Chapter 7

“Finally back.”

After 74 hours and 32 minutes, Lin Ran’s internal locator selected the tent he had personally pitched in Cherry Spring National Park.

Cold wind whipped snowflakes against the tent, rustling softly.

Lin Ran clenched his icy smartphone in his pocket, recalling the hissing neon tubes of Times Square, the sweet smile of Marilyn Monroe’s perfume ad in the shop window, passersby wrapped in wool coats slowing their steps—because his down jacket glowed with an eerie metallic sheen under the streetlamp, its hem still frayed with leftover 3M reflective strip cut edges.

What he had just experienced felt like a dream.

Now, the cold curve of the iPhone XS reminded him: he had successfully defused this time-disruption bomb, as a ghost from another timeline.

Inside it stored enough fragments of the future to make 51 Area agents climax: the orbital trajectories of the Shenzhou rocket series, the ion propulsion schematics of the Artemis program, even the Starship prototype he’d found last year on SpaceX’s official website.

Glancing around the familiar surroundings, he boldly pulled out the iPhone, checked the signal recovering, muttered his usual complaint about the damn signal, and finally let out a breath of relief.

Making it back meant everything was fine.

Even if the “door” was unusable, his altered body and mind were real.

With just this brain, achieving financial freedom in the present wasn’t hard.

To the old Lin Ran, GraphAI was a black hole—undoubtedly. But now, knowing the universal solution to the Navier-Stokes equations, GraphAI wasn’t a black hole anymore; it was an all-purpose remedy for anything.

Publishing papers was effortless. Now that he knew where the gold mine lay, digging out a little at a time, the Navier-Stokes equations alone would feed him for life.

Fully relaxed, thirty seconds passed before the iPhone regained signal. He checked the time—compared to when he’d left for the door, it was roughly an hour different.

“If we strictly calculate time flow, does that mean a 60-to-1 ratio?”

“One hour passes over there, one minute here?” Lin Ran mused. “Then if I stayed in the 1960s for a year, only six days would pass here.”

“What if I stay here for a year?”

“Is the time flow ratio still 60-to-1 between here and there?”

Lin Ran activated the iPhone’s stopwatch to precisely measure the time differential.

After a brief mental Shuli , he immediately called Li Xiaoman. “Hey, Xiao Man.”

The other end burst into a scream, then a clear, pleasant female voice:

“Randolph! Where are you?”

Li Xiaoman, third-generation Chinese-American, Lin Ran’s roommate and landlord, also his senior at Stony Brook University.

Over the past two years, their relationship had been ambiguous—not quite romantic, yet too intimate for ordinary friends.

Who goes stargazing and welcomes the new year with an ordinary friend?

“I’m in my own tent. I suddenly passed out for no reason,” Lin Ran explained.

About twenty minutes later, Li Xiaoman, breathless, pulled open the tent flap. Though his complexion showed no sign of illness, she said, “I searched the whole park and couldn’t find you!”

“Ah, forget it. Do you want to go home now, or stick to the plan and return tomorrow morning?”

Lin Ran smiled—he rarely saw Li Xiaoman so anxious.

Li Xiaoman lost both parents young, raised by her aunt and uncle, living under their roof.

In such an environment, her journey to a Ph.D. in law at Stony Brook University had forged an unshakable inner core; around him, she was always calm, meticulous, never flustered—he’d never seen her panic.

After a moment’s thought, Lin Ran said: “Now. Sorry, Xiao Man, I’m really unwell. I want to get back to my warm bed, not stay in this tent—ground moisture is too heavy.”

“Moisture?” Li Xiaoman frowned.

Even though her name was so Chinese—“A Little Fullness Surpasses All”—the concept of “moisture” was still too obscure for a third-generation Chinese-American.

“Air humidity is too high. It’s too cold,” Lin Ran explained.

The drive back to New York took four hours. Li Xiaoman drove; Lin Ran gave only vague, dismissive answers to her questions, feigning illness and unwilling to elaborate.

“I was holding a biodegradable bag, heading into the woods to pee, but halfway there I felt awful—sweating nonstop.”

“I rushed back to the tent. Before I even sat down, I passed out.”

“Oh, the phone signal? The signal just cut out for no reason.”

Though Lin Ran’s explanation was full of holes—just the fact that he returned to the tent alone was suspicious. Li Xiaoman had waited outside the tent the entire time until she couldn’t reach him for half an hour, then went searching.

Worse, there were no footprints leading back to the tent—only prints going from the tent to the forest edge, none returning.

All these inconsistencies made Li Xiaoman utterly distrust his weak, pale excuse.

So on the drive back, she grew cold: “Oh.” “I see.” “Got it.”

In short, she was all about indifference.

As she drove, Li Xiaoman wondered: What had Lin Ran really been doing? Would she wake up tomorrow to a federal police notice saying a murder had occurred in Cherry Spring National Forest, and they needed her cooperation?

But no matter how hard she guessed, she could never imagine Lin Ran’s bizarre experience—having traveled to 1960 and back. Such a fantasy was beyond her reach.

Lin Ran closed his eyes in the backseat of the used Corolla, occasionally murmuring a few words to Li Xiaoman. He knew she was upset, but to him now, it didn’t matter.

Back at home, Lin Ran first messaged his client on WeChat: “Ms. Li, can we start now?”

“Sorry, I’m feeling unwell. Can we move our appointment forward to now?”

It was 4 a.m. in New York, 7 p.m. in Beijing. Her reply came quickly: “Now?”

“Yes.”

“Alright, I’ll get ready.”

Besides school, Lin Ran ran a remote consulting business, offering overseas study advice to Chinese university students.

He’d started this business even back in Shanghai—first to earn some extra cash, since getting a job on an H-1B visa in America was hard, and second, to build a vast network.