When he woke, the air was different.
Hot. Heavy. The stench of coal smoke, horse dung, and sour water pressed into his lungs. His head throbbed like a drum, every heartbeat sending sharp pain through his skull. He groaned, raising a hand to his temple—then stopped.
The hand was not his.
It was smaller, thinner, the nails chipped and dirty. The skin was calloused, not from rifles or pistols, not from steering wheels or logistics paperwork, but from lifting sacks, pulling ropes, dragging crates. The kind of hands he had seen in his company workers, men who lived their lives bent under weight.
He forced himself upright. The room swam into view. It was small, barely wide enough for the wooden cot he had slept on. The plaster walls were cracked, the floor uneven. From a narrow window drifted the sharp stench of open drains, mixed with the cries of hawkers and the shrill laughter of children running barefoot outside.
Li Ming pressed his palms into his face. His skin felt different—softer in some places, rougher in others. With trembling steps, he staggered toward a clay pot on a low table, filled with stale water. He bent down, scooped a handful, and froze.
A reflection stared back at him.
It was not his face. The cheeks were thin, almost malnourished, the eyes sunken but bright. The jawline weaker, the lips thinner. And crowning it all—his scalp was half-shaved, the remaining hair pulled into a thin queue that hung down his back. A braid.
Li Ming stumbled back, nearly knocking the pot over. His chest tightened. He had seen this face before—not this exact one, but one like it. In the yellowed photographs of his great-grandfather, taken in a century when the braid marked submission to the Qing.
His grandfather's voice echoed in memory: "Remember, Ming'er. That braid was not just hair. It was a shackle. It showed who ruled and who obeyed."
The words struck him harder than the headache.
He staggered to a shelf in the corner. Books leaned haphazardly, their spines cracked. Most were Confucian classics—The Analects, Mencius, The Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean, Spring and Autumn Annals , Guwen Guanzhi, Records of the Grand Historian , Book of Han, Art of war, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, Water Margin ." But tucked between them were other volumes. He pulled one free. The cover was in English: Oxford Pocket Dictionary.
More followed—dog-eared copies of Macmillan's Reading Books,Andrees Allgemeiner Handatlas,A Primary Arithmetic, Part I and II , The Growing World: Or, Progress of Civilization, and the Wonders of Nature, Science, Literature and Art, The Science of Common Things,The Merchants', Students' and Clerks' Manual. The bindings were worn, the paper yellowed, the kind of secondhand stock that passed through treaty-port markets. He could almost see the owner—poor, determined, stretching every coin to keep hold of the West's knowledge.
His head throbbed harder. He needed answers. He needed to know where—or when—he was.
Then he saw it. A folded sheet on the desk, its black ink bold against cheap paper. He pulled it closer, smoothing it out with shaking hands.
"Japan Ascendant: Qing Dynasty Cedes Taiwan, Liaodong, and Korea's Suzerainty in Humiliating Peace Treaty."
The headline glared at him like a wound. Below it, smaller characters spelled the date:
April 17, 1895.
Li Ming's blood turned to ice. His vision swam. His breath caught.
He was not in Beijing anymore.
He was in Tianjin, 1895.
And the century of humiliation was just beginning.
He staggered back to the cot and collapsed. The words spilled from his lips before he could stop them:
"A hundred years of humiliation…"
They tasted sour. His grandfather's voice returned, as if whispering through time itself: "It was never the people's fault. It was the landlords. The warlords. The parasites who drained the lifeblood of the nation. Until they were torn out by the roots, China could never rise."
Li Ming pressed his hands to his face, torn between disbelief and grim recognition. Somehow, impossibly, he had been hurled into the very age his grandfather had spoken of.
And if that was true… then everything he knew about China's suffering—and its future—was waiting ahead of him.