His consciousness felt as though it were sunk in a warm chaos.
Li Qingshan forced his eyes open, and his vision held only blurred, swaying halos of light.
"Such a lusty cry; he'll surely be a sturdy lad in the future."
The man's voice carried amusement, and a rough palm gently stroked his forehead.
"Don't touch the child with hands that were just drawing blueprints."
The woman's reproachful voice came through, carrying the weakness of one who had just given birth.
"Have you thought of a good name for the child?"
"Let's call him Li Qingshan."
The man's voice paused.
"Green mountains are everywhere in life.
I hope this lad can keep his feet on the ground and live out his own grandeur, no matter what circumstances he encounters in the future."
Li Qingshan blinked, and his chaotic thoughts seemed to catch a trace of strangeness.
Why did this dialogue and this scene have an inexplicable sense of familiarity?
Before he could ponder deeply, an infant's instinct dragged him back into slumber.
In the days that followed, Li Qingshan's life was exceptionally simple.
He quickly adapted himself to the life of drinking milk, crying, and changing diapers.
Three months later, he could already crawl a couple of rounds around the bed.
One night at half a year old, Su Wan held a rattle-drum and coaxed him.
"Qingshan, call Mama."
Li Qingshan stared into her eye sockets, and an inexplicable emotion surged into his heart.
He opened his childish mouth and clearly spat out two words: "Mama."
The rattle-drum in Su Wan's hand dropped onto the carpet with a clatter.
She covered her mouth in disbelief, and tears welled up instantly.
"Guoqiang! Did you hear? Qingshan called me Mama!"
Li Guoqiang, who was drawing blueprints, raised his head abruptly, walked over quickly to pick up his son, and his rough palms trembled slightly.
"Call me again. Call Papa."
"Papa."
Li Qingshan cooperated and spoke; although his voice was childish, it was clear.
Li Guoqiang stared blankly for a long while, then suddenly burst into loud laughter, holding his son and spinning around the living room twice.
"My son is a prodigy! Absolutely a prodigy!"
From that day on, Li Qingshan's "talent" could no longer be concealed.
By age two, he could already recite dozens of Tang poems and recognize commonly used characters in the newspaper.
Su Wan taught him to count, and he directly pointed out a printing error in the textbook.
"Mama, two plus three should equal five. It's printed as six here."
Su Wan looked through the teaching material in shock and indeed discovered the typesetting error.
On his third birthday, the neighbor Aunt Zhang brought her grandson over to visit.
Seeing Li Qingshan sitting on the sofa reading the original Journey to the West, Aunt Zhang immediately laughed out loud.
"Teacher Su, are you using a comic book to play with the child?"
"It's not a comic book, it's the original text."
Su Wan explained helplessly, "He wanted to read it himself."
Aunt Zhang curled her lip, just wanting to say,
"What can a three-year-old child understand?"
when she saw Li Qingshan look up and ask:
"Grandma Zhang, do you know what 'heart like a wild ape and mind like an untamed horse' means?"
"This," Aunt Zhang froze.
"It means thoughts are restless like a monkey, and intents gallop wildly like a horse."
Li Qingshan explained with a deadpan expression,
"Just like Sun Wukong being pinned beneath the Five Elements Mountain, unable to settle his mind."
Aunt Zhang was dumbstruck, and only after a long while did she murmur:
"This child, is he afraid he's turned into a spirit?"
Those words made Su Wan and Li Guoqiang feel both proud and worried.
They took Li Qingshan to the hospital for an examination, but the doctor said all the child's indicators were normal; his intelligence was simply far beyond that of children his age.
"Let him develop naturally."
Li Guoqiang made the final decision,
"Don't put too much pressure on the child."
As he grew older, Li Qingshan made a new discovery of his own.
He could always clearly sense that something was missing from the world around him.
In spring, when he touched willow branches, he couldn't feel the vitality bursting forth;
in summer, when he basked in the sun, he couldn't sense the energy in its warmth;
even when he breathed, the air he inhaled seemed to have had its essence drained away, leaving only an empty current.
This ever-present "sense of lack" left him inexplicably restless.
It was like a painting that should have been brilliant with color, but from which someone had taken every pigment, leaving only a hazy gray base.
"Dad, why doesn't the tree in our courtyard seem 'full of vitality' like the books say?"
Five-year-old Li Qingshan sat on a stone bench in the courtyard, touching the trunk of the old scholar tree as he asked.
Li Guoqiang was repairing a bicycle. He paused when he heard that.
"The tree's growing just fine. How is it not full of vitality?"
"It just feels like it's asleep."
Li Qingshan furrowed his brow,
"Everything is asleep, even the wind is lazy."
Li Guoqiang chuckled and ruffled his hair.
"You're just a little kid. Don't think about all this nonsense. Hurry up and do your homework. You still have to go to the library tomorrow."
Li Qingshan didn't ask any more questions, but he grew increasingly puzzled.
He began reading all kinds of books, from ancient texts to modern scientific works, trying to find an answer.
But neither the mythological accounts in the "Classic of Mountains and Seas" nor the laws of energy in "Physics" could explain this strange "sense of lack."
When he was six, Li Qingshan started primary school.
During his first Chinese class, as soon as the teacher wrote the characters "heaven and earth" on the blackboard, he suddenly raised his hand.
"Teacher, what is 'heaven'? And what is 'earth'?"
The teacher smiled and explained,
"Heaven is the sky above our heads, and earth is the ground beneath our feet."
"That's not right."
Li Qingshan shook his head,
"Heaven should be the universe, and earth should be the foundation that bears all things. But why does the world feel so empty now?"
The classroom erupted in an uproar, and the other students burst into laughter.
"Is Li Qingshan stupid or something?"
"Aren't heaven and earth just the sky and the ground?"
The teacher was also a little embarrassed and could only smooth things over.
"You'll understand when you're older. Li Qingshan, let's learn the new characters first."
Li Qingshan pursed his lips and fell silent.
He could tell that neither the teacher nor his classmates understood what he felt.
This loneliness often sent Li Qingshan into another world in his midnight dreams, into the life of another Li Qingshan.
Fortunately, his parents always supported him.
Su Wan would buy her all kinds of ancient books, while Li Guoqiang would do all kinds of experiments with him.
Warmth welled up in Li Qingshan's heart, strengthening his resolve to seek the truth.
On the eve of his fifteenth birthday, Li Qingshan had grown into a slender teenager, with a depth in his eyes that often seemed at odds with his age.
Over the years, he had systematically studied every field of knowledge he could access,
trying to find a scientific explanation for his unusual perception, but without success.
Modern science completely denied the validity of this kind of perception, dismissing it as a subjective illusion.
Yet Li Qingshan was certain that the "stillness" and "lack" he sensed were real,
even more fundamental than the information received by his five senses.
Late at night, he often sat alone on the roof, gazing up at the starry sky, dimmed by the city's light pollution.
That feeling of loneliness grew ever stronger, as if all of civilization stood on a lonely island and had forgotten the ocean existed.
"What on earth happened?"
He whispered to the night sky,
"Why does it feel like the world has been locked inside a cage?"
No one answered. Only the distant hum of the city reached him.
Yet deep in a dimension unknown to Li Qingshan, some long-slumbering presence seemed to have been stirred by his perception.
On the night of his fifteenth birthday, a hazy dream visited him.
He stood before a colossal stone gate, its surface carved with ancient markings he could not decipher, emanating an archaic aura that transcended time and space.
The stone gate opened a narrow crack, letting out an indescribable light, as though it led to a world of countless possibilities.
Li Qingshan reached out to touch the gate, and a stream of information surged into his mind:
"The Great Dao is fifty, Heaven's evolution yields forty-nine, and one escapes the net."
After waking, most of the dream's details had blurred, but the shock it left behind lingered.
At that moment, deep within his soul, something seemed to go "crack" and shatter.
Countless fragments of memory surged wildly, then finally merged together perfectly.
The mystery of the womb was completely solved in that instant.
He was Li Qingshan.
Li Qingshan, a transmigrator who had been hit by a truck on his way home from working overtime.
He was also the son of this world's Li Guoqiang, a senior engineer at the Jiangcheng Machine Tool Factory, and Su Wan, a math teacher at Jiangcheng No. 1 Middle School-a couple made up of a worker and an intellectual.
Li Qingshan realized that what had just happened was no ordinary dream.
The stone gate was real-or, rather, it symbolized something that truly existed, something that had helped him break through the mystery of the womb.
And he had a premonition that his encounter with the gate hadn't been a coincidence.
It was only the beginning.
Outside the window, the first ray of dawn cut through the night sky, lighting up the open Book of Changes on his bedside table.
Li Qingshan didn't know that, in a distant starry sky, nine enormous dragon corpses were silently towing a giant bronze coffin toward a blue planet.
There were still fifteen whole years before that encounter that would change everything.