The Seeding Plan: From 2026 to 1949

In 2026, a pop-up appeared on Ma Chenxing’s phone that he couldn’t close: 255 days later, he would be sent to October 1, 1949. Personal storage space: 5 cubic meters. The transfer could not be undone.

He didn’t take it seriously. Then the System began telling him little things: a fish in his tank would jump out at a certain time on a certain day, or his computer would crash at another exact time. Every prediction was accurate to the minute. He began to believe and started preparing. In May, he mailed a report predicting an earthquake to Beijing. Five days later, the earthquake struck exactly as forecast, and no one died. The state took notice of him.

From then on, his personal preparations became a national-level project. His database expanded from 10 TB to nearly 200 TB. His personal storage space was packed with precision machine tools, rare metals, medical first-aid kits, and a few jars of luosifen that he insisted on bringing. He underwent months of intensive training, then spent three days saying goodbye to this world: gaming through the night with his closest friends, going home to have a meal with his parents, and finally telling the girl he had secretly loved for years what he had kept buried in his heart, by the Liu River. She told him to come back, and she’d treat him to luosifen with duck feet.

On September 18, amid salutes from soldiers and police, he stepped through a pale-blue portal and arrived at a military camp in Beiping on the day of the founding ceremony in 1949. That afternoon, wearing a borrowed uniform, he looked toward the Tiananmen Gate Tower as cheers filled the air. The phone in his pocket, loaded with technical information, would plant the first seed in an era just beginning to recover from devastation.

What he didn’t know was that an old man with white hair stood among the people who had come to see him off.