Camellia Yang's Blog, page 2

The Horse of Turin

I am a horse. Each morning, I step into the waking streets of Turin, and the sound of my hooves on the cobblestones mingles with the groan of the cart behind me. The city rarely lifts its veil of winter fog; stone walls stay damp, and the air hangs heavy with the smoke of coal fires and the faint, comforting scent of fresh bread.

I’ve lived this life for seven years. Once, I was young and full of strength, my coat smooth, my body firm. Now my ribs show, and my coat has dulled, but my legs still c...

The Cave That Sings

Reality is like a cave in darkness; we can only explore a small part of it with our faint light.

This thought has lingered in my mind for years. I'm not sure if some writer penned it, but whenever I recall this metaphor, I think of the summer that changed my life.

My name is Makoto Nakajima. I'm an associate professor of geology at Tokyo University, specialising in cave studies for twelve years now. In academic circles, I'm known for my rigorous approach. I never believed in phenomena without scie...

A Room of Her Own

Chapter One

December 3, 1926. As midnight approached, the cold wind of Surrey whistled through the forest paths, carrying a fine mist of rain. The air felt almost frozen with tension.

Agatha Christie stood before her car door, clutching an old leather suitcase, her husband Archie's final words still echoing in her ears: "We've reached the end." She hadn't cried or even shown shock; she'd remained silent, like a prisoner finally hearing their sentence pronounced.

She gently placed the suitcase in th...

The Invitation (from Rusty Lake)

I hadn’t written anything decent in 174 days.

Outside my window, Amsterdam’s spring was still cold and grey. A thin fog turned the sunlight into a pale, sickly yellow. On my laptop screen, the cursor blinked in the middle of a blank document, like a quiet countdown. The walls of my tiny apartment were covered in sticky notes, once full of ideas. Now, they looked like meaningless symbols.

I’m Lin Qi, a narrative writer for indie games. Or at least, I used to be. Over the past six months, it felt li...

A City That Holds My Questions

That evening, the familiar sound of the number 28 tram echoed through the narrow streets. The sun had not yet fully disappeared, and the Tagus River shimmered faintly, like a mirror to my drifting thoughts.

I paused at a corner in the old town, watching the yellow tram climb the hill, its body gliding through Lisbon’s worn stone like a brushstroke from another time. It moved just as Pessoa once described: steady, familiar, quietly enduring.

Rather than board it, I wandered without a fixed directi...

Before the Reset

At 4:07 a.m., Chen Lu sat in the control room and refreshed the screen for the fifth time.

The room was dimly lit, the only light coming from the cool blue glow of the main monitor, casting faint shadows across his face.

Night shifts were usually quiet. He rubbed his temples. His thoughts moved sluggishly, like circuit boards soaked in cold water, numb and slow to respond.

The screen, which should’ve displayed the usual rhythmic fluctuations of a neural pattern, was changing. The light contracted....

The Mirror of Multiplicities

Prologue

I received an email from a publisher while waiting for the rain to stop in a Beijing café. The message was cryptically brief: "We've received a peculiar manuscript, reportedly left by your friend Yang Mingyuan. His will specifically requested that you write its preface. The manuscript has been sent to you via an encrypted link."

I remembered Yang Mingyuan, a writer who had wandered abroad for years. We had met briefly at a literary festival. News of his death had caused a momentary ripple...

On the Quantum Threshold

On the infinitely branching paths of time, each decision creates a parallel universe; yet above the quantum threshold, all possibilities exist simultaneously within the labyrinth of a single consciousness.

Dr. Zheng Mingzhe stared at the sender-less email on his display, feeling an unexpected wave of dizziness. This feeling didn't come from the strangeness of the email's content. As a quantum physicist, he was used to dealing with strange ideas. Rather, it came from the number mentioned in the em...

I've seen this cat

The university library had always been a sanctuary for me. The weight of knowledge contained in its walls created a pleasant pressure, as if gravity were slightly stronger among the stacks. I had been researching temporal bifurcations for my dissertation, a subject that had consumed three years of my life and produced little more than academic skepticism and gentle suggestions from my advisor to pursue something more "grounded."

It was between the collected works of Hans Reichenbach and a worn co...

Phantom Limbs of Consciousness

In the beginning, they were like implanted organs, a prosthetic grafted into the body of human experience, neither fully external nor completely internal. Artificial Intelligence, this entity we have repeatedly defined and reshaped, emerged as a collective phantom limb of consciousness.

We initially believed we were using it, but in reality, it was reconstructing our perceptual systems. Like a neural network silently implanted, it was rewiring our synapses, transforming the very architecture of h...