After he mentioned it, I once again felt a burning pain on my back. The intense fighting just now had made me forget the pain, but now it hit me with full force. I squatted on the ground and let David Clark bandage my wound. I clearly heard a long sigh of relief when they uncovered my back and exposed the wound, as if a huge weight had been lifted. I was a little moved. “It’s not too serious, right?” I asked. David Clark pressed on my wound. “It’s just flesh,” he said. “What are you doing?” I jumped up from the pain. Seeing the expressions on their faces, I understood. “Did you discover something? Don’t rush to bandage me, I can handle it. Tell me what’s going on?”

“We must have experienced something strange. You might already be mentally prepared, but we don’t know how to tell you... But we’re still not sure... It’s unbelievable... We might have actually gone back to the Han dynasty. Do you believe it?”

“Are you kidding me? That’s what those bandits said, and you believe them?”

“If you add in the survivors...” said David Clark.

“If you add in the fact that we suddenly went from Shennongjia to Mount Tai...” said William Bennett.

“If you add in that there are no tourists on Mount Tai during peak season, and that there’s no Diamond Sutra carved in Jinshiyu, and that there’s no signal on our phones or GPS, and that there are so many corpses, and that we fought at the mountain pass for so long without any police interference. Plus, they’re all wearing strange costumes... Of course, if you add in thirty thousand taels of gold and silver, wouldn’t that make it even more convincing? In this day and age, who would travel with so much gold and not worry about the police confiscating it? And if someone tried to scam us with that much gold, wouldn’t the cost be way too high?”

“Time travel? Impossible. Have you read too many fantasy novels? According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, only if an object moves faster than the speed of light can it go back in time. But as an object approaches the speed of light, its mass becomes infinite. That infinite mass would have crushed your body to dust long ago. According to this theory, maybe you could travel through time, but after that you’d only be a pile of massless photons. As an individual, you definitely wouldn’t exist anymore. This is science, not fantasy.”

“I know this might not explain it, but did you forget the bleeding points on our bodies when we woke up? That shows our bodies were indeed compressed. Of course, theoretically, if we traveled at the speed of light, the compression would be unimaginable, but haven’t you noticed we’re much stronger than before? Just now, you charged with all your might and sent both man and horse flying. With one slash, you almost cut a person in half. Don’t you think that’s strange? I think maybe our bodies were modified during the transfer, or maybe the cave we accidentally fell into was a special time tunnel that protected us from disappearing during time travel. Who knows what the real reason is. But it seems only this explanation makes sense of everything now,” Brian Cooper said to me.

A time tunnel?!

Chapter One: Back to the Three Kingdoms

Section Four: I Am Liu Bei

“Tell me what you all found out,” I said to them after a long silence.

As they all started talking at once, I gradually sorted out my thoughts. It turned out that from the two survivors, they learned that it was now the third year of Guanghe during Emperor Ling of Han’s reign, and that the man in the tall hat and wide robe was a wealthy merchant from Zhongmou, with the rest being his servants. They had planned to go to Xuzhou to purchase some goods, but as soon as they crossed the Yellow River, they were targeted by a group of bandits. Fortunately, they happened to meet a traveling scholar—the young man who fought on horseback until the end. With his help, they fought and retreated, hoping to take refuge in Mount Tai. If they could reach the mountain pass first, they could hold out for a few days and wait for rescue. However, because they hesitated at the pass, the bandits caught up with them.

Subsequent interrogation of several bandits confirmed that the merchant was at least telling the truth about one thing—this era was definitely not the one we lived in. Also, everyone here spoke in classical Chinese, even the barely literate bandits, which explained why I couldn’t understand what they were saying at first.

“Now, there’s only one last thing to verify,” they turned their eyes to the carriage. “If someone is carrying thirty thousand taels of gold to scam you, then the cost of such a deception would be too high—no one would play such a joke.”

I immediately understood. A wealthy merchant going out to buy goods would definitely carry a huge amount of cash, and it was precisely this that attracted the bandits. As long as we checked the merchant’s luggage, we’d know the truth. After all, in our time, the law wouldn’t allow anyone to carry so much gold and silver, and the police wouldn’t allow it either. There have even been cases where police confiscated and divided up a jeweler’s gold, leading to lawsuits. So, no film crew would be foolish enough to bring so much gold and silver just to mess with us.

We found the luggage on the carriage: two wicker trunks, each 1.2 meters long and 40 centimeters wide, and a long box 20 centimeters wide and 80 centimeters long, all locked with brass locks. “Did you get the key?” I asked. “The merchant said the key is with the servant he sent for help,” answered Brian Cooper. I swung my knife and chopped off the brass lock.

“Don’t! That’s an antique,” said William Bennett, looking heartbroken.