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 cross-referencing every grain of the wooden slips, had been edited out under the professor's name. Your only share was a single line of critique calling your interpretation 'bold.' In other words, no one believed you.

The research you had seen countless times failed to become a thesis 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 an antique market where junk, not formal artifacts, was piled up. There, at least, no one would ask you to prove anything anymore.

The wooden statue was standing haphazardly among broken plates in a corner of a stall. The red pigment was half-peeled, and an old stain was stuck 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 figure of a woman with a blade to her throat, carved by a later hand onto the growth rings of wood that must be at least two thousand years old. Two different touches from different eras overlapped in one body. Such an object could not theoretically exist.

What is this...?

You recognized what no one else could. As your hand wiped away the dust, it 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 unfairness to a piece of wood. But the moment those words fell, a strange warmth, like the body heat of a living thing rather than wood, circulated under your palm. The stain began to spread like blood, not lacquer, and a single tear flowed from the closed eyes of the woman with the blade to her throat.