Before It Arrives

The ginkgo in Baiguo Lane has lost seventy-seven leaves. The old watchmaker said that this is not the wind, but time changing the breath. Lin Jing didn't believe it. She is a data scientist at MIT and the vice president of Shenghua. In her world, there are only confidence intervals and regression models. Until a blind old man stopped her at the subway entrance, told her the shape of the birthmark on her left shoulder, and the trap on page three, line seven of her contract, and then disappeared, leaving behind a business card. Xuanlanzhai. A used bookstore that doesn't sell books. Shop owner Zhou Xuan leaned behind the counter and explained everything using intelligence work and cold reading skills. But Lin Jing asked: What he calculated accurately was not my behavior, but my due date - my father changed the fake seal he made for me when I was born. He calculated when it would fade away. Zhou Xuan was silent. Then he opened a half-burned birth chart. "Your father locked the lives of six people with you and built a Big Dipper array. Some people filled up the Xuanwu Lake, burned the Zhong Palace, and touched the Qinglong Stake. Some people are using fluid mechanics to rewrite the eight characters, and some people have been waiting in the dark for twenty-eight years, waiting for you to make your own choice." Lin Jing opened the window. The green bricks of Ginkgo Alley are covered with ginkgo leaves. She suddenly remembered the four words written in blood by her father before his death: bleeding, reversed navel, broken lock. This is not a fortune-telling book. This is the story of a man who finally lived his own life. About data and intuition, about destiny and freedom, about a person and a city. And the ginkgo tree that pulses every seventy-seven minutes. If a due date finally comes - will you wait, or will you walk through it yourself?