Back to Lingnan

While heroes across the land vie for supremacy in the Central Plains, a young man named Chen He heads south against the tide. Carrying half a sack of rough rice, an iron hoe, and a battered copy of Essential Techniques for the Welfare of the People, he ventures alone into Lingnan’s vast wilderness. He sells the family’s ancestral fields to secure a village in Lingnan as his fief from his clan. Lingnan is nothing like it will be in later generations. It is a wild frontier. Though nominally under the court’s authority, its people obey orders but ignore proclamations.

He is no general, strategist, or legitimate heir of a great clan. He is merely a distant, illegitimate son from a collateral branch of the Yingchuan Chen clan, so low in status that he isn’t even worthy of a place in the family genealogy during ancestral rites. Yet he possesses a treasure no one else can match: memories from the future.

In his previous life, he was a doctorate in agricultural science who spent more than thirty years studying ancient Chinese agriculture. He had read The Book of Fan Shengzhi, Monthly Instructions for the Four Classes of People, and Wang Zhen’s Book of Agriculture, and could even recite the process for introducing Champa rice during the Song dynasty. After waking from a nap, his soul had transmigrated into the body of a young, illegitimate son from a collateral branch of the Yingchuan Chen clan in a world torn by war.