In the winter of the eighteenth year of the Wanli reign, physics PhD Shen Zhi woke to find himself lying in a drafty mud hut. The wound on the back of his head still hurt. His mother was crying beside him, and a creditor was shouting outside the door. They owed three hundred taels of silver, and if they couldn't pay by the twenty-fourth day of the twelfth lunar month, they would lose their home.
He had studied quantum field theory and derived equations for ten-dimensional spacetime, but no one had taught him that in this era, knowledge couldn't buy so much as a copper coin, and reason couldn't keep you alive.
Until he met Xie Lanjie.
The third young master of the Xie family was gentle and refined, with a rare sincerity in his eyes for someone born into an aristocratic clan. When they first met at Canglang Pavilion, Shen Zhi explained how shadows could be used to measure the sun's position, and Xie Lanjie's eyes shone with excitement. As they drank together on a cold night, he said, “I've studied the books of the sages for fifteen years, and no one has ever told me that such wondrous principles exist in the world.” Shen Zhi thought he had finally found someone he could talk to in this unfamiliar world.
But he didn't know that Xie Lanjie was a Xie. The Xie family's second branch had its looms, the clan had its interests, and behind them stood a tangled web of aristocratic connections. Some things mattered more than a kindred spirit.
This is a story about investigating the nature of things. But what is investigated is not the principle of all things. It is the rules of an era, a logic that devours people, and how one person puts himself back together, piece by piece, after being crushed.
