Floresceram Aquele Ano de 1981

“If, in our lives, we have never discovered anyone who has traveled back from the future, it means that humanity must have gone extinct before inventing the time machine.” — Stephen Hawking.

Li Ye lowered his head and stared blankly at the battered desk before him, his gaze unmoving for a long while.

It was a double student desk, its surface covered with marks clearly carved by human hands. The shapes of the scratches were chaotic, stained with ink from different students and different eras, the accumulated layers blending into a swirl of colors, suffused with the spirit of abstract art, as if they held the idle memories of countless youthful students.

On the desk lay an exam paper—not the mechanically printed kind, but one Li Ye had only heard about from his parents: a mimeographed test.

A mimeograph test was made by first inscribing words onto thin wax paper with a metal stylus, then using a hand-cranked mimeograph machine to press ink through the wax and onto the pages beneath. The result was a paper with rough workmanship and easily smudged ink, but it was cheap and convenient, making it wildly popular in the 1980s.

That’s right, the 1980s.

Li Ye slowly lifted his head to gaze at the portrait of a leader hanging above the blackboard, brimming with the aura of the era, still unable to believe his soul had crossed into a parallel world in 1981, becoming a repeat high school student with the same name.

Yellowed walls, a faded blackboard, battered desks, and a classroom full of students who looked like they’d just walked out of t