He had written it from memory.
Yueguang did not know, afterward, whether he had finished. He knew the cold. He knew the moment his hand was still moving and then was not — the interval between action and absence that twelve years of study had taught him was the worst kind of gap in a historical record. The kind that meant everything that came after was contingent on what had happened in that space.
He had not been there to see what happened in that space. He had simply stopped being there.
The apartment was wrong in a way it had been wrong before, and worse.
He registered the darkness first. Not the darkness of a screen in sleep mode — the darkness of a screen that had been decided for. The kind of silence that followed something purposeful. On the desk, between what had been a hard drive and what he was still in the process of understanding, was a piece of metal that he had not left there.
It was very old. He knew its shape without needing to think. He had drawn something like it once, from a museum reproduction, in a footnote that had taken him two weeks to verify.
He had not put it on his desk. He had not been in his apartment when it arrived.
Chapter Eight of Tales of Alive — 纪真然 is now live on WebNovel and Royal Road.
The Shards of Home
About this chapter
Chapter Eight brings Lü Yueguang back to the apartment he has been unable to fully inhabit for weeks. The crossings have always cost something — broken objects, marks on his body, the specific wrongness of re-entering a space that held no record of where he had been. But this time the accounting has shifted. The destruction is more deliberate. And what was left on his desk is not something that belongs to him.
The Shards of Home is a chapter about thresholds reconsidered — about what it means when the past stops being passive and begins to leave evidence.
About Tales of Alive
Tales of Alive — 纪真然 is a historical novel by 吕恩豪, set between contemporary Shenzhen and Han Dynasty China. Book One follows a man trained to read the past who finds himself forced to live inside it. New chapters publish every Sunday on WebNovel and Royal Road. Every court session, every meal, every execution has a source. What the author cannot prove is marked clearly. The rest, they will stand behind.
Continue reading
- Chapter One — The Weight of Plastic and Dust
- Chapter Two — The Vessel of Wrath
- Chapter Three — The Weight of the Bargain
- Chapter Four — The Echo of the Breaking
- Chapter Five — The Bureaucrat’s Halberd
- Chapter Six — The Long March
- Chapter Seven — The River of Rot
- Chapter Nine — The Ghost in the Glass
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