Seventeen times of ebb and flow are enough to pickle the bloody memory into sharp salt.
On a snowy night when he was eight years old, Xiao Man huddled in the closet of his Vancouver villa and witnessed how the black diamond earrings at his mother's throat dyed the moonlight scarlet. Her father used imprisonment and pills to weave lies, and nailed her to the cold basement of Quebec until she was eighteen years old, until the girl holding the star track camera broke through her eternal night like a rainbow trout flowing against the current - Wen Zhimin took the extreme daylight and wild grape juice of Altay and stubbornly planted luminous moss on her wounds.
When Wen Zhimin's camera focused on the black earring in her left ear, Xiao Man finally saw clearly the blood code solidified in the cracks of the diamond; when they kissed on a blizzard night on the Gaspé Peninsula, the tide was eating away the remaining pages of the account book that her father had buried on the cliff for seventeen years. From the glacier fissure at 48.8° North latitude to the witness box of the transnational court, Wen Zhimin used an astronomical telescope to calculate the trajectory of revenge, and Xiao Man ground his mother's bronze mirror into a knife that cut open the plutocratic empire. They pretended to be lovers amidst the sound of electric current from the wiretaps, and exchanged breaths in the middle of the night when the hypnotic drugs failed.
These are seventeen years that have been cursed by the twilight, and seventeen years that have been licked into pearls by the tide. When the hammer of the court's verdict resonated with the waves of Gaspe, the inside of the wedding rings they exchanged in the lighthouse beam was engraved with an eternal formula:
"The dusk bitten by the tide will eventually feed back into the dawn."
Purpose: Love turns bloodstains into stars
