Shatters the Dream
"Push harder! If this rammed earth isn’t solid enough, the overseer will have our hides tomorrow!" The harsh, hoarse shout, thick with a Guanzhong accent, exploded in his ear. Immediately after, a heavy weight pressed down on his back, as if Mount Tai itself were slowly bearing down on him. Shrimp Ren’s eyes snapped open, only to have his vision blurred by the swirling yellow dust.
He did not see the expected laboratory ceiling lights, nor hear the monotonous beep of an electrocardiogram. Before his eyes was a bleak grey sky and countless figures bent over like ants, toiling away. Surrounding him were endless earthen walls that seemed to pierce the heavens, while massive wooden rammers pounded the ground in the pit with a dull thud that shook his chest with pain.
"Shrimp Ren, you’re not dead yet?" A man with a face caked in black grime crouched beside him, clutching a rough iron shovel, his eyes fierce. "Get up and move stones if you’re awake. Stop playing dead—the overseer’s coming!"
Zhang Tian—or rather, Shrimp Ren now—felt a wave of dizziness. Instinctively, he wanted to ask, "Where is this?" But his throat was so parched it felt like swallowing hot coals. He looked around. The cold iron armor, the grim military banners, the suffocating, iron-law-like atmosphere—everything shattered him instantly. This was no dream. The bone-chilling cold and the real pain told him he had arrived in a completely unfamiliar era.
For the next three days, Shrimp Ren survived on a numb, almost instinctual autopilot. He carried stones, mixed mortar, endured hunger and the lash on the Great Wall construction site. As his body gradually adapted to the frail yet explosive frame of a sixteen-year-old boy, fragmented pieces of information began slicing through his memory like blades.
Great Qin. Qin Shi Huang. On a royal inspection… dead.
The news spread through the work site like a plague, silent and insidious. It began as faint whispers, then fearful glances, finally erupting into barely contained unrest.
"Heard? The Emperor… passed away on the road."
Late at night, the faint glow of a campfire flickered as several laborers huddled together, whispering. Shrimp Ren hid in the shadows, body tense, ears catching every word.
"Dead? Then what happens? The Crown Prince…"
"Shh! Keep your voice down! Xianyang is chaos right now. Word is that Minister Zhao has sealed the news, says the Emperor is still in seclusion… but everyone knows the wind has shifted in the palace."
Shrimp Ren’s heart clenched. As a modern man, he knew all too well what these words meant. The death of Qin Shi Huang heralded the end of an era—and a power storm that would devour everything. If Zhao Gao was truly concealing the funeral, then the entire empire was in its most dangerous vacuum.
"The eldest prince… Lord Fusu, he was exiled to Shangjun, wasn’t he?" Another voice carried a trace of sorrow. "Minister Zhao said that due to border unrest, the eldest prince needed to be sent far away to guard the frontier…"
Shrimp Ren shot to his feet, then crouched back down in the darkness. His pupils contracted with intense tension. Fusu, that gentle, ritual-abiding prince—if he had truly been exiled to the frontier, then in this struggle for power, he would be the first sacrificial offering.
This was not just a historical turning point; it was a crisis for Fusu’s survival. If Great Qin collapsed, all order in this era would turn to dust, and he himself, a rootless stranger, would not even have a chance to live until tomorrow.
"What are you thinking? Still not asleep? Tomorrow we’re moving those heavy crossbow parts!" A whip cracked in the distance, followed by a scream.
Shrimp Ren closed his eyes, but another image flashed through his mind: inside Xianyang Palace, Zhao Gao’s cold, snake-like face, and Li Si’s deep, ambition-filled gaze. He knew he could not just be an escaping bystander. Since fate had thrown him into this era’s vortex, only by seizing control of the variables could he survive.
On the fourth morning, the wind and sand were especially fierce. While distributing rations, Shrimp Ren heard even more chilling news from a petty officer delivering military equipment:
"Lord Fusu… there’s really no word. A secret edict from Minister Zhao says that the eldest prince, while on his journey, suffered a relapse of an old illness… and has already passed away."
Shrimp Ren gripped the coarse black bread, his body trembling. "This news is fake, it must be fake!" he kept telling himself. A thought flashed through his mind: if Fusu were truly dead, Zhao Gao would not need to fabricate a "death by illness." He could simply announce the heir and quickly consolidate power. The reason for concealment was that Fusu was still alive—the only variable—and Zhao Gao had to cut off his ties to the court before Fusu’s forces could react.
A sense of mission he had never felt before—or rather, a fear of the collapse of order—drove him forward. He could not just wait to die.
"Hey, Shrimp Ren, why are you so pale?" A fellow worker patted his shoulder. "Heard? Our military equipment here is being transferred north to support the eldest prince… oh, I mean the border legion."
Shrimp Ren looked up, a resolute gleam in his eyes. He gazed at the endless Great Wall in the distance—it was not only the empire’s backbone but also the fault line of power.
"Going where?" Shrimp Ren asked in a low voice.
"North, with General Meng Tian’s army," the worker replied casually. "Heard it’s chaos up there. The Xiongnu have already attacked."
Shrimp Ren took a deep breath, the cold air stinging his lungs. There was an opportunity. Fusu had been exiled, but as long as he was still alive and his forces in the north had not been wiped out, a comeback was possible. He just needed a foothold—a lever to catapult himself from this muddy work site into the eye of the power storm.
That night, while sorting through his tattered bag, he found a hard object hidden in a seam of his clothes. It was the only relic from his other world, brought along during his violent convulsions upon first awakening—a specially made, finely calibrated steel ruler with tiny gradations. Though it might look like a fragment of some divine artifact to the people of Qin, in his eyes, it was the key to leveraging technology across the entire era.
"Since I’m here, let’s play big." Shrimp Ren whispered to himself in the darkness. "Zhao Gao, Li Si… you think you hold all the pieces on the board, but you have no idea that a variable you can’t possibly understand has just entered the game."
He stood up and began dismantling some abandoned crossbow parts on the site. His movements were swift, marked by a logical, standardized mindset that did not belong to this era. Every gear mesh, every spring’s tension, translated into precise data in his mind.
Just then, urgent hoofbeats sounded outside the camp, shattering the silence of the Great Wall work site.
"Quick! Seal the news! Lock up all irrelevant laborers. No one leaves camp except the weapons team!"
It was Zhao Gao’s secret order.
Shrimp Ren pressed against a gap in the tent and saw a squad of elite guards in black cloaks passing through the camp like ghosts, their movements uniform, their eyes cold and devoid of humanity.
He realized the purge had begun. The "news" of the eldest prince’s death was only the prelude; the real blade was spreading across the land. But instead of fear, he felt a thrill of excitement, his blood boiling. This crisis was the perfect stage for his "dimensionality reduction strike."
He looked at the old, rusty crossbow discarded in the corner—his eyes sharpened. He knew that to save Fusu, he needed not only courage, but technological power that could crush this era.
"Mo Yu… if only I could find you…" he murmured an unknown name in his heart—the only possible collaborator in technical inheritance that he had glimpsed in his fragmented memories of this land.
The moonlight was swallowed by thick clouds, and the Great Wall site sank into deeper darkness. But the fire in Shrimp Ren’s eyes burned ever brighter. He had decided: he would no longer be a humble clerk. He would become the center of the imperial storm.
Flee. Search. Reshape.
His first step: infiltrate the political maelstrom of murderous intrigue by joining the departing military transport convoy.
In the distance, toward Xianyang, a muffled bell tolled—as if mourning the fall of an old era, or heralding the arrival of a new legend.
Shrimp Ren tightened the straps of his bag, pushed open the tent flap, and stepped into the blood-scented gale.
