A Basin Connects Past and Present: I Send Chewy Treats to the Ancients

Also known as: “The South Wind Knows My Heart, Blowing My Dreams to the West Islet” Lin Mengxi, a young woman from Linhai, fears two things more than anything: her mother Mrs. Zhao’s “dead firewood,” and the holiday “stockpile” of New Year’s food. Though every meal in the first lunar month is different, it all boils down to rice and wheat products. Rice cakes, mochi, golden rice dumplings, stuffed dumplings, rice-flour soup... The fridge is crammed to bursting, and she’s eaten so much she wants to become a nun on the spot. After an accident leaves her with a bump on the head, she discovers that her family’s ancestral dog bowl is connected to another era. On the other side, young General Shen Nanfeng of the Great Ning Dynasty and his twenty thousand soldiers are trapped at the border, cut off from food and water with no way out. When stir-fried rice cakes suddenly fall from the sky, a man and a dog kneel on the spot, convinced a god has answered their prayers. The good news: My dog bowl has become sentient! The bad news: What kind of bizarre symbols are these? I can’t understand a thing! Help! Who has ever had to teach people from ancient times Arabic numerals before they could transmigrate? Lin Mengxi is such a sucker. And what general has to worry about food and enemies every day while also learning simplified Chinese characters? Shen Nanfeng is such a sucker! One clears out the fridge and calls it “cross-temporal supply coordination,” while the other reverently worships the dog bowl like a shrine. They can’t understand each other’s language, and their drawing skills are terrible, but somehow the two of them manage to establish a supply line across a thousand years. The “sweet burden” that people in Linhai can never finish becomes lifesaving food for the soldiers at the border.