The first time she tasted sweetness was in the Xia Dynasty.
Wild honey, scraped from the cliff, mixed with gravel and grass clippings. She took it in her mouth and froze.
It turns out this exists in the human world.
She didn't know it at that time, but this was the beginning of her search for a home.
Later she tasted many sweets. Maltose in the Han Dynasty, sugarcane syrup in the Tang Dynasty, and candied fruits in the Song Dynasty. In every life, she secretly hides a little sweetness in her sleeves. It's not because of greed - it's because the sweetness can penetrate all numbness.
Petrified fingers, blind eyes, and sealed voices.
As long as the sweetness is still there, she is still a person.
Only one person is qualified to find a home.
Where is home?
She searched for it in the sweetness of bean cakes, in the tune of Chu ballads, and in the embroidered flower on the corner of her mother's clothes that could not tell whether it was orchid or gardenia.
I've been looking for it for thousands of years.
The ankles turned into jade. The eyes turned into jade. The sound turns into jade.
Every time she loses something, she becomes one step further away from "people".
But the strange thing is that Ziyu is getting warmer and warmer.
It was like telling her: the direction is right.
Later, she even lost her sweetness.
On the day her taste was petrified, she stood on the streets of the Song Dynasty, holding a piece of bean cake in her hand.
Take a bite. Nothing.
She stood for a long time.
Then continue chewing.
The resistance of the teeth when biting down, the movement of the mandible, the feeling of passage in the esophagus.
These require no sense of taste.
These tell her: your body is still working. You are still a body. You are still on the road to finding a home.
Seventy-fifth life. Republic of China.
She walked into the experimental field in the southwest, preparing to transform herself into a rice seedling.
When the soil covered the ankle - the ankle that had started to harden thousands of years ago - Ziyu suddenly felt warm.
Shorter than a heartbeat.
She suddenly understood.
Not finding a home.
It's about becoming home.
She turned into a field of rice seedlings. The feeling of bean cake still lingers in your mouth. The resistance of the teeth when biting down, the feeling of passage in the esophagus.
These feelings that had been with her for thousands of years slowly dispersed into the soil and into the roots.
Many years later.
Someone was chewing the batch of rice and suddenly cried.
They don't know who they are crying for.
They just think that there is a very old sweetness in this rice.
Like a journey home that has been chewed for thousands of years.
The wind blows across China, and the vast expanse of rice waves are like her leaning over.
Concept: Can civilization continue? A nameless sacrifice.