Lingshu Hall's meditation chamber felt as if it had been plucked from the flow of everyday time and space by an invisible hand, suspended in a dark and searing vacuum. The wooden grain of the four walls glinted with a bluish-gray like cold iron under the faintest light, as though ready to seep out a metallic chill at any moment. The lingering scent of sinking incense was now layered over by the coppery odor of high-power electrical sources, the charred smell of capacitor explosions, and the ethereal vapor of evaporating coolant—like layer upon layer of invisible metal foil, wrapping the room into a sealed resonance cavity. Honeycomb-shaped wave-absorbing modules were installed in the four corners of the ceiling, yet they couldn't completely muffle the extremely low-frequency hum emanating from deep within the instruments—not a sound, but a pressure that struck the eardrums directly, like the heartbeat of a giant beast locked in a cage of glass and titanium alloy, pounding restlessly.
Around the treatment bed, three modified biofield monitors were arranged in an equilateral triangle, their casings removed, exposing circuit boards like peeled nerves, clusters of solder points glinting with a cold blue light. The signal generator was placed at the triangle's center of gravity, its silvery-white shielding etched with mandala patterns finer than hair strands, the grooves embedded with superconducting quantum interference device probes, piercing the void like ice needles. Cables snaked out from various interfaces, black, red, and blue intertwined, coiling on the carpet into a giant ouroboros pattern—the snake scales were insulating tape, its eyes two flashing LEDs, breathing in and out, as if an invisible serpent body were slowly writhing.
In the constant-temperature box in the corner, a row of thumb-thick ampoules emitted an eerie green glow—these were rubidium isotopes diluted to femtomolar levels with heavy water, used to calibrate the faintest field drifts. At this moment, they seemed simultaneously awakened fireflies, their brightness rising synchronously by 0.7%, then falling back in unison, as if some secret tide were swelling and ebbing in the darkness.
Xiuxiu sat cross-legged on a meditation cushion three steps from the treatment bed. The cushion was stuffed with dried mugwort and magnetite powder, packed solid like a silent anvil, holding her atop the crest of magnetic field disturbances. She wore an unbleached linen jacket, the fabric undyed, its fiber gaps still carrying the chill of last autumn's frost. The cuffs and collar were edged with silver thread woven into the finest shape of the Big Dipper, emitting faint phosphorescence in the dark, as if stitching a star map into the fabric, pressed against the pulsing carotid artery at her neck. She was barefoot, a faded red rope tied around her ankle, a tiny bead ground from meteorite dangling at the knot, no larger than a mung bean yet unusually heavy, constantly pulling her toward the ground—as if to make her an anchor chain, nailing down the body about to float away.
After an hour of seated meditation and breath regulation, her skin took on an almost transparent bluish pallor, subcutaneous veins like early winter rivers, their color diluted to pale cyan yet startlingly clear. The lingering sensation of "holding the origin and guarding the one" still reverberated within her: her breathing rate was suppressed to 4.5 breaths per minute, heartbeat down to 38 beats, blood viscosity approaching glycerin, roaring distantly like an avalanche as it flowed past the Dazhui point. Her consciousness was compressed into a diamond less than one micrometer in diameter, suspended above the Niwan Palace; any trace of external disturbance would leave measurable scratches upon it. At this moment, her entire being was a freshly calibrated probe, ready to pierce the deepest unknown fields, retrieving even a femtosecond's worth of data.
Mozi stood beside the signal generator, his left thumb and forefinger gripping a secondhand oscilloscope, three fingers of his right hand hovering above the emergency stop button like a hemp rope suspended over a guillotine's blade. He wore a black T-shirt with no logo, its fabric blended with 20% silver fibers to shield against potentially rebounding microwaves, yet unable to conceal the trembling in his shoulders and back. The screen refresh rate was set to 2,000 frames per second; waveforms piled up like frozen black lightning, liable to collapse with the slightest tremor. To suppress sweat gland secretion, he had injected 0.3 milligrams of glycopyrrolate at four in the morning; now his lips were parched and pale, his tongue coating like coarse sandpaper, scraping against his palate with a faint, gritty sound. He repeatedly checked the output mode: the adversarial network trained by Yue'er using 72-hour rolling data, compressing abnormal fluctuations into a baseband signal only 1.2 seconds long, then undergoing eightfold upsampling, Hilbert transform, chaotic spread spectrum, and finally injected into the Helmholtz coil at 0.2 microwatts of power. Any step gone wrong, and Xiuxiu's brainstem might be induced into irreversible reentrant discharge, leaving her a breathing vegetable. At this thought, his fingertips grew colder, like five ice spikes nailed into the plastic casing.
Yue'er stood on the other side, two meters away yet separated as if by a river. She wore a gray hoodie, the hood pulled up, its edge pressing against her forehead like a self-imposed headband. Before her were three 27-inch 4K screens stacked into a small tower; the topmost ran the real-time topological analysis program she had rewritten in Rust, the window black with green text, matrices cascading like a waterfall. Her eyes were bloodshot yet unblinking, pupils reflecting rotating Klein bottles. Over the past seven days, she had slept only sixteen hours, propped up alternately by cold-brew coffee and melatonin; now her world shrank to a single flickering χ² value in the lower left corner of the screen—the chi-squared statistic for the deviation between model and actual measurement. Should it drop below 0.05, it would prove a non-random coupling indeed existed between the external field and the human meridian system. She dared not exhale, fearing her breath's carbon dioxide might fog the screen, blurring that fateful number.
"We can begin." Xiuxiu's voice was like an exceedingly fine silver thread, piercing through all electromagnetic noise within twenty square meters, accurately catching Mozi's eardrum. He took a deep breath, his Adam's apple bobbing as if swallowing a blade. He looked toward Yue'er, his gaze passing through two layers of glass and one of liquid crystal, striking deep within her pupils. Yue'er nodded, the movement almost imperceptibly small, yet enough for Mozi's knuckles to tense, pressing the start button. The button sank 1.5 millimeters, triggering an optical switch, a red laser severed, the signal link closing within nanoseconds.
No roar, no flash, only a nearly invisible ripple in the air, spreading from the coil's center like a stone dropped into still water, yet unable to stir even a single strand of hair. The instant the ripple swept past her ankle, Xiuxiu shut the final gate of consciousness—she sank herself into a darkness emptier than vacuum, leaving only the voltage-gated channels on her skin and mucous membranes, like countless molecular-scale microphones, awaiting the universe's faintest whispers.
When the first spark exploded at the Baihui point, she thought it her own illusion. That spark was neither hot nor cold, but a topological "protrusion"—the cortex at the very top of her skull suddenly folded into a higher-dimensional crease; she "saw" a light spot, its brightness equivalent to only thirty million photons, yet piercingly clear. Immediately afterward, two weaker spots of light simultaneously ignited at the Yongquan points, as if someone extended two red-hot needles from the earth's core, gently pressing against the soles of her feet. The light points climbed along the deep branch of the Foot Taiyang Bladder Meridian, passing through the Achilles tendon, popliteal fossa, gluteus medius, suddenly converging into a fine line beside the fifth lumbar vertebra. The line then split into seven cold stars, corresponding to the seven Back Transport Points for the lungs, heart, diaphragm, liver, gallbladder, spleen, and kidneys. She "heard" crisp cracking sounds like frozen lakes fracturing between star and star, their rhythm obeying the golden ratio, intervals of 0.618 seconds, as if the universe were keeping time with the most ancient cadence. She reported each crack's location, her voice converted by bone conduction microphones into light pulses of 0s and 1s, transmitted via fiber optics into Mozi's earphones. Mozi's left hand darted between stylus and keyboard; each time he marked an acupoint, he lit a blue sphere on the three-dimensional model while writing coordinates, intensity, and phase into the PostGIS database. On the left side of Yue'er's screen, a new curve soared, like a waking mamba snake winding along the frequency axis; each time it reached an acupoint, a green light burst from its scales, the χ² value dropping by 0.003.
The signal continued deeper. When the Neiguan point on the Hand Jueyin Pericardium Meridian lit up, Xiuxiu "smelled" a familiar medicinal fragrance—the first wisp of steam when her grandfather boiled cinnamon twig soup when she was ten years old, the scent compressed into a two-millimeter-square memory chip, now reinserted into her olfactory cortex. The aroma ascended along the medial side of the radius, transforming at the Quze point into a firefly, its brightness precisely locked at 0.04 candelas, as if someone were highlighting key points on her fascia with a light pen. She realized the external field wasn't uniformly spread but selectively "nailed" to those acupoints with the highest betweenness centrality—in the language of network science, the points with the highest betweenness. She "saw" her own meridians redrawn into a weighted directed graph, edge weights matching the speed of Ying-wei flow described in the Lingshu's "Root Transport," yet the node degree distribution followed a power law, characteristic of a scale-free network. This meant controlling just 5% of these hub acupoints could manipulate the entire system's phase transition. A chill rose within her: if "it" wished, could it cause her Yang Link Vessel to instantly collapse, like pulling the bottom king from a house of cards, the whole structure crashing down?
The midnight bell tolled from a distant clock tower, the sound wave passing through three layers of lead glass, attenuated to a mere 3-decibel sigh. The qi and blood of the Gallbladder Meridian entered their peak moment; the Fengshi point on the Foot Shaoyang channel was as if injected with molten iron, its brightness surging three orders of magnitude, transforming from firefly to lighthouse. Xiuxiu "saw" the lateral side of her femur crack open, not marrow but an entire galaxy gushing forth, stardust erupting upward along the iliotibial tract, bending at the Huantiao point into a parabolic arc, falling toward the sacral hiatus. On the spiral arms of this galaxy, seven major stars arranged themselves into a dipper shape, their spatial angular distance error not exceeding 0.1 radians. She suddenly realized this wasn't metaphor but strict topological equivalence: if the skin were flattened into a rubber sheet, acupoints projected onto the celestial sphere, geodesic lines on the sheet and connections between constellations remained homotopic under continuous transformation. Her body had become stretchable cosmic film, stars were rivets embedded in the film, and the external field was an invisible hand, adjusting those rivets, calibrating some cross-dimensional orientation.
She opened her eyes, pupils dilated to 6 millimeters, so black the iris nearly vanished. Outside the window, city lights scattered by haze formed a murky yellow misty sea, yet she seemed to penetrate the atmosphere directly, seeing the galactic core twenty thousand light-years away. She called "stop," her voice not loud but with glass-cutting sharpness. Mozi reflexively slammed the emergency stop; coil current returned to zero within 0.1 milliseconds, residual energy absorbed by the MOV, emitting a faint "click" like a distant safety catch being disengaged. Xiuxiu lunged toward the desk, her knee striking the metal edge, the dull pain instantly drowned by an adrenaline surge. She grabbed A4 paper and a 0.38mm gel pen, the pen tip pecking out the first black dot—Baihui. Then Yongquan, Tanzhong, Laogong, Mingmen, Taichong… Each dot she made, she silently recited the corresponding star name: Dubhe, Merak, Alkaid, Betelgeuse, Antares, Spica… The paper gradually became occupied by black dots, like lunar soil pierced by a meteorite swarm. She connected dots into lines; the lines weren't straight but geodesics, projections of spherical shortest paths onto two dimensions. One hundred thirty-seven acupoints, one hundred thirty-seven stars, forming a star map 0.2 meters in diameter yet containing the entire north polar region. She held the paper up to the light, looking against it; paper fibers overlapped with star tracks, like a blurry silver gelatin photograph, yet exuding breathtaking precision.
Mozi and Yue'er simultaneously held their breath. The air grew viscous at this moment, as if injected with supercooled sucrose solution; any tiny disturbance might trigger a chain crystallization from amorphous to crystalline state. Yue'er scanned the diagram into the computer, using affine transformation to map the two-dimensional point set onto a three-dimensional unit sphere, then comparing it with the Hipparcos star catalog. The match p-value was less than 10⁻⁹, far below any statistical fluke. She dragged the mouse, rotating the sphere; when Orion's belt aligned perfectly with three lines on the paper, a line of white text jumped out at the center of the screen: Homotopy equivalence confirmed. Her fingers hovered above the keyboard, trembling slightly, like a devotee touching the Holy Grail. Mozi exported the database to CSV, using Python to draw a network graph, node size proportional to response intensity, edge color corresponding to phase difference. He zoomed in on the Fengshi point, finding its degree value as high as 21, far exceeding the average of 7, while its connected nodes precisely formed a K₇ complete subgraph—the probability of this appearing in a random network was zero. He recalled the description in Lingshu's "Twenty-Five Types of Yin and Yang People": "On the upper part of Foot Shaoyang, abundant qi and blood make the beard long and beautiful." Suddenly he realized perhaps the ancients had long recorded this star map hidden within networks in another language, merely lacking mathematical tools to prove it.
Xiuxiu leaned back in the chair, sweat soaking through the linen, the fabric clinging to her skin like a second layer of cooling armor. Her temples throbbed, each pulse accompanied by a micro-phosphene—closing her eyes, she could see her optic nerve fiber bundles, like stretched optical fibers, sending the retina's star map toward the occipital lobe. She heard blood turbulent in her cochlea, its spectrum matching the external field's base frequency, as if her body had become a phase-locked loop synchronized with the universe's master oscillator. She softly said: "We need to rename acupoints; no longer 'Fengshi,' 'Baihui,' but 'Dubhe A,' 'Betelgeuse B,' using IAU naming conventions, registering the entire map as humanity's 89th constellation." She paused, her voice lower yet firmer, "Perhaps it isn't attacking us but broadcasting coordinates, seeking its kind. The human body is the galaxy's mirror; acupoints are pulsars, qi and blood are radio beams. We were designed as antenna arrays capable of sending and receiving cosmic mail, merely having forgotten to power on."
Mozi looked up, seeing the LED reflections in her eyes like a miniature galaxy. He suddenly understood every line of code he wrote, every Fourier transform, was decrypting the universe's love letter to itself. Yue'er saved the model as an .ipynb file, naming it "Homo_Sideris.ipynb"—Latin for "Star Person." She pressed Shift+Enter, running the last cell of code; the output was but a single line: Hello, World. Below it, the star map woven from human acupoints slowly rotated, like a newborn galaxy, silently burning deep within the screen.