The forty-fifth year of the Wanli reign, the autumn equinox.
When Chen An awoke, the stench of moldy straw and damp earth filled his nostrils. He pushed himself up from a bamboo couch so hard it dug into his bones. Before him were earthen walls, a drafty window, and a gaunt woman spinning thread by the light of a tiny oil lamp: his mother, Madam Lin.
Memories surged into his mind. A moment ago, he had been adjusting a gene-editing culture dish in a laboratory. In the next, he had become a poor scholar who had just failed the provincial examinations and spent three days burning with fever after being soaked by autumn rain. The one consolation was that the former owner of this body had been a bookworm, while he was a doctor who had spent most of his life studying plant pathology.
He saw several moldy cakes of fermented bean paste in the bamboo basket in the corner, and the metabolic pathways of aflatoxin-producing fungi immediately flashed through his mind. Hearing the stream outside, he inferred the lay of the land and the soil moisture. Then he caught sight of the bloodied grooves the thread had cut into his mother’s fingertips, and understood even more clearly: this body owed Sun Wangcai five taels of silver for medicine. The family’s last hope, the plot of “Qingming Field” by the stream, would bear the Sun name forever if they could not scrape together ten taels to redeem it within half a month.
This was no time for brooding over the past. Chen An pulled on his short jacket, patched three times, and walked into the courtyard. Beneath the autumn sun, he could see all three mu of riverbank land his family rented. The rice stalks were sparse and thin, showing classic symptoms of nitrogen deficiency and sheath blight. Next door, the fine fields enclosed by Sun Wangcai’s bluestone boundary markers were heavy with golden rice.
He crouched, scooped up a handful of earth, and held it to his nose. Sour, bitter, badly compacted. He raised his head and looked beyond the field ridge to the reed marsh upstream, a place no one had ever paid any attention to
