Upon the fan's surface, the dark stones are profound and heavy, while the white pines strike across with absolute force.
The ancient pine twists like a coiled dragon, its trunk mostly withered and bare, save for the dense, ink-black needles clustered at the paper's edge. Its root system, like iron hooks, has forcefully split a section of grey-bright spaceship wreckage within the crevices of the pale stone. Close inspection reveals mottled bark teeming with overlapping textures: in the sparse areas hide curled, breathing small beasts; in the deep recesses are embedded steel flowers with ball bearings. This jagged, skeletal vigor seems to draw its strength from the metallic ruins beneath the earth.
The dark stones behind the pine resemble the "wrinkled and lean" Taihu stones from afar, but up close, they are revealed as tiered dwellings. The folds on the rock's surface swell into a massive face, while the sedimentary layers stack into locks of hair, among which nameless small beasts rest in silence. The vast perforations of the stone no longer leak wind; instead, they are filled with metal capsule apartments. Within the narrow chambers, several families of little fish-men sit against the walls. Dense networks of pipes and cables twist and coil behind the stone face, piercing through every hollow like nerves.
The spiritual hollows remain ethereal, yet they are inhabited; the ancient pine is hoary, yet its joints interlock with gears. Roots split metal, stone pores connect to cables, and the tips of those cables extend into the spines of the fish-men. This intricate assembly, amidst the chill of the pine needles and the ghostly glimmer of the stones, maintains a silence that traverses the ancient and the modern.
Brightly and Harmoniously, He Says:
