Chapter 9 Departure

How did a person determine what was bizarre? What was inexplicable, beyond the ordinary?

Ma En had a method. It was stupid, and he knew it. Study — that was the whole thing. Study expanded the boundaries of what he understood, and anything that remained outside those boundaries, no matter how far he pushed them, was worth paying attention to. If something truly exceeded human imagination and cognition, then it should remain inexplicable regardless of how long a person studied, how broadly, how deeply. No amount of knowledge would crack it. But if study alone could dismantle the mystery, then by his definition, it wasn't truly bizarre.

He loved studying. Not because he was diligent or virtuous. Because it was his measuring stick. He didn't consider himself a genius. In university he'd never bothered with certification exams beyond the required subjects. Credentials proving what he knew meant nothing to him — credentials had value in human society, but they were useless for identifying the bizarre. Only the knowledge itself mattered.

He'd held to this method since elementary school. Eighteen years straight, every single day, without exception. He didn't know how hard other people worked, and he didn't need to compare. Their goals were normal: become valuable, contribute to society, improve the world. Perfectly reasonable. But Ma En didn't yearn to become valuable, and he had no grand ambitions for social reform. What he was searching for would make most people laugh — the delusional fixation of someone who'd watched too many movies.

Once his pursuit diverged from the mainstream, he'd noticed that his behavioral standards diverged with it. Comparing himself to others became meaningless. Different foundations, different values, different frameworks — no common standard existed. He couldn't judge whether other people's normalcy was good or bad, and he'd long since given up trying to make sense of how they judged him.

Most people who spent any time talking to Ma En came away with the same impression: he was never quite on the same wavelength. His responses to ordinary topics always carried a faintly off-kilter quality — not wrong, exactly, but skewed. His behavior, too, had an awkwardness people couldn't articulate. Nothing he did was unreasonable. It just felt slightly alien.

Even so, he needed to survive in human society. That was the foundation for pursuing the bizarre. In most situations he did his best to meet people's expectations, and this was exhausting but not impossible. He considered it part of the price — a trivial installment, really, measured against the catastrophe he suspected the bizarre would eventually bring, and the unimaginable cost he'd pay when that day arrived.

Civil service was stable work. Stable work meant a stable life. His city was generally peaceful — a serial killer had surfaced recently, true, but averaged across decades, the crime rate was better than ninety percent of the world's inhabited places. His parents lived in their hometown, but he wasn't alone here. Holidays brought relatives and friends. He never felt lonely. He could have found a girlfriend easily enough. Even without one, he had no shortage of female companionship. By any ordinary measure of a good life, he couldn't identify what was missing.

But the moment he chose to pursue the bizarre, all of it would end.

He understood this with absolute clarity. Most people would consider what he was giving up worse than losing life itself. What everyone chased — a safe, comfortable existence with just enough excitement to keep it interesting — he was about to throw away. And not for a clear enemy he could defeat, but for something shapeless: a sign, a fate, a curse that might follow him for the rest of his life. He wasn't certain about the form it would take. But after twenty years of analysis, this was the most likely outcome he could foresee.

How many people would deliberately choose misfortune over stability? Even gamblers expected the odds to work in their favor. To see disaster clearly and walk toward it anyway — Ma En knew this wasn't what normal people did. And it was exactly what he was doing.

When he thought about it honestly, even he found his own choice surprising. But surprise didn't mean he was going to stop.

Taking the Seven Transmutations of the Profound Mystery Records away was the right thing to do — for this city, for everyone in it. This place hadn't seen an abnormal death in ten years, let alone a killer who made front-page news. If the disturbances rippling through the city were connected to this book, then someone had to remove it. Someone had to carry it far enough away for the city to go quiet again. Otherwise, more people would die.

That someone was him. Maybe that wasn't coincidence. Maybe it was exactly the kind of inevitability he'd spent his life preparing for.

After all — why had he been the one to find the book? Out of everyone in this city, why the person who'd spent eighteen years sharpening himself into a tool for exactly this purpose?

Some people would scoff. Linking a book to an entire city's fate sounded absurd, even delusional. But Ma En had arrived at this conclusion through his own lens, his own thinking, and what other people thought about it was irrelevant.

The resignation went through on Monday. His department didn't try to keep him — plenty of people wanted the position. But the handover took four days, which he hadn't anticipated. His last assignment was wrapped up clean, but getting a replacement settled wasn't something that happened overnight. He didn't have much to do himself. He just had to wait.

Those four days weren't wasted. He spent them at the library, hunting for anything connected to the Seven Transmutations of the Profound Mystery Records. Local chronicles first, then old newspapers and periodicals, then outward — the city's history in every direction, spilling over into religion, folklore, theology, even fiction.

The book was, at its core, nameless. It looked like handwritten work from the first half of this century. In that flash of vision, it had seemed to be notes left by a cultivator from the Wei-Jin period, with roots reaching back further still — to the age of myth. But what was it really? When had it actually been made? The surface gave nothing definitive. The only certainty was that anything connected to this book would be unusual, because its contents had been written in an entirely unique script: characters that never repeated, that followed no recognizable linguistic pattern.

Like scripture from heaven. Each character had appeared once, then vanished. The entire book had gone blank.

During the four-day wait, Ma En tried every method he could think of to make the text reappear. Human history was full of techniques for concealing written words, and the modern era had added more. He tested ancient methods and cutting-edge ones alike. None of them worked.

He also called in favors to have the paper dated. The results matched what the book looked like: paper manufactured sometime around 1910, give or take twenty years. The material was plant fiber, but not from any species available in China at the time. They couldn't pin down exactly what it was — only that it wasn't any of the standard papermaking materials, past or present.

"Could it be a species native to Japan?" Ma En asked. Japan was where he intended to go. In recent decades, the number of newly discovered and registered plant species there had climbed steadily. The country was small, but its volcanoes, hot springs, and forests gave it an outsized ecological diversity. Understanding of its natural resources back home had only deepened in the current century.

"Maybe," the lab technician said, hedging. "Japanese papermaking came from techniques transmitted from China, but they adapted everything to local conditions. Different regions, different materials, different technical details. This paper isn't what they've commonly used in the last hundred years, but — look at these fibers, see the grain pattern here? It's similar to some Japanese papers. Could be some remote village using local resources, handmade, traditional methods. Rare stuff. Bottom line: more likely Japanese than Chinese."

One more reason to go.

Emigrating had never been easy, in any era. Even tourism required mountains of paperwork, and visa restrictions made longer stays complicated. A tourist visa would give him one month in Japan at most. So Ma En pulled strings — called in favors — and arranged a work visa, posing as a photographer for a travel magazine. The identity was fake. The magazine was on the verge of folding, its publisher already bleeding money.

He was already thinking about what kind of real work he'd find after arriving. Without legitimate employment, Japanese law wouldn't let him stay long. His work visa was valid for one year, and one year might not be enough to find what he was looking for. He'd accepted the possibility of never returning home, but he had no intention of drifting from country to country like a refugee.

Japan's culture and proximity made it a neighbor in the truest sense. Even if he couldn't go home for years, the closeness would take the edge off the homesickness. And his Party membership carried weight — Japan's political landscape ran on competitive elections between his party and the opposition, and Party affiliation opened doors. He'd learned to work those doors during his years in civil service.

He'd considered using his savings to open a small shop in Japan. If his stock portfolio appreciated, so much the better.

The settlement plan was already mapped out. He'd built it carefully — orderly but flexible, with enough room to absorb surprises without falling apart.

At night, he turned to a different task: reconstructing the vanished characters from the Seven Transmutations of the Profound Mystery Records. His memory was good. But the characters were alien — patternless, seen only once. Memorizing all of them was impossible. Over four days, he managed to recall twenty-four.

Twenty-four unique, unrelated characters.

He woke from dreamless sleep, and the number hit him: the Twenty-Four Solar Terms.

So he wrote that down. With no patterns and no leads, he could only chase these flashes of instinct — sudden, irrational connections that might lead somewhere. The same way the book's name had surfaced in his mind. The same way he'd intuited its origins.

The association proved fruitful, at least as a starting point. He threw himself into research on the Solar Terms with the intensity of someone who'd found a thread and refused to let go. He studied the cultural customs passed down across generations in China, catalogued every regional variation in how the terms were understood and observed, dug into the stories behind each tradition and the scientific principles that explained the differences. He searched for every imaginative interpretation — fictional, speculative, mythological. He worked through the city library, the provincial library, the university library. He searched his own archived files. He got on dial-up and tracked down strangers who knew things he didn't.

The material was overwhelming. The depth of it couldn't be processed in four days. And the Chinese and Japanese understandings of the Solar Terms, while similar, diverged in revealing ways — the associated legends alone were vast enough to rival China's own folklore. He compiled a reading list that grew longer by the hour, most of it Chinese sources. In Japan, he'd need to continue with Japanese materials, and eventually branch out to any country whose traditions even tangentially touched the Solar Terms.

Four days of research. A clear starting point. And still — nothing. Not a single direct or indirect connection between the Twenty-Four Solar Terms and those twenty-four vanishing characters.

On his last evening before departure, the high school girl still hadn't appeared. She seemed to have forgotten the encounter entirely, or maybe she'd decided she wanted nothing more to do with it. Probably for the best. Still, Ma En asked around the building — and what he heard stopped him cold.

"High school girl?" The Grandfather on the fourth floor — the neighborhood volunteer, the building's most helpful resident, the man who handled every notice about utility payments and community services — was emphatic. "We don't have any girls in this building. Not one. They're all boys." He peered at Ma En. "Little Ma, you've lived here long enough. Don't tell me you don't know your own neighbors."

"Maybe a relative visiting someone. A classmate." Ma En felt the ground shift slightly beneath him, but kept his composure. "During the blackout the other night, I bumped into her on the stairs."

"Blackout?" The Grandfather's brow furrowed. "What blackout? When? We haven't had a blackout here in months."

"The power went out one night. The whole building was dark — every apartment, no lights anywhere." Ma En named the date.

"No." The old man's certainty was absolute. "You must be confused. Did you come home to the wrong building? There was no blackout that day. The second-floor family was out, so their lights were off, but everyone else's were on." He paused. "And yours were on too. Did you actually go out that night? Did you forget to turn off the lights?"

Ma En said nothing for a long moment.

He was certain of what he'd seen. Certain he'd turned off the lights before leaving. But the Grandfather spoke with the unshakeable conviction of a man who paid attention to everything that happened in his building. One of them was wrong. The Grandfather would never believe it was him.

Unless neither of them was wrong.

Another bizarre incident? Ma En turned the thought over slowly. He wasn't frightened. But it was unsettling. The high school girl, the pitch-dark building, the encounter on the stairs — looking back now, all of it carried a wrongness he hadn't fully registered at the time. What he'd seen, heard, felt — had any of it actually happened? Or had something happened to him?

Either way, the contradictions confirmed one thing: something was already at work. He needed to leave quickly, before it reached the people who'd been his neighbors for years.

"Probably got it mixed up," he said, and smiled. "Grandfather, I'm heading abroad. It'll be a long time before I'm back. Take care of yourself."

"Abroad?" The old man's eyebrows shot up. "What for?"

"See the world. Try something new with work." Ma En kept it light.

"See the world?" The Grandfather was unimpressed. "You could see the world right here — you haven't even traveled around China, have you, Little Ma?" He shook his head. "You young people, always running off to foreign countries. It's all just novelty over there, you know. Not easy to get by. Where are you going?"

"Japan."

"Japan." The Grandfather considered this. "Heard the scenery's alright. But the people aren't very broad-minded. Volcanoes and earthquakes everywhere. Wooden houses — one wrong step and the whole thing comes down."

"Just going to take a look." Ma En laughed. The Grandfather's knowledge of Japan was entirely secondhand.

"Foreign lands. Difficult, difficult, difficult." The old man shook his head, but didn't press further. "When do you leave?"

"Tomorrow."

"Everything ready?"

"Everything's ready."

"Well then. Watch yourself out there. Foreigners are full of tricks — not as straightforward as our own people."

"Everyone's the same, everyone's the same." Ma En waved it off with a grin.

The Grandfather fixed him with a hard stare. Then he laughed too, reached out and clapped Ma En on the shoulder. He didn't say anything else. Just turned and closed his door.

Early the next morning, Ma En woke from dreamless sleep. His mind snapped clear in an instant. He washed, ate breakfast, picked up his massive suitcase, pocketed his wallet, and glanced once around the apartment that looked almost exactly the way it had when he'd moved in.

Then he opened the door and walked out.