On the afternoon of October 12, 2016, at 3:00 PM, the air inside Hall E3 of the Beijing International Exhibition Center was filled with the scent of freshly opened mineral oil. Gripping a high-intensity flashlight, I squeezed through the bustling Thai crystal exhibition zone, while the hardness tester inside my canvas shoulder bag rhythmically knocked against my ribs with each step. This bag, a World War II-era U.S. Army geology survey pack, had been passed down from my grandfather, bearing acid rain scars from his meteorite-hunting expeditions in Argentina.

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At Booth D27, a Cossack-bearded Russian was polishing a Terek River lapis lazuli with a velvet cloth. Behind him, a cardboard box, hastily labeled "Siberian Meteorites" in Russian and Chinese, sat on the floor. Beneath it, a stone encrusted with hematite gleamed a rust-colored red under the LED display lights.

"Посмотрите на текстуру!" ("Look at this texture!") Vasily suddenly exclaimed, lifting the meteorite with tweezers. A strong vodka-laced breath hit me. Thirty years of meteorite collecting experience made my pupils automatically focus: a 680-gram pallasite, its surface covered in honeycomb-like etch pits, reminiscent of the lunar surface, but along the edges, I could faintly make out the cold metallic sheen of nickel-iron alloy.

Amid the buzz of a portable XRF analyzer, Vasily and I crouched behind the booth like black-market artifact dealers. The analysis results showed a nickel content of 8.2%, consistent with a Suizhou pallasite, but an anomalous magnesium reading sent my heartbeat racing—this often indicated the presence of rare mineral inclusions within the meteorite.

"Twenty-five thousand. No bargaining." Vasily abruptly switched to Mandarin with a Northeastern accent. His Soviet red star ring glinted under the sunlight. "I bought this in Tunguska in 1983. Back then..." He suddenly stopped mid-sentence, wrapping the meteorite in velvet with a gesture that felt like he was concealing a cosmic secret.

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Three months later, as rust-colored ripples spread through the ultrasonic cleaning machine, my restoration expert, Old Li, abruptly shut it off. This craftsman, who had restored Jilin meteorite fragments for the National Geological Museum, now held up a 10x magnifying glass with trembling hands: "Director, there’s a Mandelbrot fractal beneath this oxidation layer."

We switched to a dental-grade pneumatic descaler, its 0.2mm tungsten steel tip sparking against the meteorite’s surface. As we peeled away the fourth layer of oxidation, Old Li’s breathing grew heavy—under the electron microscope, the nickel-iron alloy matrix revealed an intricate network of olivine veins, forming capillary-like patterns. More astonishingly, a natural cavity within the meteorite was gradually contracting into the shape of a human heart chamber.

The moment the oxidation layers were fully removed, alarms blared across the workspace. The thermoluminescence detector indicated persistent radiation inside, yet the Geiger counter remained silent. Professor Wang from the Chinese Academy of Sciences rushed over overnight. After performing a synchrotron X-ray tomography scan, he revealed an astonishing discovery—inside the heart-shaped cavity, a 3mm silicon carbide crystal was embedded. This ultra-high-temperature mineral usually only forms in supernova remnants.

"Look at the direction of the Widmanstätten patterns." Professor Wang traced an elegant sine wave on the spectral analysis chart. "These nickel-iron crystals cooled in space at a rate of 1°C per million years. But this meteorite's structure indicates it was reheated above 1200°C at some point." His finger paused at a spectral peak: "It’s as if the universe sculpted this heart with its own hands… and then breathed a second life into it."

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We placed it in a temperature-controlled display case in Section B of the Meteorite Hall, with a custom ring-shaped light source illuminating it from twelve angles. On the opening day, twenty members of the International Meteoritical Society spent forty-seven minutes photographing it. Marco, an Italian collector, even brought a 1960 edition of the Soviet Meteorite Catalog. In its yellowed pages, an ink drawing perfectly matched our meteorite’s crystalline patterns, labeled as "Discovered in 1978, Chelyabinsk Oblast."

But what cemented its legendary status occurred three months later, at the Beijing Meteorite Exchange Conference. Japanese meteorite hunter Takuma Kobayashi used a laser Raman spectrometer to analyze it. Suddenly, at a wavelength of 380nm, the meteorite emitted a strong fluorescence. Even more astonishing—when we reviewed the slow-motion footage, we discovered that at the exact moment of fluorescence, the meteorite levitated for 0.3 seconds. The catch? The display case’s electromagnetic levitation system had been turned off.

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Today, in meteorite collecting circles, the legend of "The Heart of Siberia" has spawned seventeen versions. Some researchers, using crater simulation software, speculate it was part of the asteroid impact that contributed to the dinosaurs' extinction. Russian bloggers unearthed KGB declassified files, claiming it was a secret Soviet space program artifact.

As for me, on quiet nights after closing, I use my grandfather’s brass microscope to observe the olivine crystals. At 400x magnification, they unmistakably resemble countless miniature hearts, each sealed with the golden glow of a collapsing nebula.

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Last weekend, Vasily suddenly appeared at the museum entrance. The Russian giant, who once drank vodka for breakfast, now pressed his forehead against the glass display, tears shimmering in his thick beard like a reflection of the Milky Way.

"That blizzard night in Tunguska, 1983…" His Mandarin was suddenly fluent. "I traded three crates of military rations for this meteorite. That Yakut elder told me… told me this was the second heart of the gods, fallen to Earth."

As the season’s first snowfall drifted outside, our monitors detected a 0.1% fluctuation in the meteorite’s radiation levels. In dimensions beyond our instruments' reach, perhaps a four-billion-year-old heartbeat was resonating with the gasps of astonished visitors, achieving quantum synchronization across time and space.

This story is purely fictional. If you are interested in this 81kg heart-shaped Seymchan pallasite, please feel free to contact us