On a spring night in 1927, Wang Wei committed suicide by throwing himself into a lake. Yet he did not die. When he opened his eyes again, the world turned into loess, chariots, and iron flags - he actually traveled to the era of Qin Xiaogong two thousand years ago, when Shang Yang's reform was in full swing.
This is the story of a man of letters who strayed into the heart of an empire. He witnessed meritorious awards, continuous torture, and a century-old debate on "civilization and order" with the Legalist master Shang Yang; he and the young Wei Mi became masters and apprentices between ideals and fears, and then drifted apart; he fell in love with a woman by the Wei River, but saw her swallowed up by the law; he wrote the "Reform Notes", sealed his thoughts in a clay pot, and buried them on the shore of the Wei River, waiting for the rain to wash them out of the soil after a thousand years.
