The rain in Boston had been falling all night.
By the time Alex pulled his car into the garage, the windshield wipers were still swinging in a futile rhythm. He cut the engine but didn't rush to get out. He sat there, watching the rainwater streak down the glass. On the passenger seat sat a manila parcel from China; the sender's column on the shipping label was left blank.
He stared at the package for a long time.
This wasn't the first time. In the American antique appraisal circles, the name "Alex" carried significant weight. A blonde, blue-eyed Caucasian man with a Mandarin accent infused with the soft cadences of the Wu dialect, driven by a near-pathological obsession with ancient Chinese paintings—this paradox itself was his brand. Collectors adored him because he could provide a "scientific" conclusion using multispectral imaging and Carbon-14 dating, yet in critical moments, he would utter cryptic remarks that left them bewildered, such as, "The ink in this painting has no breath."
His doctoral advisor once told him he was "wasting his talent." A Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from MIT should be researching quantum computing or next-generation energy materials, not rotting away in stacks of old paper. It was true, but Alex knew what he wanted.
He grabbed the parcel and headed upstairs.
His apartment in Cambridge was an old building on the banks of the Charles River, featuring a floor-to-ceiling window that spanned an entire wall of the living room. He tossed the parcel onto the coffee table and grabbed a beer from the fridge first. Late autumn in Boston was a cold that seeped into one's marrow, but the heating was cranked up high; he wore an old T-shirt, his bare feet treading on the oak floorboards.
Halfway through his beer, he tore open the package.
Inside was a scroll. The roller ends were made of black sandalwood, with a warm patina that felt as if it had been handled for centuries. He set down the bottle, moved the scroll to his workbench, and donned latex gloves, his movements as delicate as if he were defusing a bomb.
The scroll slowly unfurled.
It was a landscape in ink and color on silk. About a meter long and less than half a meter wide. In the center stood a verdant peak, layered with azurite and malachite pigments that shimmered with an eerie texture under the studio lights. The mountain was steep, shrouded in mist, with several waterfalls cascading between cliffs.
But it wasn't these details that made Alex freeze.
There was light within the painting.
A faint, golden light emanated subtly from a certain spot on the mountain, as if something were hidden deep within the rock. In various corners of the painting, countless figures were rushing toward that light—some standing on long swords, their robes billowing; others riding massive avian beasts, feathers snapping in the wind; and some simply treading on the wind, their postures as casual as if they were strolling in their own backyard.
Alex frowned.
He had seen countless ancient Chinese paintings—from Gu Kaizhi to Bada Shanren, from meticulous gongbi to freehand xieyi. But he had never seen a subject like this. Flying swords, celestial cranes, wind-riding—these were descriptions from Daoist scriptures or plot points from supernatural tales, but no one painted them like this. Ancient Chinese painters followed the principle of "learning from nature and gaining the source from within the heart." They painted what they saw and felt, not illustrations for the Classic of Mountains and Seas.
But the scroll itself was another matter.
He turned on the multispectral imager and moved the painting under it. The screen lit up, revealing the fibrous structure of the silk.
"Thread density... twenty-eight warp threads and thirty weft threads per centimeter." He whispered. This was a classic characteristic of Song Dynasty silk.
Under ultraviolet fluorescence, the green mountain peaks showed a faint blue glow, while the figures and mist appeared orange-red. Mineral pigments—azurite, malachite, cinnabar. The recipe was traditional, but the fluorescence was too strong—abnormally strong.
He switched to infrared reflectography. Under infrared light, the surface pigments became transparent, revealing the underdrawing of ink beneath.
Then, he saw it.
Hidden beneath the mountain's contours was another layer of imagery. It was a complex geometric pattern composed of countless fine lines, resembling a circuit board or a Daoist talisman. All lines converged at the point of that golden light, forming a vortex-like node.
Alex stared at the pattern for a long time. Those converging lines looked exactly like—
Wave-function collapse.
Observation leads to collapse. But what was being observed? And what was it collapsing into?
He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. The paper and ink were a thousand years old, but what was the subject? If this was a forgery, the forger's skill exceeded his comprehension. If it wasn't—
Then the world a thousand years ago was not quite what he had imagined.
The thought was too absurd. He turned off the imager, rolled the painting back into its tube, and went to the bathroom to shower.
Hot water poured from the showerhead. He stood under the stream with his eyes closed, but his mind wouldn't stop. Those lines, those converging lines—what information were they transmitting? What was that golden light? Who were those people on the swords?
He turned off the tap. The bathroom suddenly fell silent, save for the sound of water dripping from his hair onto the tiles.
He dried himself, pushed open the bathroom door, and stepped out.
The living room was dark. He hadn't turned on the lights when he went in. In the November night of Boston, moonlight streamed through the floor-to-ceiling window, dragging a silver-white ribbon across the floor.
But something was wrong.
The air seemed to have grown viscous, carrying a tension like static electricity. He stood rooted to the spot, barefoot, his hair still dripping.
The chandelier in the center of the room flickered once.
It wasn't a normal flicker, but a rhythmic pulse of light and shadow, like a faulty circuit or a signal. His peripheral vision caught something—it was the painting. The tube had been opened at some point, and the scroll was half-unrolled, draped across the redwood painting table.
The painting was glowing.
It wasn't reflected moonlight, but a soft, golden radiance seeping from within the silk itself. The light wasn't uniform; it radiated outward from the golden light at the center of the image, forming a slow pulsation—like a heartbeat, like breath.
Alex felt his own heart rate accelerate to match that rhythm.
He approached the work, his gaze scanning the familiar landscape for the source of the change. The mountains were still the same, the waterfalls the same, the immortals on their swords still rushing toward the peak.
But—
His gaze locked onto the bottom left corner.
There was an extra person.
A child. About ten years old, wearing a robe of deep crimson. That red was piercingly bright, like freshly ground cinnabar, standing out starkly against the verdant landscape.
The child sat on a blue stone, face upturned, eyes staring straight out of the painting.
Staring at Alex.
Alex's breath hitched.
The child's eyes were cerulean blue—exactly like his own.
He felt a sliver of coldness slowly crawl up his spine—the sensation of the hair on the back of his neck standing up. He hadn't felt this in years—the last time was when he was twelve, standing alone in a hallway at night, looking at his reflection in a mirror and feeling that the shadow wasn't his own.
He stared at the child in the painting, and the child stared back.
The light in the room had faded completely. The golden specks were still flickering, brighter than before, as if something were permeating outward from the depths of the silk.
Alex reached out. He didn't know what he intended to do; perhaps just touch the child's position to confirm it was merely ink, merely pigment, merely a detail a painter had added on a whim.
The moment his fingertip touched the surface—
It wasn't the texture of silk.
It was warm, soft, and yielding.
It was the unmistakable touch of human skin.
Alex's pupils constricted.
In the next instant, a massive suction force erupted from his fingertip—not a physical pull, but a profound sweeping sensation from the depths of his soul. His fingertip began to sink, as if pressed into deep water. Then his fingers, his palm, his wrist. He tried to pull back, but his body no longer obeyed him.
Golden light erupted from the point of contact, and the geometric lines hidden beneath the mountain contours suddenly flared to life, forming a complex diagram. Alex felt a surge of vertigo, as if the entire world were spinning.
He saw the child stand up and reach toward him.
"So, you've come," the child said.
Alex tried to scream, but his voice was swallowed by the golden light. He felt his consciousness unraveling, his body decomposing, like a drop of ink falling into water—rapidly diffusing and disappearing.
In his final glimpse, he saw that streak of red burning within the golden light.
Then, everything fell into darkness.
Cold.
A cold that pierced to the marrow snapped Alex's consciousness awake.
He wanted to cough, but found his throat filled with what felt like grit; he could only manage a raspy gasp. He struggled to open his eyes, his vision gradually clearing from a blur.
The scene he saw made him freeze entirely.
He was lying on grass. Real grass, not the floorboards of his apartment. The scent of greenery drifted into his nostrils, and the chill of the earth reached his skin through his clothes. He sat up and looked around.
He was in a valley. Towering peaks surrounded him, covered in lush vegetation, with mist swirling around their midsections. In the distance, a waterfall thundered down a cliffside.
It was identical to the world he had seen in the painting.
He looked down at his own body.
His hands had shrunk. His once slender fingers were now short and rounded, his skin transparently pale. He touched his face—the sensation was entirely different: plump cheeks, no stubble.
He stood up and staggered. His center of gravity had shifted; his legs were shorter. He looked down at his clothes—
A robe of deep crimson silk.
Exactly like the one worn by the boy in the painting.
Alex stood stunned on that patch of grass, the wind blowing past him, carrying the scent of earth and flora. He looked up at the sky.
The golden rift that had spanned the heavens, and the crowds of people chasing it, had all vanished. It was as if everything had returned to a state of tranquility.
Alex took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. His scientific mind began to operate at high speed, analyzing the current situation.
Hypothesis 1: He was dreaming. But he had never had a dream this vivid.
Hypothesis 2: He was hallucinating. But hallucinations don't alter one's physical body.
Hypothesis 3: He had truly entered the painting and become the boy within it.
The third hypothesis sounded the most absurd, but it was currently the only answer that explained all the phenomena.
Alex no longer hesitated. While recalling everything about this child's body, he began to walk toward a nearby massive tree.