Only when the lingering aroma of the past rose from coffee brewed at 93.6 degrees did Cheng Man understand why Lin Shen was so fixated on a margin of error of 0.5 grams. It was the measure of blood ties between two souls fate had torn apart, taken as the siphon pot rose and fell.
A dilapidated coffee shop concealed a century-old curse encrypted in coffee stains:
- Jasmine-patterned bone china cups held the twins' memories of a fire
- Blue Mountain coffee beans had frozen the torrential rain of 1995
- Morse code engraved on the siphon pot's copper tube could awaken a genetic code
A down-on-her-luck girl and a mysterious barista measured the tiniest fractions of a heartbeat with a thermometer, amid the aroma of Costa Rican honey-processed coffee. When the scar on Lin Shen's wrist faded to amber, Cheng Man finally saw how the cookie crumbs clutched in her dying mother's hand fit together with the crack in his treasured royal coffee pot, forming a forbidden totem.
This was an escape with caffeine as its unit of time:
The steam pipe spewed not only latte art, but also sparks from Xishuangbanna twenty-five years ago;
The grinder pulverized not only coffee beans, but also a bloodline curse passed down through generations;
And what they were extracting was more than the rich aroma of coffee. It was a truth about twins, in which love and destruction were born together, roasted by time for a quarter of a century.
[Coffee Aesthetics × Bloodline Paradox × Steampunk Romance]
When two broken souls bearing jasmine-patterned brands calibrated the siphon pot to a 32-degree tilt on a stormy night, every family tree altered by coffee stains would finally emerge anew in a resonance at 93.6 degrees.
