Isolated town in northern border region

Xiao Lie spread the stack of plans covered in writing on the table, read it through from beginning to end again, then leaned back in his chair and stared blankly at the ceiling beam.

The paper in front of him contained a detailed layout of pipelines, a cross-sectional view of the distillation tower, and a structural diagram of the cracking furnace. Every stroke was steady, and every annotation was written clearly.

But he knew that these things were just lines drawn on paper.

To turn them into actually working devices, someone needs to understand the principles behind those lines—the knowledge about temperature, pressure, boiling point, and molecular structure.

And in this era, no one but himself understands it.

He sat in his study all day, going through all the completed plans again, finally folding them up one by one, putting them deep in the drawer, and locking them.

The water in the copper basin next to him had cooled down. He reached out to test the water temperature but then pulled his hand back. He stood up, walked to the window, and opened it. Dusk was falling outside, and the wind was blowing in from the north, carrying the dry, cold air of early winter.

He whispered, "I can't do it."

Xu De happened to be carrying in a bowl of porridge when he heard those three words and paused: "Your Highness, what can't be done?"

Xiao Lie turned around: "We can't touch the oil for now."

No one can make those devices now.

Those techniques are incomprehensible to most people now.

He pointed to his head. "These things are all here."

But only here, they'll forever remain just a few pages.

He sat down, picked up the bowl of porridge, but didn't drink it immediately: "We need to move those things out of here and into other people's minds."

He put down his bowl of porridge, walked to his desk and spread out a new sheet of paper, "but before we move it, we need someone who can take it."

Xu De stood at the door for a while, without asking any questions, and simply closed the door gently.

That night, Xiao Lie began writing something he hadn't originally planned to start so early—a teaching syllabus.

He didn't write an instruction manual for craftsmen, but a step-by-step curriculum, starting with the most basic numbers and graphics, and extending all the way to the engineering principles he had locked away in his drawer.

He wrote very slowly because there were no ready-made textbooks to refer to; he had to create each question himself and make up each example himself.

He wrote all night long, and when dawn broke, there was a thick stack of papers on the table.

He stood up and stretched his stiff shoulders, arranged the papers in order, looked them over from beginning to end, then put them down and wrote a line in the blank space on the first page: "Introduction to Basic Arithmetic and Geometry".

He paused for a moment, then added a line of smaller text below: "Suitable for: Craftsmen who are not very literate but have skilled hands."

For the next three months, Xiao Lie hardly left the Imperial Study.

He painstakingly retrieved all the usable mathematical, physical, and chemical knowledge from his past life memories and translated it into a language that people of this era could understand, using the most basic and inefficient methods he could think of.

He wrote down addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division; fractions and decimals; simple equations; the fundamental theorems of plane and solid geometry; the basic concepts of force, heat, sound, and light; and the basic principles of combustion and oxidation reactions.

After finishing each chapter, he would reread it from beginning to end to make sure that the words would not become a bunch of completely unfamiliar syllables when they reached the craftsman's ears.

Three months later, when he closed the last booklet, it had snowed several times outside the window.

He stood up, walked to the window, glanced at the darkening sky outside, then turned around, stacked the booklets one by one, and counted them again—sixteen in total.

He placed them neatly on the bottom shelf, spines facing out, in an order he didn't utter in the twilight.

He looked at it for a while, then pulled out the top book, flipped through it, and put it back in its place, as if he were re-estimating the distance between the words and the craftsman's ears through the spine of the unopened book.

A moment later, he walked back to his desk and wrote the words "Notice of Enrollment for the Engineering Department of the Imperial Academy" on a blank sheet of paper.

After he finished writing, he looked at it again, circled the two characters "Taixue" (Imperial Academy), and added a line of small characters next to it: "No restrictions on background, only talent is considered."

Then the notice was handed to the clerk: "Post it out."

Any craftsman who is sixteen years of age or older, has a job, and can read more than two hundred characters can apply.

The clerk hesitated for a moment as he took the notice: "Your Highness, what about the Imperial Academy...?"

Xiao Lie interrupted him: "I will personally speak with the Imperial Academy."

He stood up, walked to the door, and then looked back at the neatly arranged books. "Tell them that from now on, the Imperial Academy will not only be a place to study the classics."

The day the notice was posted, the capital city was in an uproar.

The crowd gathered at the gate of the Imperial Academy from dawn until dusk. Some people stood on tiptoe to read the words on the notice, some tried to figure out if they could read, and some squatted on the steps to have someone read it to them, and then leaned forward to look at it themselves, as if they were afraid of missing a word and missing a door that had already been opened.

After reading the notice, a middle-aged man in old cloth clothes stood outside the crowd, holding half a piece of dry food in his hand, but did not eat it for a while.

He walked to the steps in front of the Imperial Academy, stopped, and took a step back, as if he were re-measuring the width of the threshold with the soles of his feet.

An elderly scholar in a long gown pointed at the notice and said to his colleague, "What kind of behavior is this!"

On the steps leading to the Imperial Academy, several craftsmen who had just registered squatted together eating dry rations, their collars still covered in sawdust and coal dust when they looked down.

A young man who looked like a scholar stood beside them, glanced down at the seal on the notice, then at the backs of the craftsmen, and without saying a word, turned and walked away.

When the news reached the public, the discussions in the teahouses were even more lively than those at the gate of the Imperial Academy.

Someone slammed their fist on the table and exclaimed, "Your Highness is going to turn the world upside down! Artisans can get into the Imperial Academy?"

An old man at the next table, holding a teacup, said, "What's wrong with craftsmen? The steam engines, muskets, and chariots under the Prince's command—weren't they all made by craftsmen? Without craftsmen, how could those scholars at the Imperial Academy have drawn up the blueprints?"

A young man standing nearby chimed in: "That's different."

Craftsmen use their hands, while students at the Imperial Academy use their minds.

The old man put down his teacup: "Does developing a steam engine require hands-on work or brainpower?"

The young man opened his mouth but didn't reply.

The old man didn't ask any further questions. He simply placed the teacup on the table, got up, and walked out. The teacup was still steaming, like a response that had been put down before it even hit the ground.

In another corner, several craftsmen dressed in shorts huddled around a table. One of them recited the contents of the notice from memory and checked the registration date again.

A young craftsman rubbed the coal dust off his hands: "Can I really go to the Imperial Academy to study?"

An older craftsman opposite him didn't answer. He lowered his head, took a sip of tea, as if using the warmth of the cup's rim to reaffirm the weight of his question, then put down the bowl and said, "Go if you can."

When the news reached neighboring countries, the reactions varied.

At a post station on the border of the Yan state, a merchant changing horses overheard the discussions in the teahouse and muttered, "He's stopped training soldiers and started teaching?"

The person next to him didn't respond.

In the Shu Kingdom's court, someone handed over the copied proclamation. After reading it, an official placed it on the table and said, "His move is even more difficult to deal with than training troops."

On the Jing Kingdom's side, Jiang Jun finished reading the copy of the notice and placed it on the table. After a moment of silence, he said, "He's doing something more difficult than fighting a war."

He didn't say anything more, but simply folded the paper and put it in the drawer.

The words on the notice were folded into a narrow crease and pressed under a stack of old reports, awaiting an answer that was still undecided whether to unfold it.

Xiao Lie ignored the discussions outside.

On the day the class began, he stood on the lecture platform of the Imperial Academy, with more than forty craftsmen sitting below.

Some people were wearing clean coarse cloth clothes, while others still had unwashed oil stains on their cuffs. Some sat upright, while others had their hands clasped on their knees.

Xiao Lie glanced at the tense and somewhat inexperienced faces below the stage and asked, "Among you, who is the most literate, how many characters can you recognize?"

There was a moment of silence in the audience.

A middle-aged craftsman stood up: "Your Highness, I can recognize... three or four hundred."

Xiao Lie then asked, "Can you write your own name?"

The man hesitated for a moment, then said, "Yes."

Xiao Lie nodded: "Okay."

Today, I'll teach you how to write your own names, and then we'll learn to count.

He turned around and wrote the character "一" on the blackboard. "This character is pronounced 'yi'."

Then he wrote down the character "二" (two), explaining, "This character is pronounced 'er'."

He wrote down ten numbers, then his own name, and turned to look at the audience. "You should copy down these lines first."

Raise your hand if you've finished copying.

He didn't speak in a condescending tone, but rather as if he were stating something that was happening.

The craftsmen below the stage bowed their heads and held their pens. Some gripped them so tightly that their knuckles turned white. Some wrote crookedly and then erased and rewrote. Some spent a whole incense stick's time to finish copying that line of text. Each stroke was slow, as if they did not intend to let go until the writing was completely dry.

Xiao Lie watched them write on the stage, without urging them, but just stood aside and waited, like a door that was slowly being pushed open, waiting for someone to step in on their own.

But when he actually started teaching, there were more problems than Xiao Lie had anticipated.

When he wrote "one-third plus one-third equals two-thirds" on the blackboard, someone in the audience asked, "Your Highness, what is one-third?"

He explained the concept of fractions again, and then someone asked, "What is a denominator?"

He started explaining from the beginning, and when he got to the difference between the numerator and denominator, someone in the corner raised their hand: "Your Highness, the word 'three' is pronounced 'shan' where I'm from, but you pronounce it 'san'. Are they the same word?"

Xiao Lie was taken aback: "The same word."

It's just a difference in accent.

The man nodded and continued copying.

Xiao Lie picked up the chalk again, turned around, and wrote the words "one-third" on the blackboard. The chalk paused for a moment on the blackboard before continuing to write.

He realized that he had to learn to explain those concepts that he took for granted in the simplest language, and before he could explain those concepts, he first had to understand what they were saying.

He began to keep a few craftsmen after class and listen to them retell what he had taught that day in their respective dialects.

A craftsman spread his palm out and gestured, saying, "The 'one-tenth' that Your Highness mentioned, does it mean dividing the cake?"

Xiao Lie looked at his palm, bent his fingers one by one, forming an unclosed arc, as if he was using his fingertips to draw a fraction line in the air that had not yet settled, and then said, "It's about dividing the cake."

Over the course of several months, Xiao Lie learned the common vocabulary of the seven major dialects within the Great Chu territory.

He learned to pronounce "one-third," "add," and "equal" in different accents, learned to explain the principles of mechanics using a blacksmith's analogy, and learned to explain solid geometry using a carpenter's experience.

A craftsman from Yongzhou once said after a class, "Your Highness, you talk like the old man at the entrance of our village now."

Xiao Lie was tidying up his lesson plans when he heard this, and put down the booklet he was holding: "Was that good news or bad news?"

The craftsman thought for a moment: "Good things."

Xiao Lie didn't ask any more questions. He tucked the booklet under his arm and walked out of the classroom. The lanterns at the entrance of the Imperial Academy were lit in the night, casting a long shadow of him, like a ruler being recalibrated, extending along the edge of the stone steps, bending at the threshold, and continuing to stretch further into the distance.

The light from the lantern fell on the inside of the threshold, illuminating even the gaps between the last few bricks.

He paused at the school gate, glanced back at the threshold, and then stepped over it.

Discussions about his "teaching" continue.

Some say he's trying to establish a new field of study, others say he's trying to give craftsmen a way out, and still others say he's just bored.

Xiao Lie did not respond or offer an explanation.

He simply appeared in the Imperial Academy classroom at a fixed time every day, writing out the characters the craftsmen didn't recognize one by one, and explaining the principles they didn't understand one by one.

The trees outside the classroom window sprouted in spring, grew lush in summer, and began to turn yellow in autumn. He remained in that classroom.

After a day of classes, a craftsman from Yongzhou did not leave immediately.

He walked to the front of the podium, stood there for a while, laid the paper full of calculations on the table, and said, "Your Highness, I used to think that I was destined to be a blacksmith all my life."

My father was a blacksmith, and so was my grandfather.

I never imagined that one day I would be sitting in a classroom at the Imperial Academy, writing calligraphy.

He didn't look up, as if speaking to the paper: "Now I feel that my son doesn't need to forge iron anymore."

Xiao Lie was grading homework, his pen never stopping, but he said, "Then let him do what he wants to do."

The craftsman didn't say anything more. He carefully folded the paper, put it in his pocket, and then turned and walked out.

As he reached the door, he seemed to remember something, stopped, turned back, and asked, "Your Highness, how long will it take you to teach this book?"

Xiao Lie finally raised his head: "I will teach you until you have learned it."

The craftsman nodded: "Then I'll come again tomorrow."

He stepped out of the threshold with lighter steps than when he came in, as if he were using the echo inside the threshold to remeasure the landing point of his next step. Only after confirming that the step would stop where it was supposed to stop did he continue walking towards the school gate.

As Xiao Lie heard the footsteps fade away in the corridor, he looked down at his homework again.

The crooked handwriting on the paper is squeezed together, like a river practicing to be straight. It is not yet fully formed, but it is extending in the direction it is meant to go.

When he turned to the next page, he saw a line of words written in charcoal in the blank space at the edge of the paper. The handwriting was messy, but the strokes were more steady than on the previous pages. The end of the strokes was smoother than the beginning, as if the river channel, after a period of practicing straightness, was trying to maintain the same width at the next bend.

He looked at it for a while, placed the page on top of the stack of corrected papers, then closed the lesson plan, blew out the oil lamp on the table, and got up to leave the classroom.

The night outside the window had already covered the entire training ground.