The north wind cut like a knife, stinging Tang Yuan’s face. It swept snowflakes through the gaps in the broken house’s window lattice and onto his cheeks, jolting him awake. His eyes flew open.
Above him loomed a dark ceiling beam, its rafters hung with cobwebs thick with dust. Snowflakes kept dropping through a hole in the roof, landing on the hard-packed earthen bed beneath him and melting at once into little damp patches. A thin layer of straw lay under him, hard and uncomfortable. The quilt covering him was thin and heavy, reeking of mildew and sweat, and did nothing to keep out the bone-chilling wind.
Tang Yuan shifted, aching all over. His head throbbed as if it had been struck with a heavy hammer, and countless fragments of memories that weren’t his surged into his mind like a tide.
This was the story of a sixteen-year-old boy named Tang Yuan. He had been an apprentice to the town’s private tutor. Orphaned young and with no one to rely on, he scraped by doing odd jobs and copying books for his teacher. A few days earlier, heavy snow had begun to fall. The boy went out to gather firewood, caught a high fever from the cold, and had no money for a doctor. He struggled on in this broken house for three days before finally dying. When he woke again, he had been replaced by Tang Yuan, a science fanatic from the twenty-first century.
