When a female doctor of philosophy meets a professor of surveying and mapping, a time and space game spanning thousands of years is quietly unfolding in the vortex of the bronze hourglass.
28-Year-old Shen Zhiwei wears silver-rimmed glasses on her cold white skin, and an ancestral jade pendant around her neck is engraved with a broken page of "The Canon of Questioning Hearts". At a Shanghai auction house, she competed with 32-year-old Gu Heng for a bronze hourglass engraved with "Jingtianweidi". This man in a navy blue shirt has the "Creation of France" pattern embroidered on his cuffs, and a portable surveyor is hidden under the mechanical watch on his wrist. Gu Heng sneered: "Dr. Shen is deconstructing the artifacts. Why don't we first deconstruct why the family lost the secret book?" Shen Zhi pushed up his glasses slightly and countered: "Professor Gu can't figure out the existential trap of the auction house - being obsessed with objects leads to losing the essence."
Before he finished speaking, the hourglass erupted into dazzling light. In the vortex of time and space, Gu Heng grabbed Shen Zhiwei's wrist, and the two of them turned into "human-shaped light spots" in the auction house's surveillance camera and disappeared into Shanghai in the 21st century.
When she woke up, Shen Zhiwei became a maid in rough clothes in the Huanyi Bureau of Shangshu Mansion of Dasheng Dynasty. She was slapped by her nanny for retorting that "maids are born to be mean" and saying "existence precedes essence" and was about to sink into the pond. But Gu Heng was actually wearing a Dongchang official uniform, with a "Certificate of Purity" hanging around his waist - scars disguised as fragments of modern body armor. He was ordered to search the Huanyi Bureau. Shen Zhiwei recognized the parts of his surveying instrument and whispered in Latin: "Your 'rules' were evidence of rebellion in ancient times." Gu Heng replied without changing his face: "What crime should a civilian woman be guilty of talking about official property?"
