The smell was the first thing that got me. It wasn't just the wet earth or the woodsmoke. It was the sharp, ammonia tang of a village that didn't understand basic sanitation, mixed with a river that was currently washing a century of animal waste through my front door. I pushed myself up from the floor, my palms sticking to the damp wood. My back screamed. Reincarnation isn't some magical second chance. It's a biological nightmare. I felt like I'd been hit by a truck and then shoved into a suit made of damp paper.
I sat there for a second, staring at my hands. They were too thin. The skin was pale, untouched by the sun, the hands of a man who had never lifted anything heavier than a brush. In my head, I could still see the structural schematics for a three-hundred-meter suspension bridge. I could still calculate the wind load for a glass tower in my sleep. But out the window, the only thing I saw was a collapsed dirt levee and a thousand terrified people about to drown because they didn't understand the concept of a reinforced foundation.
The door didn't just open; it splintered. A man the size of a mountain stomped in, bringing a cold draft that made my teeth chatter. This was Lao. He looked at me like I was a piece of fruit that had gone soft on the vine.
Your Highness, he said. He didn't bow. His voice sounded like gravel in a blender. The elders are outside with a goat. They want to know if you're going to pray now or if they should just start swimming.
I looked at him, my eyes stinging from the smoke of a dying brazier. Pray? For what? For the water to ignore gravity?
I don't need a goat, Lao. I need a piece of charcoal and something that isn't wet to write on, I said. My voice was thin, but it had a jagged edge that stopped him from laughing.
He looked at me for a long beat, his hand resting on a sword that was probably more rust than steel. A prayer for the charcoal? He asked.
Just get it, I snapped.
I didn't wait for him. I stood up, my legs shaking, and ripped a decorative silk banner off the wall. It was covered in some flowery poem about the moon. Waste of good fabric. I spread it on the floor and waited for Lao to return with a blackened stick from the fire.
I started to draw. I wasn't drawing a miracle. I was drawing a double-chambered kiln with a forced-air intake. My 2025 brain was screaming about the lack of a T-square, but I had to trust my muscle memory. I mapped out the airflow. I marked the pressure points where the heat would concentrate. If I could get the temperature up to eleven hundred degrees, I could turn this yellow mud into something that wouldn't melt the moment the river touched it.
Lao leaned over, his breath smelling of sour wine and onions. That looks like a grave, he said.
It's a kiln, I replied, my fingers turning black from the charcoal. It's how we stop being victims of the weather. Tell the men to stop digging that useless ditch. It's a waste of calories. We're going to bake the earth instead.
The elders outside were even worse. They stood in the rain, clutching their robes, looking at me like I was a ghost. The oldest one, a man who looked like he was made of wrinkled parchment, stepped forward.
Prince Lu, we must offer the blood to the river spirits, he whined. The water rises because the heavens are angry.
The heavens aren't angry, I said, stepping into the mud. My boots immediately filled with cold, brown water. It was disgusting. I felt a surge of pure, 2025 irritation. The river is rising because it has nowhere else to go. You built your village in a drainage basin. You might as well have built it in a bathtub.
I pointed at the hill. The clay there is rich in silica. We're going to build furnaces. We're going to fire bricks. Not those sun-dried crackers you call building materials. We're going to make stone.
They whispered. They looked at the sky. They looked at the skinny goat. They were waiting for a sign, and I realized I was the only one who could give it.
Lao, give me your sword, I said.
He hesitated, then handed it over. It was heavy, unbalanced, and the grip was greasy. I walked over to the mud bank and shoved the blade deep into the silt.
Look! I shouted. The water eats the dirt. It turns into soup. But if we fire the clay, the water cannot bite it. If you want to live, you dig. If you want to die, stay here and talk to the goat.
I didn't wait for an answer. I started walking toward the hill. I didn't feel like a hero. I felt like a man who was about to spend the next twenty hours doing back-breaking labor with people who didn't know which end of a shovel to hold.
The next few hours were a blur of frustration. It was one thing to design a kiln on a computer; it was another to build one with wet wood and illiterate laborers. I had to show them how to stack the stones so they wouldn't collapse under their own weight. I had to explain—six times—why we needed a vent at the bottom.
My hands were bleeding by noon. A splinter from a cedar log had jammed itself under my fingernail, and every time I moved my hand, it felt like a needle was hitting a nerve. My 2025 self would have called a medic. My current self just sucked the blood off and kept stacking.
Lao was actually useful. He didn't understand the physics, but he understood how to make men move. He'd shout, and a log would go where it was supposed to. He'd glare, and a man would stop crying and start digging.
By sunset, we had three crude towers of stone and mud. They looked like ugly chimneys, but the internal geometry was right. I could feel the draft even before we lit the fires.
The first kiln caught with a roar. The wood was damp, so the smoke was thick and white at first, but as the internal temperature climbed, the flame turned a bright, aggressive orange. The heat hit my face, drying the sweat and the rain until my skin felt tight and cracked.
I sat on a rock, watching the villagers huddle around the base of the hill. They were terrified of the sound. To them, it was a roar of a beast. To me, it was the only sound that made sense. It was the sound of a controlled reaction.
Master, Lao said, walking up to me. He used the word 'Master' with a weird sort of hesitation, like he was trying out a new pair of shoes. The heat... it's different. It feels like the sun is sitting in that hole.
It's just oxygen and carbon, Lao. Don't make it a poem, I said. My throat was so dry it felt like I'd swallowed a handful of sand.
I watched the first batch of bricks being pulled out hours later. They weren't perfect. Some were cracked, and the color was uneven. But when I dropped one on a flat stone, it didn't shatter. It rang. A high, clear note that told me the molecular structure had shifted. It was no longer mud. It was ceramic.
The elder walked up, touching the brick with a trembling finger. He pulled back as the heat bit him. It is... stone? He whispered.
It's progress, I said.
I looked at my hands. They were ruined. Blackened, blistered, and shaking. I missed my keyboard. I missed my ergonomic chair. I missed a world where I didn't have to explain basic thermodynamics to a man who thought rain was a personal insult from a god.
But as the river continued to hiss against the lower banks, I saw the villagers starting to stack the new bricks. They weren't waiting for a sacrifice anymore. They were building.
I leaned back against a tree, closing my eyes for just a second. The roar of the kiln was steady. In my mind, I was already moving past the bricks. To move that much water, I'd need a pump. To build a pump, I'd need iron. To smelt iron, I'd need more heat than these wood fires could ever give me.
I needed coal. I needed a foundry.
I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder. Lao was standing there, looking out at the rising water. You should sleep, Lu. You look like you're about to fall over.
I'm fine, I lied.
I wasn't fine. I was an architect in a world without a plumb line. I was a 21st-century mind trapped in a 12th-century body, and I had just realized that the only way out was to build a ladder.
I pulled a piece of charcoal from my pocket and looked at the silk again. The poem about the moon was mostly covered in soot now. Good. It was a terrible poem anyway. I started to draw a bellows system.
Tomorrow, I whispered to the dark. Tomorrow, we start on the iron.
The rain started to pick up again, but the fire didn't flicker. It was too hot for the rain to kill. I watched the sparks fly up into the night, disappearing into the clouds. I wasn't going to die in the silt. I was going to build a world that didn't dissolve.
I closed my eyes, and for the first time since I arrived here, the sound of the river didn't scare me. It was just a variable. And I was the one with the solution.