Struggle in the Steam Age

Half an hour later, Liang En, who had taken a shower and treated his wound, stood in front of the washbasin in his room and looked at the mirror with a missing corner hanging on the opposite wall.

A young man of medium build, with black hair and black pupils, who clearly looked like an intellectual came into his eyes. It's just that the tightly wrapped gauze on the head looks like a Tianzhu man, which seems to spoil the overall image.

"This is me now, Lawrence August." Liang En whispered to himself through the light from the small skylight on the roof of the attic. "But why did I appear in this world, why did I become Lawrence August. Most importantly, can I go back?"

Looking at this strange self in the mirror and being silent for a few minutes, Liang En, who was wearing a long cotton shirt that had just been changed into, climbed onto the bed and lay there on his back with some helplessness, thinking about the most important issue to him right now. .

As a generation born in the 90s, Liang En has naturally read a lot of online novels about time travel, and naturally, when he was bored, he fantasized about what would happen if he really went to another world. But now after he really left his hometown, he realized that he had so many things that he couldn't let go of, and he couldn't be as chic as the protagonists in many novels.

Parents, relatives, friends, smartphones, the convenience of the online world, and all kinds of familiar things. All these made him eager to go back.

Looking at the sloping ceiling, Liang En began to recall little by little what he had done before this place became Lawrence August.

"The previous few days were no different from usual. I ate normally, slept normally, and commuted normally. The only difference was that I went to a certain scenic spot known as the eighth wonder of the world, and then—"

Thinking of this, Liang En sat up suddenly, and he suddenly cleared the fog entangled in his memory, remembering that he had bought an unusual bronze mirror before.

It was on the pile of stalls at the entrance of the scenic spot. A group of people dressed as farmers have been selling the so-called treasures just dug from the ground to tourists. Of course, if these are true, they can easily rebuild a museum on the same level as the Palace Museum with what they dug out in a year.

As a local, Liang En naturally knew the ways of the place well. But this time, he accidentally saw a palm-sized bronze mirror among these tourist souvenirs, although the stall owner repeatedly claimed that it was a bronze mirror from the Han Dynasty, which had just been dug from the field. But the mirror body with metallic luster and no rust at all is really unconvincing.

After a bit of arguing, Liang En won the item with a price tag of 5,000 yuan for 200 yuan. But what he didn't know was that just after he left, the boss put the money in his pocket and whispered: "Why don't I remember that there is such a new mirror in the goods I bought, this is a sample from the factory Is it?"

After returning home from the trip, he played with this bronze mirror for a long time, but the more he played with it, the more he felt that something was wrong: From his keyboard archaeologist's point of view, this bronze mirror fully conforms to the various characteristics of Han mirrors. The same goes for the material. But from another perspective, this thing will never be manufactured for more than a week.

This is what makes him feel strange the most: because if someone really has that kind of technology to imitate mirrors so finely, theoretically, simple old-fashioning should not be forgotten.

He studied it until night, but he couldn't see any more information from this mirror. Unexpectedly, after going to bed as usual, he opened his eyes again and appeared in the sewer of another world, even the shell was changed.

"Go up to Mount Tai, meet gods and men, eat Yuying, drink sweet springs, drive Wenlong, and ride floating clouds." Liang En recalled the picture of ascending to immortals and the words on it that were common in the Han Dynasty behind the bronze mirror, and murmured in Chinese at the same time After seeing the inscription on the back of the mirror, what he didn't expect was that everything around him seemed to freeze as the last word fell.

But before he could react to these unexpected changes, all the scenes in his sight quickly began to twist and rotate. The wound on the back of his head hurt again, as if someone had stuck a soldering iron into his head.

Amid the severe headache, Liang En subconsciously closed his eyes. When the darkness enveloped everything, all the discomfort disappeared, and the body suddenly became lighter.

When he opened his eyes again, he found himself in an open space with a radius of two to three hundred meters. But outside the open space, there is nothing but white void, and nothing can be seen.

After scanning around, Liang En put his gaze directly in front of him. There was the only thing in the clearing: a ghostly tree that looked like a 3D projection.

The big tree looks a bit like a mushroom, with a straight trunk. All the branches and leaves are gathered at the top of the tree. The cyan leaves and purple trunks show a special beauty. A palm-sized bronze mirror was suspended in mid-air, as if it were embedded in a tree trunk.

"I should have come in in the state of a soul, and the bronze mirror suspended in front of me is the culprit that allowed me to pass through." Liang En realized this immediately after entering this space, and then he raised his head to look at the phantom of the big tree, which was a little uncomfortable. untie. "But how did the big tree on the relief on the back of the mirror come out?"

"Hello! Myself." Just as Liang En walked to the shadow of the big tree and was about to study the mirror seriously, a voice suddenly came from behind him. Turning his head suddenly, he was surprised to see a white phantom that looked exactly like his current body appearing behind him.

"Myself?" Liang En seemed to have heard a very crucial word.

"Yes, you are me!" After speaking, the white phantom walked to the side of the tree and touched the bronze mirror with both hands. In an instant, the familiar pain once again occupied Liang En's brain.

But different from the previous pain, this time the pain made his mind sober. He even felt that his mind had never been so clear, and his various memories had never been so clear.

His memory kept going back, from the time he got hit on the head just now, to the days when he went to school, and lived with his adoptive father in the church. Then it was blacked out, and I returned to the bed where I traveled through to sleep, and then I went back, and I could even go back to every word and every picture I saw in the past.

As if pressing the rewind button, he quickly reviewed his previous life. In the end, his eyes went dark and he returned to the mirror.

"I understand." Liang En looked at the white phantom and said, the memory that the white phantom just injected into him made him realize that he did not just travel through as he imagined, but a fetus.

His soul was originally brought to this world from his hometown by the mirror, and then bonded together with the soul of a local fetus.

Because the fetus is extremely fragile, out of self-protection considerations, the mirror sealed all of Liang En's will and memory, leaving only the most basic instincts, and then grew up with the soul of the fetus itself.

Naturally, the two souls interacted with each other when they lived together for decades, which is why Lawrence thought the oriental Aurora-style bronze mirror was so eye-catching.

Due to the wear and tear caused by time travel, Liang En's true spirit has been sleeping for the past twenty years. If there is no accident, he will probably wake up in a few years, and then become the grandfather that Lawrence carries with him.

But this robbery changed everything. When Lawrence's soul began to collapse due to the heavy injury, his body instinct awakened Liang En's soul, which had almost recovered, allowing him to regain his self-awareness.

"20 years, and it's so far away from home, it seems that I can't go back." It's good to be able to become a person again, but the fact that he can't go home also makes Liang En feel extremely frustrated.

But soon he got rid of his depression. After all, it was a gift of fate to live another life after going through such a thing, so what is there to be dissatisfied with?