Miss Lin owned a little shop in the heart of Yucheng. She never needed to work a regular job and could sleep in as late as she liked every day.
Yet, for Miss Lin, there was little difference between sleeping and waking. If she wanted, she could sleep for an entire day without consequence. In fact, she often did just that.
Time, to her, was almost meaningless. She had all the time in the world. After all, what she sold in her shop was, quite literally, time.
“Honestly, business just keeps getting worse!” Miss Lin muttered, stretching lazily. She’d slept through another day and, upon checking the previous day’s time nodes, found—unsurprisingly—that not a single customer had come by. She liked to think of herself as a driven, ambitious woman, but lately, luck just wasn’t on her side, and her shop remained empty.
In this world, time wasn’t considered precious. It was just another basic property, like length or weight. No one would barge into a store demanding to buy “some length” or “some weight”—that would be absurd. People would say, “I’d like five meters of cable,” or “two kilos of pork,” and so on.
Time was the same. Strictly speaking, Miss Lin didn’t sell time itself, but rather, items imbued with specific time attributes.
She had, in fact, sold many such things: a pet that had lived fifteen years, a bottle of wine aged twenty years, and even a pine tree that had grown for sixty years. That customer was a tree enthusiast, particularly fond of the vigorous growth period between a pine’s tenth and thirtieth year. As he put it, “I love that burst of life between ten and thirty years—can I just buy those twenty years of the pine?”
Miss Lin politely refused. Her shop didn’t sell things in pieces. Most shopkeepers wouldn’t. If you carved out the best twenty years from a sixty-year-old pine, how would you sell the remaining, fragmented forty years? It was like demanding only the lean meat from a slab of pork at the butcher’s—simply rude. Fortunately, the customer understood and bought the whole thing.
She handed him a carefully packaged sphere—a Time Orb. Don’t get the wrong idea: Miss Lin couldn’t possibly keep a real pine tree in her shop, nor raise a menagerie of pets. Her shelves displayed orbs, each called a Time Orb. Every orb contained countless time nodes; select one, and you could generate the object as it existed at that moment. It was like a disc you could read any point on the timeline from, except, unlike a disc, the Time Orb could actually produce the item.
Today, with no customers in sight, Miss Lin flopped back onto her bed. She lay there for hours, listening to the ticking of the wall clock—tick, tick, tick—until she couldn’t stand it anymore. Annoyed, she snatched the clock off the wall. Behind where the clock had hung was a Time Orb, embedded in the wall.
Miss Lin casually spun the orb with her finger, and the shop’s surroundings changed in an instant. The number of orbs on the shelves fluctuated; the chandelier flickered; the shop door opened and closed; customers zoomed in and out as if someone was fast-forwarding and rewinding time.
All of this was the result of Miss Lin’s manipulation—she was spinning the shop’s own Time Orb. By doing this, she could see at which time nodes customers might appear, or at least when there was a possibility of a customer. If she was bored, she could lock onto that node and greet a customer from the future or the past, just to satisfy her own sense of ambition.
Everything had a Time Orb—from existence to disappearance and back again. Every product, the shop itself, every customer, and even Miss Lin had their own Time Orbs. Time, as a property, was like height or weight—its value could be extreme, but it could never be absent.
As she spun the orb, the ceiling suddenly vanished, and a cold wind rushed in, making Miss Lin shiver. Quickly, she spun the orb in the opposite direction, restoring the ceiling and the warmth of the room. She stuck out her tongue—she’d spun too far, back to when the shop was still under construction.
Miss Lin felt a wave of gloom. She’d already seen all of the past and the future. She could travel anywhere along the river of time, make any choice at any node, and experience every possible outcome. But after trying every possibility, both past and future lost their appeal.
There’s an old story: a king wanted to reward the wise inventor of chess and asked what he wanted. The inventor requested grains of rice: one on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, doubling each time until all sixty-four squares were filled. The king thought this was trivial, but when the calculation was done, he realized that even his entire kingdom’s rice wouldn’t be enough.
The point of the story is that the charm of chess lies in the endless possibilities of each move. But time is even more complex—every moment holds near-infinite possibilities, branching out into countless outcomes.
Chapter 01
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