I am Chen Yuan, an archaeology professor, and I personally dug up the last words I left behind two thousand years ago.
When I was eighteen, I bound myself to the National Destiny System in an ancient tomb. My mission was to keep history alive by force before it collapsed.
So
I traveled to the Qin dynasty and snatched the last surviving volume of The Book of Songs from the flames of book burnings and buried scholars alive;
I entered the Tang dynasty and recovered a lost gunpowder formula amid the mountains of corpses and seas of blood of the An Lushan Rebellion;
I journeyed to the late Qing dynasty and hid the spark of reform amid the cannon fire of the Opium War.
But the System never told me this:
Every time I saved history, the era erased a little more of me.
Until a modern archaeological team unearthed an artifact of mine from 2035 in a Qin-era stratum
On the jade fragment, in my own handwriting, were the words:
“Don’t look for me unless you’ve thought it through… Does protecting history mean rewriting it forever?”
At that very moment, the System shrieked again:
[Warning! Countdown to the reopening of the Nine Netherworlds Gate: 10 days]
[Final mission: Find a third path before civilization destroys itself,]
This time, before the history books burn to ashes, I will rewrite the ending.
