Forty-three people, a bag of Shaqima, a collective time travel.
When I woke up, some people became emperors, some people became eunuchs, some people squatted on the bridge to calculate the probabilities, and some people were selling magic pills in the mountains. I became a palace maid doing laundry and was dragged into a side room by a eunuch - he said his name was Yu Chen and that he was my classmate in the second year of high school.
Three years. He pretended to be a grandson in the palace and crawled to the front of the palace. Outside the palace, I was stuffed into a small courtyard with a grape trellis. One classmate after another was found, there were more and more people in the yard, and the pots in the kitchen were getting bigger and bigger. We learned that the only way to return to modern times is to gather the forty-three lost people.
No one should be missing.
Some people fell down while looking for someone, some were trapped between life and death waiting to be pulled back, and some became souls in a stone. And we know nothing but squatting on the threshold to select beans, rubbing a yellow dog's ears by the well, and bringing the newly found person back to the kitchen to add a pair of chopsticks under the moonlight.
"Forty-three." Yu Chen turned the round stone at an angle in the firelight. The veins were dark red, like blood vessels flowing quietly under the skin. "Let's look for them one by one, even if there is no missing one."
