Should “Daiyu Burying Flowers” be rendered as “the holder of the Crimson Pearl Immortal Herb transfers the remains of a woody plant through space”? Lin Mo, a third-year Chinese literature student, is driven to the brink by the AI plagiarism checker for her thesis. She lets out a furious yell and somehow transmigrates into the Dream of the Red Chamber.
She thinks she can use modern knowledge to thrive in the Grand View Garden, but the relentless plagiarism-checking AI has come along too. From then on, every word she says and writes has to pass an “originality check.” “Once upon a time, there was a mountain” gets a 99% match; “Qinfang Pavilion” has 100% similarity; “The weather is sunny today” matches a Qing dynasty servant's diary... With no other choice, she tries to comfort Daiyu with mathematical formulas, tells Baoyu stories using concepts from physics, and regales Grandmother Jia with “cross-dimensional emotional communication.”
Everyone thinks she “speaks in such a novel and entertaining way.” Only she knows she's just a poor humanities student driven to babbling nonsense by an AI. Every night, she prays to the moon: Let me go back! I'd even rewrite my thesis as “An Analysis of the Career Development of Several Female Service Workers in The Story of the Stone”!
