Thunder roared through the rainy night.
Laying his head on the desk, Yang Siming woke from his deep slumber.
Lifting his head and looking around, the confusion gradually faded from his eyes, replaced by a complex smile on his young face.
"I clocked out quite early today, huh."
Before losing consciousness, he was still in the northern underground ruins of Hashimiyeh, documenting images of precious clay tablets.
However, due to an unexpected earthquake, the collapsing ground and debris had completely buried him.
Theoretically already a dead man, even if blessed by the heavens,
he should be slowly waking up in a hospital ward.
So what was this about sleeping on a desk?
"Near-death hallucination? Shock-induced mental disorder?"
"Third Kind encounter?"
"Or could it be... transmigration?"
Various speculations popped one after another in his mind.
As a young man living in the 21st century, his ability to accept facts was quite strong.
Feeling no apparent issues with his body, Yang Siming slowly rose from his chair and took a closer look around.
The moderately sized room was old but not dirty.
A row of upright wardrobes taller than a person and a dressing mirror.
A framed portrait of a Caucasian.
An old, brown-black floor clock with peeling paint stood at the edge of the room.
A patch-up fabric sofa.
His gaze firmly locked onto the candle on the desk, specifically at the base of its flame.
In front of the window, the uneven dim candlelight struggled to push away the darkness.
The burnt wick rested on the edge of the flame, which only made the already difficult light even more so.
—It was an extremely crude candle.
So crude that it made the man in front of the candle realize that he truly had transmigrated.
Unlike the mass-produced items from modern factories, the candle before him had a murky color and a rough shape, its light dim and black smoke conspicuously evident, and the air even carried the distinctive smell of burning animal fat.
And most importantly—
—the wick of this candle!
Just as he had immediately noticed.
Beneath the yellow heart of the flame lay a burnt but not entirely consumed blackened cotton thread.
It wasn't the improved version made of three twisted strands!
That was common knowledge.
Belonging to the history of Earth's humans—
As early as the early 19th century, the tongue-twisting Frenchman Jean Baptiste Chancel discovered the problem with single-thread wicks burning inefficiently and hence improved it into a version made of three twisted strands; around the same period, the French chemist Michel Eugene Chevreul abandoned animal fats and turned to chemical materials for making candles.
From that time, the candles on the world, or rather on Earth, gradually abandoned the old and backward structure.
Perhaps some remote areas still utilized such backward products.
But in a regular convenience store, one definitely couldn't buy this kind of item.
This candle, undoubtedly made by hanging a cotton thread on a stick and repeatedly soaking it in animal fat using old-fashioned mechanical operations, had almost entirely disappeared in the 21st century!
"So I've also caught up with the trend of transmigration, huh?"
After a few breaths, Yang Siming decisively pulled over the candle along with its stand to take a closer look.
—it was the real deal.
Leaning back in his chair, his gaze then shifted to an open notebook in front of him.
Other than the unrecognizable characters of a parallel world on the left side of the paper, most of the contents were submerged in ink stains.
When he had just awakened, the notebook had been pressed under his hand.
Extending both hands, smudges of ink identical to those in the notebook indeed stained his right palm; large smears even spread to the center of his palm, while a patch of fair skin stood out amidst the dark ink near the edge of his hand.
The joints were hidden and the fingers long, without calluses and with tender skin.
—it was completely different from his own once rough, yellow palms.
Turning sideways, Yang Siming slouched in his chair and peered at his reflection in the mirror behind him.
His slightly messy blond hair fell to his shoulders, and features warm as early winter sun remained gentle yet chiseled, especially the depths of his gray eyes, sculpted like Athena's, which not even the dim room could hide.
He couldn't help but complain,
"What a lady-killer this is!"
With such handsome features, merely being left on the street for an hour could easily garner at least 20 WeChat contacts.
This transmigration was top-notch...
A young handsome face, hands never labored; he most likely had transmigrated into someone whose life was untroubled simply by virtue of status and identity.
Having confirmed the transmigration and his new body, new problems followed.
The notebook before him was filled with text he had never seen.
Similarly, he was probably clueless about this world's language.
Considering his appearance and the room's furnishings, it seemed the setting could tentatively be locked into before the explosion of human societal productivity.
If the customs of this world were like the room's decor, able to align with those on Earth, those unique local customs would indeed be interesting.
Later, facing his own "amnesia," if they bring on bloodletting therapy, an exorcism by a priest, or even the most unfortunate BBQ witch-burning special, he certainly wouldn't survive.
Even if he wanted to argue, he couldn't handle it with the language barrier.
Thinking this, his main focus shifted toward the content of the notebook before him.
Wouldn't it be great if he could understand the words on it?
Are transmigrations these days this irresponsible?
No memory inheritance, no system assistance, not even comprehensible language; this was exceedingly unfriendly for average people!
Mulling over his difficult future and leaning back in his chair, Yang Siming subconsciously pressed his finger on the text of the notebook, slowly moving across it with his gaze.
This was a habitual gesture while reading books.
Pressing the fingers on the text under his gaze induced a good sensation of reading.
Even if he couldn't grasp its true meaning.
Although he couldn't understand the text, Yang Siming started to flip through it; under the current circumstances, even finding some doodles in the notebook would be better than continuing to know nothing.
However, as he continued to flip through, the clues he found were not satisfying.
The content in the notebook seemed to be some kind of alphabet but completely unlike any language he knew.
Arabic, Greek, Syriac, Cyrillic...
Apart from the universally seen character 'O,' no other characters matched.
Complete ignorance, a complete dead end!
If he didn't find something soon, his fate was nearly sealed.