Chapter 5
His foot came down on the stone.
Nothing happened.
The shed was exactly as it had always been. The wind moved outside, pushing softly against the wooden walls. Somewhere in the corner a mouse went about its business, unconcerned. The stone beneath his foot was just stone — cold, flat, indifferent.
He stepped off. Stepped back on.
Nothing.
His heart dropped somewhere below his stomach.
He got down on his knees, pressing both palms flat against the surface of the slab, running his fingers along the edges as though there were something to find — a switch, a seam, anything. The stone told him nothing. It looked the same as it always had. It felt the same. It was just a piece of rock set into a dirt floor in a falling-apart shed behind a house that barely qualified as one.
"What's going on." His voice came out barely above a whisper. "No. No, no, no—"
He started rubbing the surface with both hands, faster, pressing harder, as though he could wake it up through sheer insistence. The friction built against his palms. He felt the heat, felt the skin pulling, and kept going. His hand slipped and caught the edge of the slab, the corner biting cleanly into his palm. Blood welled up immediately, dark and slow.
He didn't look at it.
He didn't care.
Something was happening behind his eyes — a pressure building, unfamiliar and unwelcome, the kind that arrives before a person fully understands what they're feeling. Then his vision blurred and he realized, distantly, that he was crying. Not the sudden tears of a sharp moment like yesterday. These were different. They came from somewhere deeper and they didn't ask permission and they didn't stop.
He pressed his forehead to the floor of the shed, both fists against the stone, shoulders shaking with something that had no clean name. Grief, maybe. Or the particular devastation of a door slamming shut on the only way forward you'd allowed yourself to imagine.
Or something older than that. Something that had been living in this borrowed body long before he arrived in it.
The pain in his hand was real. The dirt against his face was real. But neither of them came close to the thing sitting in the center of his chest — the image of Lihua this morning, clinging to his leg, whispering about eggs like they were treasure. Xiaomei setting down her mending to get his food before he'd even asked. His mother, swollen legs and all, cooking two eggs and setting them aside because her son worked hard yesterday.
If the stone didn't open again — if that was it, one day, one trip, one stroke of impossible luck — then what?
He had a hundred and fifty yuan. Some rice. A piece of pork. And a body that couldn't haul cargo every day without eventually giving out completely.
He knew what came next. He'd inherited the memories. He knew exactly what this era looked like when it ground people down. He knew what it did to families like his.
His fist came down on the dirt beside the stone. Then again. The impact ran up his arm and he welcomed it because it was something to push against.
Was he in pain? Absolutely. Every part of him. But that pain — the hand, the chest, the burning behind his eyes — all of it was nothing. Nothing compared to what it would mean to fail them. To watch his mother's smile get smaller. To watch Lihua stop running around the house because she didn't have the energy anymore. To watch Xiaomei grow up faster than she should because someone had to.
He had come from the future. He knew things — how markets moved, what was coming, which way the wind would blow when the reforms finally arrived. That had to count for something. There had to be something he could do, some angle he hadn't seen yet, some—
He pushed himself upright, unsteady, and dragged his sleeve across his face.
Get it together, Chen Guowei.
He said it to himself the way you say something you need to believe. Flat. Direct. No room for argument.
Why are you crying. Is it going to put food on their table.
He breathed. In through the nose, slow, out through the mouth. The sorrow was still there — he could feel it pressing against his ribs like it wanted more space than he was giving it — but he packed it down. Folded it smaller. He was not going to fall apart in a shed while his mother sat twenty feet away mending clothes and pretending her legs didn't hurt.
He straightened his back. Wiped his hand on his trouser leg, leaving a smear of blood across the faded fabric. Looked at the stone one more time.
He would figure something out. He had to.
He was still pulling himself together, still arranging his face into something that wouldn't alarm anyone, when he heard it.
The door of the shed creaked.