A CRACK IN THE AGES
241 Words
Yuheng awoke gasping beneath a sky he did not recognize.
It was dawn, pale gold spilling across unfamiliar rooftops. The air smelled clean—too clean for a battlefield. He lay on cold stone, heart racing, fingers trembling as he pressed a hand to his chest.
No wound.
No blood.
No pain.
Instead, there was a faint, burning mark at his wrist, shaped like a broken hourglass.
Time had not merely spared him.
It had taken him.
Fragments came slowly. He learned that he was no longer in the final year of the Liang Dynasty—but two hundred years earlier, during its golden age, when the empire was strong and the royal family untouched by decay.
And worse—
He was still a prince.
Shen Yuheng existed here too. Younger. Untainted. Alive.
Yet the memories of betrayal, death, and ruin clung to him like a shadow. At night, he dreamed of walls collapsing and woke with laughter caught painfully in his throat.
If time had brought him back, it was not for mercy.
It was for a reason.
He met Xu Lan by accident.
Or perhaps fate was simply done pretending to be subtle.
Xu Lan was the second son of Marquis Xu, a noble house famed not for military might, but for scholars, artists, and court historians. He wore soft robes the color of spring clouds, his hair tied with a simple jade pin. His face was… unfairly pretty.
- Writer
