Chapter Three: The Art of Aging Bronze
The eleventh day brought unexpected visitors.
Lin Zefang was hunched over his makeshift furnace, carefully pouring molten bronze into the clay mold, when he heard footsteps echoing down the prison corridor. Not the usual shuffle of the jailer, but the crisp click of official boots. Multiple pairs.
He didn't look up. The pour required absolute concentration—one tremor of the hand and three days of work would pool uselessly on the stone floor.
The cell door creaked open.
"Impressive," came a woman's voice, dry as autumn leaves. "Most men would have given up after the first failure."
Lin Zefang steadied the crucible and completed the pour. Only then did he turn to face his visitors.
Empress Dowager Xiao stood at the threshold, flanked by two palace guards. She wore simpler robes than at the execution ground, dark blue silk embroidered with silver clouds. Her face was a map of wrinkles, but her eyes were sharp as obsidian blades.
"Your Majesty." Lin Zefang bowed, acutely aware of the coal dust covering his face and the smell of burnt hair from his singed eyebrows. "Forgive this humble prisoner's appearance."
"Spare me the false modesty." The Dowager stepped into the cell, her gaze sweeping over the failed castings piled in the corner. She picked up one of the broken bronzes, running her finger along its rough surface. "Warden Han reports you've destroyed eight molds. He thinks you're stalling for time."
"Warden Han doesn't understand the complexity of ancient metallurgy."
"And you do?" She set down the bronze with a soft clink. "Tell me, Lin Zefang, where exactly did you study bronze casting? Which master taught you?"
Lin Zefang's mind raced. The original owner of this body had been a common swindler, with no formal training in anything. "No master taught me, Your Majesty. I learned from the bronzes themselves."
The Dowager's eyebrow arched.
"When you spend years examining ancient artifacts," Lin Zefang continued, warming to his improvised story, "handling them, studying their weight and texture, you begin to understand the hands that made them. Every mark, every flaw tells a story. I simply... listened."
"Poetic." The Dowager's tone suggested she wasn't buying it. "Show me what you've learned."
She settled onto the wooden stool near the desk, her guards standing rigid on either side. Lin Zefang had no choice but to approach the freshly poured mold.
"The bronze needs twelve hours to cool completely. But I can show Your Majesty the design."
He unrolled the parchment on the desk. Over the past ten days, his sketch had evolved from a rough outline into a detailed technical drawing. The cauldron's form was elegant yet primitive—four legs, two loop handles, a rounded belly tapering to a flat base. The surface was covered in intricate patterns he'd painstakingly designed to look ancient: coiling dragons, stylized clouds, geometric borders.
The Dowager leaned forward, studying the drawing. Her silence stretched long enough for Lin Zefang's palms to start sweating.
"The inscription," she finally said, pointing to the characters running along the rim. "What does it say?"
Lin Zefang had spent two sleepless nights composing this text, blending archaic grammar with fabricated history: "Yu conquered the floods, united nine provinces, cast nine cauldrons. Let bronze speak of mountains and rivers, let future generations remember the sage's virtue."
He recited it in the formal classical style, adding weight to each character.
The Dowager's expression remained unreadable. "And you claim this matches the original nine cauldrons?"
"The style matches descriptions from the Bamboo Annals and the Records of the Grand Historian, Your Majesty. Of course, no one alive has seen the real vessels..."
"Which makes your version as valid as any other." The Dowager stood abruptly. "Or as false as any other. You're clever, Lin Zefang. Too clever, perhaps."
She walked to the furnace, gazing at the cooling mold. "Warden Han also reports you've requested strange materials. Copper sulfate, salt acids, vinegar by the jar. What are these for?"
Here it was—the dangerous question. Lin Zefang chose his words carefully.
"Your Majesty, a bronze vessel fresh from the mold looks nothing like an ancient artifact. True antiques develop a patina over centuries—layers of oxidation, mineral deposits, earth stains. Without these signs of age, even a perfect reproduction would be dismissed as a fake."
"So you plan to... make it look old?"
"Not make it look old, Your Majesty. Make it genuinely aged—just much faster than nature would."
The Dowager turned to face him fully, and Lin Zefang saw something flicker in her eyes. Not anger, but something more dangerous: interest.
"How?"
This was the gamble. Lin Zefang took a breath. "The copper sulfate creates copper carbonate when mixed with moisture and buried in earth—that's the green patina Your Majesty has seen on ancient bronzes. Salt acid accelerates corrosion in specific patterns. Vinegar softens the metal's surface to accept mineral deposits. Combined with controlled exposure to smoke, soil, and time—"
"How much time?"
"Six weeks, if the conditions are right."
The Dowager was silent for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice was softer, almost conspiratorial. "You're not just a forger, are you? You understand the very nature of authenticity—that it's not about what something is, but what people believe it to be."
Lin Zefang met her gaze steadily. "I understand that Your Majesty needs something people will believe in."
The corner of the Dowager's mouth twitched—not quite a smile. "Two months remain of your deadline. Warden Han will provide whatever materials you need. But hear this, Lin Zefang: if you're lying, if this is an elaborate ruse to buy time, I won't simply execute you. I'll make an example that will be remembered for generations."
"This prisoner understands."
The Dowager moved toward the door, then paused. "One more thing. Prime Minister Han Qingyuan requests an audience with you tomorrow."
Lin Zefang's blood went cold. The prime minister—the Dowager's chief political rival, the man who wanted to expose her reliance on "auspicious signs" as desperate superstition.
"May I ask... why?"
"He claims he wants to verify the legitimacy of this project. Really, he's looking for evidence of fraud to present at court." The Dowager's smile was thin and sharp. "Don't disappoint me, forger. I've invested considerable political capital in your survival."
She swept out, her guards following. The cell door clanged shut.
Lin Zefang stood frozen for several heartbeats, then exhaled slowly. He walked to the cooling mold and gently tapped it. The clay was still hot, but the bronze inside would be solidifying, taking its final shape.
Tomorrow he would face the prime minister—a man whose entire strategy depended on proving Lin Zefang was a charlatan.
He needed the bronze to be perfect.
He needed the aging process to be flawless.
But most of all, he needed a story so compelling, so rich with fabricated detail, that even the skeptical prime minister would hesitate to call it false.
Lin Zefang returned to his desk and pulled out a fresh sheet of parchment. He began writing:
"The First Excavation Account: On the Discovery of the Central Province Cauldron"
"In the third year of Jinghe, this humble scholar journeyed to Mount Song seeking ancient texts. Heavy rains caused a landslide, revealing a cave sealed for millennia..."
His brush moved steadily across the paper, weaving lies with the precision of a master craftsman. Each sentence was carefully constructed to be verifiable in spirit but impossible to disprove in fact. Vague geographical details. References to lost texts. Atmospheric descriptions that felt authentic.
This was the real art of forgery—not the casting of bronze, but the casting of belief.
By the time the jailer brought evening rice, Lin Zefang had filled six pages with his fictional excavation account. He'd added sketches of the "cave entrance," diagrams of how the cauldron was positioned, even notes about the surrounding pottery shards and jade fragments.
None of it was real. All of it would be believed.
He ate the cold rice mechanically, his mind already planning the next scene of his performance. The prime minister would come with experts—metallurgists, historians, perhaps Confucian scholars. He would need to dazzle them not with perfection, but with authentic imperfection. Real ancient bronzes had casting flaws, wear patterns, repairs from antiquity.
His forgery would need all of these.
Lin Zefang smiled grimly. In his old life, in the 21st century, he'd once restored a Han dynasty bronze that had been "repaired" in the Tang dynasty with slightly different alloy. That repair itself had become historically valuable—proof of the object's continuous cultural importance.
What if he cast his Xia dynasty cauldron with a deliberate flaw, then "repaired" it using Shang dynasty techniques? He could create layers of fake history, each authenticating the other.
The more he thought about it, the more beautiful the deception became.
He was no longer just making a fake ancient artifact.
He was creating an entire fake archaeology.
The oil lamp burned low. Outside, the night watch drum sounded midnight. Lin Zefang finally set down his brush and lay on the wooden bed, staring at the shadows dancing on the ceiling.
Tomorrow he would meet the man who wanted him dead.
But tonight, he would dream of green patinas blooming across bronze, of mineral deposits forming in precisely calculated patterns, of a fake cauldron so perfect in its imperfection that history itself would bend to accommodate it.
In the darkness, Lin Zefang's smile was the smile of a man who understood something fundamental:
The past was only ever what someone in the present claimed it to be.
And right now, that someone was him.