Two letters from Heifu's family were unearthed from Tomb M4 at Shuihudi. They were addressed to Zhong. No one ever asked who Zhong was. Lin Yuan, from the cultural relics preservation institute, touched the faded ink of the character “Zhong” on the display case, and his consciousness fell into Anlu County in the Qin dynasty. He became that infant, Zhong. No golden finger, no System. An adult's consciousness trapped in an infant's body, with fragmented perceptions of life at the very bottom of the registered commoners: registered as a grown man from birth, crushed under corvee labor, his father coughing blood, his mother's hand hovering but never falling. Seen through an infant's eyes, life becomes a microscope revealing how the Qin system entered him into the registers from the moment he was born, tallied him for taxes and labor, and used him up, until the same wooden tablet saw daylight again two thousand years later.
The moment I opened my eyes, I was a baby in the Qin dynasty. I had barely been born when the village head came to the door: “One grown man, to be entered in the register.” Dad's cough grew worse by the day, and Mom never stopped working at the loom. The two words she said most often were: Stay alive. I had seen the statutes; every character proclaimed “fairness.” But for us, fairness meant Dad serving corvee labor while sick, Mom shouldering the whole family alone, and my unborn little brother already waiting for the old cloth baby sling. No System, no golden finger. Just a pair of hands, a pair of ears, and one thought: I'm here.
