"You know, that thing you sent me... was practically... gibberish!"
Mei Yiqiu took off his protective lab clothing and, with the help of his personal assistant, Ms. Mei Ziqing, changed into casual clothes before taking Qingmu to his office.
"But you're in luck. I happen to have been studying some strange things lately. I'm not sure whether yours is one of them, but if it is, its origins are extraordinary!"
Qingmu was waiting for him to explain those extraordinary origins, but Professor Mei changed the subject and began talking about something else.
"I've been invited to Copenhagen next week for an international academic conference. It was called at short notice, and the attendees include leading experts in archaeology, architecture, biology, genetics, physics, and other fields. The reason is a significant new discovery in pyramid research."
With a pipe between his teeth, Professor Mei Yiqiu took out several photographs and showed them to Qingmu.
The first few photographs were blurry and looked as though they had been taken underwater. Grayish-white stone structures were covered in algae, coral, and other unidentified plants.
The last two were composite images, clearly recognizable as cross sections of pyramids, with the positions of burial chambers and ventilation shafts marked on them.
"This is the Pyramid of Khufu, isn't it?" Qingmu said with certainty. This image was widely circulated online, accompanied by many mysterious legends.
"So you recognized the Great Pyramid too! But let me tell you, it isn't." Mei Yiqiu chuckled. "These two images look identical, but they don't depict the same pyramid."
"Oh?" Qingmu had never studied pyramids much. "Were all the pyramids in Egypt built the same way?"
"No, no. The other one isn't in Egypt," the professor said, shaking his head. "Do you remember Verne's The Mysterious Island? He invented a small island in the South Pacific for the book. We call it fictional because we all know there's a vast ocean basin there, five thousand meters deep. There couldn't possibly be an island."
"But between 1843 and 1902, French ships recorded islands appearing there on more than one occasion. Four of them even had definite names and locations. Inspired by Verne's novel, people carried out large-scale explorations of those waters after World War II, but found nothing. So those islands became ghost islands."
"Not long ago, the ghost islands there appeared. This time, people not only located those four reefs precisely, but also discovered ancient architectural ruins on the seabed to their north, between them and the Tubuai Islands. Among them was an underwater pyramid identical to the Great Pyramid. That's what those first few blurry photographs show."
"Underwater?"
"Exactly! On the seabed-and it's an inverted pyramid." Professor Mei's face was extraordinarily expressive, as though he could hardly believe it himself. "In other words, its point faces downward, embedded in the seabed like a funnel. For that reason, its full dimensions weren't completely measured until recently."
"One is in the Sahara at the northern end of Africa, and the other is on the floor of the South Pacific. Not only are the two pyramids identical in structure, but their dimensions match exactly, down to the tiniest detail. Isn't that amazing?"
"It certainly is strange. The South Pacific and Egypt don't seem to have anything to do with each other!" Qingmu said.
"There's something even more surprising," Mei Yiqiu continued. "The scientific community didn't take an interest in this pyramid and devote enormous human and material resources to studying it because it resembled the Pyramid of Khufu. In fact, we didn't know they were identical at first. The interest was entirely due to its unusual coordinates."
"Egypt's pyramids are all clustered near the intersection of 30° north and 30° east, while these underwater ruins between Maria Theresa Reef and the Tubuai Islands of French Polynesia happen to lie near 30° south and 150° west. Do you know how those two sets of coordinates are related?"
Qingmu thought for a moment. "They seem to be on opposite sides of the earth. One's on this side, and the other's on the other side of the globe?"
"Yes. Your phrasing isn't scientific, but that's what it means. If you connect those two coordinates with a straight line, it passes right through the earth's center. As you said, the two points are on opposite sides of the earth, just like the Arctic and Antarctic."
"Although the two pyramids don't currently sit at those exact coordinates, taking tectonic shifts and volcanic activity into account, we have reason to believe that when they were built, they stood at opposite ends of one of the earth's diameters. What does that tell us?"
Qingmu blinked. "It tells us aliens built the pyramids. The ancient Egyptians couldn't possibly have known the earth was round, much less traveled halfway around it to reach the South Pacific."
Just then, the beautiful assistant Mei Ziqing happened to come over carrying a tea service. Hearing Qingmu's answer, she burst out laughing.
Mei Yiqiu shook his head. "No, no. I don't care who built them! Perhaps the Egyptians' devotion moved the goddess of the Nile. Perhaps aliens happened to take a day trip to Earth and lent the Egyptians a hand while they were here. Who cares!"
"Then what do you care about?" Qingmu accepted a cup of tea from Mei Ziqing, thanked her, and waited for Mei Yiqiu to continue.
"What I care about is what they were trying to do." The professor clenched his pipe between his teeth and puffed out white smoke. "We all know the pyramids were burial chambers for Egypt's pharaohs. What we don't understand is why those rulers of more than four thousand years ago built their burial chambers this way. You should know that, apart from saving tomb robbers the trouble of digging, tombs like these have no other advantages. What's more, unlike other tombs around the world, the interiors of the pyramids are far too simple: cramped burial chambers, pitifully few burial goods, and almost no murals or decorations in the passages. It's completely at odds with the external grandeur of the undertaking! Can you imagine Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum containing nothing but a few bare passages and a room barely big enough for a coffin?"
Qingmu remembered a live television program from some time ago, in which a robot carrying a camera entered a pyramid. The broadcast seemed to have lasted all night, but all it showed were stone passages and stone doors, and nothing else.
"And?" Qingmu asked, sipping his tea. "What does that have to do with the pyramid at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean?"
"Good question!" The professor added some tobacco to his pipe. "Before this, similar megalithic ruins had also been discovered on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, some of which looked very much like pyramids. People regarded them as evidence of the lost Atlantis Civilization. But now, we have to wonder whether every pyramid on earth has an identical Mirror Pyramid on the other side of the planet."
"This mirroring-or perhaps reflection would be a better word-must have some special significance. My friend Professor Silva in Mexico sent me a very interesting photograph. Take a look..."
Mei Yiqiu opened WeChat on his phone and pulled up a photograph.
Qingmu saw a transparent hourglass formed from triangular pyramids. Although it wasn't an animated image, he could still tell that the fine sand inside was flowing rapidly from the upper pyramid into the lower one.
"They discovered a damaged crystal hourglass on the seabed. This is a reconstruction. It pushes the invention of the hourglass back more than three thousand years! But that isn't the point. The point is that this design appeared among many of the seabed stone carvings whose meanings remain unknown."
Professor Mei swiped across the screen and opened another image.
Qingmu saw something carved into an underwater stone wall that closely resembled the design he had sent Professor Mei: two triangles joined at their tips, with a fine line passing through the point where they met and extending into the interiors of the triangles at either end.
Qingmu could tell at a glance that this was the design the woman whose whole body carried an unusual fragrance had drawn on the table.