Apricot Blossoms Between the Hours

[Two timelines + strange happenings at school + objects personified]

When the pagoda bell rings for the seventh time

✔ A Republican-era female doctor’s memories × a modern top student’s body

✔ The fire-prevention formula turns out to be a coded love letter

✔ Beneath the ginkgo tree lies our pact spanning seven lifetimes

“Every grain in the wood holds an unfinished promise.”

Transfer student Cheng Xing has seven cinnabar moles on her left wrist, arranged like the Big Dipper.

When she touches the broken copper key in the school history museum, a flood of visions surges over her

She sees herself in 1913, hiding an identical key in a crack in the wall, with seven matching red marks on her wrist.

The century-old secrets of Qingcheng High School gradually come to light as the copper key’s petals fall:

- The clock that is forever stopped at 7:07 chimes by itself on rainy nights.

- The scorch marks on the pagoda wall are actually a coded fire-prevention formula.

- Buried beneath the ginkgo tree is not a time capsule, but a solemn pact of life and death between seven girls.

“This isn’t transmigration. It’s memory finally fitting into place like interlocking joints.”

When Lu Yuan of the handicrafts club holds a carving knife, he unconsciously carves apricot blossoms. The scar beneath his collarbone and Cheng Xing’s cinnabar moles combine to form a complete tree ring. When the two uncover the truth behind the “fire” of 1913, a rift in time and space suddenly opens on the modern campus

A girl in a moon-white dress smiles at Cheng Xing from the mirror.

Republican-era handwriting appears on Lu Yuan’s engineering plans.

And on the day of the school anniversary performance, every audience member sees it:

Onstage, Cheng Xing and the girl in blue reflected in the bell tower’s glass recite the fire-prevention formula in unison, across a century...

“When the key’s fifth petal falls, in which era will we meet again?”