The sea breeze carried a salty dampness through the open windows of the research institute, stirring the hair on Chen Ying's forehead. He was bent over his desk, a draft paper on the Maritime Silk Road of the Ming Dynasty on his computer screen, but his thoughts kept drifting back to an afternoon twenty years earlier, when the air had been filled with that same scent of sea breeze.
It was the last time his father, Chen Yuanhang, left home. Wearing his crisp expedition uniform, he ruffled the hair of six-year-old Chen Ying and said with a smile, “Xiaoying, when I get back this time, I'll tell you the most amazing story about the ocean.”
His father's eyes held the excitement of an explorer, along with a trace of deep worry that Chen Ying couldn't understand at the time.
His father never came back. The official report claimed that the research vessel Explorer, aboard which his father and the others were traveling, had encountered a rare, violent storm in the Devil's Sea region of the South Pacific. All hands had perished, and not even the wreckage was ever found.
“Ding-dong, ”
