Li Yan scanned a QR code and transmigrated to a post-nuclear-war wasteland.
He opened an antique shop among the ruins, collecting unwanted junk: enamel mugs, broken mirrors, rusty tin boxes. The people of the wasteland didn't recognize these things. They called flashlights “glowing stones” and lighters “iron blocks that spit fire.”
Then a warlord named Zhang Cheng came to his door with an old watch engraved with the words, “If we could start over, I wish we had never met.” He asked if Li Yan had any treasure that could turn back time.
Following the clues, Li Yan discovered dozens of tin boxes collected by a man named Li Mingyuan. Inside were photographs, diaries, and phones from different points in time. They showed the same couple, the same child, and the same tree, but the person holding the child was sometimes the mother and sometimes the grandmother.
Li Mingyuan spent twenty years searching for a path between different worlds. He wanted to find everyone he had lost.
In the end, he never came back.
But his grandson, A Tu, was still waiting.
A Tu was a mute, mutated beastman. Every day, he sat outside the shop and carved words into bottle caps: Mom, Dad, Grandpa, Old Li. He carved six little people holding hands.
He waited for eight years.
At last, the person he had been waiting for arrived.
This is a story about collecting and forgetting, waiting and reunion. In the dusty wasteland, a little antique shop gathers old objects people have forgotten, and a few people with nowhere else to go.
Little by little, they learn how to get by, how to drink soup, and how to find the one that belongs to them among a pile of inscribed bottle caps.
The bottle cap shows six little people holding hands.
When the wind blows, the bell by the door rings.
