No Sound Gap Warmth

Shen Weisheng has lived for twenty-four years. He is the only son of the Shen family. He comes from a wealthy family and has a quick mind, but he is always slower than others in understanding people's hearts and temperatures. It's not that no one cares - his mother warms his favorite gray sweater before handing it to him every year. His father knows that he doesn't like to be disturbed. Even when he takes the initiative to stay in the study to think about something, he asks his aunt to place the sweet-scented osmanthus cake lightly at the door and never knocks. In his spare time, he likes to squat on the floor of his study and carve wood. With his hands, he can carve the curls of osmanthus petals as thin as cicada wings. People in the business world say that he has a pair of eyes that can read data very accurately, but he can't read the pleasantries at dinner parties. Last year, he alone noticed the hidden worries in the supply chain of his family business. He stayed in his study for three days and drew a deduction diagram, spread it out on the corner of the table and returned to his room. After his parents found out, they used it secretly, quietly resolving the group's business crisis. When they came back, they only gave him an extra bowl of osmanthus cake. They carefully put the crumpled draft and the crooked wood he had carved into a locked drawer. They didn't even praise "well done" for fear of putting pressure on him. Until the gap between parallel time and space opened, he was squatting on the floor carving an osmanthus petal, with sawdust on his fingertips. He fell into the Osmanthus Garden in the old city and met Tao Wan who was drying a quilt. The scar he got when he was seven years old was caused by his mother's hand shaking when she was in a hurry to put a band-aid on him. He didn't cry or fuss, so it stuck on it crookedly for three days. The same scar she got was caused by her grandma blowing on it three times with her mouth and applying home-brewed osmanthus honey. It was so sweet that she frowned and smiled. He spent seven months memorizing her yard in his mind inch by inch, and asked the gardener at home to carve an exact yard in the south corner according to this size. He hid in his study and carved twenty-seven osmanthus petal rings, and his fingers were bruised with blood from the carving knife. In the past, he only relied on his eyes when carving wood, but this time he always measured the thickness of her fingers. After carving the twenty-seventh piece, he could finally feel whether the temperature of the wood was the same as the temperature of her palm without looking down. On page 372 of his encrypted notebook, which he never shared, there was no business deduction. He only drew two overlapping handprints and wrote next to it: "I don't want to put you back into me. I want to put you into my life." In the autumn when grandma passed away, Tao Wan was finally able to take her ashes with him to his time and space. She planted an osmanthus tree in the south corner yard, but she didn't know that what grandma really liked was chrysanthemums. Grandma had planted osmanthus all her life just because Tao Wan liked it. You are Tao Wan and I am Shen Weisheng. But when the osmanthus grown by my grandma floated over, I knew for the first time that the 37-degree osmanthus water was warm. "When you smiled, I slowed down my perception by twenty-four years and suddenly caught up." Concept: Two souls of the same origin but independent, clumsily recognize each other across the gap in time and space. In Tao Wan's "Careless Treatment", Shen Weisheng was treated as a living person who could and was not afraid of pain for the first time; in Shen Weisheng's "Seven Months to Carve a Crooked Circle", Tao Wan learned for the first time that someone was willing to carve her world into her bones and blood inch by inch. In the gentle tolerance of their family and each other's "imperfect directness", they learn to love others, and also learn to accept themselves who are "slow to perceive" or "have been abandoned" - love is not about finding another self, but feeling in another person the fresh warmth that has never been captured by slow nerves.