I woke up to find I’d transmigrated into a starving refugee in the chaotic Three Kingdoms era. Just as I was about to despair, the Craftsman God System activated, giving me a recipe for compressed biscuits and a rudimentary method of making salt right from the start.
While the warlords were still hacking at each other with bronze blades, my mountain stronghold had already smelted its first batch of Chen steel. The steel blades I forged left Huang Zhong awestruck. While Cao Cao drilled his Tiger and Leopard Cavalry, my assembly line was mass-producing armor-piercing steel crossbows. At the Battle of Red Cliffs, while Zhou Yu and Zhuge Liang were still borrowing the east wind, the improved trebuchets I brought along were blasting Cao Cao’s warships into the sky.
Liu Bei wants an alliance? Sure, in exchange for technology. Sun Quan wants to marry off his sister to me? That works too, as long as her dowry includes naval blueprints. Cao Cao wants to appoint me Governor of Nanyang? Sorry, my steam engines are about to go into mass production. It’s time I started handing out official posts to all of you.
From a blacksmith in Wancheng to the founding emperor of Great Chen, I never trained in martial arts or cultivated immortality. I relied solely on knowledge from more than a thousand years in the future: blast-furnace steelmaking, gunpowder formulas, mechanical blueprints, disease-prevention manuals, and more. Along the way, I also won five empresses of extraordinary talent and beauty: the gifted Cai Yan helped me compile the grand canon; the engineering goddess Huang Yueying built locomotives with me; the heroine Sun Shangxiang took charge of the medical academy; Zhang Chunhua, leader of the secret guards, kept watch over the realm; and the gentle Zou Shi kept the imperial harem in order.
When I ascended the throne in Luoyang and the roar of steam locomotives echoed across the Central Plains, the System in my mind finally lit up its last message: [Civilization advancement test complete. Observer preparing to depart.] So my rise to supremacy had been an experiment conducted by a higher civilization?
But so what? The world is already in the midst of an Industrial Revolution I built with my own hands.
(Also known as: “Building a Tech Tree in the Three Kingdoms” and “Your Majesty, Your Rocket Artillery Has Arrived”)
