An ancient cave in the Taihang Mountains has come to light, and an archaeological team has discovered a wooden tablet dating to the end of the Qin dynasty.
It bears just two lines:
If the realm is in danger, save the wounded first.
Remembered by Xiang Dongning.
The name on the tablet is identical to that of a twenty-four-year-old graduate student in history at the site.
When the cave collapses, Xiang Dongning falls into darkness. When she opens her eyes again, it is the thirty-seventh year of the First Emperor's reign. She has no System, can't make gunpowder, and can't save a dynasty destined to fall. All she can do is press down on the wounds of soldiers whose blood keeps pouring out, starting with a pot of boiled water, a roll of clean cloth, and a wounded man's identification tag whose name she refuses to let be lost.
Together with Fusu, Meng Tian, doctors, weavers, laborers, and veteran soldiers, she establishes the Keepers of the Flame. They don't guard a storehouse for one family or hide grain for one king. They preserve the skills of tending the wounded, storing grain, weaving cloth, and finding the way, for anyone who needs to survive.
But the deaths recorded in the history books are still drawing near.
Forged edicts, investigations, wanted notices, rebellions, and offers from nobles come one after another. She knows how things end, but not which road each letter will take. She remembers when the great figures will die, yet must first save the wounded soldier before her, the one history will never record.
Later, the Qin dynasty fell.
Xiang Dongning also died in the Taihang Mountains, never returning to her own time.
The grain she left behind would rot, the cloth would decay, and the written records would be copied incorrectly. Fortunately, generation after generation of unknown people kept opening the granaries, replenishing the supplies, correcting the records, and sealing them away again, carrying that rule through two thousand years of snow and wind.
Until one snowy night in 1941, a starving, medicine-deprived company carried its wounded to a stone gate.
Carved above the gate were the words:
If the realm is in danger, save the wounded first.
