Xu Fu Sailed East, and I Built Fusang

My name is Chen Mo. I'm thirty-four, a project manager, and I died in a car crash on a rainy night.

When I opened my eyes again, I was in the Qin Dynasty, in the twenty-eighth year of the First Emperor's reign. The alchemist Xu Fu was about to sail away in search of immortals. The court had conscripted three thousand boys and girls, along with several hundred craftsmen. I became the most inconspicuous of the three hundred boys aboard the ship.

All I had left was a dead phone. On its screen was half a line of unsent text: The way back is at 35.7°, 139.7°.

Three years later, the ship came ashore on a desolate stretch of coast. The moment I stepped onto the tidal flats, I suddenly understood what those numbers meant.

The first hoe, the first canal, the first furnace of molten iron, the first written character, the first bronze mirror, the first law. Over seven years, I built a country from scratch with a group of Qin people and the island's inhabitants. They called this new land Fusang.

But the door that would take me home was buried beneath this country.

I had the key, but I couldn't open it.