1900: I Use a Phone to Draw Up the Blueprint for a Nation

The pacing is slow, and the first half is intensely oppressive, showing just how hard it was for ordinary people to survive in that era.

Around the Gengzi years, turmoil swept through the treaty ports. Foreign concessions and trading houses entrenched themselves, officials and gentry laid their hidden snares, and the great powers watched hungrily. A modern engineering expert is accidentally transported to a late-Qing treaty port, where he finds himself an undocumented nobody with no identity, backing, or resources. His only glimmer of hope is a phone AI that can develop its own generators and recharge itself. There are no shortcuts to saving the nation with poetry, no golden finger that takes him straight to the top. Starting with machine repair, he tackles the hard problem of material precision and breaks through life-or-death supply-chain bottlenecks, caught in a three-sided siege of concession law, foreign trading monopolies, and official-gentry persecution. From repairing foreign machines and making parts to building machine tools and establishing an arms industry, he turns scattered sparks of industry into a prairie fire in the cracks of the age. The pressure to survive, the struggle for profit, the crushing weight of the system: every step is taken on a knife's edge. His personal struggle, the rise of industry, and the fate of the nation are bound together at every turn. Watch him take on the powerful from a position of weakness, break monopolies with engineering prowess, and challenge tyranny with an industrial system, rising from an undocumented nobody in the dust to a pioneer capable of shifting the balance of his era and changing the fate of his nation's industry.