On September 16, 2037, I restored a roll of battlefield film from ninety-five years ago.
It was filmed in 1942.
At the thirteen-minute mark, someone who should not have been there stood up from a heap of corpses.
It was me.
I watched my ninety-five-years-younger self walk up to the camera and write a sentence on the wall with a bloodstained hand:
"Chen Du, don't go to work tomorrow."
The next day, I went anyway.
In the early hours of that morning, 372 meters underground, a bronze door with no record of its age was opened.
There was no tomb behind it. No bones.
Only a machine that was still running.
And a list engraved in metal.
Qin Shi Huang, Li Shimin, Zhu Di...
The last name was mine.
Only later did I learn that the history we knew had always served one purpose:
to conceal what had really happened.
And each time I returned to the past, the world forgot a little more of the truth.
