Chapter 6: Ten Thousand-Year Dynasty, One More Obstacle from Heaven

On his fourteenth year in Taoyuan Village, Shu Guan began to suspect that the place he had traveled to might not be ancient Earth.

It was during this year that he finally saw the written records left behind by the earliest residents of Taoyuan Village.

The villagers in Taoyuan Village were basically illiterate; knowing how to read wasn't very meaningful here since you couldn't rely on it to gain fame or fortune through academic pursuits.

Moreover, the earliest villagers who arrived over two hundred years ago were mostly unsophisticated country folk who didn't have much concept about passing down knowledge through writing.

However, among the earliest villagers, there was an old scholar who, it was said, had recorded in detail their journey to this valley.

And these records were kept in the ancestral hall of Taoyuan Village.

Ever since Shu Guan learned about these records, he had always wanted to enter the ancestral hall to see the writing left behind by those early villagers.

And this opportunity finally came when he was fourteen years old.

That year, the ancestral hall of Taoyuan Village hadn't been repaired for a long time, resulting in overgrowth of weeds on the roof and many broken tiles. When it rained heavily, rainwater would inevitably leak into the hall.

So, after discussing with the village's clan leaders, it was decided to carry out a major renovation after the autumn harvest, assigning the task to the best bricklayer in the village, the Old Lame.

Shu Guan, who had become Old Lame's capable assistant in recent years, naturally got the opportunity to enter the ancestral hall of Taoyuan Village.

...

Afternoon sunlight in autumn is one of the most soporific things in the world.

After a busy morning, Old Lame, feeling tired, lay down on a reclining chair in the courtyard of the ancestral hall after having lunch. Soon, he began to snore lightly.

Shu Guan sat on the railing of the corridor, looking at a thin book in his hand.

This was the notebook left behind by the old scholar.

The notebook was kept in a wooden box in a side room of the main hall, along with other items used by the ancestors of Taoyuan Village, for later generations to admire.

At this point, the renovation of the ancestral hall had been going on for more than ten days and was almost complete. The other workers had left, leaving only Old Lame and Shu Guan to finish up. So, Shu Guan could enter the room without any hindrance and found the long-awaited written records describing the original origin of Taoyuan Village.

This notebook had only a few pages, and although it had been kept in a wooden box and rarely opened, the paper had yellowed and dried up after more than two hundred years. It looked like brittle, sun-scorched leaves, so fragile that even a light touch might cause them to shatter.

Shu Guan first took a deep breath, then carefully turned the first page.

A paragraph of words caught his eye.

It should be mentioned that Old Lame was one of the few villagers in Taoyuan Village who could read, and he had taught Shu Guan to do so since he was young.

However, even if Old Lame hadn't taught him, it wouldn't have affected Shu Guan's ability to read the notebook.

After all, they were only traditional characters, which Shu Guan could still recognize.

...Not long after...the afternoon sun still warmed the body, but as Shu Guan read the notebook in his hand, his heart gradually grew cold.

"In the Gengshen Year of Emperor Guangxi's reign, winter, October. Baiyi people with iron-armored ships sailed up the river to Jing City. Jing City fell in just one day, and tens of thousands of soldiers were defeated overnight. The invading Baiyi army and the bandits plundered thousands of miles, leaving people in misery. The Zhongyuan Region was in turmoil. How did the Dahua Heavenly Dynasty, established for ten thousand years, decline so rapidly in just a few decades..."

This was the opening sentence of the old scholar's notebook.

Upon reading this paragraph, Shu Guan's brow furrowed, and the uneven distribution of moles on his face seemed to be squeezed together like an ugly lump of cow dung.

Still, it could not hide the emotion called doubt beneath the dung.

"Dahua Heavenly Dynasty…"

Shu Guan whispered to himself.

When Shu Guan was very young, he had guessed that he was still on Earth, and he believed that the time he had traveled to was late Qing Dynasty or early Republic period.

He had never doubted this judgment.

Until this moment, after reading the notebook left by the ancestors of Taoyuan Village, Shu Guan finally felt a hint of doubt about his original judgment.

Dahua Heavenly Dynasty?

There had never been such a dynasty in the history of Huaxia!

Shu Guan was not a history expert, but his knowledge in the field of history was much better than that of ordinary people.

At this moment, what flashed through his mind was not only those Huaxia dynasties that had basically completed the unification, but also the names of the Sixteen States of the Northern and Southern Dynasties, or the names of the Ten Kingdoms of the late Tang Dynasty, and even the names of some small ephemeral regimes established by ethnic minorities in remote areas. All of these passed quickly through Shu Guan's mind.

And then Shu Guan was quite certain that there had never been a Dahua Heavenly Dynasty in the five thousand years of Huaxia's history.

Moreover, although he did not know what kind of city "Jing City" was, it was impossible for a city with tens of thousands of troops to be an obscure small regime.

So, where did he actually travel to?

In addition, besides the name Dahua, which Shu Guan had never heard of, there were a few places in the first few dozen words of this notebook that made him extremely puzzled.

For example, the sentence "for ten thousand years."

This was completely illogical!

It must have been that old scholar exaggerating in those days.

Shu Guan was quite familiar with the exaggerating problem of Huaxia's ancient literati in their writings, such as "taking the heads of top generals in the midst of thousands of troops like picking things from a pocket."

Or the ones who could "vomit several liters of blood" and still fight valiantly.

Or the ones who could "cause the Empress Dowager to hear the Gu's accompanying yin, to delight the Empress Dowager"... this was completely unscientific!

In short, when ancient literati were inspired, they would make up anything without considering whether it was reasonable or not. If the descriptions were really used to verify historical facts, it would be highly subjective.

So when he read about a ten-thousand-year dynasty in this notebook, Shu Guan was somewhat skeptical.

Although every emperor wanted his dynasty to last forever, the longest-lived dynasty in Huaxia's history, the Zhou Dynasty, only lasted for 800 years.

Shu Guan pondered for a while.

He believed that the description of the old scholar in the notebook must have been exaggerated, but even if the boast of ten thousand years was discounted, there should still be a few thousand years.

A dynasty that lasted for thousands of years? Could it be possible?

This did not conform to the law of social development; a dynasty, under normal circumstances, could not suppress the accumulation of various contradictions in such a long period of time.

Unless... it was an abnormal dynasty.

Additionally, what did "white-skinned people" and "iron-armored battleships" mean? Shu Guan had a guess on this point from the first moment.

Could it be white people, steamships?

Could the timeline be a bit too early? Was the world he had traveled to not Earth?

Shu Guan's heartbeat accelerated, and his fingers lingered on a certain character on the paper for a long time.

That character was the "heaven" character in "Dahua Heavenly Dynasty."

The characters in this world were traditional characters of Huaxia.

However, when Shu Guan learned to recognize characters with the old lame man, he found that some of the characters taught by the old lame man were different from his previous impression.

At that time, Shu Guan didn't care much about it. He thought he might have remembered it wrong, as he had been taught simplified characters since childhood. Although he could recognize most of the traditional characters, he could not write many of them.

But Shu Guan would not mistake those traditional characters that were the same as the simplified characters, such as the character "heaven."

However, the "heaven" taught by the old lame man was different from the "heaven" in Huaxia's characters.

At that time, Shu Guan thought that the old lame man might have taught him the wrong character, or that the old lame man himself had learned it incorrectly.

But now he found that perhaps the old lame man didn't teach him the wrong character, because the "heaven" character in this notebook was written the same way.

The "heaven" character taught by the old lame man.

The "heaven" character in this world.

It had one extra horizontal stroke at the top!