Passer-By in the World

He has lived for twenty-five centuries, but he cannot remember anyone he met yesterday. Shen Du, a graduate student in the Department of History, traveled to the late Spring and Autumn Period and suffered from a rare "time blindness" - all memories before the time travel were intact, and his life after the time travel was cleared as soon as he slept. He could only carve words on bamboo slips as the only evidence of memory. He worked as a blacksmith, a private school teacher, a bookkeeper, and a traveling doctor, and he went from fighting for hegemony in Wu and Yue to the smoke of the Anti-Japanese War. He had been knifed, shot with an arrow, and buried alive, and every time he woke up among the dead. He buried thousands of bamboo slips, cloth, and porcelain pieces, on which were recorded food prices, wedding and funeral songs, and the homesickness of border soldiers—those "human fireworks" forgotten by emperors and generals. Two thousand five hundred years later, these documents were put on display together. No one knows who the unknown person is, but the same sentence is engraved at the end of each bamboo slip: "Let me see if the people who come after me have a better life." He turned and walked into the crowd. The sunshine was very good, and he didn't need to remember anymore - because those bamboo slips remembered everyone for him.