Long Journey

On the day when the war reached the village entrance, Chen Wang lost his wife. He remembered pulling her and running south, remembering the sky full of firelight behind him, and remembering her hand slipping out of his palm - and then the crowd came in, and he was swept away by the crowd. He turned around and called her name, but thousands of people were calling thousands of names, and his voice was drowned inside, like a drop of water falling into a river. That night, he hid in a ruined temple on a barren mountain. There was a thunderstorm and he lost consciousness at the feet of the idol. After waking up, there were some things in his mind that did not belong to him - the eyes of the old guard looking south for the last time, the mother running in the mud holding her dead child, the official sitting alone late at night crushing the last letter. He didn't know these people, but their pain was as clear as his own. And about himself—who he was, where he came from, where he was going—was blank. The only thing left is a vague obsession: go south and find her. From refugees to defeated soldiers, from porters to handymen, from the cracks in the door of power to the ruins of the city wall - on his way to find his wife, Chen Wang witnessed the collapse of the old dynasty with a pair of ordinary eyes. He had done things against his will - hiding food, ignoring death, and following the wrong team - and every time he told himself that he wanted to find her alive. But sometimes, fragments of strangers would suddenly come to his mind, causing him to make choices that even he couldn't explain. The wind blew and the grass grew again. The new refugee walked south on the grass, exactly like the one before.