Moonlight cut through Bianjing’s prison like a scalpel.
Lu Yan woke on a stinking straw mat. The mechanical blueprints of the twenty-first century burned in his mind, yet he was trapped in the body of an eighteen-year-old craftsman’s son. His father was waiting to die in the water prison, and his own neck was locked in a cangue. The lock’s mechanism automatically unfolded in his mind as a three-dimensional cross-section.
Hooves sounded in the distance as the Jin embassy entered the capital, shattering the autumn night of the fourth year of Xuanhe.
He clenched the half of a saw blade the jailer had left behind.
That night, the soul of a modern engineer began using knowledge from a thousand years in the future to pry at the rustiest gears of a dynasty.
