I transmigrated, with no System, no golden finger, and not even a decent shovel.
Shen Mingyuan was an ordinary young man who studied food engineering. One broken chair leg was all it took to send him into the Sixteen Kingdoms of the Five Barbarians.
Refugees were everywhere, and the land lay in ruins. The Xiongnu, Xianbei, Jie, Di, and Qiang had squeezed the Central Plains to pieces. The ramshackle city where he ended up had 437 people, fewer than seventy of them fit to fight, and most of those were old men.
Horse bandits came to steal their grain every few days, and the Later Zhao’s executioners could descend at any moment.
What was he supposed to do?
Make bricks.
Make salt.
Build city walls.
Pretend to be a deity.
With his rudimentary chemistry knowledge, he fired the first brick. He boiled salt from saltwort growing on the riverbank. And with a load of made-up feng shui, he bamboozled the local leader into submission, only to be mistaken for a god sent from heaven.
But he knew the truth: the bricks were fired from mud, the salt was boiled from wild weeds, and the god was a sham. Even the coal he treasured and carried in his pocket had been picked up on the riverbank by a lame stonemason.
This is the story of a group of old, weak, sick, and disabled people who start from scratch, hauling bricks and building a city amid the chaos of 1,600 years ago.
There’s no System chiming away, no golden finger unleashing spectacular powers. Just one mouth, two hands, and a mind from 1,600 years in the future, full of outdated knowledge that may or may not come in handy.
And, pits that will never stop needing to be filled.
There is no golden finger, no system, hard-core time travel, relying on modern knowledge bit by bit to struggle to survive in troubled times. The book contains many modern things' refining and manufacturing techniques, which can be called ancient alchemy. The author should know some physical chemistry and civil knowledge, which are extremely important in ancient troubled times. The weak fight in troubled times, build sieges with kindness, and maintain the brilliance of humanity in troubled times. It makes people feel sad. I look forward to the follow-up.
Time travel stories without cheats or systems really irritate me! The protagonist parachuted into the dangerous Five Hus and Sixteen Kingdoms, and was trapped in a dilapidated small town, guarding a group of old and weak refugees to survive. Relying on bits and pieces of modern knowledge, he baked bricks, boiled salt, and even pretended to be a ghost to survive. There is no fun of cheating all the way to the end, only the struggle to survive step by step in the troubled times, which is heart-wrenching and exciting to watch.