I Pursue the Renaissance in the Middle Ages

One person, one transmigration, one leap forward for civilization.

"I want the people of this era to be worthy of the word 'human.'"

From mud to the stars, from the Middle Ages to a new world.

Lynn Holt transmigrated.

There was no System notification, no beginner's gift pack. When he woke, he was lying in a leaky wooden hut, covered with moldy hay. Outside the door lay the mud and plague of the mid-fourteenth century.

He was the illegitimate son of a border count, "enfeoffed" with a barren stretch of mountain land called Ashwood Ridge: three hundred serfs, a drafty wooden keep, two hundred gold coins in unpaid taxes, and a neighboring lord eyeing his territory from thirty miles away.

The original owner had fallen off his horse into a ditch. Lynn had come to take over.

The good news: his mind held a complete body of knowledge from elementary school through graduate studies, with a specialty in medieval economic history.

The bad news: people here attributed even "why does it rain?" to God. Literacy was below three percent, the Black Death had only recently passed, the Church said the Earth was flat, and the system of serfdom was as solid as iron.

Lynn thought it over and decided not to rush into making gunpowder or building steam engines.

First, he repaired an irrigation canal, improved the heavy plow, disinfected with lime, and then opened a night school.

When the first movable-type newspaper was published in Ashwood Ridge, when the first arc lamp lit up the Parliament building, when the whistle of a steam locomotive rang across the tracks of the New World...

Someone asked Lynn, "What is it you really want to do?"

He looked at the sun rising on the distant horizon,