Chapters
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Start of Summer Around four in the afternoon. Wei Zhiheng stood before the security door of Unit 3, Building 6, Room 601 in the Faculty Housing. His left fingers hooked around a plastic bag containing freshly pressed rice noodles bought at the school gate, the scent of sour bamboo shoots seeping through the thin film. His right hand gripped a key, the metal teeth digging into his palm, pressing against a purpura that had yet to fade. A scent drifted from the gap beneath the door: first, the chemical tang…-
121.6 K • Ongoing
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After Grain Rain The geography lesson reached the Peru Current. The projector cast blue arrows onto the screen, the light piercingly bright. Wei Zhiheng sat in the penultimate row, a fixed dark shadow in the upper right of his vision—a retinal hemorrhage point, the size of a needle tip, which had appeared three days ago. He squinted; the ocean current arrows on the blackboard distorted at the edge of the shadow, looking like exudate from a ruptured blood vessel. The arrows were supposed to point from…
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121.6 K • Ongoing
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Before Grain Rain When the final echoes of the campus curfew bell were cut off by the iron gate, Wei Zhiheng was pressing the second knuckle of his finger against the sound-activated light switch in the third-floor corridor of Changgu Building. The plastic panel had a crack in it, layered with years of dust, and a frost-like powder rubbed off onto his fingertip, embedding itself dryly under his nail. The light hummed with an electrical overload as it flickered on, the vibrating tungsten filament…
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121.6 K • Ongoing
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After Pure Brightness The tail end of the school bell was still rusting in the stairwell. Wei Zhiheng stood behind the security bars of the third-floor corridor, watching the crowd below pour out of the square’s various exits. He counted seven seconds from the time the bell rang until now. His heart hammered to pump blood upward, and his ears were filled with the sound of blood flow, like an underground river changing its course. He turned toward the stairs, his right hand gripping the railing. The…
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121.6 K • Ongoing
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summer solstice Huang Jinye pushed open the door of the art classroom on the third floor of Changgu Tower.The door shaft was short of oil, causing a dry groan that echoed in the corridor.He stepped over the threshold with his right knee first, and felt a sharp pain in the joint cavity. The accumulated water was squeezed to the edge of the meniscus, causing him to hold on to the door frame and dig into the peeling green paint with his fingers. Someone has been in the classroom.Wei Zhiheng's pine easel,…
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121.6 K • Ongoing
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Xiaoman morning. Wei Mingyuan squatted in the middle of the living room in Building 601, Building 6, Teachers' Family Building.The kneecaps made a dry scraping sound, the wood crackled.There was a crack on the side of the index finger of his right hand, oozing with yellow water. It was caused when he was planing the wooden frame the day before yesterday.The liquid stained the pine frame, mixed with the paint, and formed a transparent scab. The last canvas of "Skylight" is spread out in front of…
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121.6 K • Ongoing
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Qingming The water level that rattled the skylights rose. Huang Jinye squatted on the fourth raised limestone.When the right knee is bent, there is no customary gurgling sound in the joint cavity.The water is stagnant, as if frozen by low temperatures.He paused and adjusted his center of gravity, placing the weight on his left leg and his right knee hanging in the air.There were cries from above the river bank. Feminine, repressed, torn apart by the mountain wind.Huang Jinye's fingers stopped in…
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121.6 K • Ongoing
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Before Pure Brightness It was nearly nine-thirty. On the third floor of the Miluo Building, in the Grade 11, Class 3 classroom, the ceiling fan whirled overhead. Its bearings lacked oil, emitting a rhythmic creak with every rotation. The breeze brushed past Wei Zhiheng’s nape, carrying away a sliver of heat, but his school uniform shirt was already soaked. It clung to his shoulder blades, the fabric heavy and saturated with sweat, sticking to his skin. He gripped a 2B pencil in his right hand. The…
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121.6 K • Ongoing
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equinox Huang Jinye got up from the camp bed.The canvas rebounded after the weight was removed, and the spring let out a dull groan that lasted for three seconds before going still.He didn't look at Wei Zhiheng on the bed. Instead, he bent down and pulled out the bamboo mat from under the bed. Straw woven, hard, dark brown strips, broken in three places on the edges, tied with red rope.There is a human-shaped depression on the mat surface, and the shoulder blades and pelvis form a smooth, deep pit with…
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121.6 K • Ongoing
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Waking of Insects 6:00.The thermometer shows -2℃. The inside of the floor-to-ceiling windows of the studio on the third floor of the Huang family villa is covered with ice flowers.The ice grows upward from the lower corner of the window pane, bifurcating in a hexagonal shape, with intertwined branches, cutting the Green Cen Mountain outside the window into pieces.The sun penetrates the ice and casts a pale grid on the ground, without any temperature. There's ice on the palette. The remaining pigments…
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121.6 K • Ongoing
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