Lian Sanzhou, a doctoral student in architecture at Lanzhou University, has never been to Xinjiang, but recently he had the same dream repeatedly - heavy rain in the desert broke away the yellow sand, revealing a bone-white ancient city.
After waking up, there is always a layer of fine sand of unknown origin on the pillow towel. X-ray diffraction analysis showed that the sand was artificially selected and was not formed by natural wind.
A national-level archaeological project sent her to Xinjiang—the Western Region Protectorate Site Group for systematic investigation. The project team has forty-seven people, coming from five units: from Beijing to Xi'an, from Dunhuang to Urumqi, including strict mentors, vicious colleagues, mysterious local female researchers, and a postdoctoral fellow from Peking University who talks like he is repairing cultural relics. They will be looking for a city that does not exist on the official map on the edge of the Taklimakan Desert.
The locals call it "Guicheng".
Before Lian Sanzhou, there was someone who had been there - her father, Lian Weidong, who died suddenly of a heart attack five years ago. My mother never mentioned that past event, but when she said it was raining in the desert, she overturned the entire dining table.
Three thousand seven hundred years ago, there was a last priest named "Shayue" in the Western Regions. After seven hundred years of drought, she sacrificed her own blood in exchange for the last rain. The whole city sank into the sand with her.
When the archaeological shovel dug out the first shovelful of sand, the fates of the two women began to overlap. One wants to complete the unfinished sacrifice before the current world collapses, and the other wants to prevent that sacrifice from happening again after a thousand years.
She thought she was just doing a project.
But Desert knew that she was going back for a date made 3,700 years ago.
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· Dual time and space/Western archeology/Group portraits/Suspense
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