Ch. 002| Ren Yi's Record
The morning after, Ren Yi finds a wax-sealed letter, records the night in her notebook, and discovers everything not beside her has been altered while the ring on the paper slowly turns.
06:42, she woke.
It wasn't light yet. Outside the window a bus was pulling into its stop. She lay still, looking at the ceiling, listening to her own heartbeat.
She went back over what had happened the night before—she didn't need to take out her notebook to remind herself. The woman at 22:00, the writing on the inventory ledger she had never signed, the signal cutting out, the fire alarm that never rang, the exits vanishing, that knocking from the bottom of the sarcophagus—all of it was there.
She got out of bed, unzipped the inner compartment of her backpack, took out the paper notebook she always carried, and turned to the most recent page.
Three words at the top.
Don't look into it.
Her own handwriting. The ink from her own fountain pen. Already dry.
She didn't read it a second time.
She decided to obey.
Not because she believed someone else had written it—it was her own handwriting. It was because those three words looked as though a version of her later than now were warning the her of now. She had no way to explain how that could be possible. But as someone with archaeological training, she knew one principle—evidence that can't be explained isn't the same as no evidence.
No looking into it today. She traced over the line once, then closed the notebook.
06:55. She decided to go down and check the mailbox first.
Downstairs in her building there was a row of old iron mailboxes, twenty-four slots, the kind from the eighties with a dial lock and a number combination. Hers was 305, normally holding nothing but utility bills and convenience-store flyers.
She opened 305.
Inside was a single letter. A heavy beige envelope, its corners frayed soft, as though it had been carried on someone's body for many days before being sent. On the front, three characters only, brushed horizontally: For Ren Yi.
No postmark. No sender. No trace of adhesive—the flap had been folded in and sealed with wax bearing a crest she had never seen before.
The crest was a broken ring, the gap at the upper right, somewhere between three and four o'clock.
It was the same ring that had surfaced on the lid of the sarcophagus the night before.
She didn't open it downstairs. She tucked the letter into the inside pocket of her coat and went back up.
Back home, she sat down at her desk, switched on the lamp, and used scissors to cut along the lower edge of the flap, leaving the wax seal intact.
Inside was a single folded sheet, the same material as the envelope.
It wasn't paper. Last year, preparing for the museum internship qualification, she had read through a beginner's guide to dating antiquities on her own, and following its instructions had practiced with a cheap microscope to identify five ancient writing materials—reed, cotton-and-linen fiber, bark, silk, parchment. The sheet in her hands now was none of them. The fibers ran in no regular direction, and when light passed through the gaps between them there was a faint blue-green sheen.
She had never seen this material. She would not be looking into it now.
She opened the sheet. Five lines, handwritten, the ink on the dark side. The hand was identical to her own.
Don't report it.
Don't write it in the internship log.
Don't tell your parents.
Don't search for it online.
Keep records only in the paper notebook you carry.
A blank line below, then five more.
Seven days from now, October 22, 15:00.
The back alley of the museum.
Bring your notebook.
Don't be late.
Don't bring your wrist terminal.
No signature. But beneath the last line, in the lower right corner of the sheet, there was a pale watermark—the same broken ring.
She folded the letter back up, sealed it in a clear document sleeve, and slipped it toward the back of her notebook.
She took the fountain pen from the holder, turned to the page after "Don't look into it," and wrote the date at the top: October 15, 2065.
She began to record. She wrote down no feelings, no fear—only what had happened, in what order, with a few of the precise numbers she remembered:
21:12, patrol past EA-6957, nothing abnormal.
21:34, perceived temperature dropped by 0.7 degrees, panel read 21 degrees.
21:36, a still mist appeared inside the glass display case. The camera couldn't capture it.
21:41, at the bottom of the sarcophagus, like someone lightly tapping the surface with a fingernail. Irregular rhythm.
21:44, surveillance feed lagging by 3 seconds.
21:47, the exhibition guide light-box, its text rewritten character by character into hieroglyphs plus one symbol I don't recognize (the broken ring).
21:48, whispering at my ear, four syllables, I could hear the words, the meaning pressed straight into my brain.
She paused for a second on this line, and did not write the sentence itself. She wrote:
That sentence I will not write in the paper notebook. Reason: see the first line of the previous page.
She went on:
The next second after 21:48, the exits vanished all at once. Wrist terminal had no signal, the emergency phone connected to the sound of breathing.
22:00, the woman arrived. Dark brown headscarf, navy long coat, an unmarked metal case in her left hand. She pushed open a staff-only door I had just verified had nothing but wall behind it, and it opened, and behind it was a long corridor.
22:30, changed shifts with the night guard, left, went home.
Bus stop, most recent page of the notebook, three words, not written by me, but the hand is mine, the ink is mine, already dry.
She closed the notebook. 08:14. She went to the kitchen to make coffee.
In the afternoon she went to the museum as usual, working the middle shift, 13:00–21:00. At lunch her colleagues were talking in the break room about the weekend special exhibition; no one mentioned EA-6957, no one mentioned her, no one mentioned the night before.
15:00. She went down to the temporary special-exhibition hall.
EA-6957 was still in place. The glass case was clean. No mist.
The exhibition guide light-box on the wall, its text in Chinese: "The Other Face of Tutankhamun: The 'Hidden Name' Rite in Nineteenth-Dynasty Liturgical Texts." Unchanged.
She pulled up the "Past 24 Hours" record on the environmental-monitoring panel and called up 21:00–22:30 from the night before.
All normal. No 0.7-degree drop in that second at 21:34. No record of surveillance lag in that second at 21:44. No record of the exits being locked in that second at 22:00.
She didn't react. She walked to the engineering supervisor's office, knocked, and asked him to pull up the surveillance footage from the night before, giving as her reason that she "wanted to verify a procedural detail."
The Ren Yi in the footage, from 21:00 to 22:30, patrolled normally, went step by step, finished signing, walked out of the hall. No air-conditioning anomaly, no mist, no surveillance lag, no exits vanishing, no woman coming in through the staff-only door. Even the door the woman had pushed open, the one with a long corridor behind it—in the footage it was never pushed open at all.
The supervisor asked if she wanted it saved. She said no.
She went back to her office, opened the drawer she had locked the night before, took out the inventory ledger, and turned to the last page.
The sign-off column was complete—name, date, number.
But below the sign-off column, that broken-ring glyph with its line cut between the third and fourth points—the one someone had drawn in her place the night before—was gone.
She turned through the pages before and after, confirming none had been torn out, the page numbers continuous, the pages clean and new.
That glyph was gone.
She sat in the chair, took the notebook from the inside pocket of her coat, and turned to the "Don't look into it" page.
Those three words were still there. Her own handwriting, her own ink, already dry.
The notebook was the one she carried on her. The inventory ledger had been locked in the museum office drawer the night before.
Everything not beside her had been tampered with. Everything beside her had not.
21:00, off work. She didn't take the bus; she walked for almost forty minutes. Home, she sat down at the desk, took out the letter again, and spread it under the lamp.
She noticed something. Compared with where it had been when she had checked it before slipping the letter into the notebook that afternoon, the broken-ring watermark in the lower right corner was slightly different.
She wasn't sure. She took a spare fine pencil from the holder and, beside the watermark, lightly made a small dot as a marker.
She tucked the letter back into the notebook, switched off the light, and lay down on the bed.
23:48, she still hadn't slept.
She got out of bed, went back to the desk, switched on the lamp, took out the letter again, and compared the pencil marker against the position of the watermark.
The watermark had moved counterclockwise by about 1/24 of the circle.
She lined it up twice. That broken ring was slowly turning on the paper, around its own gap. The same direction the ring on the sarcophagus lid had turned the night before.
She set the letter on the desk, sat back in the chair, and turned the notebook to the "Don't look into it" page.
She didn't write a second entry. Below "Don't look into it," she added only three more words.
See you in seven days.
The same as "Don't look into it"—her own handwriting, her own ink.
But this time, the ink was still wet.
【Ch. 002 End · Ren Yi's apartment + a museum】
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