Time Traveler

The wine and food were set on the table. The two knelt facing each other across it, only four or five meters apart. Staring at the wine in his bowl, Wang Mang dazed out for a while before lifting it and draining it in one gulp.

Setting down the wine bowl, Wang Mang looked at Jiang Hao and said, "Though I occupied this hall for more than a decade, this is still the first time I've drunk in the main hall. The Han laws stipulated that no drinking or revelry was permitted in the main hall—not even for the emperor."

"You're a man who follows the rules." Jiang Hao also raised his bowl and drained it in one gulp.

"Follows the rules? Hahahaha! I deposed the Young Emperor, founded the Xin Dynasty, and reformed the government. Those aristocratic clans all cursed me for breaking the rules, yet you think I'm a man who follows them."

Wang Mang threw back his head and laughed, but there was a bleakness in that laughter, the air of a hero in his twilight years.

"I'm very curious. Where did all those ideas of yours come from? Could you be a time traveler? What year did you come from?" Jiang Hao finally voiced the doubt in his heart.

Yes, this was absolutely Jiang Hao's greatest guilty pleasure, and the only reason he had kept Wang Mang alive.

He wanted to find out whether this man truly was a time traveler.

Countless later scholars had argued themselves hoarse over this question. Some claimed Wang Mang was a time traveler because his actions were too far ahead of his era and coincided uncannily with twentieth-century politics. Others said he was a pedant obsessed with restoring ancient institutions.

Yet there were many things that neither explanation could account