The Electrician's Adventures: Introduction and Contents
[Introduction: Undercurrents]
In the height of summer in 1995, cicadas shrilled through the battered tin roof. Clutching his admission letter to Jingqu No. 1 High School, the boy Chen Xiao sprinted thirty li along a mountain road in the pouring rain. By the time mud caked his trouser legs, he finally saw his parents crouched beneath a kerosene lamp, mending fishing nets, and his younger sister curled up in a corner with a high fever. The instant the sheet of paper, still fragrant with fresh ink, was swallowed by the cooking fire, he heard a sharp crack like ice splitting from deep within his bones.
Twenty years later, in front of the giant screen at the dispatch command center, Chen Xiao, chief expert at the SD Power Grid, took off his smart AR glasses. A piercing alarm suddenly sounded behind him. The fault waveform was an exact match for the one from 1998, the incident that had caused the first major mistake of his life. He clutched the old injury in his left arm as it throbbed violently, but then caught sight on the surveillance screen of his first love, missing for five years, standing beneath a 220-kilovolt disconnect switch...
