With this thought,he started to think he was surely going mad.
After spending some time at the café, Xinyi headed back to the apartment. When Xinyi entered the lobby, he found Zeren sitting on a bench by the window, reading something and hoping that Zeren would help this time. He sat beside him.
"Hey, so I want to know something."
"What?"
"What's with 3:03 time in every case related to this apartment?" Xinyi asked.
Zeren took out his tablet, typed something, and handed it over to Xinyi.
It was about an article titled:
Apartment 303 – Yuehua Apartment Incident. From the beginning, nothing made sense.It was filled with forums half deleted ,speculations,urban legends,screenshots of post that no longer existed.Xinyi was seconds away from smacking Zeren with the tablet because there was nothing sense here.. Until he found something buried in a scanned municipal blueprint file from 1986. 'I almost missed it's Xinyi mused.
Floor plan - Level 3
Units: 301,302...
Then a blank rectangle where 303 should be. Below it, with faint pencil marks that had been scanned 'accidentally' into the document. Xinyi enlarged the image. Underneath the official inked layout was another label...
Experimental Observation Room.
Xinyi's breathe hitched. Observation Room? That wasn't residential terminology. Just then old man han's words replayed in his head. 'This building wasn't built for normal people. It was just a facade' Could it be true?
Xinyi opened another archive document he saw.
Original permit application: Residential housing.
Amendment filed three months later.
Purpose: Structural reinforcement for specialized equipment.
No explanation beyond that. 'Calm down's Xinyi told himself. 'Equipment could mean anything.lab testing,signal systems. Security monitoring.'
Yuehua City in 1980s had invested heavily in research facilities. Maybe one of the University departments had temporarily borrowed space before residents moved in. That would explain modification. Xinyi was about to turn and ask and question Zeren but he saw the screen of the device flicker... For a split second,the blueprint image shifted. The bank rectangle where room 303 should have been filled in. A room drawn larger than the others. No windows,no balcony. It resembled a quarantine room. And beneath the circle,three handwritten numbers 3:03. The image snapped back to normal. For a second Xinyi thought he imagined it. He checked the file history. There was no edits,no alternative layers...just the standard floor plan again.
There was a name attached to the permit amendment when xinyi crossed checked...
Project supervisor: Professor Xu Haiyu .
Xinyi typed the name into the search bar. Results appeared immediately...
Xu Haiyu - physicist. Specialist on temporal resonance theory.
Disappeared in 1990.
Last known address: Yuehua Apartment.
Unit Number: 303
Xinyi stoped breathing for a second there. 'Temporal resonance theory?' He clicked into an academic abstract archive through some university database. Most of the papers were inaccessible without credentials, but the summary remained.
" Temporal Resonance Theory suggests that time isn't always steady—it may "oscillate" or shift under certain extreme conditions. When a system's natural frequency aligns with spacetime behavior, it could create a resonance effect that temporarily speeds up or slows down how time is experienced."
frequency aligns with spacetime behavior.
A polite academic way of saying... Time could shift.
Xinyi's reflection stared back faintly from the screen. For a moment he had this uneasy impression that it wasn't aligned perfectly with him. The tilt of the head head was off by a fraction.
He immediately closed the document. "Breathe" He whispered.