When I was a kid, my father always told me stories about history to delight me, which is one of his few virtues. He used to talk about the Spring and Autumn period and the Warring States period, Rome, the Crusades, as well as countless heroes and their triumphs and achievements. He was so good at storytelling that I was hooked by history. It is like an attractive fiction, in which there are impassioned revolutions, the wars of courage and wisdom, the honor rewarded by the victory, as well as the elegy of decline. Since then, history fascinates me. To me, it is romantic, dramatic, and inspiring, and I often dreamed of becoming historical figures.
 
Until one day.
 
Believe it or not, my knowledge about history is not only absorbed from books but also learned in computer games. For example, I gotta say, Assassin's Creed is really a great masterpiece, one that is exciting and stimulating and can take you to immersive historical scenes.
 
On that day, I climbed up to the top of the Palace of Versailles, watching the tsunami of the French Revolution roaring forward amid the smoke of gunpowder. I witnessed thousands of people battled. The blasters of guns and cannons were everywhere. The field was littered with corpses. So many lives had lost and the survived were crying and screeching.
 
I found myself in hell.
 
I saw the loudly dressed Queen Marie Antoinette, standing on the balcony, open her arms to the wrathful revolutionary army. Some blamed the outburst of the French Revolution on her, because her extremely extravagant and luxurious life exhausted the fortune of France. However, such censure is not entirely impartial, resembling the typical reproach in traditional Chinese history that attributes the fall of the Shang Dynasty all to the ‘abominable’ Su Daji（苏妲己）, or the end of the prosperity of mid-Tang Dynasty to the ‘dissipated’ Yang Yuhuan（杨玉环）. It was the luxurious lifestyle of monarchs and the entire patriciate and the failure of some national policies, such as the huge debt incurred in supporting the American Revolutionary War, which devoured this great power.
 
She led the fashion trend for centuries; she stood alone, in front of the Palace of Versailles, against the revolutionary army; she apologized for unintentionally stepping on the foot of the executioner, retaining her dignity as a noble in her last moments on the guillotine. But still, the people irritated by the famine and social unjustness would not pity this beautiful but ridiculous woman.
 
I watched her beheaded with Louis XVI, in the game. Their heads made the basket full, together with those belonging to other people, some of whom were noble, some were not. Face rubbing with face, they got along well with each other intimately and equally, finally. The gaps between classes were filled or bridged by blood and death. The masses of carnival trampled on the blood, shouting and cursing, like furious beasts. At that moment, the square became a giant forge, in which life and death, civilization and barbarism, creation and destruction were cast.
 
I was astonished by what I saw in the game, and wondered all these scenes even really existed in history? In the long river of human history, will we again fall into that bloody whirlpool? I have no idea, but while the romance and passion that history once granted me are quietly fading away, the tough faith learned from the lessons of history remains.
 
George R. R. Martin, in his epic book A Song of Ice and Fire, said “The history of death is written in ink, while the history of life is written in blood”. But I hope that one day, there would also be no bloodshed in the history of life. And maybe this is more than just hope, but the faith of our era and all the future generations.