Twelve Thousand Miles

In the fourth year of God's blessing, Zhu Wen usurped the Tang Dynasty. When the news spread, a Tang army was still halfway there. They did not surrender, nor did they disperse. The leader said that they were just staying away temporarily and would come back when the Central Plains was settled. The person who said this did not come back. There is no one who listens to this. Their sons, their grandsons, their grandsons' grandsons, none. The snow on the broken leaves, the wind in the Atami, the salt on the east coast of the Caspian Sea, the ice floes on the Ross River, and further north the sun that never sets - place names that are not on the map were recorded in the camp one after another. The reign name has always been God's blessing and has never been changed; it's not that there is no reign name, it's that it hasn't been changed for hundreds of years. There is also a very real account in the camp, which records one line year by year: "How many miles to Chang'an today". This number has been rising over the years. There is one person in the team who is different from everyone else. Mural restorer Shen Yan opened his eyes after an accident and found that he had no body and could only stick behind the ears of the Li family's descendants to watch them eat, argue, and make decisions. He remembered what was written in the textbook, but he couldn't remember how to match the prescription; he could be used as a road sign, but not as a blueprint. He has a "Ten Thousand Miles Picture" in his hand. The total journey is twelve thousand miles, and he can go home after the journey. Later, he slowly understood that the person in the picture was never going home alone. Many years later, half a scrap of paper was found in a secret slot under a wall in Dunhuang, with six words written in ink, but no sentence read: Datang is still coming back