After pulling three all-nighters to finish her blueprints, Meng Xingruo drops dead. When she opens her eyes again, she's the useless third young lady of the Meng household, hated by everyone. Only her mad, rambling concubine holds her and cries, “My daughter isn't a demon! She's a star fallen from the sky when it cracked!” Looking at the leaky, dilapidated courtyard, Meng Xingruo smiles. “Now this is right up my alley.” She improves rammed earth and fires cement, transforming the shabby yard into a grand mansion that leaves the entire household speechless. When a torrential downpour destroys the Meng family's ancestral shrine, she sketches a restoration plan for its bracket system overnight. “The mortise-and-tenon joints have loosened. We need triangular supports.”
When enemy cavalry tramples the border defenses, Meng Xingruo stands atop the city wall and smiles. “The moat's too narrow? Watch me use fluid mechanics to flood their seven armies!” At the new emperor's enthronement ceremony, she runs a hand over the concrete relief she made for the throne. “This is my profession: infrastructure.” Then, on the night of the coronation, she opens the blueprints left behind by her mad concubine and finds modern excavators and reinforced-concrete structures drawn on them.
