Siheyuan: Quietly Building Infrastructure in the Backyard

While everyone else in the courtyard spends every day miserably fighting the troublemakers, Xu Weijiang returns to the beginner's village after being discharged due to injury, carrying a max-level identity.

Yi Zhonghai tries to guilt-trip him? At the full-courtyard meeting, they demand he donate fifty jin of grain. He plants his military dagger in the table. “My rules are the only rules.” The whole courtyard falls silent.

Silly Zhu refuses to back down and tries to fight. One move, and he’s on his knees. Xu Damao talks behind his back, so that very night Xu Weijiang makes him apologize to everyone in the courtyard, one by one.

On the surface, he rides his bike to work every day to repair blast furnaces, then spends his evenings in the back courtyard roasting potatoes. Everyone thinks he’s just an ordinary technical cadre who’s not to be messed with.

Secretly, deep inside the bullet wound in his chest, a broken spark of civilization silently turns.

The country is short on food? One hundred thousand tons of cold-resistant potatoes fill the nation’s granaries overnight.

The country is short on steel? The month the Soviet experts leave, domestically produced, aviation-grade titanium alloy quietly rolls off the line.

While foreign countries are still enforcing technology blockades, he squats in the back courtyard, munching on roasted potatoes and planning the formula for his next batch of specialty steel.

“Should I put my name on the next report, or keep letting them guess?”