Li Ming sat hunched on the cot, his face buried in his hands, the newspaper trembling on the table beside him. The ink bled into his vision, black smears through his dizziness. His throat burned, his chest hammered.
Then—
"Yunsheng?"
A girl's voice. Soft, hesitant, coming from the door. The wood creaked under a light knock.
"Yunsheng, are you sick again? You've been so quiet."
Li Ming's head jerked up. The name felt foreign yet familiar, as though pulled from another man's mouth. His lips parted, but nothing came out.
Another knock, firmer. "Answer me, brother. Please."
His throat rasped. "I—I'm fine," he forced out in a hoarse whisper. The syllables felt strange in his mouth, like shoes too tight for his feet.
There was a pause. A sigh of relief. Then the sound of small feet pattering away down the narrow alley.
Silence pressed in again.
Li Ming's gaze returned to the folded paper. His hands shook as he dragged it closer, swallowing down stale water from a chipped cup. The liquid did little to cool the fire in his chest.
He spread the sheet flat and let his eyes run over the blocky characters. The headline screamed louder with every heartbeat:
From the North China Herald, April 1895
"Qing Empire Crushed: Japan Claims Total Victory in the East."
"After six months of battle, Japanese forces have captured Port Arthur, Weihaiwei, and most of the Liaodong Peninsula. The once-proud Beiyang Fleet lies shattered at the bottom of the sea. Chinese troops, poorly supplied and led by corrupt commanders, melted before the modern arms of Japan. The Treaty of Shimonoseki, signed in humiliating surrender, compels the Qing court to cede Taiwan, the Pescadores, and the Liaodong Peninsula, while recognizing the independence of Korea—long a tributary state of China. Reparations of 200 million taels of silver must also be paid."
"The Beiyang Fleet Annihilated at Weihaiwei. Admiral Ding Ruchang dead by his own hand. The pride of China, built with Western loans and foreign instructors, now lies sunk beneath the waves."
"Our correspondents report Chinese troops scattered in panic as Japanese shells rained upon the fortifications. The soldiers, unpaid and unfed for weeks, deserted en masse. Some sold their rifles to peasants for rice."
"Foreign residents in Tianjin speak openly of the Qing court's incompetence. One British merchant was quoted saying, 'China is like a rotten house—Japan merely blew upon the beams, and it all came tumbling down.'"
"In Shanghai, students and scholars whisper of reform. Some call for Western learning. Others mutter of revolution. The dynasty trembles, but the emperor remains silent."
A rotten house. Not the people.
He heard his grandfather's voice again: It was never the people's fault. It was the parasites at the top.
But the realization gnawed at him—he was trapped in the very pit of history's humiliation. And this body—this boy, Yunsheng—was part of it.
He pressed his fingers to his temples and shut his eyes, forcing his mind inward, probing for memory that was not his.
At first, only fragments came: the sharp crack of a whip at the docks; the heavy ache of shoulders under a loaded cart; the smell of ink-stained pages scavenged from a trash heap behind the British school; a thin girl's laughter as she wove cotton in the corner of a dark room.
Then clearer, sharper—
He saw a village in Hebei, flat fields stretching under pale skies. His grandfather's voice thundered about lost ancestors who once held brushes instead of plows. His father lay coughing through nights of fever, the family's last mule sold to pay for bitter medicine. When death came, the land went too—pawned to moneylenders until there was nothing left to claim. His mother shouldered the burden, hands calloused from weaving, dragging her children and grief toward Tianjin because rumors said there was work by the river. Yunsheng, barely twelve, strained against the cart ropes, his sister limping beside him, their grandfather cursing every step away from the soil.
In Tianjin, survival meant labor. By day he hauled crates until his shoulders rubbed raw, by night he lingered near the gates of the British-run school. He stooped to pick up scraps of paper tossed away by boys in silk jackets—half-torn atlases, arithmetic tables, broken spines of readers. To others they were trash; to him, they were treasures. Sometimes a kind hand slipped him worn pages: a janitor's assistant who pitied the ragged boy with hungry eyes. Yunsheng stacked these scraps proudly on a shelf no bigger than a brick, his "library." His sister scolded him for wasting time: "You read trash, while we go hungry." Still, he read by candle stub until wax pooled black.
One night, unloading crates, he overheard talk of a chance. A trading company sought bright boys to train as clerks—if they could read, write, and master foreign bookkeeping. A door into another world. The price: five hundred taels of silver. Impossible. Yet Yunsheng could not let go of the dream. He saw his mother's bent back straightening, his sister dressed in clean cotton, his little brother holding books instead of rope.
That dream pulled him into shadows. At the docks he learned of contraband—opium tins, kerosene, foreign liquor—smuggled under false labels. Because he could puzzle through both Chinese and halting English, the foremen used him to mark crates and carry coded messages. He told himself he was only copying symbols, not touching the goods. But the coins in his pocket grew heavier, and the temptation stronger.
Months later, the chance came. He was left to guard a shipment and pried one crate open. Inside—silver. Stacked neatly, shining even in the lamplight. Five hundred taels, the exact sum he had dreamed of. He could buy a new fate.
He stole it.
A smuggler caught him, and the chase ripped through Tianjin's narrow alleys. An iron hook lashed across his side; he staggered, ribs cracked, blood hot in his mouth. Somehow, he escaped. He staggered home with the sack of silver hidden under coal and rags.
He told his mother he had fallen carrying a load. He smiled even as he coughed blood, whispering to himself that the future was safe now. The silver lay waiting. But he never spent a coin. The wound festered, the fever rose, and slowly the body weakened—until it became the vessel Li Ming now inhabited.
Li Ming gasped, the memory slamming into him like a fist. He clutched his side, feeling the bruise that belonged not to him but to this borrowed flesh.
Outside, hawkers cried in the street. A bell clanged in the concession quarter. The world of 1895 pressed closer.
Li Ming stared again at the newspaper. His voice cracked, almost a whisper:
"If this is real… if I am truly here… then what am I supposed to do?"