Within Lingshu Hall, the afternoon sunlight stretched like a drawn golden thread, slanting through the gaps of the venetian blinds to carve the wooden floor into alternating stripes of light and shadow. Those stripes rested with an almost stubborn stillness, as though time itself had been folded into thin sheets, layered upon the dust of the consultation room. The remnants of mugwort ash lingered in the air, carrying a warm bitterness that intertwined with the cold, sharp scent of disinfectant, while a trace of sandalwood—so faint it seemed to seep from some invisible crevice—evoked memories of years past, reluctant to fade. Having seen off her last scheduled patient, Xiuxiu did not, as was her custom, spread her medical records across the nanmu table to circle critical acupoints with cinnabar-laden brushstrokes, nor did she sterilize her silver needles one by one in the blue flames of the alcohol lamp. Instead, she stood before the luminous wall displaying the digitalized meridian charts, fixed like a shadow nailed in place, only her eyelashes fluttering occasionally to prove that breath continued. On the screen, the Twelve Primary Meridians and Eight Extraordinary Meridians resembled an enlarged galaxy, slowly rotating around the transparent human model, acupoints flickering like pulsars. When she reached out to touch it, rivers of light overflowed from her fingertips like startled fireflies, only to be swiftly reabsorbed by the model.
This was her "child"—a dynamic visualization model born from feeding deep learning networks with the vague descriptions of qi and blood from ancient family texts, orally transmitted pulse songs, alongside millions of datasets from modern bioelectrical medicine, cultivated through countless sleepless nights. She had believed herself sufficiently detached, treating this "brilliance" with the same clinical detachment a surgeon reserves for a scalpel. Yet now, her heart hung by a slender thread in her throat, each beat scraping against a sharp edge. Her gaze crossed the river of light to settle on the gray-white noise point left by that anomalous pulse three days prior. It lasted only 0.7 milliseconds—sharp, regular, like a thin blade slicing through black silk before the silk stitched itself back together. But the tear it left behind continued to widen in her cognition. That afternoon, Xiao Li from the Quantum Computing Research Institute had entered clutching his migraine-racked head, his face pale to the point of transparency. She had selected Neiguan from the Hand Shaoyang Sanjiao Meridian, paired with Taichong and Fengchi, intending to dredge the stagnant qi mechanism. The instant the needle achieved Deqi, the monitor's waveform suddenly leaped with a square wave that belonged not to bioelectricity—as though someone had driven a steel needle through the eardrum of the universe. She had assumed it was equipment interference at the time, but playback revealed that the pulse coincided perfectly with the data packet received by Xiao Li's quantum wrist terminal, with a margin of error less than 0.1 milliseconds. She tried to convince herself it was "coincidence," yet it felt like using a single leaf to dam a bursting river. Now, that gray-white noise point flickered quietly in the corner of the screen, like an eye that refused to close.
She recalled the passage from Plain Questions' "Treatise on the Correspondence of Yin and Yang": "Heavenly qi communicates with the lungs; earthly qi communicates with the throat." The ancients regarded the human body as an inverted bellows, through which the qi of heaven and earth surged and circulated. She had memorized the Medical Formulary in Verse with her grandfather as a child, his voice hoarse as though ground by mulberry bark paper: "Qi is the root of man; when the root perishes, the stems and leaves wither." She had not understood then, perceiving "qi" merely as the smoke rings her grandfather exhaled, rising circle by circle to the roof beams, dispersing into the tile gaps. Later, she studied biomedical engineering at Tongji University, treating meridians as yet-unconfirmed interstitial channels and "defensive qi" as a defensive network woven from lymph and neurotransmitters. She had believed herself to have dissected "qi" cleanly enough with the scalpel of science, yet that pulse struck like a handful of salt rubbed fiercely into a wound not yet healed. She suddenly realized she had never truly escaped her grandfather's smoke rings—they had merely found a more secret path, creeping into the crevices of her bones.
She reached out to shut down the luminous wall, and the consultation room dimmed instantly, leaving only the stripes from the venetian blinds arranged stubbornly across the floor. She walked to the medicine cabinet, pulled open the bottom drawer, and retrieved a lacquered wooden box. The surface was carved with thunder-fire patterns, slightly uneven to the touch like a dried riverbed. Inside lay her replica of the Nine Needles: the chán needle, round and blunt as a millet grain; the round needle, sharp and slightly curved; the spoon needle, flat as a leek leaf; the sharp needle, three-edged and blade-like; the sword-shaped needle, resembling a precious sword; the round-sharp needle, its tip like a gadfly; the filiform needle, finer than a hair; the long needle, seven inches in length; and the large needle, thick as a chopstick. She touched them in sequence, her fingertips transmitting the coolness of metal, yet within that coolness she sensed a faint tremor, as though these instruments still breathed. She recalled the "Official Needles" chapter of Spiritual Pivot: "The Nine Needles each have their proper use; their lengths and sizes each have their proper application." The ancients used the chán needle to drain yang evil, the sharp needle to drain great abscesses, and the filiform needle to regulate meridians—like conversing with the body in nine different languages. She suddenly conceived an illusion: perhaps that pulse was a tenth language delivered by the universe, and she had not yet the corresponding "needle."
She closed her eyes, allowing her breath to sink to Dantian, then slowly rise to Yintang. Her grandfather had taught her the technique of "Gathering Solar Essence," saying that the afternoon sunlight contained "the essence of yang qi," capable of dispelling yin shadows. She imagined those golden stripes transforming into tiny dragons, drilling in through her pores, traveling along the meridians, and finally converging at Weilü into a beam of light arrowing straight to the base of her skull. But that gray-white noise point was like a block of ice embedded in the center of the light beam; wherever it passed, dragon scales shattered. She opened her eyes abruptly, a thin layer of sweat already coating her back. She realized she must do something, or that pulse would drain all her sleep like a leech.
She opened her terminal and composed an email to Professor Yue'er from the mathematics department. Yue'er had once come for insomnia treatment, leaving behind a parting remark: "My fluctuations and your meridians might be two parts of the same song." At the time, she had dismissed it as literary pleasantries; now she grasped at it like a straw. She wrote: "Professor Yue'er, apologies for the intrusion. I am quite interested in the 'anomalous fluctuations' you mentioned, and wonder if you would be willing to share recent data. I suspect it may be coupled with human bioelectricity at extremely short time scales. If you are willing, I can provide high-sampling physiological indicators before and after acupuncture as an exchange." She read it three times, changing "suspect" to "hypothesize" and "exchange" to "discussion," before pressing send. The screen flashed once, and the email sank like a stone into the ocean of data.
She returned to the luminous wall, rebooted the system, and magnified the human model to display only the chest cavity and above. The Sanjiao Meridian's band of light wound like an orange river, meandering from the tip of the ring finger to the eyebrow, intersecting with the Gallbladder and Pericardium meridians to form complex vortices. She called up the original waveform from that day, expanding fifty milliseconds before and after the pulse, playing it back frame by frame. At a magnification of one thousand times, that square wave was not absolutely flat; its rising and falling edges each carried a string of high-frequency oscillations at exactly 47 Hertz—the upper boundary of human brain gamma waves. Her heartbeat suddenly accelerated. Forty-seven Hertz was also the most common synchronization frequency band in patients' EEG when she achieved Deqi with needling. She recalled the "Eighth Difficulty" in the Classic of Difficulties: "The Kidney-interval Moving Qi is the root of the five viscera and six bowels, the foundation of the twelve meridians," while in modern research, the Kidney-interval Moving Qi was often correlated with the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. She suddenly conceived a nearly absurd association: perhaps that pulse came not from outside, but was Xiao Li's own "Kidney-interval Moving Qi" instantaneously magnified under quantum perturbation, like a light cough in a valley triggering an avalanche. But where did the avalanche's energy originate?
Her gaze fell upon the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation map in the upper right corner of the screen, which she had downloaded for a lecture on "Correspondence Between Heaven and Human." Amidst a uniform deep blue, tiny imperceptible bright spots were scattered, labeled as "quantum fluctuations." She reached out to touch them, and the bright spots magnified into countless tiny vortices, like snowflakes whipped up by wind. A word flashed through her mind: Dark Energy. Cosmology stated that it permeated uniformly, yet concealed within every cubic centimeter of vacuum an energy equivalent of one hundred trillion trillion trillionths of a gram—sufficient to drive galaxies apart from one another. She suddenly felt that perhaps that pulse was the "quantum snow" raised by Dark Energy within the human body, and the silver needle was merely the final grain of sand that happened to fall upon the snow slope.
She realized she needed a bridge to translate the "cosmological language" of Dark Energy into the "medical language" of meridians. She opened the literature database and entered "dark energy biological system." Fewer than ten papers appeared, all speculation and mathematical games. She downloaded them one by one, like a diver retrieving glowing fragments from the deep sea. One mentioned that if Dark Energy and matter possessed an extremely weak coupling, it might leave a "dissonant" signal at biomolecular vibration frequencies, with a magnitude comparable to brain gamma waves. Reading this, her fingertips tingled slightly, as though fine needles were piercing from beneath her nails. She suddenly understood that what she needed was not a larger laboratory, but a smaller "universe"—a model capable of scaling Dark Energy down to the dimensions of meridians.
She thought of Mozi, the quantitative trading expert who had casually mentioned using fractal algorithms to simulate market sentiment, compressing millisecond-scale order flows into "Klein bottles of emotional dimensions." She had found it merely mystical at the time; now she grasped at it like another straw. She sent Mozi a message: "Brother Mo, is there any way to compress a cosmological-scale Dark Energy field down to the centimeter-second scale of human meridians? I need a calculable bridge, even if only mathematical." She added after sending: "Consultation fees can be converted to stock options." He replied instantly with a smiley face: "Doctor Xiuxiu, using me as a needle test subject again? Tomorrow night, same place. I'll bring a bottle of '82 Lafite; you just bring your ears."
She set down the terminal to discover that the sky outside had already darkened, the venetian blind stripes dyed orange by streetlights, like diluted sunset. She turned on the consultation room's overhead light, and the meridian chart on the luminous wall immediately lost its depth, becoming an ordinary colored projection. She suddenly felt that those rivers of light, those noise points, those hypotheses were all like fireflies trapped in a glass bottle—once exposed to normal light, only fragmented black dots remained. She turned off the overhead light, allowing darkness to gather again, leaving only the screen's blue glow reflected in her pupils.
She reached into the lacquered wooden box to extract a filiform needle, raising it level with her eyebrows. The needle tip trembled slightly in the air, emitting a faint "hum," like a distant string plucked by the wind. She recalled her grandfather saying that the "filiform" in filiform needle came from the down beneath a wild goose's wing in autumn—light as nothing, yet capable of "communicating with spirit." She suddenly felt an impulse: to insert this needle into her own Neiguan point and see if she could capture that pulse again. She grasped the needle handle, an alcohol cotton ball wiping across the wrist crease, the coolness licking her skin like a serpent's tongue. She took a deep breath, the needle tip pressing vertically against her skin, yet stopping there, reluctant to pierce. She recalled the "Explanation of Acupuncture" chapter in Plain Questions: "The essence of needling is that when qi arrives, it is effective." If qi had not arrived, then the needle entered flesh, merely injuring blood vessels in vain; if qi had already arrived, then before the needle entered, it had already communicated with spirit. She closed her eyes, synchronizing her breath with her heartbeat, imagining an orange river flowing within her own body, surging from the ring finger all the way to her eyebrow. She counted to the seventh breath, suddenly feeling a slight warmth on the inner side of her wrist, like a spark of fire splashing onto the outer wall of a blood vessel. She opened her eyes abruptly; the needle tip still hovered half a millimeter above the skin, yet seemed already grasped by an invisible hand, gently guided. She held her breath, watching the needle tip descend on its own, like a feather adsorbed by water's surface, passing through skin without resistance, through subcutaneous tissue, through fascia, finally stopping in the narrow gap between the radius and ulna.
There was no pain, only an extremely slender stream of warmth winding upward along the inner forearm, crossing the elbow bend, crossing the shoulder, converging into a small vortex behind the ear and at the side of the neck. She simultaneously opened the monitor; the waveform was as steady as usual, no square wave, no high-frequency oscillation—only regular alpha waves resonating with her heartbeat. She was not disappointed; instead, she felt a strange sense of peace: perhaps that pulse required a larger "snow slope," not merely the "Kidney-interval Moving Qi" of one person alone. She gently rotated the needle, lifting and thrusting three times, retaining it for ten minutes. During this time, she sampled her own EEG, ECG, skin conductance, and transcutaneous oxygen pressure, storing them in a folder named "Neiguan_Dark_20250923."
When removing the needle, she felt that stream of warmth dispersing slowly like a receding tide, yet leaving behind a grain of cool "sand" at Weilü, like the physical manifestation of that gray-white noise point. She reached to touch her tailbone; the skin was intact, yet she distinctly felt a grain of "sand" rolling gently within the bone marrow. She suddenly laughed, the sound in the empty consultation room like a drop of water falling into a deep well, the echo long and cold.
She turned off the equipment, placed the filiform needle back into the lacquered wooden box, and closed the lid carved with thunder-fire patterns. She walked to the door, turning back for a final glance at the luminous wall. Those rivers of light had automatically entered sleep mode, leaving only the central "Dantian" acupoint still glowing like a lonely star. She reached out to turn off the light, and that star vanished into darkness. She closed the door behind her, the lock's tongue clicking like a period marking the end of a chapter. At the end of the corridor, beyond the window, the city's neon lights blazed through the night like an inverted starry sky.
She suddenly recalled her grandfather's dying words: "Xiuer, the needle is merely a boat, ferrying others as well as oneself; if one day you see the boat's bottom leaking, do not panic—it may be that the sea wishes to enter." She had not understood then; now she felt that perhaps that pulse was a drop of "sea" leaking in, and she was both the one being ferried and the craftsman repairing the boat. She took a deep breath, removing her white coat halfway, then putting it back on again, like donning a thin layer of armor. She knew that what she was about to step into was neither a laboratory nor the stock market, but a sea that was darker, deeper, and colder. Yet she also knew that what she held in her hand was no longer merely a simple filiform needle, but a "net" woven from mugwort, silver needles, gamma waves, Dark Energy, and 47-Hertz oscillations.
She raised her head to gaze at the night sky; the moon was like a bronze mirror veiled by thin clouds, its edges seeping with a fuzzy light. She extended two fingers toward the moon, lightly pinching a strand of "thread" that did not exist, like holding a piece of mugwort about to extinguish. She said silently in her heart: Wait for me. Next time, I will bring a larger "boat," and let you hear—the sound, extremely light and faint, of silver needles colliding with Dark Energy: that "ding."