Incarnation of the Wormhole

Guangzhou. A certain day in 2008.^[1]
Xiao Zishan was born in the late seventies, and was a rather average guy: average family, average looks, average grades, and he wasn’t a particularly ambitious or hardworking person either.
After Xiao Zishan got his bachelor's degree, he did a few short stints at several companies in the Pearl River delta^[2] area. During this time he got scammed by a black-hearted boss and also fell flat reaching for his unrealistic dreams. In the end he found a not-too-shabby job at a foreign company, and worked hard there to earn his keep. In the blink of an eye, almost seven years had passed, and he has running up on thirty years of age but still living in a rented apartment^[3]. He didn’t really have any hobbies apart from dabbling in a little history and reading some niche books. He was still one of those single men who celebrated November 11th^[4], as he could barely even remember the face of his ex whom he had long since broken up with.

That night the weather was abnormally bad. A lacquer-black sky was lit up by streaks of lightning, as if a god was barely holding in a tempestuous fury. This weather had been going on for almost half a month: after the lightning there’d come a ferocious downpour, or starving rumbles of thunder. After a while everyone in the city of Guangzhou got used to it. Nothing more than some strange weather.

Xiao Zishan had just gotten off the bus after work, yawning. His eyes were puffy, legs sore, hair unkempt, and overall reeking of the air of the working poor. It had already been an entire day and night since he last went home. Because he was the new manager of a district office and was about to be inspected by his superiors, he had to stay at the office preparing reports. Especially the expense documents that he had to manually prepare entry by entry, which made him go insane.

Xiao Zishan had only risen to this post three months ago. In the seven years since he joined the company he had just been doing circles in the company ranks as a district sales representative. The people above him had been cut again and again like leeks, and every time it felt like he was living the life of a leek root.

Three months ago the leadership changed again, and as usual they left behind a pile of inexplicable reports and receipts. Only this time he had grown from a leek root to a leek stem and was promoted to district manager.

If he had been promoted two years ago he would have been definitely moved to tears, but the Xiao Zishang of now only wanted to say one thing to the management above him, both past and present: fuck you.

Since last year the company had been hit hard by the global economic crisis^[5], and all his co-workers in the district office had disappeared one after another. The remaining work had been easily done by him alone. After getting a promotion, which came with not even a single cent in raises nor further development opportunities, it was obvious that this office was closing down. He was kept on just to clean things up, and once everything was done, well, it was probably his time to pack up too.

Nonetheless, the formalities still had to be done by someone. He could still get a few more months of his long stagnant salary: it was better than nothing.

Slumping into his apartment door, Xiao Zishan sighed for the twentieth time. He was carrying a big luggage bag filled with promotional gifts, accumulated in his office over the years: kitchen aprons, shirts, toothbrushes, pens - you name it he had it. Even the bag itself was a company product. Apart from a few things, he would probably never use any of it. But still, he stingily took it all away. “Poor with few ambitions.” No words could be a more fitting descriptor of Xiao Zishan’s personality.

At least he kept his apartment relatively clean and tidy. After a shower, he became much more spirited. He turned on his computer and went online.

Just as how Orson Welles once said, “the lottery is the anaesthetic of the poor,”^[6] So too was the internet the fountain of joy for people such as Xiao Zishan: be it online games or the BBS or the online novels he’d read every day.^[7]

Before Xiao Zishan graduated he was quite interested in literature and art. He had read an eclectic assortment of books, and liked showing off his flowery prose.^[8] But after a few years in the workforce he had rid all of that literary nonsense from his brain. He had seen too much of the realities of society, and didn’t want to read any more novels about the ‘human condition.’ What he enjoyed reading the most these days were those time travel novels where the protagonists would get to redo history and fulfil all their wishes…this probably had something to do with his being a history nerd, and always wanting to tamper with history. In short, he’d always read a bit of this fiction everyday. Mockingly, he’d say that this was his “spiritual masturbation.”

Every day, apart from his spiritual masturbation, he’d also browse through several BBS forums. If he didn’t do so every day he’d feel empty inside like a drug addict. He wasn’t some big shot in these online circles either. He was just a silent browser of random threads and posts: the debates, the arguments, the colourful people…even a certain internet caricature of a half marxist, half saint-simonian chimera. The things of the virtual world were all way more interesting than the society outside, filled with only masks and deceit.^[9]

After connecting to the BBS the first thing he did as usual was to take a look at today’s trending posts.

‘I found a wormhole leading to the Ming Dynasty! I swear it’s real!’

When he saw this Xiao Zishan couldn’t help but chuckle a little. In this day and age who could possibly be fooled by a time travel novel and think it was real? Or was it just another poor fool resentful of his current circumstances, dreaming of a chance to start over in another world?

On second glance he saw that this was posted by Chief Wen^[10]. Chief Wen was one of the ‘Survival Madmen’ Xiao Zishan had real respect for. His in-depth and extensive knowledge of the time travel and survival genre was indeed rare. The only pity was that Chief Wen had never written a novel, otherwise Xiao Zishan would definitely read it. Of course, he wouldn’t pay for it–he’d only read the pirated version^[11].

“Of course it’s one of Chief Wen’s strange dreams.” Xiao Zishan muttered to himself. Still, nonetheless, he clicked on the post to see what was going on.

Little did Xiao Zishan know that the moment he clicked that fateful night, his life would change forever. The wheel of fate was turning, and he was caught up into a storm that would change the history of the world forever.

---

Guangzhou. One week later. 2008.
“This is the wormhole?” Xiao Zishan carefully watched the glowing object before him. Strictly speaking, this was just a not-quite circular hole, tinted with a sapphire glow. There wasn’t a big difference between this and the wormholes he had in mind, but the difference lay in the fact that the rays of light were not strong, and it was a lot smaller, only about as large as a washroom mirror.^[12]

“It’s very small.” Wang Luobin said. He was the same as Xiao Zishan, one of the first group of people to contact Chief Wen and decide to take a look.

“Applying a bit of pressure on the rim will make it expand.” Wen Desi said. He shuffled a bit on the lid of the toilet. Fitting three people into the bathroom was on the uncomfortable side of tight.
“It can expand or contract, as long as pressure is applied evenly around the rim. The change is synched with the other side. But once it shrinks to 210mm the channel will disconnect. The actual portal remains though.”

“Can it really let you go back and forth?” Xiao Zishan said. In his impression, time travel was usually one-way, if it wasn’t caused by sudden impact with a truck then it was being suddenly struck by lightning^[13]. The least violent method he knew of was to get lost in a misty forest. The universal feature was that it was always a one-way trip.

“Well if it weren’t, I wouldn’t be able to make my post to the bulletin, and you two wouldn’t be here.” Wen Desi said.

The other two replied with their disbelieving stares.

“You should go buy some lottery tickets, Chief Wen.” Xiao Zishan mumbled to himself. “Finding a wormhole in the toilet of your house, it must be harder than winning the lottery.”

“Doesn’t this count as winning the lottery already?” Wen Desi smiled like a self-satisfied victor. “Is there a lottery that lets you win a world for yourself?”

The two didn’t have a good comeback to that.

“Chief, didn’t you always say: a righteous time traveller is one who stays humble?” Wang Luobin remembered a previous discussion on the BBS about time travel.

“That’s right.” Wen Desi said. He pointed at the wormhole. “Do you have any idea what’s behind that? A whole world!” He waved his arm excitedly. “Through it, I can have an entire earth, an entire universe!”

“One man, conquering an entire world?” Xiao Zishan expressed his doubts.

"Ah, so that’s why I made that post…” Wen Desi seemed a little unreconciled with that fact.“Also, where the other end leads isn’t exactly something to get too happy about.”

“What time period?”

“Around Tianqi. I found some currency dating from then.”^[14]

Xian Zishan and Wang Luobin both took in a deep breath. This new world that Wen Desi had discovered was one the precipice of a terrible abyss.

[TN]
Some brief background on the time period our otaku friends are talking about. Tianqi was the reign name of the second last Ming Emperor, and reigned between 1620-1627 CE. He would be succeeded by his younger brother Chongzhen in 1627. Chongzhen’s reign would in turn end in 1644 with him committing suicide after rebels entered the imperial capital Beijing. With Chong Zhen’s demise, so too would end the almost 300-year-old Ming Dynasty, the last imperial dynasty of China ruled by the Han people. The Ming Dynasty would be superseded by the Qing Dynasty led by the Manchu people. The Manchus would in turn last until the early 20th century, after which the history of imperial China comes to an end and we must turn to a history of modern China.

Now, it is important to note that there is some perception that the Qing Dynasty wasn’t a real “Chinese” dynasty because of racial reasons. The Han ethnicity are the majority ethnicity in China, constituting 92% of the modern population and making up almost 17.5% of the entire world’s population. Racial tensions are a fairly common point of conflict in pre-modern China. See for instance the literature surrounding one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history, which westerners should really know more about, the Taiping rebellion. This was an anti-Manchu revolt by the Han Chinese in the 1850s. More than twenty million people died as a direct result of this conflict.

On that pleasant note, the transitions between any of the imperial dynasties were indeed highly turbulent, chaotic times. There would inevitably be widespread clashes between internal rebels and external invaders who all perceived the imperial throne to be weak and wanted to claim it for themselves. The conflicts would then cause famine and spread disease as armies moved across the continent. The Ming-Qing transition phase, which our time travellers are heading towards, is no exception. It is perhaps thus unsurprising that our protagonists are not exactly clapping with joy about where their tunnel—and fate—leads.

---

1. First chapter published June 2009 on Qidian. ↩︎

2. The Pearl River delta is an area that covers modern day Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao. ↩︎

3. In China, there is a very strong perception that to ‘succeed’ as a man one must own a house and a car, as these are common requirements of the bride’s family (in China family opinion matters a lot when choosing a spouse, unlike here in the west) ↩︎

4. 11/11. Known as Singles’ Day, an unofficial Chinese holiday. Main activity is online shopping. I think the connection between the date and being ‘single’ should be self-evident. ↩︎

5. Reminder that the original web novel started serialisation halfway through 2009 ↩︎

6. I cannot find an English source for this quote. The original says ”彩票是穷人的止痛药“, apparently paraphrasing Welles. See also Marx’s more famous quote "Religion…is the opium of the people." ↩︎

7. Oh boy, a bit of internet history. BBS means Bulletin Board System. In the west such services died out once what we know as the modern internet emerged, mostly around the turn of the millennium. I was not aware that BBS were still being used in China in the mid to late 2000s. They were (are?) mostly text-based point-to-point services that allowed users to post messages to everyone subscribed (hence bulletin) and hence host large conversations. The specific website in question here is ‘sonicbbs’. ↩︎

8. There are parts of the book that are actually quite well written in a literary sense. Unfortunately, I’m not that good of an English writer, so I’m afraid you’ll have to be reading through a rather dark glass. ↩︎

9. These two paragraphs are heavily edited in the Qidian official version. Much of the social commentary is edited out. ↩︎

10. His full name is Wen Desi as we find out a few lines later. In Chinese, people in positions of power/respect are commonly referred to as [Surname] [Title]. In English this is of course rendered the other way. The Chinese title is 总, the english equivalent would be lit. calling a CEO by a title like Executive [Surname here]. ↩︎

11. Lol. This cracked me up. Speaking of which, I’m currently translating off the free chapters on Qidian. God help us all. ↩︎

12. Think of the portals from the Portal game series (but you can’t see through it), so a flat 2D slice. ↩︎

13. References to oft-used premises in isekai novels. If you’re reading this you probably know what I’m talking about. If not, well, how the hell did you find this novel? ↩︎

14. 天启 Romanised as Tianqi. The reign name of the 16th emperor of the Ming Dynasty, ruling between 1620-1627. ↩︎