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· Art · Chapter 3

Chapter 3: Silkworm in a Bottle

Key art for the third chapter — a cocoon of woven silk, a desert of pale sand, and a white city that everyone else can simply fly to.

Concept art in pale sand and ivory tones — on the left, a vast tunnel of woven white silk hung with glowing cocoons and mulberry leaves; on the right, two white-robed riders on a camel cross the desert toward a white domed city floating in the clouds beyond a curved wall of glass, lit from above.

Chapter 3, Silkworm in a Bottle (瓶中蚕), is adolescence.

The idea

The desert from the end of Chapter 2 goes on. Far ahead, a city of white domes floats in the sky. The people who live there are born with robes that let them fly, and they come and go as easily as breathing. You can’t fly. Neither can the traveller who offers you a ride on their camel, and who turns out to be a lot more like you than either of you expected.

Getting up there means finding out what you are, and then becoming it.

Reading the image

  • The palette is bleached sand and ivory, a single warm ink tone. The only colour is the muted green of mulberry leaves, and this chapter’s light is green.
  • The silk tunnel on the left is the inside of a cocoon: thousands of threads spun into a passage, with more cocoons hanging like lanterns. A tiny figure stands deep inside it.
  • The riders in white robes cross the dunes toward the city, leaving a long line of footprints behind them.
  • The curved wall of glass is both the barrier at the edge of the desert and a hint that this whole world sits inside a jar, lit from its open mouth above.

After the night-blue sea of Chapter 2, this is the brightest place the journey has been so far. That’s deliberate: adolescence is full of light, even when it’s hard.