"I Was a Literary Man in Ancient Times" tells the story of Shen Yanshu, a young modern scholar who accidentally traveled to the war-torn "Jiuzhou Warring States" and possessed the body of a sickly young man in the small border town of Yingdu. Here, seven kingdoms are divided and hundreds of schools of thought are contending. Mohism's institutions and beasts are rampant on the battlefield, Yin-Yang's astrology and fortune-telling, Confucianism uses literary spirit as a sword, but the capital of Ying is divided by warlords, and the people are in dire straits.
Relying on his unforgettable modern memory, Shen Yanshu broke the situation with his writing: he silently wrote "Sun Tzu's Art of War" to rectify the military system, copied "Tiangong Kaiwu" to innovate agricultural machinery, and pirated Li Bai's poems to shock the literary world of enemy countries. He even turned the "useless black stones" in the barren mountains of Yingdu into coke to create the first firearms camp in the other world. While other countries were still charging with chariots, improved red cannons had been set up on the city walls of Yingdu.
However, the road to rise is full of dangers:
- Jixia Academy denounced his "strange and obscene skills" and launched a literary war among hundreds of schools of thought;
- The Western Qin cavalry and Chen Bing border, eyeing the newly built "Concrete Great Wall" in Yingdu;
Shen Yanshu breaks the situation with modern thinking:
- Founded "Yingdu Daily" to control public opinion in various countries;
- Use economic warfare to empty out the enemy's granary and let Qi's salt merchants pay for the Yingdu cavalry;
- Promote the "standardized parts assembly line" in the Mohist government city, and control the lifeline of the military industry against customers.
In the war of troubled times, let's see how a scholar uses literature as a blade to build an iron-blooded empire...
