Lin Mu finally managed to buy the ticket. Four hundred and eighty yuan. He checked the ticket information over and over, as if the seat number printed on it wasn't a number but a complex legal provision requiring careful study to grasp its full meaning, especially the tiny, almost illegible additional clauses. The ticketing website was like a spinning maze, leading him down "Sold Out" cul-de-sacs countless times before finally, in an unexpected corner, spitting out this strangely numbered ticket. He wasn't even sure if he really wanted to go, but the process of obtaining the ticket itself, like completing an arduous and meaningless task, brought a kind of weary satisfaction.

The legend of Anai did not begin with any specific event, but rather permeated the city air like a whisper, an unsettling consensus. She was a deaf-mute girl, a fact that might ordinarily elicit only pity or indifference. However, Anai possessed an unsettling, almost absolute perfection of features. This perfection was not beauty in the conventional sense, but a kind of harmony that transcended human aesthetic experience, as if it were a fragile, fleeting projection of "Beauty itself" from Plato's world of Forms.

That room, less a home than a forgotten corner of the city, cowered in the perpetual shadow cast by towering buildings. The air hung thick with the damp smell of mold, mingled with the scent of cheap wood and the decay of old age. This was Old Liu's entire world, a space less than ten square meters. His bed occupied a third of it; the rest was filled with wood shavings, blocks of wood, carving knives, and wooden lives yet to take shape.

In the autumn of Beiping, the sky was so high, so blue. Sunlight spilled onto the grey roof tiles, warm and lazy, carrying a hint of languor. But inside Lao Liu's heart, it felt like a lead weight was pressing down, heavy, not relaxed at all.

My ass, no, my entire existence, is welded to this supposedly ergonomic chair. Dante described Hell, but he clearly never saw upstairs and downstairs neighbors waging class warfare. If he had, he would've created a special circle of torment just for the 7th and 8th floors, and I, Old Wang on the 9th, would be the innocent prisoner with a millstone around my neck, eternally damned. This war has been going on for three years, not much shorter than the damn Anti-Japanese War, but far more intense, only the battlefield is the floor slab, and the weapons have changed from planes and cannons to hammers, high heels, and a high-tech gadget called a "ceiling shaker."

That piece of news initially surfaced like a faint yet clear note in the background noise of the city, appearing in the torrent of notifications pushed to my phone screen: "Thank you to the brave female passenger on Beijing Subway Line 5." It possessed all the elements that grab attention instantly only to be quickly forgotten: a specific location (Subway Line 5), a vague protagonist (the brave female passenger), an event tinged with a moral halo (bravery), and a public gesture of gratitude. However, for me, this message did not dissipate as expected. It lingered, refusing to leave, like a metaphor, or a doorway leading into some dark labyrinth.

Old Wang felt like one of the old grandfather clocks he repaired, ticking away in the torrent of time towards an inevitable silence. His watch repair shop, hidden deep in a nearly forgotten alley in the South City, seemed separated from the outside world – a world frenzied over gold hitting 1039 yuan per gram – as if by a pane of dusty glass.

K arrived at the "Comprehensive Affairs Processing Center" on a grey morning. No one knew exactly what "comprehensive affairs" this center processed, only that if you wanted to legally continue breathing, walking, existing in this city, you had to obtain a specific permit from here. No one remembered the permit's specific name; people vaguely referred to it as "that thing" or "the permit."

The Center was a massive, ugly concrete building, like a crouching grey beast, swallowing and spitting out anxious crowds. K took a deep breath; the air was thick with dust, sweat, and an indescribable musty odor, like old paper. He entered the main door and was immediately seized by the sight before him—a queue so long it disappeared from view, like a giant, docile, grey python composed of countless human figures, coiling through the hall and vanishing around a distant corner.

I developed a cough, a sticky, persistent kind of cough that just wouldn't let go. It wasn't anything serious, just the kind where you're about to make a witty remark, and it jumps in with a "cough, cough," making the atmosphere feel like the minute before a memorial service; or in the dead of night, just as a spark of insight about the origin of the universe flashes in your mind, it lets out a couple of "hacks," shattering that spark like a clumsy waiter dropping a platter of fine food. In short, it wasn't fatal, but it thoroughly spoiled the fun of life.

I went to see a doctor, a middle-aged man wearing thick glasses, his expression as solemn as if he had just presided over a failed philosophical debate. He listened to my lungs, looked at my throat, then said in a tone that permitted no doubt: "You need to smoke."

Alonso, or let us call him Alonso for now—for his real name had long since worn away in the endless archives and atlases, like the emblem on an old coin—spent nineteen years searching for his missing daughter. These nineteen years did not pass linearly, but rather meandered across a map repeatedly folded, riddled with creases and holes. He claimed that for this search, he had traversed "a million kilometers." This number, initially just a hyperbole born of grief, gradually acquired a terrifying, almost metaphysical precision.