The first time Chen Shuisheng died was in a modern laboratory, and the second time he opened his eyes, he became a premature baby in a Ming Dynasty peasant family. When he was trying to use science to improve upland rice, a bronze ear of wheat crawling out from the depths of the field pierced his palm. Wrapped in the wheat grain was his unfinished genetic map before his sudden death five hundred years later.
In this village cursed by the twenty-four solar terms, the eldest daughter of every generation will disappear on the night of Jingzhe. The copper bell on Sister Chunyan's wrist is not a dowry, but a key that locks the rift in time and space; the old locust tree at the entrance of the village is embedded with the bones of a salesman, and its roots are entangled with the pocket watches of the Republic of China and the nanorobots of the future; and the worn-out spinning wheel that always rotates in the middle of the night, and the coarse cloth woven out of it, hides the ultimate prophecy of "The Chronicles of Time" - "When the bronze ears are ripe, cause and effect will be the mower."
In this farming epic that spans from the Hongwu Period to the Quantum Era, Chen Shuisheng will carve bronze gates with a scalpel and irrigate the Dyson Ball Farm with the blood of locust trees. And Chunyan's poisoned pupils are destined to witness how the oldest laws of survival of mankind swallow up the most cutting-edge scientific and technological ethics between the laboratory beaker and the Wuzhu bronze mirror. When five hundred wheat waves in parallel time and space are filling at the same time, they must make a decision: whose bones and blood should be used to fill the blank page of the last page of "The Chronicle of Time" - to let the Ming Dynasty's Hanba Yongzhen River Eye, or to shrink the entire universe into grains of bronze wheat seeds?
Here, what is sown is not seeds, but cause and effect; what is harvested is not ears of rice, but civilization. Opening "Shi Zhi Zhi", one can hear the twenty-four solar terms issuing an eternal question among the bronze gears: When farming becomes violence across dimensions, who is the domesticated crop?
