The Static Hour #1

The afternoon in the small town was thick and still. The air carried the faint, sun-warmed scent of laundry detergent from clothes hung out to dry, a simple aroma punctuated by the crisp, bright click-clack of an abacus from the distant rice shop.

At the mouth of the alley, a small boy, wearing sandals with worn-smooth soles, dashed joyfully out of the general store, his hand clamped tightly around a bottle of soy sauce. His mother was still inside, inspecting rice sacks, but he was impatient to get home. The boy ran past an old, red-brick wall. The peeling paint on the bricks was mottled, and beneath the flaking layers, a few faded numbers faintly emerged: 1748.

He did not pause; he did not even spare it a glance.

The street remained perfectly ordinary, a flat, unremarkable duplicate of the day before.

Inside the goldsmith’s, a digital clock hung silently on the wall, its hour and minute hands static, pointing to 19:18. A few scattered customers browsed the gold jewelry. A woman in reading glasses placidly flipped through the gold price list resting on the counter.

Outside the goldsmith's, a small, grizzled dog sniffed a telephone pole, lifted its leg, and left a puddle of urine. The old woman holding its leash nodded to the cloth shop owner across the street, a familiar greeting already on her lips: "Closing up already?"

The old man, tidying bolts of fabric, smiled and replied, "Same as yesterday."

A woman stepped out of the adjacent pharmacy, wiping traces of medicinal salve from her hands, and joined their casual conversation. The slanted afternoon sun bathed them, stretching their shadows long—a scene repeated countless times.

Lin Yongkang knelt behind the pharmacy counter, counting slivers of danggui (angelica root), piece by piece.

"...forty, forty-one..."

He frowned, staring at the last few pieces of crushed herb on the medicinal tray.

Seven pieces were missing.

He counted again. Still forty-two.

His mother reminded him every day that the count had to be exactly forty-nine.

This had become a fixed component of the town’s routine—as immutable as the sun rising in the east, the goldsmith’s digital clock advancing at the same moment every day, and the bakery opening precisely at 07:19. It never changed.

The afternoon sun, fractured by the Venetian blinds, cast shadows of equidistant bars across the counter, precise as measured increments on a ruler.

On the street outside, the goldsmith’s digital clock made a crisp, audible "tick."

The time became: 19:19.

Mr. Chen appeared.

He always arrived at this exact moment, standing by the rusted fire hydrant, quietly watching the pharmacy.

Yongkang instinctively tightened his grip on the medicinal jar he was holding.

This was not the first time.

He always felt Mr. Chen was looking directly at him.

Yet, the townspeople paid him no mind, acting as if his presence were completely natural. No one ever spoke to him.

And that was the most unsettling part.

—It was as if he didn't belong in this world at all.

The metallic ring on Mr. Chen's right wrist rotated slightly, catching and refracting the cold glint of a wristwatch—a 1991 Rolex, its hands frozen at 07:19, seemingly trapped in a past moment in time.

He was never late, and never early.

His gray shirt shimmered with a faint silver sheen in the setting sun, subtly out of sync with the surrounding environment.

Yongkang unconsciously took a step back, his fingertips brushing the copper handle of the camphor wood cabinet.

He looked up and saw the small boy walk right past Mr. Chen, clutching a bottle of soy sauce.

—This exact scene had happened yesterday.

The identical time, the identical action, and even... the identical angle of the shadows.

It could not merely be coincidence.

A creeping, inexplicable chill ascended the back of his neck.

Yongkang picked up the lottery slip pressed under the bottom-right corner of his dresser mirror and traced the number with a pencil:

"1748"

He had seen this number too many times.

It did not exist in isolation, but permeated his life in a way he couldn't explain—

His mother brushed her hair 128 times every night.

128 = 2^7. 7 is one of the four digits in 1748. 2^7 suggests a kind of exponential effect.

1 + 2 + 8 = 11. 1 + 7 + 4 + 8 = 20. 20 - 11 = 9.

11, 20, 9 seemed to be some kind of hidden calculation rule, always pointing to a different digit.

Mr. Chen always stayed for 3 minutes and 17 seconds.

3 x 60 + 17 = 197. 1 + 9 + 7 = 17.

197 is a prime number, and 17 is a number present in 1748.

Was he following some kind of invisible, structured timing?

The bakery at the street corner opened promptly at 7:19 every morning.

Was this mere chance, or the mapping of some temporal rule?

These numbers were like a hidden cipher network, constantly pointing back to 1748, yet constantly generating new connections.

Could it really be just a coincidence?

"Tick—"

The digital clock jumped to 19:22, and Mr. Chen vanished immediately into the alley.

Rain hammered against the roof at night, a rhythmically precise secret code. The streetlights were dim and yellow, casting their faint glow through the windows and projecting shapes onto the wall.

The calendar in his father's study hung motionless—

July 19, 1987.

The calendar page was slightly curled, the yellowed paper seeming to have endured too much time, yet it remained perpetually fixed on that date.

Yongkang took a deep breath and entered the study.

He stood by the desk, staring at the calendar, a page that seemed not to have been turned in years.

He reached out, trying to turn it over.

—But the bottom of the calendar was firmly secured with thumbtacks; it would not budge.

Yongkang quietly pried open his father’s study drawer. A faint wisp of sandalwood, the scent of 1987, the year his father started writing The Rainforest Paradox, drifted from the IBM computer's ventilation grille.

The screen lit up. The cursor blinked 7 times per second, perfectly synchronized with the frequency of raindrops tapping the windowpane outside.

A red warning popped up in the nineteenth minute: [ERROR 1748]. Yongkang's fingers trembled slightly. He reached out and pulled a floppy disk stained with blue ink. On the back, written in ballpoint pen:

0.719MHz—The transmission frequency of the abandoned town meteorological station.

In the drawer, a yellowed old newspaper was tucked into a corner.

"October 17, 1995: Taiping Town Experiences a Rare Total Solar Eclipse."

Yongkang froze.

That date was his birthday.

The moment he was born, the entire town plunged into momentary darkness—clocks stopped, radio silence, all electronic devices lost signal.

He slowly unfolded the newspaper. Beneath it, a corner of an old photograph was peeking out.

In the picture, a blurred figure stood in front of the abandoned cinema. The background was out of focus, but on the person's wrist, there was a Rolex, stopped at 07:19.

Yongkang stared at the photograph, a cold dread crawling up his spine.

"Drink your soup."

His mother ladled out the forty-nine pieces of danggui. The porcelain spoon struck the bowl seven times, a mechanically crisp sound.

Yongkang stared at her movement, suddenly noticing—a thin, red line on his mother’s wrist, as if she had been cut by some kind of metal, yet she seemed completely oblivious.

He asked cautiously, "Mom, did Dad ever wear a watch?"

His mother paused, then turned to clear the dishes, her back stiff. "Don't ask useless questions."

At midnight, a sound of metal clanging echoed through the heavy rain.

Yongkang followed the sound to the window and, through the glass, saw Mr. Chen stoop to pick something up.

On the ground in the alley, a broken metal ring was left behind, identical to the one on Mr. Chen's wrist.

He picked up the metal ring, his fingertips trembling. Etched faintly on the inner side of the ring was a sequence of numbers:

1991.2.17

This date... he felt he had seen it somewhere.

His heart tightened. He quickly flipped through his father's old diary. The pages were yellowed, and some handwriting had been eroded by time into faint traces. His finger skimmed the paper, stopping at a single line of text.

—February 17, 1991.

His father’s handwriting on this day was particularly messy, as if his hand had been shaking as he wrote.

"He is here."

Just three words, without context, but they sent an unnameable chill through Yongkang's heart.

He kept reading. The diary entries were sparse and restrained, as if someone had deliberately tried to hide something.

February 17, 1992

—It’s been a year, and everything is as it was... Perhaps I was just imagining things?

February 20, 1995

—She is pregnant. Is this good news?

June 3, 1995

—Everything is in place. Arrangements have been made.

October 17, 1995

—Total eclipse. The child was born safely.

October 20, 1995

—I’m sorry. Please forgive me.

Yongkang's fingertip rested on the final page.

October 20, 1995, the day his father disappeared.

He stared at the words, feeling the air in the entire study become heavy and suffocating.

"He is here."

Who was this "He"?

"Everything is in place. Arrangements have been made."

What exactly had his father arranged?

"Please forgive me."

—What had he done that required forgiveness?

The raindrops hitting the glass outside sounded like a distant echo, questioning a truth that lay buried.