Civilization No. 37

He was tied to an altar, about to be burned alive. The moment the priest raised his stone knife, he pulled out his phone and lit up the screen. The white light was blinding. The priest screamed and fell. Sparks from the sacred fire flew out and set the dry grass ablaze. He snapped the ropes and stood amid the flames, covered in blood, raising his phone high. “I’m no god. But I know a thing or two about fire.” His phone had 37% battery left. His name was Chen Ju, a graduate student in archaeology. After touching a bone at the Sui Ren archaeological site, he transmigrated to 2697 BCE. The Three Sovereigns were gone, and the Five Emperors had yet to rise. Descendants of the gods enslaved humankind, and tribes slaughtered one another. A human life was worth less than a dog’s, and living past thirty counted as longevity. His golden finger was a phone loaded with an offline copy of Wikipedia. Its battery drained every day, and once it ran out, it would be useless. Before the battery died, he had to use modern knowledge to build an unshakable power. Farming, pottery, salt boiling, copper smelting, crossbow making, city building, and training soldiers. He taught a blind girl to identify medicinal herbs, a mute craftsman to make tools, slaves to read, and farmers to fertilize their fields. He built the first school, wrote the first textbook, and established the first set of laws. His name changed from “sacrifice” to “teacher,” then from “teacher” to “Flame King.” The Xuanyuan clan came to form an alliance, the Jiuli came to recruit him, and the descendants of the gods came to destroy him. Leading a group of primitive people dressed in animal skins, he used gunpowder to blow apart bronze colossi, a south-pointing chariot to break through a vast, concealing fog, and iron swords to sever the gods’ scepters. On the battlefield at Zhuolu, he knelt and closed Chi You’s eyes. The Yellow Emperor asked him why. “He was human, too,” he said. But the real enemy wasn’t the descendants of the gods, nor...