The atmosphere in Lingshu Hall today differed from ordinary days. Beyond the familiar fragrance of mugwort, the air carried the cool, aseptic scent of an operating theater, layered with a gravity of concentrated focus. This was no routine consultation, but a meticulously prepared live demonstration and collaborative experiment. The meridian charts usually hanging on the walls had been temporarily removed, replaced by movable lead-colored curtains that cleanly bisected the space into treatment and observation areas. The curtain edges were embedded with fine copper mesh, connected to the grounding grid beneath the floorboards, forming a crude yet effective electromagnetic shield. The lighting had been recalibrated to 4000 K—bright enough to avoid interfering with monitor readings, yet soft enough to lend the silver needles a gentle luster on camera. Even the most spirited apprentices had been required to change into soft-soled shoes; their footsteps fell upon the aged elm floorboards with only the faintest *ch-ch* sound, like silkworms devouring mulberry leaves, or branches snapping in a snowy night. The entire clinic seemed pressed into silence by an invisible hand, leaving only the alternating rhythm of heartbeat and breath resonating within chest cavities.
Xiuxiu wore pale blue surgical scrubs, her long hair secured tightly beneath a surgical cap, revealing only a pair of eyes as tranquil as still water. She stood beside the treatment bed. The patient was no ordinary client, but a volunteer from the Institute of Technology—a sophomore from the Applied Physics department named Zhou Yu, twenty-two years old, lean, with a 1.8-centimeter subcutaneous lipoma on the inner side of his left forearm. The tumor's borders were clear, its texture soft, usually painless, yet repeatedly abraded by climbing holds until it had ruptured twice. The special nature of this procedure lay in its complete abstention from chemical anesthetics; pain suppression would rely solely upon Xiuxiu's silver needles. In preparation for this moment, Zhou Yu had undergone four meridian sensitivity tests over the past two weeks, two baseline EEG recordings, and even measured the ultra-weak magnetic signals at the Jing-well point of the Pericardium Meridian using the laboratory's SQUID magnetometer. The data curves undulated across screens like eels refusing to beach themselves, drawing continuous exclamations from the research professor.
In the observation area, Mozi and Yue'er sat shoulder to shoulder. Their presence served as both response to Xiuxiu's encrypted three-person conference and expression of deep concern for her discovery of human meridian sensitivity to "field perturbations." Mozi required more intuitive understanding of this biological energy system's potential and characteristics; Yue'er sought more vivid biological mappings for her "generalized fluid" model. The small table between them had been converted into a temporary data workstation. A matte-black laptop captured raw streams from the monitors in real time—sixteen channels, twenty-kilohertz sampling rate, single-precision floating point—files ballooning with the ".raw" suffix. Yue'er had twisted her long hair into a loose bun, secured with a disposable chopstick, though stray ends still fell rebelliously, brushing against the keyboard with soft rustling sounds. Mozi's hands were folded, knuckles slightly deformed from years of striking mechanical keys, like a row of reefs smoothed by ocean waves. His gaze lifted over the curtain's upper edge to settle upon Xiuxiu's wrist—there, between the radial styloid process and the scaphoid bone, a slender tendon ridge swelled with her needle-holding motion, like a bowstring drawn taut and ready.
"Everyone," Xiuxiu's voice was steady and clear, much like her needle tips, "today we attempt acupuncture anesthesia. Its principle does not lie in blocking neural conduction, but in stimulating specific acupoints to activate the body's self-regulatory functions, unblock meridian qi and blood, harmonize yin and yang, and achieve analgesic effects. This depends upon the sensation of *Deqi*, and the arrival of qi at the disease site." As she spoke, she pressed Zhou Yu's dorsum gently with her left thumb, locating the depression at the midpoint of the second metacarpal bone. That depression gleamed faintly blue in the cold light, like a bamboo leaf bent beneath snow. Her right middle and ring fingers gripped the needle handle, index finger suspended, the needle tip angled fifteen degrees to the skin. A light pluck, and the silver needle slid beneath the epidermis like a swimming fish, scarcely raising any visible depression. The needle tail immediately began trembling slightly at approximately eight hertz, forming a near-synchronous beat frequency with Zhou Yu's heart rate.
"Have you obtained *Deqi*?" she asked softly.
"Distending soreness, traveling toward the index finger," Zhou Yu replied, his voice carrying the particular hoarseness of youth, yet betraying no panic. His right eye was clipped with a miniature near-infrared spectroscopy probe, monitoring prefrontal blood oxygen changes in real time; his left middle finger wore a photoplethysmography ring, recording pulse rate variability. Data streamed via Bluetooth to Yue'er's screen, transforming into two intertwined bright lines: one ochre-red, one lake-blue, like two fireflies mating in the dark night.
Xiuxiu nodded. The second needle fell upon Zusanli. She first traced a crescent-shaped imprint three *cun* below Dubi with her fingernail, then followed the lateral aspect of the tibial anterior crest one finger-breadth outward, lightly tapping with the needle tip to seek that "bean-in-cauldron" sinking-tight sensation. The needle entered one *cun* two *fen* deep. Her right wrist suddenly sank, finger pads rotating clockwise one hundred eighty degrees, then counterclockwise ninety degrees. The needle body emitted an extremely fine humming sound at approximately twenty kilohertz—precisely at the Nyquist limit of the monitor's ADC, sampled as a blurred harmonic noise floor. Yue'er removed her headphones, letting that noise spill from the speakers like distant cicadas, or bubbles rupturing at deep-sea hydrothermal vents.
The third needle was an *Ah Shi* point, located 0.5 centimeters from the tumor margin. Xiuxiu gently squeezed the tumor with her left index finger, making it roll beneath the skin like a pearl lifted by water waves. The needle tip entered along the tangential direction, passing through adipose lobule gaps, avoiding superficial venous bifurcations. She deliberately performed "green turtle probing the cave" style small-amplitude lifting and thrusting within the connective tissue layer—each movement not exceeding 0.5 millimeters, yet sufficient to trigger high-frequency discharge from local mechanoreceptors. On the monitor, the channel corresponding to the Stomach Meridian of Foot-Yangming suddenly sprouted a string of spike waves—not large in amplitude, yet pulling a sharp bright line across the time-frequency diagram, like lightning tearing open the night.
In the back row of the observation area, the elderly shopkeeper of Lingshu Hall, now past seventy, had also arrived quietly. He wore a dark gray mandarin jacket, clutching a string of purple sandalwood prayer beads. Each bead, when rolled between finger pads, produced a low *click* against the wood. That sound mixed with the white noise of air conditioning, like distant evening drums from some faraway temple. The old shopkeeper's gaze did not focus on the silver needles, but upon Xiuxiu's glabella—there, an extremely fine wrinkle was gradually smoothing as her "spirit governing" deepened, like silk pressed flat by a warm iron. He recalled thirty years past, when he had followed his master to gather herbs in Shennongjia. In the midnight howling of pine winds, his master had needled his Baihui with a two-inch filiform needle, saying: "When the needle arrives, the spirit arrives; when the spirit arrives, the qi arrives; when the qi arrives, the disease departs. Remember—the needle is the boat, the spirit is the sail. A boat without sail is but a length of rusted iron." Now, Xiuxiu's sail seemed to have caught a more expansive wind.
Time elongated. The atomic clock on the operating room wall pulsed once per second, its red light flashing like a miniature pulsar refusing to descend into the mundane. Zhou Yu's breathing gradually deepened, the expiratory phase lengthening, inspiratory phase shortening, forming an approximate four-to-six rhythm. Yue'er murmured: "Vagal tone rising, HF band power increased thirty-two percent." Mozi grunted acknowledgment, typing a line of annotation: "Acupuncture-induced parasympathetic dominance—possibly related to 'qi arrival'?" On the left side of his screen, a self-written Python script ran in parallel, projecting sixteen-channel data into three-dimensional phase space in real time, then capturing section points through Poincaré sections. Those points moved like nocturnal navigation fireflies—initially scattered, yet gradually gathering into a slender band after the third needle, the band's edges showing fractal structure, box dimension approximately 1.7, strikingly similar to the "anomalous attractor" they had previously observed in high-frequency financial market data.
The surgeon entered. She was an attending physician from the Municipal Hospital's Oncology Department, surname Zhao, thirty-five years old, short-haired, nails trimmed short and rounded. She first painted a three-centimeter diameter brown-yellow circle around the tumor with iodine, then vertically punctured the skin wheal with a No. 5 scalpel. The blade ran parallel to dermal collagen fiber bundles to minimize scarring. The incision was one centimeter; blood exudation was minimal—only a few drops, like gum honey congealing on early spring peach branches. Dr. Zhao glanced up at Xiuxiu, who nodded slightly, her right middle finger plucking the needle handle once, suddenly increasing the needle tail's vibration amplitude like wind-stirred reeds. Zhou Yu's brow furrowed for only half a second, then smoothed. Near-infrared spectroscopy showed his prefrontal blood oxygen dropping three percent at the incision instant, yet covered within two seconds by a stronger compensatory blood flow wave—amplitude exceeding baseline by five percent, like tide surging toward reefs then rapidly retreating.
The tumor was bluntly dissected—pale yellow, lobulated, surface capsule intact, like a peeled lychee. Dr. Zhao clipped the basal capillaries with curved scissors, grasped the stump with hemostats, and lightly touched the electrocautery pen, emitting an extremely fine *chi* sound. A wisp of blue smoke rose, carrying a faint roasted meat scent that intertwined with mugwort fragrance to form a strange, sweet fishiness. That smoke spiraled in LED cold light like a reluctant small dragon, slowly shredded by the laminar flow above. On the monitor, the spike wave frequency in the Stomach Meridian channel suddenly plummeted, replaced by a string of slow waves with approximately 1.2-second periods, amplitude gradually increasing, as if someone were shouting in a valley, echoes layering upon echoes.
Xiuxiu's gaze swept across the screen, yet her heart suddenly contracted. Deep within the slow waves, she captured a more covert fluctuation—frequency extremely low, approximately 0.05 hertz, yet wavelength extremely long, like a giant salamander lurking in deep ocean. That fluctuation's phase showed integer-multiple phase-locking with her right hand's needle-twisting rhythm, as if the needle tip shared the same clock with some pulsar in the distant star-sea. She recalled last week's solitary session in the dark room, needling her own Neiguan with the same technique—the monitor had also jumped with similar waveforms, which she had dismissed as environmental noise then. Now, before everyone's eyes, it appeared again, like an undercurrent refusing to be ignored.
She betrayed nothing, continuing needle manipulation, yet quietly accelerated twisting frequency from two rotations per second to three, then to four. The fluctuation drifted accordingly, frequency rising to 0.08 hertz, phase-locking maintained. Yue'er was first to discover the anomaly, gasping: "Coherence peak appearing in low-frequency band, Q-value exceeding thirty—like... like artificially injected carrier wave!" Mozi's pupils contracted sharply, rapidly switching windows to the spectrogram. Indeed, near zero frequency, a sharp peak thrust upward like an inverted sword, flanked by symmetric sidebands spaced precisely at twice Xiuxiu's needle-twisting frequency. He murmured: "For such coherence to appear in biological systems, unless... unless some global coupling mechanism exists."
The final needle: Xiuxiu chose the tumor bed base, performing "green dragon wagging tail" technique—the needle tip obliquely penetrated the muscle fascia at forty-five degrees to muscle fiber direction, swaying left and right with three-millimeter amplitude, two-hertz frequency. That motion was like a loach probing through sand and mud, rhythmically stretching muscle spindle receptors as it passed, afferent discharges converging into rivers at the spinal dorsal horn. On the monitor, slow waves and low-frequency coherence peaks simultaneously reached maxima, then—like being gently smoothed by an invisible hand—abruptly attenuated into tranquil baseline noise. In the lower right corner of the screen, the attractor in phase space also collapsed at that same instant, fireflies scattering, returning to chaos.
Surgery concluded. Dr. Zhao sutured the subcutaneous layer with 5-0 absorbable thread, skin edges aligned neatly, leaving only a hair-thin pale red line. Zhou Yu opened his eyes, gaze limpid as black obsidian freshly washed by mountain springs. He said softly: "I seemed to... have a dream. Someone was singing in the distance, the tune very low, yet heard clearly." Xiuxiu smiled, removing his needles. As each needle left the skin, it brought out a tiny water droplet, like dew condensed on grass blades at dawn. She raised her eyes, exchanging glances with Mozi and Yue'er—their three gazes intersecting in the cold light like three laser beams refracted through a prism, briefly overlapping, then each projecting toward different directions.
The old shopkeeper rose, prayer beads *clicking* once as they settled into his palm. He stepped forward slowly and, through the sterile curtain, bowed deeply to Xiuxiu, yet said nothing. Xiuxiu returned the gesture, fine sweat beading on her forehead, glinting like shattered silver in the lamplight. She knew that 0.05-hertz fluctuation was like a key, having just pried open a door crack; behind the door might lie a deeper well, or possibly a vaster sea. And at this moment, both the well wall and sea surface simultaneously reflected three silhouettes—one holding needles, one grasping equations, one cradling a fluid model—like hunters surrounding great beasts in ancient rock paintings, their shadows stretched long by campfire light, cast upon time's dome, burning long without extinguishing.