White-robed Minister

0000 [High-speed train bound for the Northern Song Dynasty]

"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard..."

"This train is G6073, traveling from Guangzhou Station to Qingyuan Station..."

Xu Lai leaned back in his seat, looking exhausted and yawning repeatedly.

I stayed up all night revising my master's thesis, not falling asleep until 4 a.m. Now I have to get up early this morning to take the high-speed train to my undergraduate roommate's wedding.

His graduation thesis was titled: "A Study of Prepositions and Conjunctions in Oracle Bone Script".

I randomly chose this topic, and these past few months I've been writing about it non-stop. I've racked my brains to fill it with filler, and I've managed to get at least 50,000 words, but I don't even know if it'll pass.

He applied to the Chinese Department of Sun Yat-sen University for his college entrance exam, but unfortunately was assigned to the Folklore major. He gave it his all in the postgraduate entrance exam and was admitted to the Chinese Language and Literature Master's program at his own university.

Philology is not literature.

Extremely boring!

A wave of drowsiness washed over Xu Lai, and he yawned, closing his eyes to catch up on sleep.

Inside the carriage, the lights flickered abnormally, then went out completely, and a blinding white light suddenly appeared.

When he opened his eyes again, he found himself no longer on the high-speed train.

"Third Uncle, why are you asleep?"

Xu Lai was a little confused and didn't understand what was going on.

Standing in front of him was a little girl, about four or five years old. She was wearing an ancient-style dress, made of what appeared to be linen, with a simple design that wasn't as pretty as the Hanfu sold online.

The other person seemed to be speaking Cantonese, but the tone was slightly off, making it sound more like the local dialect from Guangxi.

How come I can understand it completely?

Xu Lai stood up blankly, looked around, and found himself in a farmhouse courtyard.

The courtyard is surrounded by a bamboo fence, and inside the fence is a small vegetable garden.

Behind him were several thatched huts with bamboo and mud walls and thatched roofs.

Two women dressed in coarse ancient clothing emerged from the house carrying baskets filled with white silkworm cocoons. Then a man in ancient clothing appeared, carrying a large wooden bucket.

Smoke was billowing from the chimney, and a man shouted from the kitchen, "The water's boiling!"

Xu Lai was increasingly confused. He subconsciously walked into the main room and then went to other rooms.

The room had very little furniture and was furnished extremely simply.

He walked into someone's bedroom; the bed frame was rather low, and the mosquito net seemed to be made of linen.

Then they went into the silkworm room.

There were no silkworms in the room. The silkworm cocoons were placed upright and stacked against the corner of the wall to save space. The cocoon cages were also piled up together, and there were still a few bad cocoons that had not been removed.

He wandered around in a daze, and finally found something with writing on it.

It was an outdated, tattered calendar that had been picked up and thrown on a small table; it was already damp and moldy.

The cover is severely damaged, and the words "Approved by the Imperial Observatory, printed and promulgated" and "The forger of the xxx is executed, and the person who reports it will be rewarded with xx strings of cash" are faintly visible.

Xu Lai's hands trembled as he opened the calendar, his gaze finally settling on a line of text: "By order of xxx, the calendar date of the Jiayou reign of the Great Song Dynasty."

I grass!