My lungs felt like they were full of wet wool. Every time I breathed in, I tasted the lingering soot from the failed bloomery and the sharp, sour stench of the river. I didn't wake up with a brilliant plan. I woke up because a leak in the roof was dripping cold, muddy water directly onto my forehead. I tried to roll over, but my body just refused. I lay there on the straw, staring at the dark wooden beams above me, wondering if this was the day my heart would just stop out of pure spite.
I am an architect, I told myself. I am a man of logic. But logic doesn't stop your joints from feeling like they have been fused together with rusted bolts.
I eventually rolled out of the bedding and crawled toward the door. I didn't stand. Standing required a level of coordination I just didn't have at six in the morning. I sat on the threshold of the shack, watching the village. It was a miserable sight. The rain had turned into a thick, gray fog that sat low over the flooded streets. People were moving like ghosts, their shoulders hunched against the damp.
Lao was already out there. He was standing by the riverbank, staring at the rushing water. He looked back at me and didn't even say good morning. He just pointed at the water.
It rose two inches overnight, he said.
I looked at the water. It was a churning, brown mess of debris and dead branches. It was a terrifying amount of kinetic energy just going to waste. In 2025, I would have seen a hydroelectric opportunity. Here, I just saw a giant hand trying to shove the village off the map.
I need wood, I said, my voice cracking. Not for the fire. For the wheel.
Lao walked over and stood over me. You look like death, Lu. Your skin is the color of a fish belly. You have a fever.
I probably did. My head was thumping in time with my pulse, and I was shivering despite the humidity. It doesn't matter, I said. If we don't build the wheel, the bellows won't run. If the bellows don't run, the iron stays in the dirt. If the iron stays in the dirt, the levee breaks. It is a simple equation, Lao.
Equations don't build wheels, Lao grunted. Men do. And the men are done. They spent yesterday watching you make a pile of hot rocks. They are hungry, and they think you are a curse.
I forced myself to stand up. I had to use the doorframe to pull myself up, and for a second, the world tilted forty five degrees to the left. I leaned my head against the wood until the spinning stopped.
Take me to the elders, I said.
The village meeting hall was just a larger version of my shack, filled with the smell of old incense and damp wool. The elders were sitting in a circle, their faces grim. When I walked in, the room went silent. It wasn't a respectful silence. It was the kind of silence you give to a crazy person before you kick them out into the cold.
Prince Lu, the head elder said, his voice trembling. We have listened to you. We gave you our coal. We gave you our sons to dig in the mud. And what do we have? A pile of slag and more rain.
I looked at him. I didn't feel like a prince. I felt like a tired project manager dealing with a hostile board of directors. You have the first batch of fired bricks in the history of this province, I said. Those bricks are currently the only thing keeping the eastern bank from collapsing.
Bricks cannot stop the spirits, another elder spat.
The spirits are just physics you don't understand yet, I snapped. My temper was short, sharpened by the fever. You want to save this village? You want to see your grandchildren grow up? Then stop talking about spirits and start talking about torque.
They didn't know what torque was. They didn't care. But the sheer arrogance in my voice seemed to rattle them. They were used to a prince who spoke in flowery metaphors. They weren't used to a man who spoke like a hammer hitting an anvil.
I need the big cedars from the north grove, I said. I need the straightest trunks you have. We are going to build a wheel that turns the river's anger into breath for the furnace.
It took another hour of arguing. I had to threaten to leave. I had to tell them that if I left, the Governor's men would come for the taxes and find nothing but a graveyard. Fear is a powerful motivator when hope is gone. Eventually, they gave in. Not because they believed in me, but because they were too tired to fight me anymore.
The next three days were a blur of agony. We didn't have saws. Not real ones. We had heavy, blunt axes and bronze wedges. I had to show the men how to split the logs into planks. My 2025 brain was screaming at the waste of material. In a modern sawmill, I could have turned one log into twenty perfect boards. Here, we were lucky to get four crooked ones.
I sat on a stump, my hands wrapped in greasy rags to hide the sores. I was drawing again, but not on silk. I was carving the design into the dirt with a pointed stick. I was designing an overshot water wheel. It had to be light enough to turn but heavy enough to drive the cam system for the bellows.
Lao was the only reason the work got done. He was everywhere at once. He cuffed the lazy ones, encouraged the tired ones, and did the work of three men himself. He never asked me how I knew these things. He just watched me with a wary, silent intensity.
The construction was a disaster. The first axle we made was too thin. It snapped the moment we tried to lift it into place. The sound of the wood splintering felt like a bone breaking in my own body. The men stopped working. They looked at the broken wood, then at me.
See? One of the workers shouted. The river will not be tamed!
I didn't say a word. I just walked over to the broken axle, picked up a wedge, and handed it back to him. Start again, I said. Double the thickness.
My voice was a whisper, but nobody argued. There was something in my eyes that scared them. It was the look of a man who had already died once and didn't have anything left to lose.
We worked through the night under the light of oil lamps. The rain came back, a steady, depressing drizzle that made the wood slippery and dangerous. We were building the buckets for the wheel now. Each one had to be angled perfectly to catch the weight of the water. I didn't have a protractor. I had to use a piece of folded paper and the shadow of a plum line.
My fever was getting worse. I was seeing things in the shadows. I thought I saw my old office. I thought I saw the blueprints for a dam I had worked on in California. I kept reaching for a mouse that wasn't there, my fingers twitching against the rough bark of the cedar logs.
Lao grabbed my arm at one point. Lu, you need to sit down. You're talking to yourself.
I'm calculating the load, I muttered, trying to shake him off. If the bucket volume is too high, the axle will shear. If it is too low, we won't get the RPMs.
You're talking gibberish, Lao said. He forced me down onto a pile of wood shavings. Sit. Drink this.
He handed me a skin of fermented grain. It burned my throat, but it cleared my head for a second. I looked at the wheel. It was a massive, ugly thing. It wasn't the elegant engineering I was used to. It was a jagged, heavy circle of wood and hope. But it was balanced. I had made sure of that.
On the fourth day, we moved the wheel to the river. We had to use a system of rollers and ropes that I had rigged up. It took the entire village. Even the women and children were pulling on the lines. The mud was waist deep in some places. We were all covered in it. We looked like creatures made of silt.
Slowly, the wheel slid toward the wooden frame we had built out over the current. The river was roaring, sensing a new enemy. The water splashed against the frame, trying to knock it over.
Lower it! I screamed.
The wheel dropped into the slot. For a second, nothing happened. The water hit the buckets and just splashed away. The wheel sat there, stubborn and still.
The elders started to jeer. The workers let the ropes go slack.
It's too heavy, Lao whispered.
I didn't listen. I grabbed a long pole and shoved it against one of the spokes. I pushed with everything I had left. My feet slipped in the mud. My shoulder felt like it was popping out of the socket.
Move, you piece of junk, I hissed. Move!
Lao stepped in beside me. He put his massive shoulder against the spoke and roared.
The wheel groaned. A deep, wooden protest that sounded like a scream. Then, it shifted. Just an inch. The first bucket filled with water. The weight pulled the spoke down. The next bucket filled.
And then, it started to turn.
It was slow at first. A heavy, rhythmic thud-thud-thud as the wood settled into the current. But as the momentum built, the wheel began to spin with a terrifying power. The water was being thrown into the air in white sheets. The wooden axle was humming.
The jeers stopped. The villagers backed away, their eyes wide. They had never seen anything like it. It was a machine. A real, honest to god machine, powered by the very thing they feared.
The wheel was connected to a long wooden shaft that ran back toward the bloomery. On the end of that shaft, I had carved a series of cams. As the shaft turned, the cams pushed down on the bellows handles, then let them go.
Puff. Puff. Puff.
The bellows were moving. Perfectly. Rhythmically. They didn't get tired. They didn't need to eat. They just kept breathing life into the furnace.
I fell back into the mud, my breath coming in ragged gasps. I was laughing, but it sounded more like a cough.
We did it, I whispered.
Lao was standing over me, staring at the bellows. He looked like he had just seen a ghost. It doesn't stop, he said. It just keeps going.
That is the point, Lao, I said. That is the whole point of progress.
I tried to get up, but my body finally gave out. The world went dark. The last thing I heard was the steady, mechanical heartbeat of the bellows and the roar of the river, no longer a master, but a servant.
I woke up hours later back in my shack. The fever was still there, but the sharp edge of the headache had dulled. Lao was sitting in the corner, sharpening his sword. The sound of the stone against the metal was a nice change from the sound of the rain.
The furnace is hot, Lao said without looking up. The fire is white. I've never seen a fire like that. It's scary, Lu.
It should be, I said. We are playing with the building blocks of the world now.
The elder came in a few minutes later. He didn't have his staff. He looked small. He didn't look at me. He just looked at the floor.
The men are calling it the Jade Wheel, he said. They say you have trapped a dragon in the wood.
I don't care what they call it, I said. Just make sure they keep the buckets clear of debris. If a log jams that wheel, the whole system will rip itself apart.
The elder nodded. We will guard it.
He left, and I felt a cold realization hit me. I had given them power. But I had also given them something to break. In my old world, infrastructure was something people took for granted until a bridge collapsed or the power went out. Here, the infrastructure was a miracle, and miracles are always followed by greed.
I looked at Lao. How much scrap do we have left?
Not much, he said. A few old pots. Some broken tools from the next village over.
We need more, I said. We need to start thinking bigger than plows. We need to think about pumps. If we can't move the water out of the fields, the crops will rot, and it won't matter how many bricks we have.
I reached for my charcoal stick. My hands were still shaking, but the blueprint was already there, hovering in the air. I could see the valves. I could see the pistons.
You should rest, Lao said.
I'll rest when the water stops rising, I replied.
I started to draw. The silk was almost full now. The flowery poem was completely gone, replaced by the cold, hard lines of geometry. I was an architect in a world of mud, and I was finally starting to feel at home.
The sound of the wheel was a constant hum in the background. It was a beautiful sound. It was the sound of the future. And as I drifted back into a restless sleep, I knew that the village would never be the same. I had started something that couldn't be stopped. I had given the river a job to do.
But as the gears turned in my head, I also knew that the Western provinces would hear about the wheel. The Governor would hear about the prince who made stone out of mud. And then, the real trouble would begin.
For now, though, the bellows kept breathing. The furnace kept roaring. And the iron, for the first time in this province's history, was starting to run pure.
I fell asleep with the charcoal still in my hand, dreaming of steel.