The night before Chen Jianlu was laid off, he was reassigned to a doomed mobile game as the only human GM on the server.
While sorting through the player list, he spotted an account that had logged in for 14,000 days, longer than the game company had even existed. It belonged to his grandfather, who had lost the ability to speak after a stroke.
Even stranger, the sign-in rewards were supplies for a Han dynasty army at war, and the corrupt officials taken down by paying for in-game items were real people from the history books.
Only when he figured out the backend data did he understand: the so-called "server" was five thousand years of real history. And on the night he laid hands on the first fragment of a bamboo slip, his grandfather's account stayed online for eleven hours.
The company had just made its decision: the game would officially shut down in three months.
