In the forty-fifth year of Wanli, it is the autumnal equinox.
When Chen An woke up, his nose was filled with the smell of moldy straw and wet earth. He stood up from an extremely hard bamboo couch. In front of him was an adobe wall, a leaky window lattice, and a thin woman—his mother Lin—who was spinning thread with a large oil lamp.
Memories came flooding back. One moment, he was debugging a gene-editing petri dish in the laboratory, and the next moment, he became this poor scholar who had just failed the provincial examination and had a high fever for three days due to the autumn rain. The only good thing is that the original owner of this body was a nerd, and he was a doctor who had studied plant pathology for most of his life.
He saw a few pieces of moldy soybean cake in a bamboo basket in the corner, and the metabolic path of Aspergillus flavus immediately flashed in his mind; he heard the sound of the stream outside the window, and inferred the terrain and soil moisture; he caught a glimpse of the blood marks on his mother's fingertips from the spinning thread, and he realized more clearly: this body owed Sun Wangcai five taels of medicine money, and the family's last hope - the "Qingming Field" by the stream. If he couldn't redeem it for ten taels in half a month, he would forever change his surname to Sun.
It is not the time to be sad about spring and sad about autumn. Chen An put on a short brown shirt with three patches and walked to the courtyard. Under the autumn sun, the three acres of riverbank land rented by the family can be seen clearly. The rice ears are sparse and the stems are thin, showing typical symptoms of nitrogen deficiency and sheath blight. Next door, in the fertile farmland of Sun Wangcai's family that is surrounded by bluestone boundary monuments, the waves of rice are golden and heavy.
He knelt down, picked up a handful of dirt, put it to the tip of his nose and smelled it. Sour, astringent, and severely hardened. He raised his head and looked across the field ridge to the unattended reeds upstream of the stream——
