In the second year of Jian Ning, the chill of early spring still lingered. In a dilapidated mountain-god shrine outside Zhuo County, Liu Yang suddenly opened his eyes. The biting cold seeped through his thin hemp clothes and into his bones, making him shiver.
“Brr... Where am I?”
Rubbing his throbbing temples, he looked around. A cobweb-covered statue leaned crookedly behind the altar, half its face collapsed to reveal rotten wood beneath. The ground under him was cold mud strewn with a little dried grass, which did nothing to keep out the penetrating chill. The air smelled musty, with the faint lingering scent of incense, nothing like the overpowering disinfectant of the hospital in his memory.
“Wasn't I working late in the lab when my heart stopped and they took me to the hospital?” Liu Yang furrowed his brow. His last memory was of his colleagues' panicked faces and flashing emergency lights. How had he woken up in this forsaken place?
He struggled to sit up, only to discover that he wasn't wearing a hospital gown at all. He had on a coarse cloth tunic, washed until it had faded, with several patches sewn onto it. One trouser leg was torn, exposing a calf reddened by the cold.
Just then, fragments of memories that did not belong to him surged into his mind
“Liu Yang, courtesy name Ziheng, a native of Zhuo County, seventeen years old. His parents died early, and he makes a living by farming a landlord's fields as a tenant...”
“The current emperor is foolish and inept, eunuchs hold power, the government is rotten, and the people are in dire straits...”
“Zhang Jiao of Julu calls himself the ‘Great Teacher of Peace’ and spreads the Way of Great Peace far and wide. His followers number in the hundreds of thousands, and he declares, ‘The Blue Heaven is dead, the Yellow Heaven shall rise; in the year of Jiazi, the world will know great fortune’...”
