From Construction Worker to Master Craftsman of a Great Nation

In 2009, after failing the high school entrance exam, Ren Sheng clutched his middle school textbooks and squeezed onto a green train. Mud from the threshing ground back home still clung to his trouser cuffs. Who could have guessed that this laborer, who bent wire into fish spears at construction sites, would meet Jing Yi in an unfinished building, hauling bricks with a higher mathematics textbook tucked under his arm, and draw a coordinate system on the concrete floor that would change their fates?

From an arithmetic notebook covered in gears sketched on calendar paper, to CAD drawings on an old computer in the library; from designing nonslip mechanical joints for a coworker with a broken leg, to weaving corrosion-resistant knee pads from coconut fiber for fishermen in the South China Sea, Ren Sheng spends ten years turning construction-site calluses into measurements on blueprints, and the clatter of sewing machines and roar of cement mixers into a harmony of machines and life. When he carries a dandelion lamp embroidered by an old woman from a fishing village into the laboratory, bringing the wisdom of mending fishing nets into a deep-sea submersible, the days when people declared he was "not cut out for studying" become the most resilient creases on the blueprint of his fate.

This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.