A Day a Monk, a Day Ringing the Bell

[Female Lead + Buddhist Cultivation + Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms + No Romance + Time Travel]

As a yuchian pancake caught the moonlight of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, five-year-old Qi Yun hid behind the donation box, drawing a diagram of an interstellar time-travel route. This little girl, who had been born into the chaotic Later Tang, kept two secrets amid the dawn bells and evening drums of Yuxu Palace: memories from the twenty-first century were stuck in her child’s body like a damp cassette tape, and why should I, a girl, be made to practice Buddhism?

When the copper bells beneath the ancient temple eaves suddenly began reciting A Brief History of Time in the Bashu dialect, she realized that the hexagonal bamboo trays used by the monks of Yuxu Palace to dry herbs were actually the key to unlocking a temporal honeycomb. This thousand-year-old temple, bustling with worshippers, was in truth a temporal furnace forged by a vow of compassion. Whenever Qi Yun resonated with the suffering of those in the river of history, the sundial in the Great Buddha Hall would cast her into a new slice of an era: picking up the great poet’s lost straw sandals beneath the hooves of the An Lushan Rebellion, or accepting the untouched farewell wine of General Yue on a snowy night during the Jingkang Incident. Yet Buddhist karma bound her like chains: save a plague-stricken child in Kaifeng, and she must endure three days of rotting-bone pain in their place; change the massacre of Yangzhou, and she must offer up ten years of her life.

Amid oil lamps and ancient scrolls, a journey of cultivation spanning twelve dynasties slowly unfolds. Watch as this little girl makes a boat of her young self and ferries people across the calamities of the mortal world. And what astonishing verse will the mobile phone QR code hidden between the pages of the Medicine Buddha Sutra reveal when it is scanned a thousand years later?