In the summer of 1937, before the guns at Lugou Bridge had fired, undercurrents were already surging. Lin Mu, a reporter for the Beiping Times, is hunted for uncovering a key Japanese plot. As he lies on the brink of death, a “beacon” from a higher-dimensional civilization is accidentally activated. It cannot provide weapons from the future. At an enormous cost, it can only summon fragments of knowledge and consciousness from a shattered future, sending them to this land of suffering.
And so a group of “returnees” appear, their memories incomplete and their minds lost in temporal disarray: mechanical engineers, chemistry scholars, battlefield medical students, and more. They bring fragments of knowledge that do not belong to this era, but must face the harsh reality of scarce steel and medicine, surrounded by powerful enemies. In an abandoned repair shop outside Wanping City, under the doubtful gaze of security force captain Zhou Wu, a deeply moving effort to “put knowledge to use” begins: using scrap iron and saltpeter to fight the tide of steel, and resilience and sacrifice to seize every chance of survival
