Lin Xiaoxia, a third-year archaeology student at Sichuan University, leads a double life: by day, she’s a top student hunched over pottery shards in the lab; by night, she’s a bronze-ranked “angry little lamb” in Breakout, cursing hackers until her voice cracks.
Then one day, the server’s number-one “Lone Wolf” suddenly drops into her low-ranked lobby.
To everyone else, Gu Yan is a cool, taciturn gaming ace. Only Lin Xiaoxia knows that he’ll quietly give her his Ghillie Suit, block bullets for her with a frying pan, and even speak up on team voice chat for the first time when a random player calls her a “noob”: “She’s my teammate. I’ll carry her.”
While she’s busy excavating a bronze sacred tree at Sanxingdui, he helps her take down hackers in the game. When she’s fretting over Han Dynasty tomb murals for her thesis, he’s already looked up the relevant research and sent it to her.
“Big shot, do you have a crush on me?” Lin Xiaoxia says, waving an archaeology trowel model at the screen.
After a moment’s silence, he tosses her a flare gun. “Check the airdrop. See for yourself.”
When the gunfire dies down, she finds half a piece of chocolate decorated with a Sanxingdui pattern inside the virtual airdrop crate, exactly like the souvenir she once sent to an online friend.
As it turns out, the distance from bronze rank to Ace is no more than the heartbeat he hides beneath his Ghillie Suit, and the words she writes in her archaeology diary: “The pottery shard I dug up today has a pattern just like his aiming reticle in the game.”
On one side is the safe life her family has planned for her in Suzhou; on the other is her unfinished dream of archaeology in Chengdu, and the figure on the other side of the screen who is growing ever clearer. When the earth of Sanxingdui meets the gunfire of the game, she finally understands: some things that make your heart flutter are even more precious than unearthed artifacts.
