Glory of the Tang Dynasty

"Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going?" It is said that these three questions plagued Plato his entire life.

Yet, these so-called ultimate questions of Western philosophy troubled Zhang Qian, the grad school hopeful, for less than five minutes before he saw right through them.

A wolf with a coat of bluish-gray fur crept stealthily toward him through knee-high weeds.

Why on earth would there still be wolves near a university town in the twenty-first century? Zhang Qian couldn’t make sense of it. Just as, three minutes earlier, he couldn’t understand how a brief glance at his phone while walking had ended with him lost on the outskirts of campus.

But the instant he saw the wolf’s eyes, clarity struck him. If he kept pondering his identity and origins beneath this old tree, he could be quite certain that his next destination would be the wolf’s stomach!

His body jolted as if electrified, springing up from the ground. Instinctively, his left arm groped for the tree trunk behind him, while his right hand flailed desperately. “Go away, go away, get lost, get lost!” he cried, his voice trembling and pouring from his throat in a flurry. Cold sweat streamed down his forehead and temples.

“Strike to the east, jab to the west, animals don’t always need sharp teeth…” The lyrics of Joker Xue’s “Animal World” fittingly blared from his right palm.

Huawei’s convenience was no joke—its shake-to-play-music feature worked exactly as advertised. But at this moment, Zhang Qian would have preferred to be holding a ceramic-encase