December 26th, Harbin's chill, like a coarse silver file, polished the air to a crystalline clarity. I stood in Sophia Church Square, the unshed snowflakes hung

On December 26th, Harbin's chill, like a coarse silver file, polished the air to a crystalline clarity. I stood in Sophia Church Square, the unshed snowflakes hung in mid-air, as if heaven and earth held their breath, awaiting a fated confession. This Orthodox sanctuary, with its onion-domed spires piercing the lead-gray sky, and its mottled brick walls encrusted with a century of frost, resembled a parchment scroll whose first page had been turned by the wind, waiting for future generations to inscribe its footnotes with their gaze. The square was packed with travelers holding selfie sticks, their lenses aimed at the pigeons circling the dome, and at the stubborn ice flowers blooming in the cracks of the stone steps. Live streams and camera clicks rose and fell in a continuous chorus. In a trance, I imagined the monks who, in 1907, transcribed "The Lives of the Saints" with quill pens; if they were to push open the bronze doors, they might mistake this for another form of prayer—modern people making pilgrimages with pixels, much like old believers questioning heaven with candlelight, achieving a wondrous reconciliation in the folds of time and space. I circled to the bell tower on the west side of the church. Splinters from the Tsarist era were embedded in the cracks of the wooden spiral staircase; with each step, fine snow rustled down from the carved dome. Reaching the top, the reflection of the Volkhov River solidified into shattered diamonds in the minus fifteen-degree air, and Central Street on the opposite bank was being gilded with a patina of twilight. The warm steam wafting from the Russian bakeries drew fleeting rime ice totems on the glass windows, reminiscent of the Minjiang River at Dujiangyan described by Yu Qiuyu—civilization always solidifies in flux, and flows in solidification. As twilight deepened, the first snowflake finally fell. It was not the soft, gentle fluff of the south, but a silver needle carrying the scent of Siberian pine, precisely piercing every brick seam in the church square. The live-streaming influencers hastily packed away their fill lights, only to see the golden dome appear even more sacred in the snowy mist, like a relic floating in mid-air. An old woman in a fur coat squatted by the steps, drawing a cross on the accumulated snow with a withered branch, her movements as slow as the pendulum of the century-old church. At this moment, I suddenly understood the metaphor of Sophia: it is both a vessel of faith and an amber of time, sealing layers of Slavic piety, colonial scars, and nomadic grandeur beneath the ice of the Songhua River. As night fell, the ice surface of the Songhua River glowed with a faint blue phosphorescence. The blue-purple spotlights from the Ice and Snow World on the opposite bank swept across the church dome, bathing the mottled frescoes in the divine aura of the digital age. A poet in a white robe stood in the center of the square, reciting Pasternak's verses, his voice shattered by the howling north wind and scattered into the scent of black bread, fermented for three hundred years in the church's cellar. I recalled the pottery shards Yu Qiuyu picked up in the snow of Yangguan; isn't Harbin at this moment another "ruin"? Yet, upon its ruins, an ice and snow myth belonging to the 21st century is growing.