After working overtime for three consecutive months in 996, Lin Yuan, a social worker, fell asleep at his workstation and woke up to find that he had traveled to the Northern Song Dynasty.
There is no system, no cheats, and no counterattack script. He became a down-and-out scholar living in the suburbs of Luoyang. Next door lived a white-haired old man who smiled all day long. The old man's life is very regular: he gets up early and sweeps, reads and writes, and watches ants move around for an hour.
Lin Yuan was going crazy. No cell phones, no takeout, not even toilet paper. More importantly, he suddenly didn't know how to live anymore—no one assigned him work, no one urged him, and no one told him what today's OKRs were. He sat in the yard in a daze for three days, and then asked the old man: "Aren't you bored?"
The old man looked at him strangely: "Why can't we waste time?"
Later he learned that this old man's name was Shao Yong, one of the Five Sons of the Northern Song Dynasty and a master of Neo-Confucianism through the ages. Sima Guang lived in the alley next door, and the two Cheng brothers often came to visit him. The scholars, farmers, businessmen and merchants in Luoyang City called him "Mr. An".
Lin Yuan originally thought that time travel was an adventure to upgrade and fight monsters, but it turned out that he just learned to sweep the floor, chop wood, and bask in the sun here. He followed Shao Yong to watch the ants move, listened to the rain hitting the bamboo leaves, and after turning over a vegetable patch, he lay on the ground with soreness. Suddenly he found that the noises in his head had stopped at some point.
Shao Yong said: "Looking at things through things, all things are originally clear and bright. It is people who have brought in the turbidity."
There was no preaching or systematic tasks. Lin Yuan was cured of mental illness in the simplest way by an old man from a thousand years ago in this courtyard without Wi-Fi.
