Hirota was asleep. Feeling the steady rhythm of her breathing, Ma En released the hand he'd clamped around the back of her neck.

The evening had been something of a fever dream. But Ma En refused to treat that as license to go with the current. He could invent any number of explanations for Hirota's behavior — what he could not tolerate was his own. Tonight, the decisive factor had not been her attitude. It had been his.

He laid the unconscious Hirota on the sofa. His eyes fell on the materials spread across the coffee table — it was precisely the Twenty-Four Solar Terms content that had surfaced in his mind at the critical moment, yanking him back from the brink. He felt, in hindsight, a small gratitude that his preparations over these past days hadn't been wasted.

If he'd actually gone further, he had no way of knowing how Hirota would feel afterward. But of one thing he was certain: he had absolutely no intention of marrying her.

From everything she'd shown tonight — if this was just a momentary impulse, then fine. But if she harbored something deeper, Ma En didn't see how that could end well. He was incapable of making her any promises. He didn't believe that everything done on impulse was wrong, but compared to rejecting someone after the fact, he'd rather not begin at all.

He hadn't wanted to say these hurtful things while the room still hummed with that charged, rosy atmosphere. Better to let her sleep than to be blunt about it. That was what he'd decided, and he'd acted on it immediately. Looking at Hirota's calm, sleeping face, he didn't think the decision was wrong.

Wisest, sometimes, to stay muddled.

He said it to himself, then turned the materials on the coffee table to face him. He could have carried Hirota to her bedroom, and the thought had crossed his mind, but for reasons he couldn't quite explain, he felt no inclination to do so. If anything, some instinct — maybe just nerves — told him to keep her within sight.

Perhaps it was the strange eye that had visited this apartment. That was probably what made him uneasy. He glanced at the front door, then at Hirota's bedroom. The bedroom door stood wide open; he could easily walk in and fetch a blanket. Again the thought came, and again he didn't act on it.

This entire evening — his thoughts, his actions, his impulses — had all been subtly different from his usual self. But to call it genuinely wrong might be too strong. He was fairly sure that nine out of ten men, in his position, would have been just as reckless.

He took off his jacket and draped it over Hirota in place of a blanket. Her change of clothes sat on the sofa's armrest, but those wouldn't be needed tonight. From experience, he knew she'd sleep through until morning.

After that, Ma En devoted the remaining hours to the Twenty-Four Solar Terms.

As on most nights, he sank into knowledge and thought with a quiet steadiness. Study and research had never been smooth for him — there were always maddening, intractable problems — but even at their worst, these frustrations carried a kind of freedom, far lighter than the obstacles and sabotage he'd faced in actual fieldwork.

Hirota slept beside him. The unwarranted thoughts and impulses that had plagued him earlier had vanished from his body entirely.

At midnight, a sudden chill snapped him out of his concentration. He set down his pen and pressed a bookmark into the page.

The solar terms of May by the Gregorian calendar were Beginning of Summer and Grain Full.

Beginning of Summer meant, at its simplest, the entry into the summer season. In antiquity, it carried greater ceremony — it was the day for conferring titles and bestowing honors.

Grain Full had deeper agricultural significance: the point in the calendar when summer-ripening crops approached their final and most critical stage before harvest.

The ancients had written: In the fourth month, Beginning of Summer marks the seasonal node. Summer means great; by this time, all things have grown to completion, hence the name. Grain Full marks the mid-point; living things have grown — slightly, yet fully — hence the name Grain Full.

The "fourth month" in that passage referred to the lunar calendar.

Now, in the Gregorian month of May, past Beginning of Summer but not yet Grain Full, Ma En had been paying particular attention to these two terms. Yet he still could not extract, from all the commentary ancient and modern scholars had offered on them, any thread connecting to the Seven Transmutations of the Profound Mystery Records. The flash of inspiration had arrived without warning and departed the same way, leaving no trace. Even pulling out his notes — the twenty-four inexplicable characters he'd transcribed — revealed nothing further.

He was fully aware that his efforts hadn't been fruitless. At minimum, he understood the solar terms far more deeply now. But deeper understanding of the solar terms was not the goal. Effort without results bred a particular kind of exhaustion.

Ma En rubbed his temples and lit a cigarette. The bitterness cut through the fog of frustration, anchoring him back in the present. He drew hard, burning a third of it in one pull, tapped the ash, and began gathering the books and papers from the coffee table.

On a normal night he might have pushed later. But tomorrow he had a job interview.

As he closed his notebook, the cold hit him again — sudden, directional. Like a night breeze, except it seemed aimed at his body. He looked around. Every window in sight was firmly shut.

Something was off. He sat with the feeling, testing it, and decided it wasn't a night breeze after all. It was May. Even after dark, the temperature wouldn't drop enough to produce anything he'd call "cold."

He'd just finished an intensive study of Beginning of Summer and Grain Full, leaving him acutely attuned to the season's temperature and humidity. But before he could investigate the source of the chill, he heard papers rustling on the coffee table.

A whisper of movement —

Several loose draft sheets slid off the edge and drifted to the floor. The cover of a book had been lifted; when he looked, it settled back without fully opening. But his notebook — that had flipped open completely. The characters on the page were his own handwriting: transcriptions of the ancient text.

This time, though, scanning the words, something felt minutely different from what he'd read and understood before.

It was only a feeling. The moment he focused, the sense of difference dissolved, and the passage looked exactly as he remembered.

On the sofa, Hirota turned over. By the time he glanced up, she was facing away from him.

The overhead fluorescent had been off for a while. Only the small desk lamp on the coffee table still glowed, pooling light in a narrow circle. Beyond it, the room lay in soft darkness. The sofa was half in shadow. Ma En adjusted the lampshade, angling the light away from Hirota's face.

A moment ago, everything had felt normal. But now — whether it was a trick of heightened awareness or genuine perception — Hirota's silhouette, the shape of her body turned away from him, carried an eerie, drifting quality. An impulse rose: to go over and check, to see her whole.

He did nothing. He had enough experience to know that human perception was fragile and suggestible, easily swayed by environment into producing illusions. "Something feels wrong." "An inexplicable dread." "As though something abnormal is present." "A strange sense of déjà vu." These were situations people had discussed to exhaustion, and nine times out of ten, they were the ordinary errors of an ordinary mind.

Read too many horror novels, associate with the wrong imagery, and suddenly the familiar world turned alien — breeding deeper fear from nothing.

Ma En could explain what he was feeling in purely theoretical terms. But he couldn't stop himself from feeling it.

The silence in the living room was beginning to taste strange.

He drew on his cigarette without thinking, but the heat that reached his fingertips jolted him — the cigarette had burned to its end. He dropped the butt into the glass, steadied himself, and lit a second.

Under its ember, the lamplight seemed dimmer than before. But the writing in his notebook was still legible.

— In the fourth month, Beginning — of Summer marks the node — great; by this time, all things have grown — completion as the name. Grain Full marks the mid — living things — slightly, yet fully — hence — Grain Full as the name.

The transcription of the ancient text, in the instant his eyes passed over it, again produced that subtle dissonance. The sentence seemed to be not quite this.

He stared directly. He read it through in his mind: In the fourth month, Beginning of Summer marks the seasonal node. Summer means great; by this time, all things have grown to completion, hence the name. Grain Full marks the mid-point; living things have grown — slightly, yet fully — hence the name Grain Full.

This time it felt right. So what, exactly, had been wrong before?

He took another drag. In the haze of smoke, his mind replayed the passage once more:

— In the fourth month, Beginning — of Summer marks the node — great; by this time, all things have grown — completion as the name. Grain Full marks the mid — living things — slightly, yet fully — hence — Grain Full as the name.

His body went rigid. He thought back, glanced at the notebook, and quickly copied what had surfaced in his mind beneath the original transcription.

Then he saw it.

The version in his head differed from the one he'd written — words missing, breaks falling in different places. And because of those missing words, because the punctuation had shifted, the meaning of the whole passage had changed.

The transcription and the version that flickered through his mind in those unfocused moments described "Beginning of Summer" and "Grain Full" as though they were talking about two entirely different things.

When the realization hit, Ma En didn't find it surprising. Text meaning that shifted through altered word-breaks and missing characters was a fundamental property of classical Chinese. And since his research had begun from nothing — with no evidence that his twenty-four mysterious characters related to the solar terms at all — then a new sentence appearing unbidden in his mind could simply be treated as inspiration.

Though he'd been ready to rest, the discovery pulled him back in. He couldn't resist examining the new passage further.

Every character in an ancient text could carry multiple meanings. Which meaning applied in any given sentence was determined by scholars of later ages — people who studied the surviving records, who tried to reconstruct what the ancients had meant, and who re-expressed those meanings in their own contemporary terms. They believed their interpretations. But for some readers, those explanations — however authoritative and widely accepted — were not entirely convincing.

A single character held so many possible meanings. Ancient and modern interpretations diverged. The further back you traced, the more the conventions of phrasing shifted with each passing era. It was like a game of whispered messages: after enough rounds of transmission, the original intent was inevitably distorted. Applied to the modern understanding of ancient texts, this principle meant that the oldest passages — having passed through generations of citation, commentary, and re-commentary — might well have acquired critical differences from their earliest meaning.

Ideas shifted in transmission. Understanding warped as it traveled. And people, ancient and modern alike, tended to favor the interpretations that supported their own arguments — to re-annotate the classics from their own era's perspective.

What had the ancients actually said? For most people, the question didn't matter. Trust the standard translations and move on. But for a small number of people, truly grasping the original intent was a near-impossible task. They believed that the distortions introduced through transmission were more likely than the preservation of wholeness.

Ma En was not that extreme. But compared to those who simply trusted the canonical readings, his mindset — shaped by his pursuit of the bizarre — leaned toward the skeptics. He wouldn't reflexively doubt the established interpretations, but he wouldn't reject a new reading either. And what he'd just recorded, compared to the standard transcription, represented a divergence even larger than the gaps between ancient and modern scholarly readings.

Different word-breaks were one thing — those could be debated. But missing characters produced what was essentially a new sentence. For deeply personal reasons, Ma En was more interested in this "error" — this new sentence born of omission — than in the canonical version he'd transcribed.

He turned the thought over, stubbing out his cigarette.

The sense of illusion persisted: the lamplight seemed to have dimmed again. But his vision wasn't any worse —

And as that thought formed, the lamp in the living room went out with a sharp click. Total darkness.

The cold he'd felt twice before swept across his skin, more pronounced than either time.

He shivered involuntarily. This was absolutely not the "coolness" of early summer.