JFWCM Chapter 11
by VolareChalk dust spiraled and fell in the afternoon sunlight. Yi Shang stared at the parabolic arc, her pupils slightly contracting. In her vision, each speck of dust trailed a comet-like glow, its trajectory transforming into a calculable function graph.
“Student in the third row by the window, please answer my question.”
The professor’s voice startled Yi Shang. She reflexively stood up, her knee knocking against the desk, causing the chalk box on the podium to tremble and float five centimeters into the air. Several students in the front row gasped, while some in the back had already raised their phones.
“It’s… it’s air convection.” Yi Shang pushed up her glasses, fluid dynamics formulas automatically appearing on the lenses. “The combined effect of the air conditioning and the Coriolis force…”
“Liar!” the sports committee member sitting near the podium shouted. “The centrifuge in the lab floated up like that last week too, and you were right there!”
The classroom erupted in an uproar. Yi Shang felt her eardrums buzzing, the murmuring voices amplified a hundredfold:
“…She’s been acting strange ever since that meteor shower night…”
“…Look at her cuffs… they’re glowing…”
“…I heard the observatory’s monitoring system recorded…”
“Quiet!” The professor slammed his hand heavily on the podium, and the floating chalk box fell to the ground. Yi Shang took the opportunity to sit down, discovering that her palms were covered in sweat. She reached into her lab coat pocket, but the orange-flavored paper star was gone, though a faint warmth remained on the inside of the fabric.
A rustling sound came from her right. Jiang Wan’yuan was using a red marker to draw stars on her desk, each stroke leaving a fleeting trail of golden light. Even more strangely, the chestnut hair she had dyed last week was gradually being tinged with a starry, blue-purple hue at the tips.
“Your hair…” Yi Shang lowered her voice.
Jiang Wan’yuan carelessly tossed her ponytail: “Cool, right? I found it like this this morning.” She suddenly leaned closer, strands of hair carrying the scent of sunlight brushing against Yi Shang’s cheek. “I’ll tell you a secret – I can make things bloom.”
She lightly touched the withered potted plant on the windowsill. Instantly, the brownish-yellow veins of the leaves took on a jade-green luster, the curled leaves unfurled, and a bud the size of a grain of rice even sprouted from the top of the stem. Yi Shang’s eyes widened as she saw microscopic images of plant cell reorganization projected onto her retina – a resolution far beyond the capabilities of human vision.
“Stop your supernatural behavior.” Yi Shang grabbed Jiang Wan’yuan’s wrist, but the moment they made contact, she saw a swirling nebula pattern flash in the other girl’s pupils. A certain resonance caused complex star trajectory equations to automatically appear on her glasses, identical to what she had seen on the observatory roof three days ago.
Jiang Wan’yuan suddenly gripped her hand in return: “You saw it too, didn’t you?” Her thumb drew a spiral in Yi Shang’s palm. “When our hands are like this…”
“Class, please pay attention to the projection.” The professor suddenly raised his voice. “This is an abnormal phenomenon captured by our school’s observatory last night.”
The moment the screen lit up, Yi Shang stiffened. The image showed the starry sky from the night they disappeared, but in the area that should have been empty in the Draco constellation, a huge double helix structure composed of celestial bodies had appeared. Even more terrifying, two bright spots in the center of the spiral were orbiting each other in a way that completely violated Kepler’s laws.
“Some theories suggest that this is a visual error caused by gravitational lensing.” The professor’s gaze swept across the classroom, lingering on Yi Shang’s face for a few seconds. “But another view is that this represents an interaction force in the universe that we have yet to understand.”
Yi Shang’s pen suddenly began writing on her notebook on its own, the ink forming a line of ancient text she had never learned. At the same time, a colorful star chart simultaneously appeared on Jiang Wan’yuan’s scratch paper. They exchanged glances and immediately recognized it as the complete map of the “star dance” that had surrounded them that night.
Outside the glass window of the classroom’s back door, Professor Yi’s figure flashed by. The instrument in his hand was emitting rapid beeping sounds, and two fluctuating curves on the screen were gradually converging.
When the bell rang, Jiang Wan’yuan suddenly dragged Yi Shang toward the restroom at the end of the hallway. After locking the door, she lifted the hem of her uniform – a double helix mark identical to the one in the astronomical photograph floated on her waist, emitting a faint blue light.
“Where’s yours?” Jiang Wan’yuan asked breathlessly. “I bet you have one too.”
Yi Shang hesitated and rolled up her left sleeve. On the inside of her elbow, a similar mark was slowly pulsating beneath her skin. When the two marks were less than ten centimeters apart, the fluorescent lights in the restroom suddenly flickered, and the water in the pipes began to flow backward.
“This isn’t something that science can explain…” Yi Shang’s voice trembled slightly.
But Jiang Wan’yuan laughed: “Silly, this wasn’t science to begin with.” She dipped her finger in water and drew a constellation symbol on the mirror. “It’s something older than science.”
Footsteps echoed in the hallway, and the two hurriedly pulled down their clothes. The door of one of the stalls swung open on its own, locking with a click. Yi Shang was surprised to find that she hadn’t touched the lock, while Jiang Wan’yuan was staring blankly at her glowing fingertips.
“Found you.” A note was slipped under the stall door, printed with cold, hard lettering: “8 PM tonight, observatory basement. Don’t tell anyone. – Professor E.”
The faucet suddenly burst open, the spray of water solidifying into ice crystals in the air. Amidst the swirling diamond dust, Yi Shang saw the formula she had just drawn on the mirror, perfectly piecing together with Jiang Wan’yuan’s graffiti to form a complete ancient star chart.
Outside the window, a blue-purple petal floated down onto the windowsill, a flower that the pothos plant should have never been able to bloom.
As Jiang Wan’yuan drew the last star on the desk with a highlighter, she suddenly clutched her chest and crouched down. Nebulae churned in her pupils, and fine ice crystals formed in her breath, spreading frost flowers across the tiled floor.
“Don’t touch me!” She pushed away Yi Shang, who was trying to help her up, and arcs of electricity crackled in the air from her fingertips. The ancient star chart on the mirror suddenly began to rotate, the constellation symbols formed from water stains breaking away from the mirror and floating around them, forming a three-dimensional projection.
Yi Shang’s glasses shattered with spiderweb-like cracks. Through the broken lenses, she saw that each constellation symbol corresponded to an energy node within Jiang Wan’yuan’s body. When her gaze locked onto the Antares location, her body reacted before her mind – grabbing a bottle of hand sanitizer and smashing it against the fire alarm.
The moment the piercing alarm sounded, the nebulae in Jiang Wan’yuan’s eyes abruptly disappeared. In the curtain of water unleashed by the sprinkler system, the floating constellation symbols transformed into blue particles of light that merged into the water flow, turning the entire space into a flowing galaxy.
“You…” Jiang Wan’yuan slumped to the ground, looking at her hands. “I felt like I turned into someone else just now.”
Yi Shang tore off her soaked lab coat, revealing the glowing mark on the inside of her left arm. The previously still double helix was now slowly rotating, resonating with the mark on Jiang Wan’yuan’s waist. The rain curtain around them suddenly froze, countless suspended water droplets refracting the entrance to the basement – which wasn’t a path to the observatory at all, but a reflection tunnel mirrored in the accumulated water.
“Quantum tunneling.” Yi Shang brushed the wet hair from her eyes. “The subject my father researched…” She suddenly remembered accidentally entering the laboratory when she was twelve and seeing a similar holographic projection. Her father had furiously smashed all the data disks back then, and it was the first time he had ever yelled at her.
Jiang Wan’yuan’s electronic watch suddenly popped up a holographic map, showing that they were currently one hundred and twenty meters underground, beneath the library. Even more strangely, a double helix identical to the marks on their bodies appeared on the surface, and the hands were spinning counterclockwise wildly.
“We’re not in real space anymore.” Jiang Wan’yuan tore off the watch strap, the electronic components melting into liquid metal in her palm. “This is a memory maze, constructed by your father using the starlight data from that night…” She paused, a look of vicissitude that didn’t belong to her age flashing in her eyes. “Just like how it trapped my parents twenty years ago.”
Yi Shang’s temples throbbed, and fragments of broken memories suddenly flooded in – the laboratory fire on her fifth birthday, the star-shaped badge on her mother’s white research coat, and the short-haired girl sleeping in the glass pod…
The water curtain was suddenly torn apart, and Professor Yi’s figure walked out from the fluctuating space. The metal box in his hand was seeping starlight, and the star chart on the lid perfectly matched their marks.
“You shouldn’t have awakened it.” Beneath his lab coat, mechanical prosthetics were revealed, with glowing meteorite fragments embedded in the joints. “Twenty years ago, Jiang Wan’yuan’s parents discovered the truth about the starlight symbiote, which is why…”
The entire building suddenly trembled violently, and a defense program appeared on Yi Shang’s irises. When she instinctively stood in front of Jiang Wan’yuan, the file number of her mother’s top-secret laboratory file appeared on the floor – numbers she had copied since childhood but never understood, now being recombined into the activation code for an annihilation program.
Binary star charts danced on Yi Shang’s retina, the numerical code left behind by her mother reorganizing between her neural synapses. Just as the annihilation program was about to complete compilation, she suddenly bit the tip of her tongue – the taste of blood mixed with the melody of Bach blossoming in her mouth, the pain anchoring her consciousness in the gap between reality and data.
“Not delete…” Her bloodstained fingertip traced the trajectory of π in the air, “Overwrite!”
The mark on Jiang Wan’yuan’s waist suddenly blazed as brightly as a supernova explosion. Memory fragments that had been sealed by Professor Yi gushed out from the ground: in the laboratory twenty years ago, four figures in white coats were adjusting the quantum entanglement chamber. A young Yi Shang was curled up in the observation room, holding a short-haired girl in her arms – it was five-year-old Jiang Wan’yuan, and they wore ribbons with the same starry sky pattern on their wrists.
“So we’re the original starlight bodies.” Jiang Wan’yuan’s pupils split into a compound eye structure, each lens reflecting the truth from a different dimension. “Your father extracted our quantum states to create the star chart key.”
The meteorite fragments on Professor Yi’s mechanical arm began to disintegrate. He staggered and leaned against the wall, revealing flickering circuits beneath the artificial skin: “The accident back then wasn’t an accident… Your mother’s consciousness was trapped in…”
The entire memory maze suddenly began to collapse. Yi Shang grabbed Jiang Wan’yuan’s hand, and the powerful light erupting from the intersection of their marks revealed a binary star system model – they were never experimental subjects, but living anchor points that maintained the stability of the membrane of reality.
“It’s time to dance.” Jiang Wan’yuan suddenly smiled, the electricity dancing between her short hair outlining the shape of a Klein bottle. Yi Shang’s lab coat transformed into stardust in the energy field, revealing the eleven-dimensional string theory equation floating on her back.
When Professor Yi’s mechanical prosthetics were completely vaporized, they saw the sea of truth in four-dimensional space: in the waves of countless parallel universes, the mothers in each world pressed the termination button in front of the glass pod. In the fire twenty years ago, what was truly destroyed was the sinister plan to transform children into energy containers.
“It’s time for the curtain call.” Yi Shang pressed her bloodstained tongue against Jiang Wan’yuan’s forehead. The moment the observer effect was activated, the starlight bodies in all parallel universes performed a kissing action simultaneously – the final instruction that the mothers had hidden in the genetic code.
The chocolate wrapper on the top floor of the observatory suddenly burst into flames, revealing a nanochip hidden in the foil layer. Professor Zhang inserted it into the reader with trembling hands, and the holographic projection erupted with the truth that had been deleted twenty years ago: two mothers embracing and activating the self-destruct program, behind them, children sleeping peacefully in protective pods.
Three months later, at the school’s anniversary celebration, a cross-departmental exhibition between the physics and art departments featured a installation art called “Binary Star System,” which caused a sensation. In a maze composed of countless mirrors, visitors could hear conversations that seemed both near and far:
“Do you believe in magic?”
“I believe in unwritten laws of physics.”
When a certain girl simultaneously touches two opposite mirrors, she will see a silhouette of a girl made of starlight walk out of the mirror. The water stains they leave behind will slowly condense into sugar paper stars, one of which is written on with a lab label:
Proof of energy conservation:
1. Heat released during embrace = 46.9kJ
2. Heat of vaporization of tears = 2450J/g
3. Entropy reduction caused by longing = ∞