Synopsis of The First Emperor, This Is a Machine Tool, Not Sorcery
Lin Shen, a 32-year-old machining-center programmer, was working overtime until one in the morning when a burr on the machine's safety door sliced his finger. A drop of blood fell into the old VMC850.
Then he transmigrated.
He arrived in the Qin state of Xianyang in the third century BC, bringing a six-and-a-half-ton machining center with him.
The machine bound to him somehow had power from an unknown source. A dark gold totem had appeared on its safety door, and a spirit calling itself “Old Ghost” constantly chattered in his head. But none of that mattered. What mattered was that Ying Zheng had given him three months to make usable weapons, or else “you won't have to see me again.”
No modern materials, no cutting fluid, no fixtures, and not even a decent pair of calipers. Lin Shen faced a pile of scrap iron full of impurities, like sesame cakes, and a group of ancient craftsmen who watched him work as if he were performing some shamanic ritual.
Even more absurdly, a mysterious person who appeared and vanished without a trace kept slipping things under his bed when he wasn't looking: high-carbon steel rods, carbide inserts, and vernier calipers accurate to 0.02 millimeters. None of them should have existed in this era.
This is the not-so-serious story of a modern master machinist who transmigrates to the Qin dynasty with an upgradeable CNC machine, handcrafts standardized weapons, radically transforms ancient metallurgy, and, along the way, ushers the Great Qin Empire toward the Industrial Revolution.
