Previous life: A mechanical engineering professor at Beijing University of Science and Technology in 2025, he died in an accident during an extreme test of a new material.
* Present life: He transmigrates back to 1975 and becomes an ordinary resident of Fu'an Courtyard on Nanluo Lane. His father, a veteran fitter at Hongxing Steel Rolling Mill, retired early due to a work injury, and the family fell on hard times. Li Wenjun takes his father's place and becomes a fitter's apprentice at the mill.
* Personality: Calm and rational, a technology fanatic with principles but no saintly sense of self-sacrifice. He disdains the streetwise tricks of small-time schemers.
3. Core conflicts
* Technological gap: An advanced engineer with decades of future mechanical engineering knowledge dominates the industrial world of the 1970s.
* Clash of values: The modern engineer's belief in contracts and property rights collides fiercely with the courtyard residents' ideas of “sharing poverty and wealth equally” and their moral blackmail in the name of “the old ways.”
* Rise in status: Starting as an apprentice who is pushed around, he makes his way through technical skill, step by step becoming a pillar of industry and even influencing the nation's industrial development.
