? Anyone who watches it dies seven days later. It’s one of the biggest urban legends out there! Is that the amygdala acting up too?”
The classroom erupted in laughter.
Chen Po-han let out a cold snort, the corner of his mouth curling into a distinctly intimidating smile. He walked to the edge of the lectern and picked up a cup of Americano that had gone completely cold.
“The Seven-Night Curse? What’s the physical principle behind Sadako Yamamura crawling out of a television? Magnetic-field interference in the picture tube, or a high-voltage ion beam?” Chen Po-han swept his gaze across the room, his eyes as sharp as knives. “If a curse like that really existed, I’d recommend that every country’s defense ministry immediately abandon nuclear weapons and mass-produce videotapes to launch at enemy nations instead. It would save time, protect the environment, and leave no radioactive residue.”
The laughter grew louder. The students loved listening to this stubborn professor strip every ghost story and supernatural legend bare with the most vicious scientific logic.
A male student sitting in the middle rows raised his hand, his tone provocative. “Professor, then how do you explain ghost photos? Lots of people take pictures of empty places and end up with blurry human figures. Some cameras even capture facial features that shouldn’t be there. That can’t be an amygdala problem, can it? Those are physical phenomena captured by the lens!”
Chen Po-han turned around, and the whiteboard marker quickly sketched an optical path diagram across the blackboard.
“Ghost photos?” Chen Po-han sneered, the tip of his marker outlining a simple lens structure. “In the overwhelming majority of cases, it’s lens flare caused by the angle of incoming light, or image noise produced by the sensor in low-light conditions. The brain automatically fills in the gaps, forcibly categorizing meaningless geometric shapes as familiar faces. That’s a visual advantage strengthened by human evolution for predator detection. What you’re seeing isn’t a ghost. It’s the result of your brain overinterpreting things to confirm that you’re safe.”
He gave the student no chance to catch his breath before pointing at another girl wearing glasses. “You. What do you have to say?”
“Professor…what about the elevator ghost? A lot of buildings have floor-skipping, or you press a floor and the elevator stops at one that doesn’t exist…”
“That’s either a logic error in the elevator’s control system or a sensor failure.” Chen Po-han’s tone was decisive. “When the electromechanical modules age and cause signal delays in the logic circuits, random stops occur. Blaming a problem a maintenance engineer can solve on a ghost isn’t merely an insult to science. It’s disrespectful to the expertise of the people who maintain electromechanical systems.”
The classroom fell briefly silent. Chen Po-han scanned the room, and wherever his eyes landed, students lowered their heads to avoid his sharp gaze. His teaching style had never been about imparting knowledge. It was about using hard logic to shatter his students’ emotional perceptions.
“Class,” Chen Po-han said, his voice dropping into a uniquely oppressive register, “if you’re eager to encounter the mysterious, the Physics Department section of the library has books on quantum entanglement and spacetime singularities. They’re stranger and more unbelievable than the ghost stories you see on online forums—and most importantly, they’re supported by mathematical models.”
He tossed the whiteboard marker into its holder and turned toward the lectern, his movements smooth and precise.
“But if all you want to do in my class is discuss that shoddily made superstition…I suggest you turn your textbooks to the next chapter and read about the second law of thermodynamics. The universe trends toward disorder and entropy increase. Phenomena like ghosts and curses, which forcibly maintain a specific form while interfering with reality, violate conservation of energy at a fundamental level. Unless you can produce experimental data consistent with the laws of physics, then all of this…”
He drew a huge red X across the blackboard with a heavy stroke.
“Is complete nonsense.”
And yet, in a corner toward the back of the classroom, a female student in a plain knit sweater sat quietly. Her name was Lin Yu-ching. For the two months since the semester began, she had always sat there in silence, hardly ever speaking.
Now, as the entire room erupted in laughter, Lin Yu-ching slowly lowered her eyes. Her face looked pale in the shadows, and the fingers gripping her pen trembled faintly, her knuckles whitening.
She wasn’t laughing. She had thought of the old home village…the ancient settlement almost impossible to find on a map, surrounded by mountains, and the curse hanging over them like the Sword of Damocles—the one her elders had spoken of from the time she was little.
“All right, that’s it for today. Your assignment is to turn in a calculation report on quantum tunneling. Class dismissed.”
When the dismissal bell rang, the students surged out of the classroom like a tide. Lin Yu-ching silently packed her notebook into her backpack and hurried from her seat. She didn’t go anywhere near the lectern from beginning to end. She was only a freshman, and to her, Chen Po-han was nothing more than a university professor far removed from her world, arrogantly rational about everything in it.
On the noisy sidewalk, Lin Yu-ching instinctively pulled her coat zipper all the way up, as though that could block the omnipresent eyes around her. She took out her phone and lit up the screen. It displayed a minimalist countdown app: against a stark black background, bright red numbers pulsed in the center: [Time until 25th birthday: 6 years, 172 days, 14 hours remaining].
Her fingertips trembled lightly against the cold glass. Ever since she had moved to Taipei for college, those numbers had been like an invisible countdown, gnawing at her nerves every waking moment. She opened her contacts and looked at the text message from her mother…There was no greeting, no concern, only one brief, icy reminder: “Don’t even think about staying in Taipei, and don’t go telling other people about the village’s secrets.”
Lin Yu-ching took a deep breath and clenched the phone tightly in her palm. She looked up at the bustling streets of Taipei in the distance. Traffic flowed endlessly, and everyone was running toward a future of their own, as if tomorrow, next year, and even ten years from now were all guaranteed.
But she knew those brilliant futures did not belong to her. She could only spend these few years in a brief escape, before eventually facing reality when the countdown ended. In the shadow of that mountain village forgotten by the map, her life had been sentenced to death long ago—on that night when her cursed fate was decreed.
Just as she stood at the school entrance, dazed, a warm hand suddenly patted her shoulder.
“Yu-ching! What are you spacing out for? Didn’t we agree to go eat that cheap Italian place in the alley this evening?” Her roommate Fen came over with a bright smile, Ling linked around her arm.
Lin Yu-ching snapped back to reality and hurriedly shoved her phone into her pocket, forcing out a faint smile. “Sorry. I got so lost in thought…”
“Come on, come on. If you keep stressing like this, you’ll lose a whole pound in Taipei from hunger before you even make it back to the old home village.” Ling grabbed her arm without giving her a choice, laughing as she pulled her toward the restaurant outside the school gates.
They sat in a brightly lit little restaurant filled with the aroma of food, surrounded by the overlapping laughter of college students. Fen and Ling eagerly shared a plate of french fries, ordered Lin Yu-ching her favorite pumpkin bisque, and even thoughtfully wiped down her utensils for her.
Looking at these two new friends who treated her with genuine warmth and no ulterior motives, listening to them excitedly plan a trip to Yangmingshan to see the night view next month and discuss where they would find jobs over winter break, Lin Yu-ching felt not relaxed but an icy, bone-deep sorrow rising inside her.
They were so wonderful. Taipei was so wonderful. Every streetlamp, every burst of laughter, every seemingly distant yet ordinary tomorrow here was a scene she would use every ounce of her strength—and even give her life—to hold on to.
Steam from the bisque fogged her glasses. Lin Yu-ching lowered her head and secretly wiped away a tear sliding from the corner of her eye, burying herself in the brief, warm clamor of everyday life. The more deeply she felt her friends’ warmth, the more desperate and unwilling she became when she thought of the fate waiting deep in the mountains of Nantou.
Late that night, the department building gradually fell quiet.
A warm desk lamp glowed in Chen Po-han’s research office. Several thick original editions of materials mechanics textbooks lay scattered across the desk beside a laptop running simulation software.
Knock knock.
The door opened immediately afterward. The department’s teaching assistant came in carrying a steaming cup of black coffee and set it beside Chen Po-han.
“Brother Chen, you’re still grading midterms? It’s almost eleven.” The teaching assistant pulled out a chair and sat down, casually picking up a student’s assignment from the desk and flipping through it. “Your ‘superstition-busting class’ fried those freshmen again this afternoon. People are still laughing about it on the department message board. They’re calling you the strongest exorcist in the Physics Department on Earth.”
Chen Po-han didn’t look up. His eyes remained fixed on the fluctuating data curves on the screen as he lifted the coffee and took a sip.
“The essence of science is questioning. If you don’t even have the capacity for that level of logical reasoning, why study physics?” Chen Po-han’s tone was flat. Then he abruptly changed subjects. “Have this semester’s lab-equipment purchase order been approved? The factory reported that the high-precision temperature sensors in this batch still have a sensitivity error. I’m going to the off-campus warehouse tomorrow afternoon to inspect the delivery myself.”
“Sure. I’ll clear your schedule.” The teaching assistant stood to leave, but at the door, he suddenly remembered something and turned back with a grin. “By the way, Brother Chen, you really don’t plan to go hiking this weekend to relax? I heard the maple leaves around Yangmingshan are looking pretty good lately. You’re always locking yourself in the research office. Be careful—you might not get beaten by the laws of physics, but cholesterol could take you out first.”
“I already have plans for the weekend,” Chen Po-han said mildly. “I need to finish revising the first draft of my paper for next month’s conference in Germany.”
The teaching assistant shook his head helplessly. As he reached the door, he suddenly remembered something else, turned back, and teased him with a smile. “Right, you’re a science fanatic. I should’ve gotten used to it by now. By the way, there’s that public group prayer at the president’s office next Monday morning. You’re not interested in going to Longshan Temple to burn incense with the president either, are you? I heard they even hired a renowned ritual master this time to pray for the university’s good fortune. The public relations office is strongly recommending that professors from the key departments attend.”
Chen Po-han didn’t even lift his head. His gaze remained locked on the graph of the data curves, his fingers tapping the keyboard with crisp, hard clicks.
“If praying to the gods and fortune-telling could improve the efficiency of the university’s budget allocation by ten percent, I’d personally carry the altar table over and kneel,” he said coldly. “If not, then make this kind of publicity stunt that wastes public time disappear from my calendar.”
The teaching assistant gave a wry laugh, shrugged, and left, pulling the door shut behind him.
Silence returned to the research office. Chen Po-han shut off his laptop and walked to the window. The night was deep, and the faint fragrance of osmanthus drifted into the room from the campus outside. He looked at his reflection in the glass, his expression calm and resolute.
His life was like the physics he studied, demanding purity, structure, and order. Those illogical tales of ghosts and gods and that blind fear were nothing more than impurities left behind by human civilization, not yet fully evolved out of the darkness.
At least, in this moment, he firmly believed that to be true.