Chapter 1: The Wormhole Arrives

The protagonist of this story, or one of the protagonists, is named Xiao Zishan.

Xiao Zishan was born at the end of the 1970s, an ordinary person: an ordinary family, ordinary appearance, and very ordinary talent. Moreover, he was not someone who was willing to work hard, so his academic performance was average. Thanks to the expansion of universities, he eventually became a college student.

After graduation, Xiao Zishan worked in several companies in the Pearl River Delta. He had been deceived by unscrupulous bosses and had dreams that were far from reality. Finally, he found a job with a foreign company that offered decent pay, and he worked diligently for the salary—this lasted for about six or seven years. By the time he was thirty, he was still living in someone else's house. He had few hobbies, just a love for history and a preference for obscure books. He had once had a girlfriend and lost his virginity, but by the time the story begins, he could hardly remember her face—he still belonged to the group of people who celebrated Singles' Day.

On the night the story begins, the weather was terrible, with a pitch-black sky constantly lit by lightning—such days had lasted for nearly half a month. Sometimes, heavy rain followed the lightning, and sometimes, rolling thunder. Earthquake rumors had been circulating for a long time, and people had gradually become accustomed to them. Xiao Zishan yawned as he got off the bus, his eyelids swollen, his legs weak, and his hair disheveled, looking like a typical overworked and unkempt person. He hadn't been home for a night and a day. As a newly appointed regional manager, he had to stay in the office to prepare reports for the inspection by his superiors, especially the detailed accounts of reimbursement expenses, which gave him a headache.

To call Xiao Zishan a corporate parasite would be a great injustice. He had only officially held this position for less than three months. During the six or seven years he had been with the company, he had been stuck in the role of a regional sales representative. The various levels of leadership above him had changed like the blades of grass, but he had remained like the root of the grass.

Three months ago, the leadership changed again, leaving behind a pile of unexplained reports and invoices. This time, he was appointed as the regional manager.

If he had been given this position two years earlier, he would have been extremely grateful to the company. But at this moment—Xiao Zishan only wanted to say to the leaders, both past and present: "F**k you."

The company had been semi-paralyzed since last year due to the global economic crisis. Familiar colleagues in the regional office had disappeared one by one. The remaining business was so light that he could handle it with ease. This appointment, which came with no salary increase and no guidance on business operations, clearly indicated that the regional office was about to be shut down. He was just a caretaker, and once all the affairs were settled, he would have to pack up and leave.

But the reports still needed to be done... to earn a few more months of the stagnant salary.

Xiao Zishan sighed for the twentieth time. He carried a large travel bag, which, from the bag itself to its contents, was filled with promotional items left over from the office over the years: from kitchen aprons, T-shirts, toothbrushes to ballpoint pens, all kinds of cheap trinkets. He didn't need most of them but still greedily took them back—poverty makes one short-sighted, and this saying fit him perfectly.

The rented apartment was relatively clean and tidy. After a shower, he felt more energetic. He casually turned on his computer and went online.

Orson Welles said that lottery tickets are the painkillers of the poor, and the internet is the opium of people like Xiao Zishan. Whether it's online games, forums, or the web novels he reads every day.

Before he started working, Xiao Zishan could be considered a half-literary youth, having read a lot of books in a cursory manner and enjoying writing. However, his talent was limited, and he didn't make a living from writing. After a few years of work, literary novels, no matter how profound or meaningful, were completely driven out of his life—reality in society was too much for him, and he didn't need novels to add to his thoughts. What he loved to read most were various stories of people traveling back in time to rewrite history—this was probably related to his interest in history and his desire to alter it. He read them every day, as he often joked, for "mental self-pleasure."

Besides his daily mental self-pleasure, he regularly visited a few forums. Like a drug addict, he felt empty if he didn't visit them. Although he wasn't a prominent figure in the forums, the various kinds of information, theories, and knowledge, the debates and arguments, and the colorful human nature, even the performances of hypocrites who were Marxist on the surface and Western on the inside, were far more interesting than the masked society.

He went to the forum as usual and first checked the hot posts of the day.

"I have discovered a wormhole to the Ming Dynasty! It's absolutely true!"

Xiao Zishan couldn't help but laugh. Was everyone so obsessed with穿越 (time travel) novels that they had gone crazy? Or were they dissatisfied with their current lives and yearned to start anew in another world?

He saw that the post was written by Wen Zong, one of the "survival enthusiasts" on the forum whom Xiao Zishan admired. Wen Zong was not only knowledgeable but also had a rare level of detail in his considerations of survival and time travel. Unfortunately, Wen Zong didn't write time travel novels; otherwise, Xiao Zishan would have definitely followed his work—of course, only the pirated versions.

"Another one of Wen Zong's wild ideas, I guess." Xiao Zishan casually clicked on the post. At that moment, his world changed.

To put it in cliché terms, "the wheels of fate began to turn."

One week later.

"Is this the wormhole?" Xiao Zishan carefully examined the glowing object in front of him. Strictly speaking, it was an irregular circle, slightly blue, and not much different from his imagination of a wormhole. The difference was that the light was not very strong, and the size was much smaller, only as big as a bathroom mirror.

"It's quite small," Wang Luobin said. He, like Xiao Zishan, was one of the first people to communicate with Wen Zong and decide to come and see.

"The edges can be expanded with a certain amount of pressure," Wen Desi said, sitting on the toilet lid. The bathroom was crowded with three people. "The opening can be enlarged or reduced by applying symmetrical force in the diameter direction. The expansion and reduction of the opening are synchronized in both time and space," Wen Desi explained. "When the opening is reduced to 210mm, the wormhole will close and no longer connect the two time and space."

"Can it really travel back and forth?" In Xiao Zishan's mind, time travel was one-way, usually involving being hit by a car or struck by lightning, or at best, getting lost, with the common feature being that one never returned.

"If I couldn't come back, I wouldn't have posted, and you wouldn't be here," he said. "I estimate that the location after traveling through the wormhole will be the same as the place where the travel occurs."

"You should buy a lottery ticket, Mr. Wen," Xiao Zishan muttered. "Finding a wormhole in a bathroom is less likely than winning the jackpot."

"Is this not the jackpot?" Wen Desi smiled contentedly. "Is there a lottery that can win you a world?"

"Mr. Wen, didn't you always say that low-key, two-way, individual time travel is the best way?" Wang Luobin recalled the discussions on the forum about time travel.

"That's right," Wen Desi pointed to the wormhole. "Do you know what's behind it? A world!" He waved his arms excitedly. "Through it, I can own an Earth, a universe!"

"Are you going to conquer the world alone?" Xiao Zishan seriously doubted it.

"That's why I posted... and besides, the other side is not a pleasant time and space."

"What time and space?"

"Probably the Tianqi era. I found a Tianqi Tongbao coin."

Xiao Zishan and Wang Luobin both gasped—Mr. Wen's new world was an era dominated by eunuchs.

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