Consciousness slowly surfaced from the heavy darkness. The first sensation was pain, a splitting headache, as if being stuffed into a centrifuge tube and spun at high speed. Then came the cold, a bone-chilling dryness unique to northern autumn nights.
Zhāng Yuǎnshēng's eyes snapped open. What greeted him were not the cold fluorescent lights of a laboratory, nor the familiar ceiling of his rented room. It was a dim oil lamp, its wick sputtering, creating a tiny spark. The ceiling was made of dark, rough wooden beams, from which hung several withered, unidentifiable farm produce. The air was filled with a faint scent of herbal medicine and earth.
"Brother Sheng? Brother Sheng is awake! Mother! Mother!" a tearful, childish female voice called out from nearby. He painstakingly turned his neck and saw a little girl, about ten years old, with her hair in twin buns and a sallow complexion. She was excitedly shouting towards the door. The girl wore patched coarse cloth clothes, her eyes filled with surprise and worry.
Brother Sheng?
Massive fragments of memories, not his own, surged into his mind like a breached dam, bringing with them even more intense pain. Zhāng Yuǎnshēng, twelve years old, the second son of Zhāng Shǒutián, a landowner in Zhang Family Village, Chang'an County. He fell while climbing a tree to get bird eggs three days ago and has been in a coma since… Zhāng Yuǎnshēng, twenty-five years old, a doctoral student in agricultural biotechnology, who had stayed up three consecutive nights in the lab recording drought resistance data for a batch of hybrid wheat, suddenly blacked out…
Two souls, memories from two different timelines, frantically intertwined, collided, and merged. He… had transmigrated? And into a twelve-year-old child with the same name?
The curtain was abruptly flung open, and a middle-aged woman in a dark blue cotton dress, her hair slightly disheveled, her eyes red-rimmed, rushed in. She pulled him into her arms, and warm tears dripped onto his cheeks. "My child! You're finally awake! You scared me to death! Thank heaven, thank our ancestors!"
The woman carried a pleasant scent of sun-dried cotton, mingled with the everyday aroma of household chores. This was "his" mother, Zhāng Zhōushì.
Immediately after, a middle-aged man in a long gown, his face haggard, possessing the air of a scholar yet marked by years of manual labor, also hurried in, his face alight with relieved excitement. This was his father, Zhāng Shǒutián.
"It's good that you're awake, good that you're awake," his father's voice was somewhat hoarse. He reached out as if to touch his head but hesitated and withdrew his hand, finally letting out a heavy sigh. "You must never be so reckless again!"
Zhāng Yuǎnshēng's mind was still in chaos. Relying on instinct, he weakly called out, "Dad… Mom… Sis…"
His voice was dry and hoarse, not at all like a child's. This simple address made his parents and sister's eyes well up with tears again.
After drinking another bowl of bitter herbal medicine that made his tongue go numb, and enduring a barrage of relieved concern from his family, the room finally fell silent. His mother turned down the oil lamp, urged him to rest well, and then left with his sister, who kept looking back.
Moonlight streamed through a hole in the paper window, casting a small pool of clear light. Zhāng Yuǎnshēng lay on the hard adobe kang, covered by a thick but not very warm cotton quilt, gazing at the darkness of the ceiling, completely awake.
Late Ming Dynasty… the Fourth Year of Tianqi Reign… Chang'an, Shaanxi…
As a history enthusiast, he knew too well what these words combined meant! The Little Ice Age! Great Drought! Locust Plague! Plague! Refugees! Tatars! And just a few years later, the peasant uprising that would sweep across this land and ultimately destroy the Territory of the Great Ming!
This was the center of the future storm, a preview of hell on earth! And he, a twelve-year-old child with no strength to even truss a chicken, was lying on this tinderbox about to ignite!
A wave of immense panic and despair instantly seized him, a hundred times more intense than the headache from merging memories. He, someone who researches agricultural science, dealing with seeds and soil every day, what could he do? Should he use PCR technology to sequence Emperor Chongzhen? Or use Marker-Assisted Breeding to conjure food for the starving refugees? Wait… food? Land? Agriculture? His emotions were suddenly split by a bolt of lightning.
He suddenly remembered the research he was doing before he lost consciousness – the breeding research for drought-resistant wheat and millet in the arid and semi-arid regions of the Northwest! His laptop contained thousands of experiment data, literature, and even several drought-resistant gene editing schemes that had proven effective in laboratory conditions (though impossible to implement in this era)…
But more importantly, there was the fundamental knowledge! Those instincts that had integrated into his very blood!
Soil structure, fertilizer ratios, water conservancy planning, crop rotation, biological pest control, and… right! Sweet Potato! Potato! Corn! These "Famine Relief Artifacts" that had been introduced to China but not yet widely planted by the end of the Ming Dynasty!
In his despair, a faint sliver of light seemed to penetrate. He couldn't forge guns or cannons, couldn't train soldiers or fight battles, and might never even see the Emperor in his lifetime. But, perhaps, he could make the land beneath his feet grow more grain.
More grain would allow the Zhang family to survive, allow this village to survive, and perhaps… strike a tiny wedge into the coming tidal wave.
He took a deep breath of the cold, earthy air, his eyes gradually firming. First, he had to survive, as this twelve-year-old child. Second, he had to understand the true situation of this family, this village, and this land. Finally, he would gradually transform the knowledge in his mind into golden, life-saving grain in the fields.
The first step would be to carefully observe the vegetable patch in his backyard tomorrow.
Outside the window, the autumn wind wailed, making the window frame creak, as if sounding a premature elegy for this precarious era.
And on the adobe kang, a soul from the future began to plan his first "experimental plot" for a sliver of hope.