Huo Sining frowned and moved her hand little by little across the chessboard. When she touched a point where the horizontal and vertical lines intersected, she paused for a moment.
Only then did she discover that beneath that black intersection, there seemed to be a tiny hole, invisible because of the paint that covered those intersections.
When Huo Sining first touched this chessboard, she didn't pay attention to those minute holes, thinking they were tiny cavities caused by gas bubbles during the granite's formation process, so she disregarded them.
But upon touching it this time, she found something amiss: there were fifty-six of these tiny holes irregularly distributed across the intersections of the lines, some round and some square.
Had there been merely two or three holes, one might attribute it to coincidence, but over fifty holes, all at the intersections, demanded skepticism.
