The moment ten pairs of hands touched the bronze ding from the Warring States period, history ceased to be cold words on a page. It became the fingerprints still fresh on Yangshao pottery, the sweat congealed between the furrows of the well-field system, and the souls imprisoned in the stones of the Great Wall.
This is the story of a modern team made up of a history graduate student, a social journalist, the child of migrant workers, and others, who unexpectedly gain the ability to transmigrate through the river of history. They are not world-shaking figures who rewrite the past, but witnesses to its suffering: from human-sacrifice bonfires in the Neolithic Age to the blood and tears of farming under the well-field system; from the piles of bones along the Great Wall at the end of the Qin dynasty to the laments of impoverished families under the aristocratic clans of the Wei and Jin dynasties. Across eight historical eras and a hundred chapters of earthly purgatory, they carry their modern souls into the struggles for survival endured by people of the past under class oppression.
"We thought we were lamps illuminating history, but in the end we discovered we were only duckweed drifting with the current." When Lin Mo, the history graduate student, uses his extrasensory ability to catch the final sigh of a slave from three thousand years ago; when Chen Yang, the social journalist, can only photograph burning bamboo slips; when the team tries to save one life but causes an even greater tragedy, they finally understand: some suffering is destined to become the cornerstone of civilization, and some sacrifices can never be redeemed.
