River Opening

Great Deer Kingdom, Li Prefecture's provincial capital.

A great river ran through the provincial capital, called the Li River.

Li Prefecture took its name from the Li River. This great river not only cut across Lizhou City, but farther downstream split into two branches, one flowing north, one south. The northern branch entered Song Kingdom, while the southern branch flowed into the sea. Its routes stretched in all directions, making it an immensely important waterway for the Great Deer Kingdom. Except during winter, it was bustling in every season, with hundreds of large and small ships passing through each day.

Thus, an ancient poem went:

"Where the Li River opened to boats, profit flowed; south to the vast sea, north to Song. Pushing waves, layering swells, it carried fat and wealth; one river could accomplish the work of enriching a nation."

Though it was the turn of winter and spring, the great river had only just thawed, and cold winds still howled. Yet the docks were sweltering and packed shoulder to shoulder. The heat radiating from laborers and boatmen gathered together, while stench and steam surged outward in equal measure, fierce beyond compare.

Today was the Beginning of Spring. The Li River was breaking free from its winter freeze. Even if it had not thawed, they would have summoned corvée laborers and workers to smash the ice apart and forcibly open it to shipping. This whole process was called "River Opening."

Every year when the river was opened, all those who lived off the Li River's water transport gathered here. The laborers chiseled away at the ice to weaken it, then the boatmen hauled a heavily laden ship forward, crushing the ice sheet and clearing the waterway completely.

Boatmen bore the ships, laborers smashed the ice; wind blew over blood and sweat, sun scorched bare skin, and the work chants never ceased.

"Rope on our shoulders, nine zhang three! Ho-hai!"

The boatmen roared their chant and exerted themselves together, dragging the great ship onward. Its thick hull caught the wind like a raised sail, while sailors aboard joined in, combining wind power with human strength to crush the ice into powder.

"A life of toil, rope tied round the shoulders! Ho-hai!"

This was no ordinary ship. It was a specially made vessel brought out only for the yearly River Opening, with an iron-cast hull and a body built from century-old timber. No ice sheet could withstand a single blow from it.

"Feet kick stone, hands claw sand! Ho-hai!"

The ice sheet split open, cracks bursting everywhere. Huge chunks of ice turned somersaults in the water, even forming miniature icebergs one after another.

"Never say a boat cannot sail against the current! Ho-hai!"

A great river like the Li River was a full five li wide. Opening it was a massive undertaking that took the entire day, and even the Prefect of Li Prefecture would come personally to supervise.

The iron-bottomed ship charged into the ice with astonishing force. Terrifying cracks rang out as it smashed the ice apart like a battering ram. Shards of ice shot high into the sky, falling around the boatmen like hail, while fine icy dust and mist reflected the sunlight, casting rainbow after rainbow through the air.

Icy mist steamed through the air, while heat billowed from people's bodies. Cold and heat intertwined, crashing together into clouds of white vapor.

The first group of boatmen exhausted their strength, and a second group immediately stepped in to take up the burden, continuing to haul the icebreaker forward.

The first group, freed from their heavy burden, hurried away one after another to rest.

Only one person remained standing where he was, without moving.

His skin was dark brown and looked exceptionally healthy. Years of hauling ships had built his muscles into powerful ridges, yet his physique remained well-proportioned.

What made him stand head and shoulders above the rest was that most boatmen had rough features and hunched backs, while he alone stood straight as a ramrod, handsome enough that at first glance, no one would take him for a boatman at all.

His name was Li Qi.

Having just set down the towrope, Li Qi looked at the great ship and the frozen river before him and sighed with emotion. Though this was already the third time he had seen it, he still found it spectacular.

Before he could finish that breath of awe, however, an old boatman beside him threw an arm around him and dragged the dazed Li Qi away from his scenery-gazing.

"Come on, Little Li. It's the second shift's turn now. Let's go have a couple mouthfuls of hot soup first!"

"Uh, ah... all right, Uncle Liu." Li Qi nodded and walked to the shore with the other boatmen, all bare-chested save for loincloths.

Li Qi was a boatman too, but unlike the others, he had not come from generations of boatmen.

By the shore, others had already prepared hot soup and clothing for the boatmen and sailors coming off the river, so they could warm themselves up. Before long, once they had recovered their strength, they would have to go back for a second round.

Sitting together, the boatmen changed into clothes, cradled bowls of meat soup, and began wolfing down their food with slurping gulps. None of them ate prettily.

Only Li Qi crouched by the riverbank. He was exhausted as well, drenched in sweat and marked by injuries left from the towrope, but he still waited quietly instead of scrambling for the meat soup cooked by the authorities.

Only after the people crammed together had all gotten theirs did he step forward to collect his own bowl. Then he returned to the riverbank, watching the other boatmen haul the great ship while taking small sips of soup.

"Brother Li! Here, I found you a stool!" A boatman carried over a stool from afar, though no one knew where he had found it.

"You've troubled yourself. There's no need, no need. No one else has a stool..." Li Qi had barely begun to refuse when the boatmen beside him pressed him down onto it.

"Uncle Liu has one too. Brother Li, don't stand on ceremony. You and Uncle Liu won us the first shift for this River Opening. It's only a chair, what's there to say you can't sit on it?!"

"Exactly!"

"The first shift comes with a personal reward from the Prefect himself. Brother Li got us this position, so what's wrong with sitting on a chair?"

"Right, right, right!"

"Me too!"

Seeing this, Li Qi stopped refusing. He sat down to rest while watching the boatmen of the "second shift" haul the great ship onward.

Before he knew it, he had already watched the River Opening three times.

He had been in this world for nearly three years.

Yes, he was not from this world. As he watched that great ship, the thought rose in his heart once more.

That ship must have displaced several thousand tons, yet a mere one or two hundred boatmen, plus its sails, could actually drag it along—and even smash through the ice!

He looked again at the sinewy muscles on his body. Even among all these boatmen, he did not look scrawny. Back when he had been an ordinary researcher, how could he possibly have had such a physique?

But here...

At that thought, he suddenly rose to his feet and threw a fierce punch!

The air seemed compressed, howling with the motion of his fist. Dust flew up from the ground some distance away, as though something heavy had struck it.

The other boatmen immediately praised him. "Brother Li's Wave-Pushing Strength looks downright splendid!"

"I've trained for ten years, but I still can't compare to Brother Li's two or three years of skill!"

"Bullshit. What kind of person are you? What kind of person is Brother Li?"

The boatmen burst into laughter. They merely thought Li Qi had suddenly felt like moving around and found nothing strange about it.

A man suddenly getting the urge to throw a couple punches at the air was as natural as heaven and earth. Surely no one had never done it.

But Li Qi was sighing inwardly.

More than three years ago, his plane had crashed. After losing consciousness, he had discovered that he had arrived here—and he had come in his original body. There had even been a shattered game console in his pocket and his travel backpack, though most of its contents had been burned away, leaving only a few scraps of useless metal.

He had transmigrated, and he had brought his body with him.

He had heard of transmigration before, but where was the promised inherited memory? Where was the promised original identity?

There was nothing. He did not even have household registration.

Other people even brought smartphones with them when they crossed over. He had only brought half a game console.

Fortunately, he had encountered local boatmen and been saved. And as a researcher, he at least had some brains. He established himself among the boatmen and earned their trust, after which Uncle Liu taught him some ancestral methods the boatmen used to train their strength.

In only three short years, he could now carry a seven- or eight-hundred-jin sack while moving as swiftly as if he were flying. He even wondered whether he was still human. Could human beings really reach such a level through training?

According to Uncle Liu, the boatmen's strength-training methods were still among the crudest kind. The methods used by the military, the government, and sects were what counted as profound, far beyond anything boatmen could compare to.

At first, he had been wildly excited, believing he could use the things in his head to accomplish something great!

Then reality had slapped him mercilessly across the face. He discovered that this place was developed to a terrifying degree and had no need for his little cleverness at all...

He was good at mathematics, yet Lizhou City had a sect called the Thousand Mechanisms Sect that specialized in divination and calculation. Every one of its disciples was terrifyingly proficient in mental arithmetic, data analysis, and probability theory.

There really were no cars here, but people could travel a hundred li a day on their own two legs. He had heard that wealthy households even possessed spirit horses that could travel a thousand li in a single day.

And that was over mountain roads. If there were a highway, could those horses race F1 cars?

Yes, there truly were no machines here, but what would they need machines for?

The strange laws of this world had sent it down an entirely different path. There were few tools, yet nearly every function of a tool could be replaced by human strength.

Freight trucks? Boatmen could already carry seven or eight hundred jin, while those strongmen could each shoulder two or three thousand jin and work all day.

Precision machine tools? Li Qi had personally seen a craftsman carve a hundred-man battle scene onto a grain of rice with a needle in the time it took to burn one stick of incense, simply to flaunt his skill.

Research? What a joke. The Thousand Mechanisms Sect mentioned earlier—not even counting their mental calculation ability—was supposedly not considered a major sect among Li Prefecture's upper ranks. Yet when Li Qi heard them recruiting disciples, he discovered that their research into probability theory and chaos algorithms surpassed even his world's by far. He could not even understand it.

Human strength had been magnified without limit in this world. Through these things called "cultivation methods," people had completely replaced every tool. No tool was as useful as a person himself.

Even when it came to weapons, Li Qi believed that if an entire modern army group were dropped into this world, it would probably be annihilated by the Li Prefecture Armed Guard.

He had once seen those Armed Guard soldiers while hauling a boat for some important figure. At the time, the Armed Guard's commanding general performed martial arts for the amusement of the officials aboard. With a long saber in hand, he cut the five-li-wide Li River apart, stopping its flow for several seconds with a single slash.

That sight had given Li Qi nightmares for three nights.

And their productive capacity was no worse, either.

Wasn't it said that people in other worlds had something wrong with their brains, remaining stuck in an agrarian society even after ten thousand years of development?

They did practice agriculture, sure, but had anyone ever seen rice yields of three or four thousand jin per mu? And it was Spirit Rice, with an energy content that was probably terrifyingly high. At first, before Li Qi had trained in Wave-Pushing Strength, he could not even finish half a bowl in one meal. He would be painfully stuffed.

But now, three jin per meal only counted as half full.

He simply could not afford meat.

There was hardly any animal husbandry in this world, so meat mostly came from hunting. But hunting costs were high as well, which meant they could only eat a little minced meat and meat soup during festivals and special occasions, such as the current River Opening.

That was precisely why the boatmen ate like starving ghosts.

Animal husbandry was nearly nonexistent. Li Qi had initially thought it was a business opportunity too, but after trying it once, he gave up.

People in this world were already so fierce, while the wild beasts were even more monstrously fierce. A pig was like a tank, making large-scale domestication incredibly difficult. Li Qi had never seen this world's tigers, but he reckoned those things would have no great trouble tearing apart a Gundam.

So far, the only domesticated animals he had seen were the spirit horses that occasionally appeared at the docks.

He had heard of demon beasts and spirit beasts and the like, but those were far too distant from Li Qi. He was only a boatman, at the very bottom of society, with no chance to see such things.

It was not that he lacked ambition. During his first two years here, he had not given up trying to climb upward either, hoping to become someone like a protagonist.

But in a world like this, "cultivation methods" were bound to become the most precious resource.

People relied on cultivation methods to gather into one small group after another.

Take Lizhou City. There were three Boatman Gangs: their Wave-Pushing Gang, plus the Water-Horse Gang and the Mighty Gang. Together, they had seven or eight hundred boatmen.

The three gangs guarded their internal cultivation methods with extreme strictness. Only after undergoing background checks, submitting a pledge of allegiance, and then being observed for a long time could someone be granted the right to cultivate the methods and formally become a gang member.

Afterward, they had to swear poisonous oaths and sign documents promising not to spread the cultivation methods. If there were traitors, not only would they face internal punishment, but the authorities had explicit laws forbidding the disclosure of methods learned after signing such documents. The punishments were severe, with exile thirty thousand li away at the slightest turn. He had no idea how large this continent even was.

Under such circumstances, small groups in every city divided people according to cultivation methods. The various gangs and communities had become rigidly stratified beyond belief. There was simply no way for him to learn another group's methods.

In three years, aside from relying on his wits to gain the position of strategist within the Wave-Pushing Gang and earn the respect of one or two hundred boatmen, he had truly accomplished nothing.

"Ha..." Thinking of this, he sighed.

He drifted through life without achievement. Though he could eat enough rice every day, he had to think twice if he wanted to add some vegetables. As for meat... that depended entirely on rewards from the great figures above.

He had transmigrated, yet his life seemed to have worsened... aside from becoming somewhat stronger.

Oh, more than somewhat.

He was simply unwilling to accept it.

"Uncle Li, Sixth Master wants you!" At that moment, a child came running over with another boatman who looked to be in his forties or fifties, calling out to Li Qi.

As the child shouted, drool streamed from his mouth without stopping.

Li Qi laughed at the sight. Smiling, he handed over his unfinished half-bowl of meat soup. "All right, look at you. Take it. Remember to return the bowl when you're done!"

The child cried out in delight and leaped up. He grabbed the bowl and drank it down together with the drool that had just run out of his mouth, smacking his lips as he chewed the minced meat inside. He even forgot to thank him.

It was Uncle Liu, the old boatman, who frowned when he saw the child. He set the stool beside Li Qi, then sat down. "You only get meat a few times all year, and you gave it away just because he ran an errand?"

"I've been rained on, so I give others an umbrella. I've gone hungry, so I know how precious a casual bowl of soup can be. If Uncle Liu hadn't given me a bowl of soup back then, wouldn't I have died too?" Li Qi replied with an offhand smile.

Then he turned to business. "All right, enough of that. Uncle Liu, what did you need me for?"

"What I gave you back then was vegetable soup!"

Uncle Liu muttered, but he did not delay the matter. He immediately got to the point. "Little Li, you're smarter. Help me think this through. It seems we've run into trouble."

The new book is out! This is not a system story, declaring that in advance.

I already have a completed work of over a million characters. No dropped updates, no eunuching. Feel free to follow with confidence.