The moment he woke up in the reeds, the twelve-year-old Zhu An didn't know that he would experience firsthand what it meant to be a star shining in the rest of his life.
All he knew was that he was cold, hungry, and his mouth was full of mud. What I saw when I opened my eyes was the sky in 211 BC, and the first sentence I encountered was "The Thirty-Sixth Year of the First Emperor". A college student who stayed up late to study for his thesis died suddenly and was thrown into the end of Qin Dynasty, replacing the body of an orphan who was dying of hunger, penniless and without any relatives.
Then a university appeared in his mind.
The gray-white teaching building, the faded plastic runway, and the seven-story library—the most ordinary campus in the 21st century—became his only spiritual destination. Huo Qubing was the first mentor, Zhang Juzheng taught him politics, Li Shizhen made prescriptions from a distance, Yue Fei and Li Jing performed deductions on the sand table, Zhu Yuanzhang and Wang Anshi quarreled in the corridor of the administrative building, Li Shimin sat in the first row of the lecture hall and said, "The day you sit down, remember that there are some things that emperors should not do." The most shining stars in Chinese history are all crowded into a virtual campus, surrounding a twelve-year-old child, teaching him for a lifetime.
When he came, the country did not need him. When he left, the country no longer needed him.
