The Battle of Qin and Ou: I Grow Antimatter Rice Under the First Emperor

In 214 BC, half a million Qin soldiers marched south, determined to crush the barbarous lands of the Western Ou. I was a sacrificial shamaness. The instant my blood stained a bronze measuring square, a mechanical hand from 2133 reached through the crack. I, Jinghong, learned the most blood-soaked truth about this planet: The unification of Qin was nothing more than a resilience test conducted before the harvest of the seventy-third batch of "genetic crops" by an alien civilization. The Lingqu Canal is circuitry for a scanner, the Nine Tripods are interstellar anchors, and the Terracotta Warriors are silicon-based soldiers awaiting activation. And we, every last one of us, are crops raised in an "Earth experimental field." My ashes can grow antimatter rice, whose crushed grains will explode like stars. My blood-written message can rewrite the Lingqu's program and turn the canal into a heavenly moat. My tears can awaken the bronze ghost army buried deep underground. The Qin general Zhao Tuo, who defected to our side, tore open his chest. The mechanical key he pulled out reflected a sigh from a hologram of his future self. The Ou king, Yixu Song, leapt into boiling bronze. He forged an eternal twin statue from his own flesh and blood, its sword pointing toward Orion. And in the ice coffin, the First Emperor Ying Zheng awoke. Inside his mechanical chest, a stalk of antimatter rice glowed. It was the last spark he had saved for himself as a "puppet administrator." The enemy in this battle was never one another. It was the eyes beyond the sea of stars, which saw civilizations as crops to be harvested on a schedule. As the bronze measuring square split open into a wormhole and the sea of antimatter rice detonated across the galaxy, we proclaimed our final rebellion to the universe: "Better to be a spark that sets the stars ablaze, and burn the heavens to ash, " "Than crops in a hothouse, waiting for others to reap!"