The woman in the photograph looked like Serena Zhao.
Ethan noticed it the same moment Marcus did. He said it first, quietly — "She looks like Serena Zhao" — and watched Marcus's face go through three different expressions in quick succession, ending somewhere between reverent and betrayed.
Professor Lin gave Marcus a light cuff on the back of the head.
"That," he said, "is Serena Zhao's grandmother."
The silence that followed lasted several seconds.
Marcus sat very still.
"You know her," Ethan said to the professor.
"I knew her," Professor Lin said. "A long time ago." He closed the album without hurry. "She was one of the most well-known performers on New Star — a generation ago. Singer. Painter. The kind of person who has no idea how remarkable she is, which is always the most dangerous kind." He paused. "She came to Old Earth once for a cultural exchange visit. I was twenty-three and had absolutely no business being in the same room as her. But I was there, and I had just gotten back from the Sichuan dig, and she asked me what I'd found." He turned the album face-down on the table. "We talked for most of a night. She left the next morning. I never saw her again in person."
"Forty-five years," Ethan said.
The professor looked at him. Acknowledged the accuracy with a slight nod.
"She comes to Old Earth to see me sometimes," he added. "When she has reason to. I don't — initiate." He glanced at Ethan. "I haven't told you this. But when Serena Zhao appeared at the gate tonight, I knew why, even before she said anything. She's been visiting her grandmother's old contacts for the past six months. Taking inventory, I think, of who still remembers." He looked at the closed album. "She'll be back."
Ethan said nothing.
"I'll contact Yue-Hua about your situation," the professor said. That was the first time he'd used the woman's name. "The granddaughter and I don't have the same relationship, but the Zhao family knows I can be trusted. There may be a way."
"You've done enough," Ethan said.
"I've given you paper and ink. That's not the same as enough." Professor Lin stood, made more tea, and sat back down as if the conversation had simply moved to a new chapter. "Now. You have questions about the later sections."
---
It was nearly midnight when Ethan got through the part that stopped making sense.
He'd been reading for two hours by then — slowly, forward and back, the way he'd read the earlier pages. The first half of the continuation was difficult in the way dense technical writing is difficult: unfamiliar terms, compressed instruction, meaning that required unpacking. He could work through that. He'd done it before.
The second half was something else.
"This passage," he said, and showed the professor the page.
Professor Lin looked at it for a moment. The section Ethan was pointing to described a field of some kind — barren at first, then dark soil, and then the description became less precise in ways that felt deliberate rather than incomplete. The text didn't fail. It changed register entirely, as if the person writing it had run out of available vocabulary and was now reaching for metaphors that didn't quite fit what they were trying to describe.
"The *Huangtingjing* diagrams," Professor Lin said. He pronounced it carefully — the full title, as if the specificity mattered. "The Yellow Court Inner Landscape diagrams. There's a line in the fourth section that describes what you're looking at. The pre-Qin text assumes the reader has already seen it, which they would have, at that time — those images circulated among practitioners as foundational material." He paused. "The language of that era doesn't map cleanly to later terminology. When you see *barren* followed by *black earth*, think of it less as a literal landscape and more as a sequence — like passing through a threshold. The diagram shows what comes after."
"And after the diagram?"
"The *Baopuzi*," the professor said. "Ge Hong, fourth century. He's writing much later but he's working with the same underlying framework — you can see the connections if you know what to look for. He's also more explicit about the practical side. Things the pre-Qin writer assumes you already know, Ge Hong explains." He looked at his cup. "And for the very last section — Chen Tuan's *Wuji Diagram*. Song dynasty. Controversial in its time and still is, in certain circles. But I think it's pointing at the same threshold from the other direction."
Ethan wrote all three down in the margin.
Marcus, who had been quiet for the past hour in the way of someone doing their best to follow along, said: "So to study the old arts properly, a person first needs to read a library."
"A person needs to read the right books," the professor said. "Which is a smaller set than it sounds."
---
Marcus left somewhere around one in the morning — he had an early transport to arrange.
Ethan stayed another hour, reading, asking questions when something stopped him. The professor answered without impatience, the way a person answers questions they've been waiting for someone to ask for a long time.
When Ethan finally left, the campus was dark and completely still. He walked back through the central courtyard, the folded continuation pages in his jacket. He went to his room and sat at the desk and read for another three hours before he slept.
---
He was on the east lawn at dawn.
The first twenty minutes were familiar — the *cai qi* sequence he'd been running for four years, the *nei yang* work, the stillness at the center. Then he set all of it aside and began from the beginning of the continuation pages.
What followed was difficult to describe afterward. Not because he lacked words, but because the words he had didn't match the scale of what he was tracking.
There was something in the new root method that was different from anything he'd practiced before. Not more powerful — different in architecture, like a system that had been built to go somewhere the previous method hadn't been designed to reach. He worked through it slowly, carefully, correcting his form against the text's instructions. Somewhere in the second hour, something shifted.
He sweated through his shirt. His body ran a fever he didn't have, broke it without him noticing. He could feel his metabolism working at a different rate than usual — faster, deeper, as if something that had been accumulating for years was being processed and cleared.
When he stopped, the sun was fully up. He was on his knees in the grass, both hands flat on the ground, breathing. The dampness on his skin had gone cold in the morning air.
The state he was in — physically, mentally — was unlike anything he'd reached before. Not exhausted. The opposite of exhausted. Clean in a way he had no previous reference point for.
He thought: *The program's materials were incomplete.*
Then he thought: *New Star.*
Out loud, to no one: "I need to get there."
---
"You're still here."
Kevin Zhou came across the lawn with his hands in his pockets, unhurried. Fair-skinned, a little melancholy in his bearing, looking less fit than he actually was — a quality Ethan had always noticed and filed away.
"Two more days," Ethan said.
Kevin sat down on the grass next to him without asking if that was alright. He looked at the east wing dormitory, already locked.
"You're still doing the old arts," he said, not as a question.
Ethan didn't answer.
Kevin lowered his voice slightly. It was a habit he had — talking about certain things at a quieter register, as if the information was still classified even though the situation that had classified it no longer existed. "Listen. Old Earth isn't where this is going. I can't tell you the specifics — I'm still not supposed to, technically. But the new development changes the math in a way where it doesn't matter anymore." He looked at the horizon. "What I'm saying is: be practical. Whatever plan you have, account for the fact that New Star doesn't need the old path right now."
"I know," Ethan said.
Kevin was quiet for a moment.
"Yeah," he said. "You probably do." He looked at the locked dormitory again. "You figured it out faster than anyone. You were always going to. I just—" He stopped. Tried again. "Three years ago I said something I shouldn't have. I spent the years after pretending I didn't. I want you to know I don't regret the first part."
The air between them settled into something that wasn't quite an apology and wasn't quite not one either.
"I know that too," Ethan said.
Kevin nodded once. Then: "There's a gathering tonight. The ones who got selected — we're leaving in four days. Some people want to mark the end of things. I'm asking if you'll come."
Ethan looked at him.
"It'll be good," Kevin said. "Four years of decent company deserves a proper send-off. No one's going to make it strange, I promise." He paused. "There might be someone there you want to see."
"There isn't," Ethan said.
Kevin smiled — the first full one Ethan had seen from him in days. "Sure. I'll take that." He stood, brushed the grass off his knees. "I'll see you tonight."
---
Ethan's phone buzzed when Kevin had barely cleared the east wing.
Marcus: *they invited me too. going??*
Ethan looked at the message. Then at the empty campus. Then at the faint sweat-outline his hands had left on the grass.
He called back instead of texting.
"You're going to New Moon, not New Star," he said when Marcus picked up. "You'll be looking down at all of them from orbit every day. What's bothering you about a dinner?"
"I don't know, it's weird—"
"It's not weird. You come and pick me up. We go together."
A pause. Then Marcus, with the particular energy of someone who had been waiting for that exact response: "—*yes*. Okay. That's what I wanted you to say. I'll be there at seven."
Ethan ended the call and looked at the east lawn for a long moment.
Then he went back inside to read.