Between the Morning Light of Paris and the Spotlights of London

The January morning light in Paris was silver-gray. From the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Shangri-La Hotel suite, only half the Eiffel Tower was visible across the Seine through the mist, its tip hidden in the clouds like a broken needle.

Su Jin stood by the window, fresh from a shower, her hair still wet. Droplets fell from the ends onto the collar of her white bathrobe.

She had not dried it. She simply stood there, letting the Parisian morning light fall on her face. It was cold light, carrying the chill of the Seine and the chalky texture of the Haussmann buildings' stone facades, casting her skin in a marble-like, cool white.

The natural pink on her cheekbones looked especially fresh in the cold light, like a peach just picked from the branch, a thin layer of frost settling on its skin in the winter morning air.

The system spoke at that moment.

[Host, it is time to check in.]

She leaned against the dressing table, looking at the Eiffel Tower outside the window, waiting for that familiar voice.

[Ten, nine, eight, seven...]

She lowered her head as the countdown continued, looking at her fingers.

Her nails were cut short and bore no polish. A thin layer of calluses, worn there by a keyboard, covered her fingertips.

She turned her hands over and looked at the lines on her palms. The three main lines were clear and deep, like three rivers flowing from different directions, meeting in the center of her palm before flowing off in different directions again.

[Three, two, one-ding!]

[Congratulations, host, on completing your one hundred and nineteenth daily check-in!]

[Today's check-in reward: a 1.5% stake in The Walt Disney Company, valued at approximately 2.1 billion US dollars. The equity transfer has been completed, and the host is now one of Disney's shareholders. This asset has been automatically placed in an offshore trust under the host's name, with annual dividends estimated at 32 million US dollars.

Additional permission unlocked: "Content integration." Productions from the host's film and television production company can reach audiences in 233 countries and regions through Disney's global distribution network.]

After listening, Su Jin put her phone on the dressing table.

Outside the window, the Eiffel Tower lit up in the mist. The light at its tip pierced the clouds, like a star someone had nailed in midair.

2.1 billion US dollars. A Disney shareholder.

She remembered when she was fifteen and the orphanage organized a trip to Shanghai Disney. She had not gone because places were limited, and the teachers had given the chance to the younger children.

She had stood behind the orphanage's iron gate and watched the bus drive away, dust flying up in the sunlight, slowly settling over her shoes.

She had looked down at the dust and drawn a circle on the ground with her toe, then drawn two ears inside it-a picture of Mickey Mouse's head.

The wind had blown the picture away, so she had crouched down and drawn another.

The corner of her mouth curved up. She picked up her phone and walked out of the room.

Two

At ten that morning, Su Jin arrived at the entrance to the Chanel haute couture atelier at 31 Rue Cambon in Paris.

The building's exterior was classic Haussmann style, with exquisite carvings on its gray stone facade and red geraniums planted on its black wrought-iron balconies, still blooming exuberantly in winter.

There was no sign at the entrance, only a tiny golden double-C logo on the address plate. It was so discreet it was almost invisible, yet everyone who passed could not resist a second look.

The door opened.

A woman in a black suit stood in the entrance hall. She was in her sixties, with graying hair arranged in an immaculate bun and secured with a camellia-shaped hairpin.

The lines around her mouth were deep, but her eyes were extraordinarily bright, like two gems that had been polished for too long, their surfaces covered in countless tiny scratches, yet the light beneath still sharp.

She was Madame Lefèvre, the head seamstress of the Chanel haute couture atelier. She had been at the atelier for forty-two years, since Gabrielle Chanel herself was still alive.

"Ms. Su," she said, dipping into a slight curtsy, her French carrying an old-fashioned, elegant roll to its r's.

"Welcome. The atelier is ready."

She led Su Jin down a narrow corridor, its walls covered in black-and-white photographs: Coco Chanel herself cutting fabric in her studio, Karl Lagerfeld arranging a model's skirt backstage, Virginie Viard contemplating a design sketch.

The people in the photographs had changed from one generation to the next, but the background was always this atelier, these tables, these lights, these dress forms marked countless times with pins and chalk.

The atelier occupied the building's top floor, the entire level opened into one space. Skylights poured even, shadowless natural light down from above.

More than a dozen dress forms stood in the center of the room, draped in unfinished garments at various stages. Some had only a collar, some only a sleeve, and some had already taken shape but were still waiting for their final beadwork.

Fabric samples covered the walls, from the lightest organza to the heaviest tweed. Each color came in a gradient of more than a dozen shades, like a wall filled with color.

A faint scent of wool and silk thread hung in the air, along with a trace of coffee's bitter aroma drifting from the coffee machine in the corner, which was always on.

Madame Lefèvre took a thick portfolio from among the dress forms and opened it. Inside were more than a dozen hand-drawn designs.

Virginie Viard had drawn every one of them especially for Su Jin's Berlin red carpet appearance. Their lines were fluid and their colors bold: some had exaggerated bows at the neckline, some had skirts embroidered all over with camellias, and some used feathers and sequins to create patterns of ocean waves.

Su Jin turned the pages one by one, studying them carefully. She paused for several seconds at each one, her fingers gliding lightly along the edges of the drawings, as if touching the lines and colors that had yet to become real.

When she reached the fifth page, she stopped.

The design showed a silver-white gown.

Not pure white, but a silver-white with the quality of moonlight, like snow on a late winter night after the moon had shone on it all night, a thin layer of ice forming on its surface, with snow beneath the ice and earth beneath the snow.

The neckline was asymmetrical, with a slender strap on the left and a bare shoulder on the right. The curve from collarbone to shoulder blade was fully exposed, like a carefully composed photograph, its empty space more powerful than the parts filled in.

The skirt was A-line, flaring outward from the waist and falling to the ankles.

Tiny crystals and pearls were embroidered all over the fabric, not spread evenly, but scattered in denser and sparser clusters, like stars in the night sky: in some places they gathered into the Milky Way, while in others the space was as empty as an uninhabited wilderness.

"This one," Su Jin said decisively.

Madame Lefèvre leaned over to look at the design and nodded. Her expression did not change, but her finger lightly flicked the edge of the paper, as if in some silent acknowledgment.

"This one will take four hundred hours of work," she said. "The beadwork takes the most time. The crystals and pearls can't be placed symmetrically. Symmetry kills it. They have to look as if they were scattered on at random, but every position is calculated.

"That kind of 'casual precision' is the hardest."

Su Jin looked at the design, imagining it growing out of the paper into a gown she could wear.

The silver-white fabric would flow beneath the red carpet lights, the crystals would refract tiny shards of light, and the pearls would sway gently with her steps, as if she were clad in stars and every one of them were moving.

"Four hundred hours," she said. "Will there be enough time?"

Madame Lefèvre glanced at the calendar on the wall.

"The Berlin red carpet is on February fifteenth. Today is January seventh. There's enough time."

She took the design out of the portfolio, walked over to a blank wall, and secured it with magnets.

Then she turned around and looked at Su Jin.

"Ms. Su, you need a styling team. Hair, makeup, jewelry, shoes. An haute couture gown is the skeleton of a building, but the person living inside it is the soul."

Su Jin looked at her. "Is there anyone you'd recommend?"

The corner of Madame Lefèvre's mouth curved up. It was her first smile since Su Jin had come in, faint and fleeting, like a flash of lightning gone before it could be seen clearly.

"I have a friend who has done red carpet styling in Paris for thirty years. She's seen everyone-from Cate Blanchett to Tilda Swinton, from Huppert to Auntie Huppert. She says she's no longer afraid of anything except boredom.

"I don't think you'll bore her."

She took a business card from her pocket and handed it over. It bore only a name and a phone number, no title and no company. The paper was thick, textured, handmade cotton stock that felt like a small piece of flattened silk.

Su Jin took it and glanced at the name-Geneviève Durand.

She put the card in her bag and nodded. "Arrange a meeting with her for me."

Three

Geneviève Durand's studio was in a small alley in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, only a few steps from the Church of Saint-Sulpice.

The storefront was a wooden door painted dark green, its brass handle polished bright by countless hands.

Su Jin rang the doorbell and waited about ten seconds before the door opened.

The studio was not large, about sixty square meters, divided into two areas. The outer area was a reception space with a dark-blue velvet sofa and a floor lamp. The walls were covered in black-and-white photographs, all of them capturing red carpet moments of stars Geneviève had styled;

The inner area was the workspace, with a huge mirror surrounded by light bulbs and a dressing table covered in brushes, bottles, and jars, arranged as neatly as an army awaiting inspection.

Geneviève herself stood in front of the mirror. She was in her early sixties, her hair cut extremely short, revealing a row of tiny silver earrings.

She wore a black work jacket with several combs and a pair of scissors tucked into its pockets. She looked as capable and efficient as a surgeon fresh from the operating table.

When she saw Su Jin come in, her gaze rested on her face for about three seconds. It was not appraisal but diagnosis, like a doctor looking at an X-ray, searching for the structure of the bones, the direction of the muscles, and where the light fell.

"Sit." She pointed to the chair in front of the mirror. Her French had a slight southern accent, the ends of her sentences rising a little.

Su Jin sat down.

Geneviève stood behind her, placed both hands on her shoulders, and looked at her face in the mirror.

The two held each other's gaze like that for about ten seconds, neither saying a word.

Then Geneviève let go, walked to the dressing table, picked up a comb, and began combing Su Jin's hair.

Her movements were gentle. The teeth of the comb glided from scalp to ends, traveling the full length every time, skipping not a single inch.

"Your hair," she said. "Don't cut it. Don't dye it. Don't perm it. Keep it like this.

"Its shine is natural. Any chemical treatment would damage it."

She put down the comb, walked in front of Su Jin, and bent over to look at her face. Her fingers pressed lightly beneath her cheekbone, then felt along her brow bone.

"You have very good bone structure. High brow bones, full cheekbones, and a jaw that's neither square nor pointed, but somewhere in between. A face like this can take any light-overhead light, side light, backlight, all of it."

She straightened, walked to the wall, and took a thick reference book off a shelf. She opened it to a page and handed it to Su Jin.

Several photographs were pasted on the page, all showing how silver-white gowns looked under different lighting: sunlight, artificial light, moonlight, and camera flash.

Beside each photograph were handwritten notes, the writing messy but orderly: "Sunlight eats up silver-white; increase the reflective surface at the shoulders to balance it";

"Under artificial light, pearls turn yellow but crystals don't, so use crystals at the neckline and cuffs, pearls on the skirt";

"Flash is the greatest test of a fabric's texture. Bad satin looks like plastic under flash; good satin looks like flowing water."

"Berlin's red carpet is indoors, and the photographers control the lighting. But we can't rely entirely on them. Sometimes they use very strange lighting for artistic effect."

Geneviève closed the reference book and looked at Su Jin.

"So we need a plan that will let your face be seen in any light. Not illuminated-seen. Those are two different things."

She picked up a pen from the dressing table, drew a simple outline of a face on a sheet of white paper, then drew a small circle at the cheekbone.

"Here, highlighter. Not the glittery kind, but the kind where you can't see the powder, only the light. It'll make your cheekbones glow on their own in any light."

She drew an arc at the eye socket. "Here, matte eyeshadow, gray-brown. No shimmer at all. Shimmer turns into two white patches of light under flash and eats up your eyes."

She drew a small triangle at the lips. "No red lipstick. There are too many red lips on the red carpet. Your face doesn't need to compete with anyone's.

"Use a nude shade, a nude with a hint of brown, as if you'd just bitten your own lips, leaving them a little flushed but not yet red."

Su Jin looked at the lines and circles she had drawn, imagining them transferred from the paper to her own face.

She had never had anyone give her a complete styling before. At first she had had no money, then no time, and later she had felt there was no need.

But now, looking at Geneviève's eyes, trained on countless faces, she felt she could give it a try.

"What about jewelry?" she asked.

Geneviève put down the pen, turned, and took a black velvet box from a drawer. She opened it.

Inside was a pair of Chanel diamond earrings, neither camellia-shaped nor bearing the double-C logo, but two extremely fine diamond tassels that would hang about three centimeters from the earlobes. Every diamond was a different size, arranged from largest to smallest. The one at the very end was as small as a grain of sand, but it still flashed under the light.

"No necklace. Your neckline already leaves one shoulder bare; a necklace would be too much. The earrings need to move. When you walk the red carpet, they'll sway and sparkle, drawing people's eyes from your shoulder to your face.

"That's a stylist's job-not piling the most beautiful things onto you, but making people's eyes follow the path you want when they look at you."

Su Jin looked at the tassel earrings, imagining them swaying from her earlobes.

The silver-white gown, the bare shoulder, the diamond tassels swaying gently beside her ears, her face seen under the lights, not illuminated.

"What about shoes?" She gave her foot a little shake.

Geneviève took another photograph from the drawer and handed it to her.

It showed a pair of RV strappy sandals. The heels were transparent, like crystal columns, and the uppers had only two extremely thin straps, one at the ankle and one over the instep.

The shoes were exactly the same color as the gown, silver-white with the quality of moonlight.

"The transparent heels will make your legs look longer without being as clunky as platforms. Two straps, one to secure the ankle and one to trace the instep.

"The instep is one of the most beautiful curves on a woman's body, but few people notice it.

"You want people to notice your feet last, after they've looked at your dress, your earrings, and your face.

"Then they'll think, This person-even her feet are beautiful."

Su Jin looked at the photograph, the corner of her mouth curving up. "How long have you been doing this?" She looked at Geneviève's absorbed expression.

Geneviève leaned against the dressing table, arms folded across her chest. "Forty years."

"What have you learned in forty years?"

Geneviève looked at her and was silent for a few seconds. Then she spoke, her voice a little softer than before.

"I've learned that true beauty isn't created. It's discovered. All you need to do is remove what's standing in front of it-too much makeup, too much jewelry, too much design, too many ideas. Take it away.

"What remains is what was already there in her."

Su Jin looked at her, and the two exchanged a glance in the sixty-square-meter studio.

Outside, someone rode a bicycle through an alley in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, its bell ringing in a series of bright notes.

She took the silver-white gown design from her bag, set it on the dressing table, and pushed it toward Geneviève.

"This gown, February fifteenth, Berlin. Help me prepare the rest."

Geneviève looked down at the design and lightly flicked a finger against the silver-white skirt, as if testing the texture of the fabric.

"All right." She smiled at her.

Four

February fourteenth, London.

The Great Hall at Imperial College London was packed.

All 1,500 seats, from the floor to the dome, were filled, every row crammed full.

This was the global final of the Elite University Championship. Over the past three months, twenty contestants from five universities-Oxford, Cambridge, ETH Zurich, Caltech, and MIT-had fought their way through a field of more than a hundred universities worldwide.

They now sat behind a long table in the center of the stage, each with a laptop and a whiteboard in front of them. In the audience were media outlets from around the world-B

BC, CNN, NHK, CGTN. Cameras of every size were mounted on a raised platform at the back, the red dots on their lenses lit like a pack of unblinking beasts lying in wait in the dark.

Su Jin sat in the very center of the MIT contestants' section.

Today she wore a black cashmere turtleneck from The Row, minimalist and entirely undecorated, the fabric as thin as mist, fitting her like a second skin;

On the bottom she wore a long black leather skirt from Acne Studios and a pair of burgundy Common Projects ankle boots.

Her hair was tied in a low bun with a black velvet ribbon, leaving her whole face visible.

No makeup, no jewelry, nothing extraneous.

Yet under the stage lights, that face was like a piece of white jade laid on black velvet. All the light rushed toward her, was absorbed, then released by her in a softer form.

Her eyelashes cast dense shadows beneath her eyes, trembling gently when she blinked, like two butterflies resting on petals, ready to fly away at any moment.

The host was a BBC technology journalist in his forties, with graying hair and a deep, magnetic voice.

He stood in the center of the stage, facing the twenty contestants from the five universities, an unopened envelope in his hand.

"The format of the final is different from previous years,"

He said, his gaze sweeping over the audience before settling on the camera.

"There is no predetermined question this year. This year's question was jointly decided by the five judges at the very last moment. They took the hardest questions of the past five years, the problems least likely to be solved, and the most cutting-edge directions of research, kneaded them all together, and turned them into something-

"-that none of you has ever seen before."

He opened the envelope, pulled out a card, glanced at it, then turned it around to face the contestants.

There was only one line on the card:

Design a system capable of reconstructing a high-precision 3D scene from a single blurry, low-resolution nighttime image, and running in real time on a mobile device.

The entire venue fell silent.

It was not the silence of nerves, but of shock-the problem had bundled together five of the hardest subproblems in computer vision.

Each subproblem was enough to keep a doctoral student writing papers for three years, and they had to solve them all in four hours.

Su Jin stared at the line for about ten seconds. Then she lowered her head and closed her eyes.

Something began to turn in her mind. It was not linear, step-by-step reasoning, but a kind of intuition that leaped across dimensions-her IQ of 178 was fully engaged at that moment, but she did not rush to start.

With her eyes closed, she took the five subproblems apart in her mind, recombined them, then took them apart and recombined them again.

She did not want a solution that merely worked. She wanted one that would shut everyone up.

Four hours and seventeen minutes later, Su Jin submitted her answer.

Her code was only 320 lines long, nearly 200 lines shorter than the second-place contestant's, yet it ran 1.7 times as efficiently as his.

She used a unified multitask learning framework to handle all five subproblems at once, achieving 35 frames per second on an iPad Pro-exceeding the problem's real-time requirement.

The moment her submission went through, all five judges leaned toward the screen at once.

They looked at it for a long time. No one spoke.

Then the head judge-Professor Harris of MIT-took off his glasses, wiped the lenses, put them back on, and looked again.

He turned and murmured a few words to the judge beside him.

That judge nodded, then shook his head, as if to say, "What else can I say?"

Professor Harris stood up excitedly, walked to the center of the stage, and picked up the microphone.

"The results are in," he announced loudly. His voice echoed beneath the dome of the Great Hall, like a stone thrown into a deep well.

The echoes bounced back from the walls of the well, once, twice, three times, growing more distant and fainter.

"First place-MIT, Su Jin!"

Thunderous applause erupted throughout the hall.

Fifteen hundred people rose to their feet at once, clapping and cheering. Some whistled; others shouted her name.

Camera flashes lit up in every corner of the audience, joining into a white sea.

Su Jin remained in her seat. She did not stand or wave, only smiled faintly.

She sat there quietly, her hands resting on the keyboard, looking at the 320 lines of code on her screen. Light poured down from the dome and fell on her, casting a soft halo over her black turtleneck sweater.

Her profile emerged between light and shadow with the contours of a classical sculpture-the curve of her cheekbone, the line of her jaw, the shallow groove between the bridge of her nose and her lips. Every angle looked calculated, yet every angle also looked as though it had grown there by chance.

Ethan was the second person to stand and applaud.

He stood behind the Princeton contestants' seats, clapping so hard that his palms turned red.

He looked at Su Jin, the corners of his mouth curved upward, a pure light in his light brown eyes-not jealousy, not disappointment, but the relief of someone who had lost to a worthy opponent.

Su Jin had once again set the world ablaze.

Five

After the awards ceremony, Su Jin did not stay in the auditorium to receive congratulations.

She went out through a side door and headed down the corridor toward the exit.

The corridor was quiet, with only the sound of her footsteps echoing through the empty space.

She walked slowly, planting each step firmly, as if confirming that the ground beneath her feet was real, not a dream.

Her phone vibrated in her pocket.

She took it out. It was a message from Professor Harris: I read your code three times.

The third time, I cried.

Not because the code was well written, but because in thirty years of teaching, it was the first time I had seen someone solve such a complicated problem so cleanly.

Before you came to MIT, I thought I was a good teacher. Only after you came did I realize

A teacher doesn't make a good student; a good student made me a good teacher.

Su Jin stopped, looking at those words.

At the end of the corridor was a floor-to-ceiling window. Outside lay a London winter night, the lights across the River Thames blurred into a haze of halos in the mist.

She stood there, the blue light from her phone screen falling on her face, giving the skin that countless people had gazed upon a cold, metallic texture.

Her fingers hovered over the screen for a long time, then she typed a line: Thank you, Professor. Not a polite thank-you, but a real one.

Before I came to MIT, I thought I was just here to learn. Only after I arrived did I realize that some things aren't learned; they're lit up.

After sending it, she slipped her phone into her pocket and continued forward.

When she reached the end of the corridor, she pushed open a small door beside the floor-to-ceiling window. Behind it was a tiny terrace.

The terrace was only a few square meters, furnished with a wrought-iron table and two chairs. An ashtray and a forgotten coffee cup sat on the table.

She leaned against the terrace railing and looked at the London Eye in the distance. The enormous Ferris wheel glowed blue in the night, turning slowly like a precision timepiece magnified countless times.

Footsteps sounded behind her. She did not turn around.

"Congratulations." Ethan's voice came from behind her, a little breathless, as though he had run over. He walked up beside her and braced both hands on the railing, looking at the Ferris wheel in the distance.

"I looked at your code. I understood it the third time through."

He paused. "That multitask learning framework-I thought about going in that direction, but I didn't dare do it. You used gradient normalization to align the gradient scales of the different tasks, then took their weighted sum.

"That idea is beautiful."

Su Jin turned to look at him.

There was no light on the terrace. Only the distant blue glow of the London Eye reflected on his face, giving his features a cold, metallic sheen.

The wind had tousled his curls, and his bangs nearly covered half his brow and eyes, but his light brown eyes shone startlingly bright in the blue light.

"It's not that you didn't dare," she said with a soft laugh, seeing through him.

"You just didn't have enough time. Give you another half hour, and you could have done it too."

Ethan looked at her in silence for a few seconds, then smiled.

"Not necessarily. But I like hearing you say that."

He took his hands off the railing, slipped them into his pockets, and turned to lean against it, facing Su Jin. "I noticed when you received your award just now. You weren't excited. Why?"

Su Jin thought for a moment. "Because I didn't know what there was to be excited about.

"I won? I knew I would win.

"I knew from the moment I got the problem.

"It wasn't confidence-it was that the instant the problem was handed out, I already had the answer in my head.

"For the remaining four hours, all I did was write it down.

"Once it was written, there was no surprise, only the calm of knowing it was just as I'd expected."

Ethan looked at her for a long time.

In the distance, a blue light on the London Eye reached its highest point, paused for a second, then began to descend slowly.

"You know," he said, "what you just said makes me admire you even more than your code does. Not because you said you were smart, but because you said you were calm.

"No ecstasy when you win, no despair when you lose.

"That state of mind is rarer than a high IQ."

Su Jin merely shrugged and said nothing.

She pondered for a while, then suddenly took her phone from her pocket and opened her contacts.

"Sony," she said, looking at him. "Do you know anyone there?"

Ethan was taken aback. "Sony? Which department?"

"Game development."

Su Jin put her phone away and looked at the London Eye in the distance.

"I want to make a game.

"Using Sony's technology and a Chinese story.

"Based on Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio.

"Not some shoddily made game that exploits Chinese elements, but one that

"-makes people want to visit Pu Songling's former residence in Zichuan, Shandong, after they play it, want to read the original text, and want to know what those stories about foxes, scholars, female ghosts, and Daoist priests are really saying."

Ethan looked at her and remained silent for a long time.

Then he pulled his phone from his pocket, opened his contacts, and found a number.

"My undergraduate roommate is now a technical director at Sony Interactive Entertainment's headquarters in Japan.

"Just last month, he asked me whether I knew anyone interested in game development.

"Sony wants to expand further into the Chinese market, but they don't know how-when it comes to telling Chinese stories, they don't know where to start."

He handed her the phone. A person's name and a string of digits were on the screen. "You can contact him. Just say I referred you."

Su Jin took the phone and glanced at the name-Takeshi Yamamoto.

She saved the number in her own contacts, then handed the phone back to Ethan.

"Thank you," she said to him solemnly.

Ethan shook his head. "Don't thank me. Thank yourself."

He paused. "If you really make this game-Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, AAA, released worldwide-you'll change how a lot of people see things.

"Not how they see games, but how they see China.

"They think China has nothing but kung fu and pandas. They don't know China also has stories about fox spirits and scholars.

"They don't know those stories conceal things more profound, more complex, and more fascinating than anything in any other culture."

Su Jin looked at him, the corners of her mouth curving.

It was her first genuine smile that night, faint and brief, like a petal falling onto water and vanishing before the ripples had time to spread.

"I know," she said.

In the distance, the London Eye's blue lights went out and were replaced by warm yellow ones. The Ferris wheel continued turning, round and round and round.

The two stood on the terrace, neither speaking. London was cold on that winter night, and they simply stood there

Watching the Ferris wheel turn in the darkness, watching the lights across the River Thames flicker in and out through the mist, watching the London winter night spread out beneath their feet like a vast container filled with light.