At thirty-five, construction engineer Lu Yuan is drowning in debt and despair when he clutches his family's ancestral Luban ruler. When he opens his eyes again, he has transmigrated to the twentieth year of the Kangxi era, reborn as Lu San, a low-ranking craftsman badly wounded and on the brink of death. The bank bills from his former life have become deadly usury contracts in the Qing dynasty.
Penniless and covered in injuries, his only lifeline is the modern engineering knowledge in his head, spanning centuries. Starting with the structural reinforcement of a dangerously rickety bridge, his precise calculations and ingenious ideas astonish the capital. His improved tools and revolutionary construction methods also set the world of craftsmen ablaze. He rises from a ramshackle hovel in the city to the heart of imperial construction, the Imperial Design Office, but that also places him at the center of a storm.
Here, craft authorities who cling to ancestral conventions see him as a heretic; ambitious court officials want to use him as a pawn; and royal overseers demanding quick results force him to choose between safety and imperial authority. The Luban ruler in his hands also seems to conceal a deeper secret behind his transmigration.
This is a hard-core, technology-driven tale of a comeback. Watch a modern engineer, armed with a will as strong as reinforced concrete, reshape the realm with the tools of precision and proportion in a dynasty of gray roof tiles and blue bricks, and write his own legendary chapter in the art of construction.
