[When a Lie-Flat Youth Gets His Hands on a 3-Cubic-Meter Cheat Space, Storing Cornmeal in a Famine Becomes His Least Useful Golden Finger]
In the autumn of 1961, overworked office drone Lin Zhaoyang opened his eyes after staying up all night revising a proposal and found himself a Grade Three fitter at a steel mill. The moment the jade pendant he carried cracked, he discovered that at three in the morning every Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday, he could open a 3-cubic-meter stasis space that couldn't preserve freshness. In an era when cabbages had to be stored in cellars and grain coupons could mean the difference between life and death, this ability was practically useless.
That was until he saw a Grade Eight worker dance across a file with 0.01-millimeter precision, discovered precision German bearings smashed to pieces in a courtyard cellar, and heard an engineer reciting Taylor equations in Russian while waiting in line at the grain station. When the storm came, he used his space to hide not food but the banned book Principles of Mechanical Engineering. When the black market thrived, he resold not grain coupons but Model 204 bearings smuggled out of the Luoyang Bearing Factory. While everyone chased the myth of becoming a ten-thousand-yuan household, he converted a workshop in the courtyard and used a 1950s lathe to build the country's first domestically made CNC machine.
Looking back on his journey after transmigrating, from secretly stashing cornmeal to safeguarding the spark of industry, from passively scraping by to actively breaking through. When Su Xiaoyun showed him two plane tickets for studying abroad on the night before she left, he pointed to the gears of the machine tool beneath the courtyard eaves. "This is my parallel world."
