Chapter 1: The Advent of the Wormhole
Our story’s protagonist—or, more accurately, one of them—is a man named Xiao Zishan.
Born in the late 1970s, Xiao Zishan was a man steeped in mediocrity. He had an ordinary family, unremarkable looks, and a distinct lack of ambition. His grades were, unsurprisingly, average. Yet, thanks to a timely expansion of university admissions, he managed to snag a college degree.
After graduation, Xiao Zishan drifted through a series of jobs in the Pearl River Delta, weathering deceitful bosses and chasing unrealistic dreams. Eventually, he landed a respectable, if unexciting, position at a foreign company, where he diligently traded his time for a paycheck. For six or seven years, this was his life. Now, in the blink of an eye, he was thirty, still a tenant in a rented apartment. His hobbies were few, limited to a quiet love for history and obscure books. He’d had a girlfriend once, a brief affair that had cost him his long-held virginity. But by the time our story begins, her face was a distant memory, and he was, once again, a card-carrying member of the lonely hearts’ club.
The night our story begins was a foul one. For the better part of a month, the sky had been a canvas of near-constant lightning, sometimes followed by torrential downpours, other times by nothing more than the grumble of distant thunder. Rumors of a massive earthquake had long since faded into background noise, another quirk of a world gone strange.
Xiao Zishan stumbled off the bus, a yawn cracking his jaw. His eyes were swollen, his legs ached, and his hair was a mess—a quintessential image of the beleaguered working man. He hadn’t been home in over twenty-four hours. As a newly-minted regional manager, he’d been chained to his desk, preparing reports for an impending inspection from his superiors. Tracking the labyrinthine trail of expense reimbursements, in particular, had given him a splitting headache.
To call Xiao a corporate parasite would be a gross injustice. He’d only held the manager title for three months. Before that, he’d been a low-level regional sales rep for the better part of a decade. Managers came and went, cut down and replaced like a row of dominoes, yet he persisted, a fixture at the bottom of the corporate ladder.
Three months prior, another management shuffle had left the usual chaotic paper trail of inexplicable reports and invoices in its wake. This time, however, he was the one left holding the bag, promoted to regional manager.
Had this happened two years earlier, he might have wept with gratitude. But now? Xiao Zishan wanted to offer a single, heartfelt sentiment to all his superiors, past and present: Go to hell.
The global economic crisis had left the company hobbling, a shadow of its former self. Colleagues in the regional office had vanished one by one, like ghosts. The remaining workload was so meager he could handle it in his sleep. His promotion, then, felt less like a reward and more like a bad joke. No salary increase, no new business directives. With his years of experience, he could read the writing on the wall: the office was being shuttered. He was the caretaker, the last man standing, tasked with turning off the lights before he too was shown the door.
Still, the paperwork had to be done. He’d at least collect a few more of those stagnant paychecks.
He sighed for the twentieth time, hefting a large travel bag stuffed with the detritus of corporate life: promotional giveaways. Aprons, T-shirts, toothbrushes, pens—a motley collection of cheap trinkets he had no use for, yet couldn’t bring himself to leave behind. Poverty, he mused, had a way of making a man greedy for even the most useless of things.
His rented room was, as always, clean and tidy. A hot shower revived him. He switched on his computer and logged on.
Orson Welles once called the lottery a painkiller for the poor. For men like Xiao Zishan, the internet was opium. Online games, BBS forums, the web novels he devoured daily—they were his escape.
In his younger days, he’d been a pseudo-intellectual, dabbling in writing and devouring books without any real depth. But the harsh realities of the working world had soured him on profound literature. He’d seen enough of society’s underbelly; he didn’t need novels to stir his emotions. Now, his literary diet consisted of wish-fulfillment fantasies, tales of time travel and rewriting history. A history buff at heart, he harbored a secret desire to meddle with the past. He called it his daily “spiritual masturbation,” a self-deprecating nod to his escapist habit.
Beyond his daily dose of spiritual release, he was a creature of habit on several online forums. He was an addict, feeling a gnawing emptiness if he missed a day. He was no big shot, just a lurker, but the chaotic spectacle of the forums was his true escape. The endless stream of trivia, the furious debates, the raw pageant of human nature—even the sanctimonious hypocrites, spouting Marx while chasing tail—it was all infinitely more entertaining than the masked ball of real life.
On the BBS, he scrolled to the day’s hot posts.
“I’ve discovered a wormhole to the Ming Dynasty! It’s absolutely true!”
Xiao Zishan smirked. Had everyone gone mad from reading time-travel novels? Or was reality so bleak that everyone was desperate for a do-over in another era?
The post was by “Chief Wen,” one of the forum’s resident survivalist gurus whom Xiao Zishan secretly admired. Wen’s knowledge was encyclopedic, his approach to survival scenarios—especially time-travel ones—was meticulously detailed. It was a shame he didn’t write fiction; Xiao Zishan would have been a devoted fan. (Though he’d probably just read the pirated copies online.)
“Chief Wen’s latest fantasy,” Xiao Zishan muttered, and clicked the link. In that instant, his world tilted on its axis.
To borrow a cliché, the wheels of fate had begun to turn.
One week later.
“This is the wormhole?” Xiao Zishan stared at the luminous object before him. It was a shimmering, slightly irregular circle of faint blue light. It looked much like he’d always imagined a wormhole would, only smaller, no bigger than a bathroom mirror.
“It’s tiny,” said Wang Luobin. He, like Xiao Zishan, was one of the first to answer Chief Wen’s summons.
“The edges expand under pressure.” Wen Desi was perched on the toilet lid, the small bathroom now cramped with three grown men. “The opening can be enlarged or shrunk by applying symmetrical force along its diameter. The changes are synchronized in both spacetimes,” he explained. “If it shrinks to 210mm, the wormhole closes, and the connection is lost.”
“And you can really go back and forth?” In Xiao Zishan’s experience with the genre, time travel was a one-way ticket. You got hit by a car, struck by lightning, or simply lost your way, but you never got to go home.
“If I couldn’t come back, I couldn’t have made the post, and you wouldn’t be here,” Wen Desi said reasonably. “I believe the destination on the other side corresponds to this exact physical location.”
“You should’ve bought a lottery ticket, Chief Wen,” Xiao Zishan said under his breath. “The odds of finding a wormhole in your bathroom have to be worse than hitting the jackpot.”
“Isn’t this the jackpot?” Wen Desi beamed. “What lottery ticket wins you a new world?”
“Chief Wen, you always said the ideal scenario was a solo, two-way, low-profile time-travel setup,” Wang Luobin recalled from their forum discussions.
“Exactly.” Wen Desi gestured at the shimmering portal. “Do you know what’s on the other side of that? A world!” He spread his arms wide with excitement. “Through there, I can have a planet, a universe!”
“You’re going to conquer a world by yourself?” Xiao Zishan was skeptical.
“That’s why I posted…” Wen Desi’s enthusiasm seemed to deflate slightly. “Besides, the other side… it’s not a very pleasant spacetime.”
“What spacetime?”
“The Tianqi era, I think. I found a Tianqi Tongbao coin.”
A chill went through Xiao Zishan and Wang Luobin. The new world Chief Wen had discovered was the chaotic final years of the Ming Dynasty, an era of corrupt eunuchs and political strife.