There's a convenience store on Old Street in Teng County, a small town in Guangxi. Business is so bad you can hear flies buzzing.
The owner, Chen Ye, is twenty-eight. He poured every last bit of the money he'd saved from eight years of working into the store.
Things took a turn on a rainy day in the plum rain season. A crack appeared in the toilet wall. Beyond it lay a riverbank from the Wanli era, with reeds, cooking smoke, and people. Living people, from four hundred years ago.
They were short on salt, sugar, needles, thread, and matches. His shelves, meanwhile, were full of unsold goods he was losing money on. A packet of salt could be traded for a bolt of homespun cloth, a sewing kit for a basket of mountain produce. If he was lucky enough to get a copper coin, it would cover a year's rent.
But there were people on the other side waiting for him, too. Old Shi's family treated him as their savior, and as their only god.
Over four hundred years, the crack had opened and closed, and many people had passed through. But not one of them had ever come back.
Chen Ye didn't know whether he would be the next.
