In the autumn of the third year of Chongzhen, in the wilderness of Shanxi, the smell of rust was carried by the wind.
A soul from the future falls into this impending purgatory at the end of the world.
Lu Qi, a doctor of modern mechanical engineering, woke up among the corpses of starving people, with a broken left arm and nothing on his body.
What he faced was drought, plague, army defeat and despair that swept across northern China. The cold "late Ming Dynasty" in the history books turned into thirty-eight dying refugees in front of us - they were the humblest footnotes in this broken mountain and river.
Starting from the first handful of filtered clean water, starting from the first molten iron smelted by local methods, starting from the first covenant of "distribution according to work, and the elderly and the young must be supported"——
Lu Qi and his companions stubbornly carried out a small but determined experiment in the cracks of history:
Can a group of ants redefine "living" in a desperate situation?
Lu Qi will keep asking:
Are we saving an old civilization or creating a new one?
Is the "Chinese" soul that we strive to preserve still the same after undergoing such intense forging?
The answer is in front of the barbed wire fence under the city of Xuzhou, in the new flag at the top of the city of Relanja, in the heated debate on the Federal Charter, in the shadow of the sail of the first giant ship sailing into the deep blue...
Forged out with hammer after hammer.
This is a story about rebirth——
It is not only the rebirth of an individual, the rebirth of a team, but also the struggling, staggering, and desperate turn and rebirth of a civilization before falling into the abyss.
It does not shy away from the darkness and heaviness of history, but insists on igniting a cluster of light with modern warmth in the darkness.
If you don't travel far, the road will be endless.
