The Grand Canal Cauldron: The Li Clan of Heyin

In the eleventh year of the Daye era under the Sui, the Grand Canal churns with muddy waves, corrupt aristocratic clans prey on the people, and the spring floods are coming. The Heyin embankment is about to collapse, and a million lives are at risk of being swept away.

Li Yanzhi, a modern doctoral specialist in Sui-Tang water conservancy and river administration, touches a fragment of the ancestral Record of the Li Family's River Defenses and transmigrates into the Sui dynasty as the clan grandson of Li Bo, a celebrated river engineer. He becomes a boy with the same name, framed for colluding with bandits in a dispute over water rights and now lying near death in prison.

No System, no cheats: he has only a thousand years of knowledge about river management, the Li family's ancestral methods, and his command of canal works and riverside polders.

He stands up to the great clans, protects the canal transport gangs, and gathers farmers around him. He establishes rules for river administration, gives people security through agriculture and sericulture, and builds fortifications to defend the river, guarding a corner of Heyin.

From prisoner to leader of the river farmers, from protecting embankments in a time of chaos to establishing institutions for the Tang, the Li family will guard the rivers for generations!

What they protect is not just an embankment or canal. It is the lights of countless homes beneath the levees, the grain from every plot of farmland, and the thousand-year legacy of the Grand Canal, kept safe year after year!