Chapter 52: The Intent Behind 59.3 Seconds

At six o'clock in the morning, the museum lobby was draped in a pale golden mist. The cleaning lady's broom had just reached the third floor tile when Chen Cezhan's voice burst through the intercom: "All exhibition department members, gather in the main hall in ten minutes."

Shen Mo was helping Su Wangying straighten her cuff—the pale blue bruise on the back of her neck had not yet faded, looking like a discolored ribbon.

Hearing the broadcast, Su Wangying started to stand up, but her wrist was gently caught.

His thumb pressed against her wrist bone, the warmth seeping through his medical rubber gloves: "Wait until I finish."

"The electroencephalogram shows that every time you interrupt an action, your alpha wave peak is twenty-seven percent higher than usual." Shen Mo pulled a printout from his lab coat pocket, the jagged spikes on the waveform resembling a small sword. "The 0.7-Hertz coupled wave is the reverberation trying to synchronize with your brain frequency, but it gets pushed back by your conscious will every single time." His Adam's apple bobbed, and his voice dropped lower, "It didn't choose you to be its vessel; it's you..."

"I hijacked its host privileges." Su Wangying finished for him, her fingertips lightly brushing over the sharpest peak on the waveform.

She hadn't slept last night, faint blue shadows lingering beneath her eyes, yet her smile remained clear and bright, "Just like Zhou Xiaotang said at the very end—'Your shoelaces are tied wrong.' No matter how strong an obsession is, it's still a human thing."

The intercom rang again, Chen Cezhan's cough crackling harshly through the current.

Shen Mo tugged at her cuff: "Go deal with Old Chen first. Later, I'll show you Xiao Wu's new discovery."

Seven or eight curators had already gathered in the exhibition hall. Chen Cezhan stood in front of a display case, his suit collar crooked, evidently having thrown on his clothes and rushed right over.

He clutched a testing report in his hand, the corners of the paper crumpled from his grip: "The compositional test results for the thirteen exhibits are out. No abnormalities."

An audible gasp rippled through the crowd.

Those frost-like fragments that had fallen in flurries early yesterday morning, those winding cracks across the glass display cases, seemed like nothing more than a collective hallucination.

"So I've decided," Chen Cezhan raised his voice, the eyes behind his glasses as red as if he had pulled an all-nighter, "at three o'clock this afternoon, the exhibition will reopen."

"Fear shouldn't triumph over memory. These old artifacts..."

"Director Chen." Xiao Wu's voice drifted from the back door of the exhibition hall.

He was hugging a laptop, his hoodie drawstring dangling down his neck, his hair sticking up like a tuft of tangled grass, "You'd better take a look at this first."

The air conditioning in the server room hummed overhead. Xiao Wu's mouse cursor hovered over a "Unnamed File," his knuckles pale and cyan from pressing too hard: "At seventeen minutes past five this morning, the server automatically generated an encrypted package."

"I cracked it three times. The first two times it popped up 'Insufficient Access Privileges,' and the third time..." He right-clicked, and thirteen audio files rolled out like a string of pearls, "Each segment is applause in a different language—French, Arabic, Min Nan... and the duration is uniformly fifty-nine point three seconds."

Shen Mo leaned closer to the screen, the jagged lines on the audio waveform reminding him of Su Wangying's EEG report.

Xiao Wu brought up the surveillance records. On the green timeline, the silent periods of each speaker were flashing red dots: "These recordings recorded themselves." His Adam's apple moved, "Just like... waiting for someone to applaud for a full minute."

Su Wangying's fingers rested lightly on the edge of the desk, her fingernails glowing an unhealthy white: "Zhou Xiaotang's curtain call was originally supposed to involve spinning thirteen times and taking one complete bow." When she raised her head, the light from outside swept across the corner of her eye, "Sixty seconds in a minute, thirteen spins—all of them are the 'perfect increments' of a ritual."

"Yet I stopped at the twelfth and a half spin, zero point seven seconds..."

"Which broke the gap of perfection." Shen Mo picked up right away, his knuckles pressing against his chin—his habitual gesture when deep in thought, "The reverberation requires a closed-loop ritual, but your imperfection jammed it."

When the door to the server room was knocked upon, Director Lin was squeezing in, carrying an old-fashioned camera.

His dark circles were even heavier than Xiao Wu's, the lens cap spinning rapidly in his hand: "Look at this."

When the video footage popped up, Su Wangying abruptly gripped Shen Mo's wrist.

Her self in the surveillance footage was still spinning; the pause at the twelfth and a half spin pierced into the scene like a thorn, yet the phantom that should have dissipated did not vanish.

It faded into a translucent grayish-white, drifted over to sit in the front row of the audience, and folded its hands over its knees, truly resembling an ordinary spectator.

"What's even more eerie is this." Director Lin brought up his photo album, his sliding fingertips trembling.

Every photo showed an empty stage, a blurred silhouette in the center, and the seats below filled with shadow-like people.

The shooting times were all in the small hours of the morning after the museum closed. "I asked the people who visited yesterday, and eight out of ten had this extra picture in their phones." He looked up, his eyes behind his lenses chillingly bright, "They said... they always felt the audience in the photo was waiting for something."

The museum's old elevator gave a "ding," and Old Cheng's figure appeared at the end of the corridor.

He leaned heavily on a jujube-wood cane, his back severely hunched, yet he walked extremely slowly, every step as if measuring the passage of years.

When Su Wangying went to meet him, he pulled something pitch-black from his bosom—it was an old stage curtain rope, with dark red rust still staining the knot.

"The mechanism that locked the door back then was bolted from the outside by someone." Old Cheng's voice sounded like sandpaper scraping against an iron plate, his withered fingers tracing the ligature marks on the curtain rope, "When Xiaotang finished her last spin, the door could no longer be opened."

"Before she died, she clutched this rope and said, 'Mom, your shoelaces are tied wrong'..." He loosened his grip, and the curtain rope dropped into Su Wangying's palm, "Some curtain calls are farewells, not reincarnations."

"Little Su, don't let it trap you."

When Shen Mo adjusted the microscope in the dissection room, the light from outside was creeping onto the operating table.

In front of him sat a glass specimen box containing tissue slices from the visitor yesterday who claimed he "saw the audience applauding."

In the synaptic clefts within the eyepiece floated extremely fine frost-like crystals, arranged in a 0.7-second waveform—perfectly overlapping with Xiao Wu's audio and Su Wangying's EEG.

"It didn't win, and neither did we." He heard the door being pushed open, knowing without turning around that it was Su Wangying.

She carried the scent of the museum's aged timber, mixed with the bitter trace of disinfectant, "It learned 'unfinished,' and we have also learned... that some things cannot be completely ended."

Su Wangying walked up to his side, her fingertips lightly touching the specimen box.

Under her touch, the crystals emitted a pale blue glow, remarkably resembling the shattered frost flakes on the display case from last night. "Zhou Xiaotang's phantom is sitting in the audience now." She gazed out the window where the exterior glass wall of the museum indeed reflected the blurred outlines of a crowd, "Director Lin said a visitor mentioned that the audience in the photo was 'waiting for the curtain call.'"

Shen Mo followed her gaze.

The silhouette on the glass suddenly moved, the dancer in the center raising her hand and pressing it gently against her chest.

Morning light pierced through the glass, casting dappled spots of light onto the back of her hand, strikingly similar to the untied shoelace from the display case last night, hanging limply yet swaying freely.

"It saw." Su Wangying said softly.

Shen Mo grasped her hand.

The scalpel still rested on the operating table, gleaming with a cold, pale light.

Yet what he wished to hold onto most at this moment was this pair of warm, trembling, breakable, imperfect hands—for these were the sharpest weapons against all reverberations.

The applause outside was still sounding.

This time, it was not a perfect minute, nor a thirteen-spin reincarnation, but fifty-nine point three seconds of the unfinished, the pause at the twelfth and a half spin, someone finally learning how to say at the moment of the curtain call: I understand.