Writing a Preface

When he was sixteen years old, Liu Xu walked into the academy deep in the Qinling Mountains with a hot copper coin. He came here to find answers - to find the truth behind his father's disappearance, to find a hidden name, and to find the warmth on his collarbone that did not belong to him when the copper coins became hot. For the entrance exam he drew a cracked mirror. The moment he started writing, the mirrors in the entire teaching building cracked, and the cracks were exactly the same as what he had drawn. Someone saw three layers of transparent shadows stacked on his shoulders, one squatting, one standing, and one standing far away. He himself cannot see it. His roommate Chen Nian stared at the copper coin for a long time when they first met and said, "Have I seen it somewhere?" Then he touched his empty collarbone - something should be hanging there. The young lecturer on the podium had an old thorn-like scar on the back of his hand, which was exactly the same as the cast pattern on the copper coins. The man looked at him as if he were looking at himself twenty years ago, but said nothing. The girl on the rooftop opened her sketchbook and drew his back. She said she drew the three layers of outline on his shoulders three times, and they were different each time. "I'll show it to you when I get it right." The copper coin is still hot. Someone was waiting for him far away to find the door. And the hidden name - Chen Xu - is slowly waking up. It turns out that some of the stories were not told unfinished, but were folded into three pages, with the same name written in different strokes on each page. When he finally put the three pages back together, he discovered that there was a blank line on the title page: "The prologue is the beginning of the story."