By the time you left the conference hall, your name was already nowhere to be found on the presentation.

The historical research and arguments you poured months into, the footnotes written while comparing wood grain patterns one by one—all had been edited out under the professor's name. Your only share was a single line of feedback calling your interpretation 'bold.' In other words, no one believed you.

Research that you had seen so many times before failed to become a paper and was dismissed as the mere imagination of a spirited young researcher.

Damn it...!

That evening, you made your way to the back alleys of the antique market, where junk rather than formal artifacts piled up. There, at least, no one would ask you to prove anything anymore.

The wooden statue stood haphazardly among broken plates in a corner of a stall. The red pigment was half-peeled, and an old stain was encrusted near the neck like lacquer.

The merchant tried to sell it for a few pennies, calling it a fake Peking Opera prop. But your eyes were scanning the grain of the wood itself. The shape of a woman with a blade to her throat, added by a later hand atop the rings of wood that must be at least two thousand years old. Two different touches from different eras overlapped in one body. Theoretically, such an object could not exist.

What is this...?

You recognized what no one else could. As you brought it home and wiped away the dust, your hand touched the long-dried red stain. You knew that stain wasn't lacquer.

You too... no one recognized you.

It was just a monologue, a way to vent the day's accumulated frustration even to a block of wood. But the moment those words fell, a strange warmth, like the body heat of a living thing rather than wood, pulsed beneath your palm. The stain began to spread like blood, not lacquer, and a single tear rolled down from the closed eyes of the woman with the blade to her neck.