1.
My name is Mộ Dung Nguyệt. I’m an archaeology major at Peking University, and I’m also a popular online streamer.
In my spare time, I often livestream antique appraisals online to earn a little extra spending money.
A few days ago, I happened to connect with top star Chu Thịnh and discovered that his grandmother was a thousand-year-old corpse. Thanks to that, my livestream gained over a million followers in a single night.
Some of the people who watched my livestream that night became die-hard fans, while others thought it was just a publicity stunt. Every day, the two sides battled it out in my livestream chat, making it incredibly lively.
Tonight, I was livestreaming as usual when the connection window suddenly flickered. Then a pale hand appeared on the screen.
A deep, hoarse voice came through.
“I hear you can tell how old anything is. Come take a look and tell me what era this hand is from.”
The bones of the hand were well-proportioned, and its fingers long and slender, but the skin was deathly pale, giving it an eerie, sickly look.
The chat erupted at once.
【Whoa! Please tell me it’s not another corpse!】
【If a zombie actually seeks out the streamer, I’m declaring Mộ Dung Nguyệt my GOAT.*】
*GOAT: Greatest of all time.
【Are you all idiots? That looks so fake. How does the streamer find so many extras? She’s even acting herself.】
I stared at the hand on the screen, then calmly nodded.
“Tap the purchase button.”
I’d always charged for an appraisal upfront during my livestreams. The person tapped the yellow shopping cart icon in the lower-left corner, then suddenly shouted.
“Wasn’t it 800 yuan per appraisal last month? Why is it 1,800 yuan now?”
“Eight hundred was the price when I had only a thousand followers. Look at how many people are watching now. How can the price be the same?”
I let out an impatient snort.
“Enough talk. Are you going ahead or not? There are plenty of people waiting in line.”
The other person froze, then angrily tapped the purchase button and said:
“Fine! If you can’t identify the era, refund me!”
The transaction-success notification appeared in the lower-left corner. I glanced at the crescent-shaped scar on the hand’s index finger and replied with a sneer:
“Surname: Tôn. Born in 2004.”
2.
“Ha ha ha! Mộ Dung Nguyệt, you’re awful. I didn’t think you’d recognize me so quickly.”
The camera shifted. The person had turned off the voice changer and filter, revealing a lively, delicate face on the screen. It was my high school classmate, Tôn Khả Khả.
Tôn Khả Khả had been the prettiest girl at my old high school. She was beautiful and rich, and now she was an online celebrity too.
Before I could say a word, she was already chattering away in front of the camera.
“Hi, everyone! I’m Tôn Khả Khả, Mộ Dung Nguyệt’s high school classmate. I can’t believe she used to be so plain in high school, but now she’s famous and has a huge fan base!”
“Her family wasn’t well-off at all. Her parents divorced when she was little, and her grandfather even went to prison. I’m really happy for her, seeing how successful she is now.”
Hearing her mention my grandfather, I frowned in displeasure.
“The appraisal’s done. If there’s nothing else, end the connection.”
【What’s going on? The streamer’s grandfather went to prison? Maybe he was a con artist and got arrested.】
【The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. The streamer must be a bad person too. This is definitely a publicity stunt.】
【Grandpa was a con man, and the granddaughter’s a crook. That’s hilarious.】
The chat filled with people questioning who I really was. I was about to end the connection when Tô Khả Khả quickly tapped to purchase another appraisal.
“Why so serious? You’re famous now, so you look down on me, huh? Can’t an old classmate catch up with you?”
“Hey! I really do want you to appraise something for me. Can you tell me how much these embroidered shoes are worth?”
Tôn Khả Khả took a pair of red embroidered shoes out of her designer handbag and set them in front of the camera.
“Hmm…”
My eyes lit up. I pushed my glasses up the bridge of my nose and studied the shoe on the screen intently.
I hadn’t wanted to keep talking to Tôn Khả Khả, but I was an antiques fanatic. Once I saw something, I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
And this shoe really was a rare find.
“These are multicolored silk shoes from the early Ming dynasty.”
Multicolored shoes, also known as color-blocked shoes, were all monochrome before the Song dynasty. It wasn’t until the Xuanhe era near the end of the Southern Song that Lu You wrote in Notes from the Laoxue Studio: “Women’s shoes with two-colored soles are also called ‘crossed wrong.’”
Women in ancient feudal society had very limited freedom. To some extent, a pair of multicolored shoes represented a rebellion against oppressive conventions. Women quickly embraced them, and the style spread throughout the country.
After the Southern Song, the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties took the style a step further, developing many more designs that combined multiple colors.
The pair in Tôn Khả Khả’s hands was also multicolored, combining three shades of red: deep red, peach red, and pale red. They were embroidered with lotus-pink clouds; the colors were dazzlingly vivid, and the workmanship was exceptionally fine.
3.
“Pfft— Ha ha ha—”
“Take another good look. Are these really from the Ming dynasty?”
Tô Khả Khả tried to hold back her laughter as she brought the shoes closer to the screen.
“Look closely again. Maybe you just got it wrong.”
“I’m not mistaken. Look at the pattern. That’s looped-braid embroidery, found only in the Ming and Yuan dynasties. The technique is nearly lost, so very few people know about it.”
“What’s more, foot-binding became widespread in the early Yuan. The country fell into chaos at the end of the Yuan, so far fewer people bound their feet. It wasn’t until the Ming court was established and things stabilized that the practice became widespread again. These shoes fit a natural, unbound foot, so they could only have appeared in the late Yuan or early Ming.”
【The streamer’s amazing!】
【Exactly! She knows so much history. And those embroidered shoes are so exquisite—you can tell at a glance they weren’t made in modern times.】
【Exactly! Those things were made by her grandfather, not by her. Besides, we don’t even know why he went in there. Maybe he just got drunk and got into a fight or something. Don’t wrong the man.】
After I said that, more people in the chat started taking my side. Tôn Khả Khả puffed out her cheeks, her shoulders trembling as if she were trying to hold back a laugh.
“Then, Ms. Mộ Dung Nguyệt, just how much are these precious shoes worth?”
I gave a light cough and put on a serious expression.
“More than three years. Something like this is something you can only hope for, not obtain!”
“Three years of what—?”
The smile froze on Tôn Khả Khả’s face. Looking baffled, she asked,
“What are you talking about? I’m asking how much they’re worth!”
“I mean more than three years. If you’re trying to profit from them, you could get a sentence of three years or more. These shoes clearly look like they were just excavated. Turn them in now, and hurry up and confess.”
The chat erupted.
【The streamer is so cool!】
【This is so exciting. After watching antique appraisal livestreams so many times, I finally get to see something like this happen.】
【I know this Khả Khả girl. Her family’s really rich, so she probably wouldn’t buy antiques stolen from a tomb. I bet she got scammed.】
【Scammed or not, so many people have seen this now. She definitely has to turn them over to the authorities.】
4.
Tôn Khả Khả stared at the chat for a long while before finally reacting. But, contrary to my expectations, she clapped her hands and burst out laughing.
“I seriously can’t hold it in. You’re hilarious, Mộ Dung Nguyệt—I’m laughing so hard my stomach hurts!”
“Ha ha ha, oh my—What Ming dynasty, what tomb raiding? These are my sister-in-law’s shoes, you silly old thing! She just took them off!”
“What? That’s impossible!”
As I frowned in surprise, the chat exploded.
【I’m dead—how did she get exposed?!】
【Who was just saying she was an expert? Feeling embarrassed now?】
【And she said the embroidery was so exquisite it couldn’t be faked nowadays, ha ha ha—How much did the streamer pay you?】
【Then why don’t you say Tôn Khả Khả is making this up? She obviously wouldn’t dare admit these are illegal goods!】
【Exactly. Mộ Dung Nguyệt explained it so thoroughly. How could she have gotten it wrong? Tô Khả Khả is definitely lying!】
【Give it a rest! Mộ Dung Nguyệt is the one who got exposed and won’t admit it. Get lost, paid trolls!】
The chat was in total chaos, but I focused on the shoes on the screen once more and shook my head firmly.
“There’s absolutely no way. These shoes are definitely antiques that were excavated not long ago.”
“The woven material may be similar, but it would still oxidize in a tomb. There’s only one way they could have been preserved this well.”
“They were soaked in water!”
There is a particular kind of corpse called a waterlogged mummy. In ancient times, the body was soaked in a specially prepared coffin liquid, then sealed inside and buried. Because the body was so well preserved, the skin remained elastic and the joints could still move.
The most famous such mummy is Lady Xin Zhui, from the Mawangdui tomb in Changsha. They say she still looked as she had in life when she was first unearthed, making her the best-preserved female mummy ever discovered.
*Mawangdui in Changsha: An archaeological site in China.
This kind of corpse has one distinctive trait: over time, it secretes corpse wax, which dissolves into the specially prepared coffin liquid.
“Look at your shoes. The threads on them gleam with a glossy sheen—that’s from the wax they secreted! The wax can preserve the shoes very well, but of course they’ll still oxidize before long.”
“So these were definitely dug out of a tomb no more than three days ago!”