The Unfinished Conservation Equation

"Do you believe body temperature is conserved?"

In the autumn of 2009, Lin Zhi wrote an absurd formula in her physics notebook: when the temperature difference between two people's fingertips reaches 36.5 degrees Celsius, their heartbeats will resonate. Back then, she had no idea that at the far end of the corridor, beyond two panes of mirrored glass, Shen Zhao was carving the very same temperature onto his desk with a pencil sharpener blade.

The pride of the honors class and an ordinary-class girl who loved illustration should have been like two parallel tracks in separate worlds. Then, one dusk when cherry blossoms drifted through evening study hall, Shen Zhao's basketball smashed the window of an old bookstore, and Lin Zhi shook his late mother's diagnosis out of the title page of Stray Birds. A seventeen-year-old secret grew wildly like a vine: she hid the school badge he'd lost, while he secretly kept the pages in her sketchbook covered in gardenias.