After Old Fifth, who had failed his College English Test Band 4, said, “If we transmigrated back to the Qin dynasty, we wouldn't have to take the test,” all six residents of Dorm 602 transmigrated together to the Great Qin of 220 BC.
Scattered across six corners of the empire, the six college students recognized one another and regrouped using the secret code “odd functions change, even functions stay the same.” At the imperial fengshan ceremony on Mount Tai, they presented a “world map” pieced together from modern knowledge and claimed to have been “sent by Heaven.” Qin Shi Huang, Ying Zheng, was suspicious but intrigued, and took them on as advisers.
The six used engineering management to rebuild the imperial roads, modern medicine to expose the truth about elixirs, and advances in metallurgy and waterworks to revolutionize agriculture. They also tutored the weak Prince Fusu into becoming a technocratic heir. Twelve years later, they confessed the truth about their transmigration to the aging Ying Zheng. The “charming old ancestor” burst into laughter: “I have lived up to my name as your old ancestor.”
In 202 BC, Ying Zheng died peacefully at the age of sixty-five, and the Great Qin did not fall. The six were made marquises and stayed to watch over the world they had changed: iron plows everywhere, imperial roads stretching to the heavens, and the story of a technological empire only just beginning.
