The streets of Yongcheng buzzed with life—electric scooters zipped between uneven pavement cracks, merchants hawked bootleg gadgets, and secondhand parts stores flickered with flickering LED signs. In this city, people didn't notice a teenager wandering alone with a backpack full of broken circuits and boot-sector notes.
Li Wei scanned the rows of warehouses tucked behind the old textile district. These weren't listed on any rental site. No contracts, no permits. Perfect.
He stopped in front of an iron gate, rusted around the edges. Faded white paint read: Unit C-23 – Storage Only. Not for Living Use. Below it, someone had spray-painted: Power Cut – Bring Your Own Generator.
"Good enough."
The First Forge
It took ¥3,000, a handshake, and two packs of smuggled imported cigarettes to seal the deal. The owner, a wiry man named Uncle Meng, barely glanced at Li Wei before handing over the padlock key.
"Stay out of trouble," Meng warned. "Don't bring cops. Don't blow anything up."
Li Wei nodded, already planning how to run a silent inverter generator through the back alley power conduit. Blowing things up was months away—if all went well.
The inside of the unit was dusty, bare concrete, with a leaking roof in one corner. But it had two things Li Wei needed: space, and silence.
He dubbed it: Forge Alpha.
Starting from Scraps
His first week inside Forge Alpha was humble.
Li Wei brought in:
A folding table from home
An extension cord rigged to siphon power from a streetlight
Three CRT monitors and two salvaged tower cases
A printer someone threw out because it jammed once
He soldered in silence, sometimes working twelve hours straight. His fingers blistered, his back ached, and the air stank of melted plastic.
And yet, he smiled.
Because on the screen, line by line, ForgeOS evolved.
He coded low-level drivers for input devices. Built a bootable UI shell—text-only, for now. Designed a custom virtual file structure that prioritized modular growth over raw speed. No clutter. No legacy bloat. Just raw potential.
He named the core loop: IronRoot.
Friends, Then Associates
By the tenth day, Li Wei realized one thing: if he kept scavenging and soldering alone, his progress would stall.
He needed help.
Not friends—resources.
He remembered two names from this timeline. Both students. Both useful.
First, Xu Yanyue. Daughter of a small factory owner, already dabbling in amateur PCB design during school club days. Intelligent, competitive, and dangerously curious.
Second, Lan Jie. Soft-spoken, brilliant in signal processing. Quietly aced national-level programming tests without fanfare. Li Wei knew she liked solving practical problems, not academic ones.
He sent them both the same text:
Want to make something real? Show up at Unit C-23 tomorrow. Bring tools.
No explanation. Just that.
Skepticism and Sparks
The next day, Xu Yanyue arrived first.
She looked unimpressed by the cracked walls and fried monitors. "Is this some hacker den? Are you trying to be edgy?"
Li Wei handed her a soldering iron and a schematic. "No. This is a forge. You're here to help build the future."
"Pfft. What, like a startup?"
"No. A civilization."
She blinked, half-laughing. Then she saw the diagram: a logic board unlike anything she'd seen—modular circuits fused with an OS architecture she couldn't recognize.
"Where did you get this?"
"I designed it."
Xu Yanyue was smart. She didn't say 'impossible.' She said, "Prove it."
He ran the first ForgeShell terminal emulator. It loaded in four seconds flat on recycled hardware.
Her jaw tightened. She sat down.
An hour later, Lan Jie arrived, quietly opening the door with a knock. Her eyes were wary, but she said nothing as Li Wei handed her a debugging module for the custom RAM handler.
Two hours after that, she spoke for the first time.
"Your memory allocation routine… it's predictive?"
Li Wei nodded. "It grows based on execution context, not static block sizes. I call it smart heap shaping."
Lan Jie sat down. She didn't leave.
Naming the Future
By nightfall, Forge Alpha had three occupants. Xu Yanyue handled hardware stabilization. Lan Jie tested the OS shell while patching I/O bugs. Li Wei revised the scheduler and began sketching out designs for custom microcontrollers that could one day run ForgeOS without foreign dependencies.
"No reliance on Western chipsets," he said. "No imported firmware. Everything from silicon to software—ours."
They worked in near silence, except for the occasional static buzz or the clink of tools.
Eventually, Xu Yanyue wiped sweat from her brow. "What is this, really? Why do you care so much?"
Li Wei leaned back in his chair.
"Because in thirty years, we lose everything. Civilization collapses. And no one's ready."
The girls exchanged glances. Yanyue narrowed her eyes. "That's a bit much."
Li Wei didn't answer. He didn't have to. The blinking terminal spoke for itself.
The Spark Spreads
Within a week, Xu Yanyue sourced their first proper microcontroller kit through her father's factory contacts. Lan Jie, after a sleepless night, debugged a driver stack that stabilized ForgeShell on multi-threading emulation.
ForgeOS was still fragile. Crashes were common. Components failed. But it was alive.
And it was theirs.
Li Wei wrote on the whiteboard in large black marker:
THE FORGE SOCIETY – Founded July 1, 2025
Mission: Build the Tools of Tomorrow. Reclaim the Future.