Dawn again brushed against the city's skyline, but like a blunt knife, it slowly carved open the wound in Mozi's chest that had yet to scab. Light refracted through the glass curtain wall, casting diamond-shaped bright spots on the cold gray floor of "The Nest," glaringly bright yet unable to warm him. The last frame before the screen went to sleep still showed yesterday's closing: that blue curve representing net worth, like a crane's neck snapped, plunged headlong into an abyss, the figures frozen at -73.84%. An eight-digit deficit, enough to turn any investor's hair white overnight, but for Mozi, what was truly fatal wasn't the money, but the icy mockery behind those numbers—it reminded him that the so-called algorithmic empire, the data hegemony, was merely crumpled draft paper in the face of higher-dimensional existence. He raised his hand to shut off the display but paused the moment his fingertip touched the power button, as though pressing it would shut himself into the darkness as well. He feared the dark, feared even more that within the darkness would emerge that faceless, ripple-only visage—the anthropomorphic phantom of "Perturbation." It needed no eyes to make him see his own insignificance.
Defeat came like tidal waves, one after another, rising from his ankles to his chest. He had tried every method he could think of: stacking LSTM to one hundred twenty-eight layers, letting Transformer gallop across a hundred thousand GPUs, even tuning the mutation rate of genetic algorithms to the edge of chaos, yet "Perturbation" remained like mist, rain, and wind. Each time he seemed to catch its tail, the next moment it would, via a tiny phase shift, tear the entire model to shreds. Yue'er said it was "high-dimensional projection," said the human brain could only comprehend three dimensions plus time, while the real battlefield lay on higher-order manifolds. She used the most elegant mathematical language to sketch a strategic map for him, yet could not give him an arrow that could shoot into the higher dimensions. He needed a tactical-grade weapon, a particle blade that could carve a fissure between the everyday world and the unspeakable realm. But where was the blade? Materials, energy, blueprints—he had none. Clutching his head, his knuckles turning white from excessive force, his temples throbbed as though a heart had been transplanted into his skull, yet found no exit.
At two in the morning, he turned off the last lamp, the screen's blue light carving deep pits on his face. He thought of his father—that silent man who worked thirty years in the steel mill yet ultimately jumped from a building due to intelligent layoffs. The last words his father left him were "Mozi, machines don't bleed, but humans do." Back then he sneered, but now it felt like a delayed bullet, striking right between the eyes. He suddenly saw clearly the trajectory of his own mad dash: using algorithms to replace flesh and blood, using leverage to pry the world, using reason to build high walls, all just to prove his father wrong. But "Perturbation" slapped him hard, the walls collapsed, he fell back to where he started, discovering he was still that boy held in his father's arms, only the embrace long since empty. He walked to the floor-to-ceiling window, the forty-second-floor night wind like a cold cat, slipping through his collar and scratching along his spine down to the tailbone. Below, neon lights sprawled like festering colonies, multiplying wildly in the petri-dish metropolis. For the first time, he felt the urge to jump—not to end his life, but to pierce through some invisible membrane with free-fall acceleration, to see if there truly was so-called "truth" behind it. But reason told him the outcome would only be another social news item, not even harming a single hair of Perturbation.
This sense of powerlessness spread like black ink dripping into clear water, from career to emotions. Yue'er could still report the AUC, F1 of all his models within a second, could still draw topological Möbius strips with her tongue in bed, but he distinctly felt that after climax, her sweat-drenched palm no longer pressed against his chest as before, but quietly slid away, like evacuating a minefield about to explode. She still smiled at him, smiled like dawn, but no longer shone into the cracks. One early morning, he woke earlier than usual, saw her sitting on the bed edge with her back to him, her shoulder blades rising and falling beneath pale skin like a pair of wings plucked of feathers. He wanted to reach out but halted midair—afraid of shattering her, more afraid that after shattering, he'd find he had no glue. In that moment he understood, the resonant frequency between them was drifting, like two pulsars once phase-locked, one suddenly pulled away by unknown gravity, leaving the other emitting increasingly lonely ticks.
He desperately needed an exit, not escape, but to drill a hole to borrow light. So he drove through half the city, as if drawn by an invisible thread, stopping before the mottled wooden door of "Lingshu Hall." The lacquer of the two characters 'Hanging Pot' (a traditional symbol for medicine) on the lintel had peeled up like an old man's cracked fingernails. He didn't knock, but the door creaked open on its own, the bitter fragrance of mugwort rushing at him like a warm tongue, licking his heart crusted with ice. Xiuxiu stood before the medicine cabinet, her pale blue cloth robe soaked through with afternoon sunlight, her entire person like a translucent lamp. She didn't ask for reasons, only stepped aside to let him in, her movements gentle as though afraid of disturbing the insects sleeping in the medicine drawers. The treatment chair was still that one, the leather covering long worn into a patina, glowing with a dusky sheen. He lay down, the nape of his neck fitting perfectly into the dent formed over years, as though someone had pre-carved a tenon into his body. Xiuxiu placed the copper kettle on the small stove, but before the water simmered, handed him a cup of goji berry and Solomon's seal tea. The cup's warmth climbed from his fingertips into his veins, winding all the way to his heart, like a homing dog sneaking back, rubbing him with a damp nose. He suddenly felt his nose sting, but stubbornly held back, afraid a single tear would wash him away.
Silence simmered like the bitterest medicine, slowly decocting in the room. Xiuxiu didn't rush, only occasionally stirred the ash in the incense burner with copper tongs, keeping the blue smoke straight, as if guarding his secret. The twelve regular meridians and eight extraordinary meridians on the meridian chart on the wall resembled ancient star maps under the dim red light, recapturing his long-wandering gaze. He remembered the first time he came here was due to neck stiffness from long desk work; Xiuxiu merely inserted needles at Taichong and Hegu points, making him hear the "shaa—" sound as blood rushed back to his brain, like snow falling in a bamboo forest. Back then he marveled at her as supernatural, but only now did he realize that true healers treat not the body, but folded time. After a long while, he finally spoke, his voice so hoarse it didn't sound like himself: "I've hit a wall, invisible, intangible, yet bounces everything back." Xiuxiu looked up, her gaze like two black pebbles nurtured by well water, calm yet reflective. She didn't ask what the wall was, only gently said: "Remember 'Deqi'?" One sentence pulled him back from the data wilderness to the sesame-sized point of the needle tip. She continued, her voice low and steady: "If the needle tip hasn't arrived, Qi doesn't come; if Qi doesn't come, illness isn't removed. But sometimes the pathogenic factor hides too deep, like a mosquito trapped in amber; conventional needling can't reach it, then you need 'penetrating needling'—one needle piercing through multiple layers, even from a yang meridian to a yin meridian, like digging a tunnel, unexpectedly reaching the diseased site." She paused, then added, "Like what you call quantum tunneling."
With a roar, a fuse in his mind blew, then instantly reconnected. Quantum tunneling! Of course he understood—in the classical world, particles with energy lower than a potential barrier cannot cross it; but in the quantum world, wavefunctions don't instantly vanish but decay exponentially, meaning particles have a nonzero probability of suddenly appearing on the other side. That wall, wasn't it a "potential barrier"? All his models were doing brute-force collisions within classical frameworks, but had forgotten the world isn't classical. If he wrote algorithms as wavefunctions, allowing them to decay and permeate within high-dimensional potential barriers, could they "tunnel" to the other side of truth at some unpredictable point? Ideas swarmed like a stirred hornet's nest, buzzing everywhere. He could almost see the new path: replacing gradient descent with quantum annealing, replacing single-point estimates with superposition states, replacing feature engineering with entanglement... But immediately, the reality of lacking tools poured like a bucket of ice water—he had no quantum computer, no dilution refrigerator, no superconducting resonant cavities made of niobium-titanium alloy, not even a decent quantum bit. Even the cleverest housewife can't cook without rice; no matter how mad he was, he couldn't run a wavefunction on a laptop.
Agitation crawled back to his fingertips; he unconsciously rubbed the cup rim, emitting a grating squeak. Xiuxiu then rose, took a set of silver needles from a drawer, the needle bodies gleaming like cold stars under the light. She arranged them one by one, movements like a guqin master placing fingernails. Mozi stared at that row of fine needles, suddenly conceiving an absurd thought: If "Perturbation" is information, information needs a medium, could the medium be a living body? If he encoded high-dimensional patterns into electrical pulses, writing them directly into meridians through acupuncture—letting life itself become quantum bits, would that bypass hardware limitations, achieving a "biological tunneling"? His heart beat so fast it hurt, his throat dried as if someone had stuffed it with glass shards. He spoke with difficulty, incoherent: "If... we feed Perturbation's frequency spectrum, not to GPUs, but... through needles, into a person's body, letting meridians resonate, act as wavefunctions... could we 'see' behind the wall?" Once the words left his mouth, he regretted it—this bordered on cultish, blaspheming both science and life.
Xiuxiu didn't frown, only gently placed her fingertip on the needle handle, as if sensing some extremely subtle tremor. She remained silent for a long time, so long that the water in the copper kettle finally boiled, emitting a "poof" sound, as if speaking the danger for her. She looked up, her eyes deep as an ancient well, reflecting his distorted face: "The 'Divine Pivot' says, 'The essence of needling lies in regulating the Spirit.' Spirit is the master of the body; if the master is clear, the subordinates are at peace; if the master is unclear, the twelve organs are in peril. If you directly pour unknown information into the Spirit's dwelling, the slightest deviation isn't healing but soul-stealing." Her voice was light, yet each word like a needle, "But theoretically, if the recipient's righteous Qi is abundant, the healer regulates the Spirit to the extreme, using the body as a bridge, guiding the Qi of heaven and earth to wrestle with the external pathogenic factor, perhaps danger could be transformed into safety." She paused, her gaze like two small lamps, making him nowhere to hide, "But what's the cost? Once failed, the recipient's spiritual mechanism may be forever deranged, the healer also suffering backlash, becoming a mere shell. Are you willing to gamble? Am I willing to gamble?"
The room fell into dead silence, only the water boiling on the stove, each sound more urgent than the last, like a death drum. Mozi looked at Xiuxiu, for the first time noticing fine lines at the corners of her eyes, like faint ink on rice paper, slowly spread by time. He suddenly understood, this wall standing between technology and metaphysics, reason and faith, self and others, wasn't just built by "Perturbation," but also by his arrogance, his fear, his solitude. And tunneling was never a solitary affair—particles could tunnel potential barriers alone, but humans could not. Humans need another heart as a springboard, need another pair of hands to pull them back from the cliff edge. He remembered the night before his father jumped, his mother crying "At least look back at us," but his father didn't pause a single step. That step was the potential barrier his father failed to tunnel through, and also the wound within himself that never healed. Now, would he pull Xiuxiu into the same shadow?
Outside the window, dusk gathered, the last wisp of light swallowed by the eaves. No lamps were lit inside, only a faint red glow in the stove, like a dying heart. Mozi slowly reached out, covering the back of Xiuxiu's hand. Both their hands were icy, yet upon contact generated a faint electric current, like quantum fluctuation, flashing then extinguishing. He took a deep breath, his voice low and hoarse but steady: "I need you, but I won't force you. If you shake your head, I'll leave immediately, never mention it again." Xiuxiu didn't answer immediately, only turned her wrist, her fingertip resting on his radial pulse, as if taking his pulse, or perhaps her own. After a long while, she smiled lightly, that smile like a camellia blooming in snow, not showy but enough to break the ice: "A healer's heart is like a parent's, but parents also must let go one day. If I accompany your madness, it's not because you're anything to me, but because—" she paused, her gaze passing beyond him, looking at the Conception Vessel meridian line on the wall, "because I too want to know how far the human spirit can travel."
One sentence, like lighting a lamp in his chest, the wick crackling but stubbornly bright. He suddenly saw clearly: so-called tunneling isn't a violent cleaving, but two hearts resonating on the same frequency, letting the potential barrier crack open a fissure by itself in the resonance. Behind the fissure might not be truth, but at least there is light. He stood, extending his other hand toward Xiuxiu, palm upward, as if offering a bridge. Xiuxiu gently placed the silver needles into his palm, needle tips touching, emitting an extremely subtle "ding," like the soft sigh of quantum decoherence. Neither spoke, yet both simultaneously understood: from this moment, they were no longer healer and patient, nor mystic and patron, but two pathfinders standing at the cliff edge, sharing a single rope. One end of the rope is the abyss, the other end may be nothingness, or a new continent. And tunneling will begin with their next heartbeat—not using a supercomputer, nor a particle collider, but a flesh-and-blood body, a set of silver needles, and two souls willing to risk collapse together. The wall of technology, the wall of the heart, in this moment merge into the same wall, and the wall already has a crack; light is leaking through, like dawn, or the abyss's gaze.