The first thing Li Wei felt was pain. Not sharp, but dull and constant—like the ache of forgotten youth returning to a body that had long since aged, burned, and died.
Then came light.
He opened his eyes to a familiar wooden ceiling, warped with age. The scent of old books, cooking oil, and warm metal filled his nose. This wasn't a simulation, and it certainly wasn't the charred ruins of the last Earth he remembered.
He sat up quickly.
"No neural uplink. No retinal display. No automated health monitor."
His hands were thin, uncalloused. His arms lacked the augmented muscle fibers he had once installed himself.
A cracked mirror beside the desk confirmed what he feared—and hoped.
"Sixteen," he whispered. "I'm sixteen again."
Collapse and Return
The last thing Li Wei remembered from the future was the sound of orbital cannons tearing through the Earth's final defense ring.
Humanity's last stand against an endless war across dimensions—alien empires, AI-led extinction fleets, magical civilizations tearing open reality.
He had fought with everything: nano-forges, sentient weapons, even cloning himself to keep working while he slept. And still, they lost.
Right before the singularity drive detonated, he had activated a one-way temporal collapse—fusing brain-state preservation and quantum entanglement. A desperate gamble.
"And it worked. Somehow… I'm here."
The past. His sixteen-year-old self. In this city: Yongcheng, a mid-tier industrial zone in the eastern province of the Republic of Dongxia.
The world was still on the edge of modernity. Cheap labor. Corrupt officials. Electricity, yes. Computers, barely. AI? Just a myth outside of fiction.
"Which means I have time," he said, standing. "Time to build it right."
A Modest Beginning
Li Wei's room was small but organized. A low bed. One steel bookshelf. A desk with two broken radios and a local-brand computer that still ran on a 32-bit architecture.
His memory confirmed the year: 2025 New Era, Dongxia Standard Calendar. He had three months left before university entrance exams.
But he wouldn't waste his time on school now.
He needed capital. Equipment. Materials. Access to industrial tools. And to get that, he had to start where it mattered: basic computing infrastructure.
"I'll need to build my own OS. ForgeOS, version zero."
Windows and open-source Linux wouldn't scale to what he had in mind. He needed complete control: kernel-level autonomy, modular tasking, and a data structure ready for exponential complexity.
And it had to run on the most basic hardware.
He pulled out his old notebook. It was half-full of physics formulas and scribbles about programming logic from when he was in high school. With a half-smile, he tore out the pages.
Step One: ForgeOS
That night, he wrote the first boot routine for ForgeOS in assembly—lean, light, efficient.
The next morning, after skipping school, he headed into the Yongcheng electronics market. An open-air chaos of stalls, spare parts, and repackaged motherboards.
He bought:
Two broken laptops (Pentium-era)
A soldering iron
Basic PCB breadboards
A 512MB USB stick
With ¥900 left in his pocket, he stopped for the cheapest dumplings he could find.
At home, he booted up the system. The BIOS flickered weakly, but it worked. He slid in the USB.
"Boot sector clear. Load kernel..."
The screen blinked.
ForgeOS: Initiating Kernel Environment...System Ready.
Li Wei leaned back, exhaling. It was crude. No GUI. No network stack. Just a blinking terminal.
But it was his.
Seeds of Innovation
Over the next week, Li Wei wrote code by hand: file system logic, user-space access controls, memory handlers. Using nothing but assembly and C.
Every few hours, he backed up his code into three locations: USB, an old hard disk, and his repurposed MP3 player.
The key was modularity. ForgeOS wasn't meant to rival today's operating systems. It was meant to support tomorrow's machines—including things that didn't exist yet.
"Quantum bridges. Swarm computing. Elastic task cloning.""It all begins with clean architecture."
But he needed more than code.
He needed a lab.
A Quiet Conversation
At dinner, Li Wei's mother looked up from her bowl of noodles. "You've been home all week. Are you studying for exams?"
He nodded. "In a way."
His father grunted. "Just don't fail the math part this time. If you want a future, university is the path."
Not this time, Li Wei thought. This time, I make the path.
Later that night, he went outside and looked at the faint glow of the industrial sector in the distance. Machine shops. Welding garages. Old factories half-converted into storage units.
"One of them will do," he said softly.
The Forge is Lit
Li Wei's plan was simple: rent out a garage under a false name, rewire the power feed, and begin prototyping.
In the morning, he would scout sites. By night, he would code.
And when he had enough of both, he would start building the tools that would power the next age.
Not with spells. Not with miracles.
But with systems, silicon, and steel.