Gou Bufan transmigrates to a primitive tribe where nobody even knows how to make fire by rubbing sticks together.
The fire goes out. The tribe members kneel and pray to the gods, babies freeze to death, and the tribe teeters on the brink of collapse.
He plans to build things step by step: first teach them to make fire, then craft spear-throwers, build defenses, and lead the tribe steadily from the Stone Age toward civilization.
But things gradually start to go awry.
While other tribes are still hunting with stone spears, his tribe has composite bows and tactical traps.
While others still worship mountain spirits, his people are discussing “the principle of heat generated by friction” and “the mechanics of levers.”
When hostile tribes come at them with bronze swords, his people set up makeshift catapults and stock standardized stone ammunition.
Even more astonishingly, the mythical creatures that should only exist in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, such as Zhizhu, Tulao, Zheng, and Bifang, are real. And his tribe is trying to study their ecology scientifically and… domesticate and breed them.
When an envoy of the Queen Mother of the West arrives and sees the “bronze crossbow production line” being tested in the tribe, she falls into deep thought.
When a successor of the Yellow Emperor visits, he discovers that these primitives are not only working out the Eight Trigrams battle formations, but using pebbles to calculate ballistic trajectories.
The black tortoise sent by Yu the Great watches the rivers, now thoroughly tamed by irrigation works, and wonders if it has come to the wrong age.
And so, on a stone tablet in the Yanshan Tribe, the world's first line of code appears:
IF beasts attack THEN fire crossbow bolts ELSE keep farming
