“The instant the particle collider powered up, I kissed you across a century of smoke and fire.”
A quantum storm in a Hong Kong University laboratory tore open a rift in time and space, sending finance PhD student Zhang Wanting tumbling into 1927, clad in a blood-red dress. One second, she was clutching the bloodstained collar of her boyfriend Chu Nian’s shirt; the next, military boots were grinding the gold trim of her peacock-patterned cheongsam into the dirt. The warlord’s heir, Wu Yichen, pressed a gun to her heart, but the bullet bore a serial number from a modern arms depot.
In her left hand was the last bloodstained love letter Chu Nian had sent before vanishing. In her right was a strip of engagement-film from the battle-scarred pocket watch Wu Yichen carried.
A Browning pistol at a banquet in Republican-era China fired bullets from a Hong Kong serial-murder case. On the shattered observation screen in the laboratory, Gu Qingwan’s birthmark seemed to spread, burning in time with Zhang Wanting’s heartbeat. When codes for an arms train appeared in Chu Nian’s sketchbook, while a telegraph machine in Wu Yichen’s secret room printed financial figures from 2023, she finally realized that their love had long been written into a conspiracy spanning two timelines.
Every touch amid the particle storm altered the fate of two centuries.
A cherry-blossom kiss mark from Wutong Road appeared on an embroidered Hunan-silk screen in the Gu residence. Lab coats and military overcoats whipped in the wind of quantum entanglement. The crescent-shaped scar on Wu Yichen’s collarbone fit perfectly with the crack in the jade pendant at Chu Nian’s neck. And when Gu Qingwan swallowed cyanide to stop an arms deal, a crabapple tree in a modern laboratory withered in an instant. The thirty days Chu Nian had been missing corresponded exactly to the countdown to the assassination of Marshal Wu…
When scientific formulas become the codes of a turbulent age, who holds the only answer to love?
