The Shu Sacrifice: My 102 Years at Sanxingdui
I spent a century bringing Sanxingdui and all of Bashu under one rule, yet I couldn't save it from destruction by natural disaster.
The bronze wheel from Sanxingdui that my father brought home sent me back three thousand years to the ancient Shu kingdom, where I became its high priest.
Facing a tribe whose people lived to an average of just forty-five, I made pottery and salt, channeled water, and built a city, using modern knowledge to establish a powerful dynasty. The first chieftain died of a cold; the second was badly injured and succumbed to infection. I couldn't save them, so I established a medical system. Papermaking, ironworking, irrigation... I sowed seeds from a thousand years in the future and watched them take root and flourish in this land.
Across three generations, Shu expanded from the Chengdu Plain to all of Bashu. I married the chieftain's younger sister and had children, only to watch her die in my arms from a plague. For a hundred years, I pushed reforms, unified the written language, and trained an army, hoping to prevent the catastrophe erased from the history books.
But the natural disasters came too suddenly and violently: the earth split apart, floods surged, plague spread, and snow fell in summer. I poured all my knowledge into fighting back, but could only watch the civilization I had built with my own hands crumble before the overwhelming power of nature.
After 102 years, I awoke in a modern hospital. I'd been unconscious for a hundred days and could no longer speak. When my father used the memories I'd left behind to excavate a jade tablet buried deep underground, engraved with my final warning to future generations, the academic world was shaken.
I simply held tight to the jade fragment I'd brought back from ancient Shu and waited quietly in my hospital bed. The civilization I failed to save a century ago will now tell its story to the world in another way.
