Xie Zhao died at Wuyi Ferry in the fifth year of Yonghe, during the Great Liang dynasty. A wooden cangue weighing twenty jin dragged him into the depths of the river. All he had left in his arms was half of the Panlong inkstone his mother had given him.
When he opened his eyes again, a thousand years had passed. He had become another "Xie Zhao," a Chinese literature student at Jiangzhou University who had failed eight courses and was about to be forced to repeat a year.
In the thesis defense room, a professor deliberately gave him a hard time. Xie Zhao picked up his pen and recited "Li Sao," then improvised a parallel prose passage. The room fell utterly silent.
From then on, calligraphy that sold for ten yuan a sheet on the cultural creative street was snapped up in a frenzy. The long-lost fragments of The History of Liang awaited his interpretation, and four hundred ancient books piled up at the museum awaited his proofreading. When he went live, three million people watched a "man from the past" talk about the past.
Only the restoration specialist Gu Wanqing felt there was something off about him. The ink he ground seemed to have been prepared a thousand years ago.
Books outlive people. For a dynasty that had been burned to ashes, he would write its words back, one by one.
[No System + One Female Lead + Slow-Burn Daily Life + Traditional Culture + Live-Stream Face-Slapping]
