The Veteran Workers

“Xiao Zishan, I think you have the temperament of a landlord.” Wen Desi laughed.

“Maybe my ancestors were landlords. My dream was always to own a large farm, plant vegetables, raise some cattle, grow some grapes, and lounge away on a rattan chain sipping tea…”

“That’s the dream isn’t it? But can’t we actually do it for real now?” Wen Desi said slowly. “We have made a lot of money, your dream isn’t hard to achieve.”

“It’s a pity that the wormhole will disappear one day.” Xiao Zishan stretched. “This time I felt a very obvious fluctuation.”

“It would be nice if it was Doraemon’s door.” Wen Desi laughed.

“I haven’t even finished what I was saying. In my dream, there are also a few beauties fanning me and peeling fruits for me. A mature woman, a tsundere ice-queen, a little loli…actually, this Gao Lujie is a good start.”

“That girl,” Wen Desi peeled a lychee while reclining into the sofa, “is not Gao Qing’s daughter.”

“Well, their DNA is for sure different.”

Xiao Zishan began to take stock of the pile of porcelain wares. Every time they came back he was the one responsible for taking inventory and tracking their income. Wang Luobin soon left for his job in the factory again.^[1] Recently, he had been very enthusiastic about his job, much to the surprise of Wen Desi and Xiao Zishan. Not only was he always working overtime, he was even very excited when he returned.

It was now just the two left in the suite.

“She bears no resemblance to her father and brother. Also, her height is a dead giveaway.”

“Wen Desi, are you into this long-legged loli?”

“Shove it back into your pants. There are more serious things we need to do.”

“Yeah you’re right. So, recruiting the troops.”

After this third time trading, they had more than 20 million in cash available, which would be enough to begin some serious preparation work.

To build a team they would first have to designate a suitable assembly point. Somewhere to register and receive the hundreds of people joining them, and where they could prepare everything they would need to bring with them. Guangzhou city was obviously not a good choice. Wen Desi was of the opinion that this assembly point should be relatively remote, close to the future crossing point in Hainan, and have facilities to comfortably accommodate hundreds of people. Ideally, there should also be some large, open-air grounds and a sports field.

“What do we need a sports field for?” Xiao Zishan was puzzled.

“Exercise.” Wen Desi looked at his stick-like arms and Xiao Zishan’s pot belly.

“Above all else, when we have to run for our lives, we must at least be able to outrun the natives of the Ming Dynasty.”

Xiao Zishan thus became responsible for finding where they could build a base on this side of the portal, as he was most familiar with the coastal cities of Guangdong from his work as a salesperson. Wang Luobin continued work at his factory. Wen Desi stayed in Guangzhou to prepare for the next trade, while also hosting online discussions on the bullet board and finding suitable specialists. In fact, he had already drafted an invitation list.

Surprisingly however the fourth person to join the Executive Committee was not a person Wen Desi recruited from the discussion board.

---

That night, Wen Desi was trawling the discussion board and contemplating who else he needed to talk to, when Wang Luobin suddenly entered his room. His overalls were still greasy with oil, but he still sat down on the sofa without a care in the world. Although there were deep bags under his eyes, he was positively bursting with excitement.

“Luobin, you come back from work so excited every day, has something good happened?” Desi was very curious.

“Wen Desi, I want you to meet someone.”

“Who?” Wen Desi was puzzled. Wang Luobin usually didn’t talk much, socialised even less, and moreso didn’t know anyone local in Guangzhou. Why would Wang Luobin suddenly be introducing someone to him?

“My boss.”

Seeing that Wen Desi didn’t react, he added, “It’s my boss from the factory I work at, his last name is Zhan.”

“Huh?”

“So, anyway, I told him about the time travel–”

“You what?!” Wen Desi leaped to his feet.

“Old Wen, calm down, calm down.” Luobin said.

“His last name is Zhan, full name Zhan Wuya. He’s a senior technician, an excellent craftsman. Proficient in all sorts of tooling: lathing, pinching, planing, milling…”

“Okay, okay, fine. Let’s be serious then. Does your boss believe you? Or does he think you’ve gone crazy?”

“He believes me. In fact, he wants to join.”

“J-Join?” Wen Desi stuttered, stumbling over his words for a moment. “He wants to come along as well?”

“Yeah, the other day when we were making a hand-cranked Gatling gun…”

“What the hell?!” Wen Desi exclaimed, but soon crouched over in a whisper. “Are you insane? You’ll get arrested for illegally making guns!”

“It’s fine man, we’ll have to make guns anyway once we get to the Great Ming. Might as well practise first.” Wang Luobin shrugged. “It’s nothing special for two mechanics to make a small gun. I’ve even heard of another group who made a Japanese Type 92 cannon before.”

“Let’s not hear that story. So what’s up with your boss?”

“He greatly admires your thinking. He says to leave all the machining jobs to him. He’s preparing to move his entire factory over to the other side.”

---

Zhan Wuya was not quite the white-hair, mad-scientist type Wen Desi imagined him to be. Instead, Wuya was a man in his early thirties, and wore a T-shirt and had neatly combed hair. Only his large, calloused hands revealed the nature of his job.

Wen Desi had actually worked closely with several of these small outsourcing manufacturers in the past. After a quick mutual introduction, they delved into a deep discussion on several machine tooling topics. Their common language brought the two together, and soon they felt like fast friends.

“Mr. Wen, let’s put it this way, us mechanics can make anything.” Zhan Wuya was full of pride. “Just taking my small shop for instance, although I can’t guarantee I’d be able to build a tank from scratch, it’d be a piece of cake to make mortars and automatic rifles. Even when I was in vocational school…”

Zhan Wuya then spent five minutes talking about the time when he made a mortar for his graduation project. After this he slipped into a conversation with Wang Luobin about gunsmithing again. Later Wen Desi would learn that the reason why Wang Luobin and Zhan Wuya had developed such a solid friendship so fast was because they were both avid gun nerds. Wen Desi hurriedly broke their conversation so that any possible eavesdroppers would not think they were some underground gun dealers.

Zhan Wuya quickly introduced the main equipment in his shop: two hydraulic shears, one 80T bender, a 63T and 5T punch press, two lathes, one planer, one radial drilling machine, three bench drills, one nibbler, five electric welders, one spot welder, one table saw, one heavy-lift crane, one grinding machine and two other table top grinders, one oxygen welder, one air compressor, and one spray paint booth.

“However, if we were pressed for space, just bringing over three main machine tools would be enough.” Zhan Wuya said. “When I was in school, I loved to read old military industrial memos. Back then all the mechanics were geniuses. They could make guns, cannons and even other machine tools just with a lathe and a bench vise.”

Wuya thought for a bit. “But, disregarding the tools, for anything you make the materials are just as critical. Without good materials the quality of everything you make would take a significant hit. In particular, we must have good steel.”

Wang Luobin added, “We already intend to establish a full metallurgical industry, including iron and steel processing.”

“I know nothing about that stuff. But as long as raw materials can be supplied, the best thing about machine tools is that we can use them to build more machine tools, and so continuously and sustainably scale up production. Even more so, this makes our manufacturing capacity more resilient against machine losses and breakdowns.”

“Indeed, no matter how much you bring across, there will be a day when our initial capital dries up.”

“That’s exactly right. But there’s some stuff we can’t skimp on bringing, like tool bits. These are usually made of alloy steel or sintered ceramics. We can’t make such stuff ourselves in the beginning. Similarly for grinding wheels, they require special materials and sintering techniques. In addition, I don’t know if there are any good substitutes for grease…”

“These problems we can solve one by one as they arise.” Wen Desi was full of energy after their long discussion with Zhan Wuya. “Old Zhan, you should take charge of the industrial part of our preparations.”

“Leave it to me!” Zhan Wuya hadn’t been so passionate about a project for as long as he could remember. After leaving school to start his own business, although it was stable, his life had become quite boring. He was exhausted from having to deal with clients every day. At this moment however an unprecedented world had opened its gates, beckoning him in. He was filled with fighting spirit and was determined to leave his mark in this new world.

The Industrial Group of the Executive Committee was established on that day.

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A few days later, another member joined the Industrial Group. This was Ma Qianzhu. The fierce competition between Ma Qianzhu and Zhan Wuya would feature prominently in later memoirs.

Ma Qianzhu was in the same bulletin board space as Xiao Zishan and the others, and had heard of each other's names. However, he wasn’t a participant in the early discussions of the wormhole, but was instead fully immersed in another thread fantasising about a fully analogue computing centre: the affectionately named Model 5.

At first, he thought that Wen Desi’s wormhole was just pure imagination, just like his mechanical computer. When he later found out that this group of people were really going to the Ming Dynasty, he quickly signed up through an acquaintance. As for his motivation, it wasn’t hard to imagine. Only in a new world untainted by electronics could he realise his dream: a sprawling analogue computing centre covering 6,000 mu running off 80,000 horsepower at 20,000 operations per second. This huge machine made him starry-eyed just by thinking about it.

In summary, Ma Qianzhu’s genre of interest was steampunk. Keywords: steam and steel. Rows of smoking chimneys, roaring boilers, black smoke, steel sparks, floating gunboats across the sky…This was his ideal world. After receiving an invitation from Wen Desi, Ma Qianzhu, without a shred of hesitation, packed his bags, quit his job as a traffic engineer, and set off on a train down to Guangdong.

Ma Qianzhu wasn’t going to Guangzhou city but rather another county-level city he had never even heard of before. After disembarking from the train he had to hop onto another long-distance bus. His destination was the home base scouted out by Xiao Zishan. All the time travellers would prepare their gear here and ready themselves for the one-way road into a parallel world. One that they would never return from.

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1. I think there is a continuity error; we were told earlier on that Wang Luobin quit his job and came down to Guangzhou, but we weren’t told that he found a new job. ↩︎