Daming Brick House

Xu Lang is an ordinary appliance repairman whose routine fix on a water heater sends him hurtling back in time to the twenty-ninth year of the Jiajing reign of the Ming Dynasty (1550). He opens his eyes to a desolate mountain wilderness echoing with the howls of wolves—and he does not even have a full set of clothes on his back. While other transmigrators arrive with cheat systems and pocket warehouses, all Xu Lang brings with him is a head full of repair skills: mending pots, bowls, and bellows, forging iron, building carts, and tracking down water. "This boy is deft with his hands—he just talks strangely," says Aunt Zhao. "Work the forge beside him and you'll learn a thing or two," says Zhao Tiezhu. But Yan Shifan sneers, "A mere craftsman dares to stand in my path?" Xu Lang's answer: "Never underestimate a craftsman. The armaments? I made them. The city walls? I repaired them. And that blade in your hand—it was forged by my own apprentice." From a ramshackle hut in the wilderness to the Bureau of Armaments in the imperial capital, from a single bowl of hot porridge to a first-rank imperial patent of honor—the bricks of the Great Ming must be laid one at a time. And as Xu Lang lays them, brick by brick, he builds the entire realm into the shape he wants it to be.