Coach: Coaching the Grizzlies at the beginning, playing the bantam

The Donald Duck puppet suddenly took off his headgear, revealing the face of the ticket inspector from the morning: "Mr. Button, would you like to try to pilot the float?"

Lu Yong was pushed onto a pirate ship-shaped float, and Hannah's camera followed his stiff waving movements.

At the moment when the ribbons and soap bubbles flooded the vision, the white horse that didn't want to turn around really slipped out from the backstage, with the wishing card that had been stuffed in it three hours ago pinned to its mane.

When the closing announcement sounded, they sat on a bench and counted their spoils: a badge made of seven tokens flickered under the street light, with a tiny line of words engraved on the back - "Sober people are the most ridiculous."

Hannah threw the badge into the fountain pool. At the moment the metal collided with the water, the map that flew away in the morning happened to be salvaged from the artificial lake, and the inky waves slowly spread out in the night breeze.

…………

The wooden boardwalk along the coastal road had just been gilded, and Hannah's sun hat had been blown into a kite by the sea breeze.

"What's that on this railing?" She tugged at a faded blue ribbon, and shell bells jingled between the rusty chains.

Lu Yong, who was adjusting the brakes on his bike, looked up and said, "This is the route marking of last year's marathon." Before he finished speaking, a sanitation worker in a fluorescent green vest suddenly stuffed a bottle of salt soda into each of their baskets and said, "The supply station three kilometers ahead has been removed. Please help clear the inventory."

When Hannah unscrewed the bottle cap, the soda gushed out, and the foam just overflowed the milestone of "32.5 kilometers of Binhai Road" on the roadside. Lu Yong's camera captured this coincidence: the number was distorted into "3.25" in the refraction of the bubbles, like a secret code.

There are thirty-three love padlocks hanging on the viewing platform of Yanwoling. Hannah's fingertips stroked the most mottled one: "2001. This lock is older than both of us combined." The copper lock suddenly "clicked" and half of a crayon note fell out of the keyhole.

"Be careful!" Lu Yong pulled her back from the guardrail. The note was swept to the sea by the rising air currents, and the words "Please give it to the one wearing a red skirt" were faintly visible. The bride in a wedding dress happened to pass by at this moment, and the hem of her skirt swept across Hannah's calves. The sound of the photographer's shutter and the echo of the cliff in the distance resonated into the sound of the tide.

"The echo here has a seven-second delay." The photographer suddenly turned around, "This is the golden time for a love confession." Hannah's salt soda bottle rolled to her feet, and the sound of bubbles bursting collided back and forth on the cliffs, eventually turning into a series of vague gurgling sounds.

There is a mint coffee cart next to the emergency lane in the middle of the North Bridge. The owner has pasted sticky notes all over the windshield: "Exchange poetry for drinks, 5 yuan per line." While Hannah was biting her pen and worrying, Lu Yong had taken off his sun hat and used it as manuscript paper.

"The seventh wave engulfed the 32-kilometer signpost
Salt water bottles are creating coral reefs.”

The lady boss paused while grinding coffee beans and asked, "Young man, have you ever submitted a letter to Highway Poetry Magazine?"

Hannah's sentence got stuck at "the sea fog bit the spokes of the bicycle wheel", and Lu Yong suddenly took the pen from her hand and added at the end: "and our shadows are always one centimeter younger than the coastline." As the aroma of espresso mixed with the smell of the sea spread, the proprietress embellished the rim of the cup with a sea salt caramel: "This cup is called Delayed Echo."

Hannah clenched the handlebars as she passed through the Binhai Tunnel. The LED light strips formed star tracks at a speed of 20 kilometers per hour. She suddenly noticed that the back of Lu Yong's shirt was stained with sweat, and the shape was exactly like a miniature version of the Tiger Beach map.

"Look up!" Lu Yong lowered his voice. The setting sun leaking in through the vents was being cut into diamond-shaped spots of light, flowing around them as the car speeded. The convertible behind them suddenly played "Hotel California", and the guitar prelude startled the egrets at the entrance of the tunnel. Hannah's sun hat was blown away by the airflow again - this time it got stuck on the tunnel monitoring probe.

"We can pick up thirty hats every week." The maintenance worker handed over a grappling hook from the window of the construction vehicle, "but you have to pay extra for hats this high." When Lu Yong took out his mobile phone to scan the code, Hannah was waving at the surveillance screen, and the mechanical sound of the rotating probe was like the echo of a stretched conch.

When the lights came on at the Eighteen Bends, Hannah's bike began to creak in protest. "Want to bet on how many 'sharp bend ahead' signs there are?" Her hoarse voice mixed with the noise of the chain box. Lu Yong's count ended at the 7.8th sign - the yellow and black warning sign, on which someone had written in chalk a line of small words: "The sunset speed here is meters per second."

The moment they stopped, the salted egg yolk sunset was stuck between the towers of the cross-sea bridge. Hannah suddenly turned out the residue at the bottom of the coffee cup, and the dark brown traces overlapped with the outline of the bay in the twilight. Lu Yong took out the manuscript of the poem on Beidaqiao, and the back of the paper showed the mysterious number written by the proprietress in invisible ink through the last daylight: 32.5.

As the neon lights of Xinghaiwan Square engulfed them, Hannah was studying the bottle of salt water in the basket. The aluminum can was covered with dents from the bumpy ride, and now it looked strikingly similar to the Binhai Road map. Lu Yong suddenly pointed to the cross-sea bridge: "Look at that light!"

The headlights of the night fishermen flickered on the dark sea, like the shell bells they had seen in the morning. The sanitation workers passed by on tricycles, the faded blue ribbons in the buckets still fluttering, as if trying to break free from the ropes bound by time.

The crayon note with the words "wear a red skirt" is now stuck on the porthole of an old ship at Fisherman's Wharf.

The bar singer in a wine-red dress opened the window, and the note fell into the brandy glass in her hand. The unmelted words floated on the ice ball:
“…Please tell her that the oath locked in 2001 is still the slowest flow on the Corniche.”

.........

There was a half-shell of mussel stuck in the crack of the Qixianling breakwater. Just as the tip of Hannah's sandals rubbed against the salt stains, an old man in rubber pants suddenly poked his head out from behind the reef and said, "Girl, we have to wait for another 47 minutes for the tide to recede!"

The hoarse weather forecast sounded from the radio on his waist, forming a duet with the beat of the waves.

Lu Yong was using a branch to pick barnacles from the cracks in the rocks when he heard the words and kicked a pebble away. The pebble hit an abandoned tide-observation column, startling a blue-footed booby, which actually had a still-twisting sea entrail in its beak. "This is the locals' alarm clock for going to the sea."

The old man smiled and swung two wire rakes. "There are moon shells on the rocky beach to the west. Don't touch the seaweed on the north. The fish farmers have set up invisible fishing nets."

Hidden under the low cliff covered with brown algae is a cement observatory, with the wall peeling off like a continental shelf map. Hannah's fingernails scraped off a patch of mold, revealing a chalk drawing underneath: two stick figures throwing drifting bottles into the sea, with the date marked as 1997.6.30. "The wishing well on the eve of Hong Kong's return?" She took out her eyeliner and filled in a little man wearing a straw hat in the blank space.

Lu Yong's camera swept across the broken glass window and suddenly stopped at the inside of the window frame - a tide table was turned to the page of August 2005 by the sea breeze, with a dried starfish stuck on the edge. "Look at the page crease." He blew away the dust, and there was a very small number written in ballpoint pen at the corner: "8".

The young man in a diving suit suddenly threw down a rope ladder from the top of the cliff: "The golden section refers to the pile of oysters below. My father said that the fattest ones always grow in the depressions that the waves can't reach." The moon shells that the old man mentioned are hidden under the sea bridge hole. As soon as Hannah's rake touched the sand, the whole shallow beach suddenly glowed with pearls. "It's the reflection of the broken shells of shellfish." Lu Yong squatted down and picked up half a snail shell. The threads were embedded with filamentous blue algae, like a sea chart that had been sealed for many years.

The tide receded much faster than expected, and they were forced to retreat to higher reefs. Hannah's canvas bag accidentally cut a transparent fishing line, and the buoy 20 meters away suddenly exploded, scaring away the sandpipers foraging in the reef pool. Lu Yong picked up a floating mineral water bottle, and a button battery was sunk at the bottom of the bottle: "It's a tracer for ocean monitoring. It seems that someone is doing secret research here."

A researcher in fluorescent orange work clothes crawled out of the sea cave, with a sample box in his arms dripping with mucus: "Would you like me to help test the water quality?" Hannah caught a glimpse of a familiar number in the flashing values ​​on the detector screen - 0.618.

The second floor of the abandoned observatory is filled with moldy notebooks, and an old man in a sailor shirt is nailing shells to the wall. Under each shell is a yellowed photo, from group photos in the 1970s to fluorescent beaches taken last year. "The frequency of tides is inversely proportional to the number of tourists." He erased the differential equation on the blackboard, "but there are always people who can't calculate the gravity of the moon."

Hannah's fingertips brushed over a group photo from 1997, and the chalk figure in the background was clearly visible. "Are you the one who drew the message in the bottle?" The old man smiled but did not answer. Instead, he pointed to the rising tide outside the window and said, "It's time to run for our lives. Today's waves will be 0.618 meters higher than the forecast."

As they rushed out of the observatory, the old man's radio was announcing the hourly reminder, and the original 47-minute countdown was strangely shortened to 29 minutes. Lu Yong dragged Hannah over the slippery reef, and the waves began to swallow up the pearls of the moon shells.

When the warning light came on at the end of the breakwater, Hannah's sandal straps got tangled in the rusty iron chain. Lu Yong took out the 0.618-marked shell and rubbed the edge of the blade against the iron chain, leaving sparks. "Did you pick up my drifting bottle from years ago?" An old man in a sailor shirt suddenly appeared, and his flashlight illuminated the inside of the shell - there was a tiny line of English engraved there: "Marry me."

The roar of the rising tide swallowed up the second half of the sentence, and Hannah's ears were left with only the reverberation of waves and heartbeats. The old man stuffed a photo into her palm. Under the moonlight in 1997, the young man was putting a conch ring on his lover's ring finger, with the background being the sea bridge cave that had not yet collapsed.

“Formulas can accurately calculate tides, but not human hearts.” His sigh melted into the night mist. The searchlights from the distant farms pierced the sea surface, turning the engraved shell into tempered gold foil.

When the last bus left Qixianling, Hannah studied the shell under the streetlight. Lu Yong's fingertips stroked the inscription of "Marry me", and the thread cast a spider-web-like shadow on his palm. "The golden ratio may not work in love." He unscrewed the bottle of salt soda, and the parabola of the bubbles just intersected with the sea level outside the car window.

A boy in a diving suit was feeding shrimp to a blue-footed booby, and the bird suddenly flapped its wings and flew towards the observatory. The drifting bottle from 1997 had just drifted to the breeding cage area, and the cork stuck between the nylon knots had already loosened, and the chalk drawing on the letter paper was being soaked into a chaotic color block by the sea water.

A shell that the old man had nailed to the wall suddenly fell down, and the formula on the back was redrawn in the moonlight: "e^(iπ)+1=0".

The black tide swept the Noctiluca scintillans over the breakwater, painting the entire Qixianling Ridge into a dark blue unknown.

.........

When the waves on the Black Stone Reef beach climbed up the sixth crack in the rocks, an old lady in rain boots was using an iron hook to search for the pores of razor clams.

"Sandworms burrow shallower on southerly days," she tossed Hannah an aluminum salt shaker, "and you need to make circles when you sprinkle salt, like stamping a tide table."

Lu Yong's sneakers sank into the blackened Enteromorpha, and the soles of his shoes brought up a palm-sized oyster shell. On the layers of pearl inside the shell, there was a star map glued with fishing net wire. "The Great Triangle in the Summer of 1987," he gestured to the star map app on his phone, "This position corresponds to"

"That's Lao Bao's marriage proposal token!" The old lady suddenly interrupted, pointing the hook at a cement pier 300 meters away. Under the faded "Beacon Maintenance Station" plaque, an old man in high-top rubber shoes was tying kelp seedlings to the rusty buoy.

There were more than 1998 beer bottles sunk in the intertidal puddle, their bodies covered with barnacles and tubeworms. Hannah scooped up a Dalian dry beer produced in , with brown algae etching annual rings on the green glass. "This knows more about time than a tree stump." She shook the transparent shrimp swimming in the bottle.

The old man came over at some point and tapped the bottle with the tip of a screwdriver: "Every time a bottle was stored, the tide line retreated one millimeter." He took out a flashlight and shone it on the turbid liquid, where the beam of light penetrated, revealing a ring-shaped sedimentary layer - the red tide in 2005, the storm surge in 2012, and the Ulva eruption in 2018, all compressed in a seven-centimeter-high amber prison.

“Do you want to open the bottle and take a look at the sealed El Nino?” When his screwdriver was inserted into the bottle cap, Lu Yong suddenly pressed the circle of rusted metal and said, “Keep it as a doomsday specimen.”

The walls of the abandoned beacon station are covered with yellowed sea charts. Hannah's fingertips trace over a pencil note: "2003.9.14 Killer whales passed through." Mold spots grow around the coordinate point to form the outline of a whale, connecting it with the arrows drawn by the observer that year to form a migration route.

"The big guys came back last month!" The old man suddenly opened the north window. On the sea five hundred meters away, the dorsal fin cut through the silky morning light, and six water marks were advancing towards the cement pier. Lu Yong's camera zoomed wildly, but an even more shocking picture appeared at the edge of the frame - on a deliquescent rock wall, under the moss he had rubbed off half an hour ago, a killer whale sketch made of salmon eggs was revealed.

The old lady leaned against the door frame holding a bucket of clams: "This painting has to be repainted with fresh fish eggs every spring, otherwise it will be washed away by heavy rains." The clams that slid out of the bucket were using their axe feet to draw crooked depth contours in the sand.

Ten minutes before high tide, the old man pulled out a tide record book from the iron cabinet. The data from 1997 to 2021 were densely packed, but the entire page for 2016 was blank. "My granddaughter was born that year, and I forgot to count." He turned to the latest page and asked Lu Yong to fill in the data for that day.

Hannah grabbed the pen and drew a function curve in the blank space. The ink rose and fell with the sound of the killer whales in the distance. The old lady suddenly pressed a salty fingerprint on the bottom of the curve: "This is the real tidal factor."

Four silver-gray dorsal fins just happened to cross the observation window. Lu Yong found that the frequency of the whales' swimming was synchronized with Hannah's brushstrokes. The old man took out a test tube with a cork. The seawater in 2016 left ring-shaped salt crystals on the glass wall. "It's time to save today's sample." He scooped up the retreating waves, and the spray from the killer whale's blowhole formed a fleeting rainbow at the mouth of the test tube.

When the last bus left Black Rock Reef, Hannah held the bottle of sealed beer from 1998. On the dark green glass, the limestone shell of the barnacles was peeling off, revealing the -year-old wave tattoo underneath.

The array of beer bottles that the old man had left in the intertidal zone began to sway with the night tide.

The blank skyline of 2016 is reflected in a bottle, and the starlight is twisted into baby's palm prints by the ripples. The function curve drawn by Hannah is being crushed by nocturnal animals, and the sandworms use mucus to reweave a topological map that is closer to the truth.

When the first drop of night rain wet the blank record book of the observation station, three hundred nautical miles to the northeast, the group of killer whales had just jumped out of the moonlit sea.

The wave marks cut by their dorsal fins and the star map on the oyster shell in 1987 are slowly overlapping due to the tidal force. (End of this chapter)