My name is Feng Zhi, and I'm the most forgettable "chaotic tour guide" at the museum. I shout my way through tours and wait out my days for a paycheck. Then one day, I touched a rusty bronze sword, and the ancestral jade bracelet on my wrist suddenly grew hot. When I opened my eyes again, I was General Bai, who had died at Yanmen Pass during the Warring States period, with a Xiongnu blade buried in my chest and the voice of my fiancée, Yue'e, calling from the walls of Anding City: "Bai Lang, come home."
That's when I learned the bracelet was a "key" that could pull me into the "memory scenes" of artifacts. When I talk about a jade dragon, I can see the Hongshan craftsman's trembling hand as he carves its C shape. Touching the stone carvings at Huo Qubing's tomb, I can hear the young general cry, "With the Xiongnu undefeated, how can I think of home?" My livestream followers went wild, calling me a "special-effects genius," but the empathy was driving me crazy. Seven straight days of bloody nightmares left me vomiting until I was dehydrated. My colleagues accused me of making things up for views, while my boss hinted that I shouldn't ruin the museum's reputation.
When I was about to give up, Gu, a master of the field, ushered me into his study, where walls lined with thread-bound books. "Perception is a wild horse. You need the Records of the Grand Historian to rein it in." That's when I understood that raw madness wasn't enough. I had to anchor these fragmented "transmigration experiences" in historical records. I found an account in the Anding County Gazetteer stating that Yue'e waited forty years for General Bai. The rust on the sword matched the characteristics of Qin and Jin script, and I even began to unravel the mystery of the missing "Wild Goose Feather Sword" by tracing clues to the Qin system of tally tokens.
I'm still the tour guide who rambles wildly in the exhibition hall, but now my livestreams have a new opening line: "Today, we're not talking special effects. We're talking about a general from two thousand years ago who never made it home." The bracelet still grows hot, but I'm no longer afraid. It lets me give voice to the unspoken longing of the nameless people in the history books, so the world today can hear them.
