coobybook Chapter 345 Stardust: Sealing Techniques Within the Space-Time Rift
Chapter 345 Stardust: Sealing Techniques Within the Space-Time Rift
"What do you think of starting tomorrow by inviting Lin Zi'an to the gym?"
"That's a good idea, but if the other person isn't willing to work out, it could mean a permanent decline..."
At this moment, she is neither a princess of the Tang Dynasty nor destined to become the richest woman in Songjiang. Only the stardust on her wrist is forging the arc of Zhen Xiaosi's transformation.
When Zhen Xiaosi embedded the last piece of deep-sea scale into the astrolabe of the Imperial Observatory, a complete star map of the Pisces constellation suddenly appeared on the surface of the bronze artifact—a mark forged from two thousand days and nights of guarding, pencil marks from the middle school entrance exam, and fragments of star nails she gnawed on during her hard labor in the dark palace.
At this moment, the morning bell of Zhuque Street and the takeoff announcement of a modern flight resonated in her eardrums, and she finally understood: the so-called twins were actually two scrolls of growth given to her by fate, and July, after the middle school entrance examination, was the moment for her to break free from her cocoon...
Once upon a time, she was trapped behind the iron gates of the deep sea, counting the sands of time, taking the rules of Saturn's rings as an inviolable destiny. It wasn't until retrograde Saturn melted the shackles of the first house into flowing gold that she realized that the suffocating feeling of being "obstructed everywhere" was actually a cocoon of anxiety woven by her own fear.
When Mars rolls from the seventh house to the eighth house on a night when she no longer uses seawater to extinguish the flames of confrontation as before, she takes out the bronze measuring ruler from the Imperial Observatory—which transforms into a drawing pencil under the eye-protection lamp. She uses the principles of stellar geometry to draw a third path on the conflict map: neither compromise nor confrontation, but building a harmonious stellar bridge where the flames meet.
When her father's 200,000 yuan from selling wild ginseng piled up like a small mountain on the table, she didn't feel the same curiosity and confusion she had when she first arrived in the Tang Dynasty. Instead, she took the initiative to open a financial magazine and circle the education investment section.
“Dad,” she placed the astrolabe model next to the banknotes, “this money should be invested where star trails can grow.” The gilded hourglass with the Tang Dynasty rhinoceros on her phone vibrated gently. The sediment at the bottom was no longer a sigh of farewell to Saturn, but a cryptic message from the star chart: “How to revitalize modern assets with the business wisdom of Songjiang City.”
The so-called twin tempering is nothing more than the gears of the astrolabe biting into the scale of reality.
On the night of July 3, 2025, when Venus and Uranus were in conjunction, she handled two things at the same time: sending a proposal for a transnational art festival to Zian using modern communication software, and engraving the incantation "using astrology to break Du Xiaobing's jealousy" on the back of a Tang Dynasty bronze mirror.
When the British university acceptance letter arrived, what fell out of the envelope was not an ordinary stamp, but a double fish postmark that Zi'an had personally made with star sand. The left half of the postmark design was an armillary sphere from the Imperial Observatory, and the right half was a quartz clock from the middle school entrance examination hall, with the gears meshing and shining with the light of Jupiter passing by. Zi'an hoped that Zhen Xiaosi could also study in the UK.
That night, as the black stone dome of the Dark Palace collapsed, Zhen Xiaosi didn't flinch. Instead, she opened her arms to catch the falling star spikes. Those Saturnian spikes that had once caused her so much suffering now transformed into warm, lustrous pearls on the table, each pearl sealing a moment of growth: the trembling she felt every time she said "no" to Qiu Rongmu, the ecstatic joy of solving the most challenging math problem using her astrological knowledge, the unwavering determination she showed while her father counted money…
It turns out that the duty of the deep-sea guardians is never to guard the gate, but to learn to mend cracks with stardust. She whispered to the pearl in her palm, and the pearl suddenly cracked, releasing two starfish with their tail fins joined together.
As the flight pierced through the clouds, Zhen Xiaosi melted the gilded crown of a Tang Dynasty princess into a star-shaped hairpin and pinned it in her hair.
The passenger next to her asked curiously about the hair clip's design. Pointing to the vermilion bird's tail feathers at the end of the starlight, she smiled and said, "This is the star trail totem of my hometown, Changbai Mountain, and it's also the flight path I'll be drawing in the future."
Then a message popped up from Zi'an, with an attachment of a "Space-Time Balance Journal" he designed for her using Saturn's data model. The first page of the journal read: "True transformation is making each 'me' an anchor for each other."
She looked down at her wrist—the bronze water clock from the Imperial Observatory and her modern watch had been fused together to form a circular star track, with the 12 hour markers corresponding to the 12 constellations, and the Pisces constellation was inlaid with star sand that she had personally polished.
When the broadcast announced the landing in Britain, Zhen Xiaosi saw a young woman in a green robe in Chang'an holding up an astrolabe high in the sea of clouds outside the porthole. The center of the astrolabe no longer projected the split twin images, but rather the transformative arc of light that bloomed from the tip of her pen when she filled in the last stroke in the middle school entrance exam hall, enough to illuminate the entire star trail.
Zhen Xiaosi stood in the center of the spacetime rift, watching Saturn's fading light be washed away by Mercury into silver sand, and Mars solidify into glass beads through tempering. When the August monsoon unfurled the middle school entrance exam results, Zhen Xiaosi reached out and caught two scales falling simultaneously—
One brick is engraved with the pattern of the Chang'an Observatory, the other reflects the glass curtain wall of a modern library.