A Village Official in the Gobi: Is Industrializing Cthulhu Really That Reasonable?

From the start, he gets sixty mu of Gobi Desert and a village official's post thrown in. Lin Xiao plans to lie flat and live as a landlord with his wife, but the village Party secretary shoves him into an assistant's job. “You're a college graduate. Help the villagers get rich!” Looking at the saline-alkali soil where not even grass will grow, Lin Xiao reaches for the thing in his mind called the [Wasteland Reforging System]. While other village officials focus on farming, he opens the tech tree: self-charging drones for deliveries, mineral synthesis for lightweight alloys, geothermal heat pumps for heating... His projects grow more and more high-tech. While the villagers are still fretting over how to water their fields, Lin Xiao's “little toys” are already weaving a silent energy network across the Gobi. The neighboring village sneers, “All he does is tinker with useless gimmicks!” The higher-ups remain skeptical. “This technical report... why is the section on principles blank?” Online keyboard warriors write it off. “Building industry in the Gobi? A complete waste of resources!” Lin Xiao pushes up a pair of nonexistent glasses and studies the System's hazy, terrifying blueprints: from microbial mats that make rocks “ferment” to derricks that draw “inert energy” from deep within the earth. He knows there's something not quite right about these things, but the villagers' hopeful eyes are real, and so are the growing figures in the ledger. In every report, he writes the same phrase: “Adapt to local conditions and innovate with simple methods.” This is a hard-core infrastructure project, wedged between the system and the wilderness, built with “not quite scientific” advanced technology. What he wants to build is a village so magnificent that even the sun will marvel at it: the greatest village in China.