Fragile History

"He actually didn't notice! He didn't notice!"

At Central Hospital, Dean Yang's face was contorted with anguish. He had nearly curled up in his chair, full of self-reproach. "His spiritual perception! Such a stable anchor point—he should have been able to help!"

"Dean Yang, there's no need to be so anxious. Isn't everyone trying to find a solution?" Beside him, Xiao Wu held a terminal with a warning flashing on its screen, trying helplessly to reassure him.

"No! Taihao said there's no time left! We're out of time!"

Xiao Wu hesitated and looked at Dean Yang. "Or perhaps you could tell us what's going to happen next. We have the country backing us up. There's no problem we can't solve."

Dean Yang jerked his head up and glared at Xiao Wu, gnashing his teeth like a beast. "Do you think I'm not committed enough? I took the oath too, but Taihao—ah, Taihao—I can't say."

"That would bring even greater disaster, and time is what we lack most."

Xiao Wu was speechless. He slowly shook his head at the camera beside him.

Suddenly, Dean Yang realized something and looked at the camera too. He grabbed a pen and paper and wrote two characters in a bold flourish: Taihao.

"I know what you're worried about, keeping us locked down and under control. You're simply afraid Taihao disease will spread. I won't leave, and I don't ask for anything else. I only hope you'll give this paper to Xu Chen and tell him to look up these two characters."

The people behind the camera urgently convened a meeting. They examined the paper and discussed it, then decided they could pass along a copy.

Xu Chen looked at his search results with an unsurprised expression.

After returning to his dorm and showing off to Xiao Song, he had immediately looked up the little fishing village where the source of the disease had appeared. Sure enough, he couldn't find it at all. All related information had been blocked.

The university medical internship team had originally been formed to try to save the patients, but after the past few days, anyone could see that even the divine physician Hua Tuo himself couldn't have saved them.

The day before yesterday, after the patient's vital signs disappeared, they had made a token resuscitation attempt on humanitarian grounds and then declared the patient dead.

He had to admit, everyone had breathed a sigh of relief at the time. After all, dying was better than going on living with the infection.

Xu Chen alone thought that the fewer patients there were, the harder it would be for the disease to spread. Once every patient was dead, the disease would no longer exist in the world. That being the case, the faster the patients died, the better.

The patient's death also meant the internship assignment was over. Although there were still plenty of samples available for research, Xu Chen didn't feel he could stay any longer, so when the contracts were handed out, he was the quickest to sign.

The contract contained no sensitive information, so he could show it off to Song Tian without worrying.

Xu Chen had also wanted to show Song Tian the 404 he had just found, but after some thought, he decided against it. After all, that came close to the edge of the confidentiality rules.

Suddenly, Xu Chen thought of something and planned to use some special computer techniques to look for information. Then he discovered an email had been sent to him.

He checked the sender. To his surprise, it was Grandpa Yang.

He opened it at once, took one look, and fell silent.

His face twisted.

Before changing majors, Xu Chen had been in the history department. After transmigrating, the first thing he had looked into was historical information.

When Xu Chen arrived in this world, he had initially thought time had flowed backward or that he had been reborn. It wasn't until he learned the name of his provincial capital that he realized something was wrong.

The province he lived in was called Southern Plain and was in the Central Plains region, while its capital was called Eternal Peace. That was damn strange, and almost none of the cities, counties, townships, or towns under it had familiar names either.

Some provincial capitals and cities had kept their names throughout history, and some had even lived on in idioms, like learning to walk in Handan, paper becoming expensive in Luoyang, and... Bengbu can't hold it in anymore.

Xu Chen checked, and none of them were there.

The idioms existed, but the city names didn't.

So Xu Chen began tracing the cause, which naturally and inevitably led him to history. His parents in this life saw this and thought it remarkable that he was interested in history at such a young age. After his college entrance exams, they encouraged him to apply to the history department.

Of course, Xu Chen hadn't been unwilling.

He had discovered that the history of this world was all damn well shrouded in secrecy. With only his own amateur knowledge, he couldn't make heads or tails of it.

Apart from a rough outline of history, the history books sold on the street didn't contain a single detail.

It was as if... there were no historical records at all.

But when Xu Chen went to a museum to check, he found that historical records did indeed exist.

It had fried Xu Chen's CPU on the spot.

Xu Chen had indeed been somewhat happy when he received his university history department acceptance letter. He thought he could finally solve the mystery. Then, not long after classes began, he encountered the "cultural relic restoration course," and his face immediately turned green.

The cultural relic alteration course merely handed out a photocopy of a damaged ancient text and had students guess the meanings of the characters, writing them out one by one beside it.

The ancient text looked like something pulled out of the mud. Not only were large sections of its pages missing, but there was also severe ink loss and staining. There was no damn way anyone could guess accurately.

Still, Xu Chen relied on the classical Chinese materials he had forced himself to study for the college entrance exams in his previous life. Using the context and making educated guesses, he managed to fill in the entire text, and his completed version caused a stir among a bunch of old fogeys in the history department.

At first, those people could still point out mistakes, but after Xu Chen rebutted them one by one with examples and allusions, they realized they might as well give up their seats and let him take them.

Xu Chen hadn't thought much of it at the time. He believed those people were chasing fame and praise, occupying their positions without doing any real work. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been unable to point out such simple mistakes, and their writing wouldn't have been full of holes. His temper was so bad that he made things awkward for both sides.

That was until those people showed Xu Chen real historical records.

Xu Chen was shocked.

The real historical records had long since decayed, becoming extremely fragile under the erosion of history and time. Xu Chen had even wanted to touch them, only to be told that vacuum sealing was already a last resort. Simply opening the seal could seriously damage the records again.

Many of the characters in them were missing or erroneous as well.

He refused to believe it. After all, historical records included more than just official histories. There were also alternative histories, miscellaneous histories, and unofficial accounts. They hadn't all been compiled by the same people, and their storage conditions had varied. Surely they couldn't all be in this shitty state?

Then Xu Chen looked, and every damn one of them was in that shitty state.

Every historical document was in that shitty state.

Quite a few old artifacts had even crumbled to dust during the early stages of preservation. What remained could only be protected under glass covers filled with inert gas, and then copied in full using special imaging equipment.

Xu Chen instantly understood why the classical Chinese section of his college entrance exam in this life had felt so off. Even the classical poems and verses had contained plenty of absurdly wrong characters. It turned out the missing parts had been damn well guessed.

This wasn't secrecy. It was plainly missing arms and legs.

Everything he had learned about classical Chinese in this life had been imagined by those old fogeys, and to think he had assumed people in this world had some unique insights into history.

Xu Chen had originally wanted to contribute to the history of this world, but after estimating the scale of the undertaking, he immediately gave up. There were so many white-haired old men in the history department; if he dared stay, he would have to devote his youth to it too.

Then he would have lived his second life in vain.

So Xu Chen relentlessly begged to change majors and entered the medical department after paying a series of prices unknown to outsiders.

From then on, for some reason, Southern Plain University's history department rose to prominence. Not only did it become the leading history program in the country, but it also gained a say over the classical Chinese sections of the country's language textbooks.

Thus, as soon as Xu Chen saw that he was supposed to look up those two characters, it was as if his face had put on a mask of anguish.

Look them up in those historical materials? The stuff in his own head was more reliable.