Li Chen didn't open his eyes to the sound of a heartbeat, but to the groan of a dying structure.
It was a low, rhythmic creak—the sound of unseasoned timber yielding to a load it was never meant to carry. To a layman, it was just the house "settling." To Li Chen, who had spent forty years commanding the skylines of the modern world, it was the sound of a tragedy in progress.
He forced his eyes open. Above him, the ceiling was a chaotic forest of interlocking dougong brackets. They were beautiful, carved with the precision of a jeweler, but as his eyes traced the lines of the main ridgepole, his stomach twisted.
Deflection, his mind hissed.
The beam was bowing at the center, a subtle curve that screamed of fiber stress. By his quick mental calculation, the dead load of the heavy clay tiles above was exceeding the timber's limit by at least twenty percent. One heavy snowfall, one shift in the soil, and this masterpiece would become a guillotine.
"Your Highness? Your Highness, you've returned to us!"
A face swam into his field of vision—an old man with skin like wrinkled parchment and eyes wet with genuine, terrified relief. Uncle Chen. Li Chen's mind flickered with memories that weren't his: the disgrace, the exile, the cold rain of the journey to this muddy edge of the world.
Li Chen didn't answer. He tried to sit up, but his new body was a reed—thin, weak, and trembling with the remnants of a fever. He looked at the massive cedar pillar beside his bed. He didn't look at the carvings; he looked at the base.
"There's no plinth," Li Chen rasped, his voice sounding like dry leaves.
"Your Highness?" Uncle Chen stammered, freezing. "The physician said the fever might—"
"The pillar is sitting directly on the floor, Uncle," Li Chen interrupted, his hand reaching out to touch the wood. It felt cold. Too soft. "This is Lingnan. The air is soup. Without a stone base to break the contact, the wood is acting like a straw, sucking up ground moisture through capillary action. The heartwood is already rot-soft. This entire wing is a tomb."
He forced himself out of bed, his feet hitting the stone tiles. He winced. The floor was uneven, heaving in places where the frost or the moisture had shifted the sub-grade. He knelt, pressing a palm to the stone, feeling the stagnant chill.
Eighty-five percent humidity, he noted. He looked at the thick, rammed-earth walls. In the modern world, he would have praised the thermal mass, but here, without cross-ventilation, the walls were just sponges for the damp. The room was a heat sink, trapped in a "dead zone" of air. Every breath felt heavy, thick with the smell of stagnant charcoal smoke and the sweet, cloying scent of mold.
He dragged himself to the window and pushed aside the heavy silk curtains.
The view was a nightmare.
Below the palace hill, the "Marsh Province" stretched out—a grey, wounded landscape under a relentless drizzle. He saw the village hovels, built on the floodplains with the optimism of the doomed. But his eyes were drawn to the river.
It was a bloated, brown artery, choked with the silt of upstream erosion. It wasn't just flowing; it was attacking.
Look at the turbulence, he thought, his professional eye tracking the chaotic white-water eddies. The Reynolds Number must be off the charts. The flow is completely detached from the boundary layer.
He watched as a massive whirlpool formed near a sharp bend in the dike. The water was carving a scour hole beneath the mud walls—a process called 'sapping.' To the peasants throwing rocks into the water, it was a battle against a dragon. To Li Chen, it was a structural collapse in slow motion. The pore water pressure inside those earthen dikes was rising; the dirt was losing its effective stress, turning from a solid into a liquid.
"They're fighting a landslide with pebbles," Li Chen whispered.
A sharp memory of Prince Lu—the fragile, discarded son—flashed in his mind. The Emperor had sent him here to die in the damp silence.
Li Chen gripped the windowsill, his knuckles turning white. He wasn't a fragile prince. He was a man who had conquered the earth with steel and math.
"You wanted to bury me in the mud?" Li Chen said to the grey horizon, a cold, arrogant fire lighting his eyes. "Fine. I'll turn your mud into concrete. I'll turn your swamps into a city that will make your capital look like a collection of pigsties."
The door burst open. Governor Wang entered, smelling of sour wine. He didn't bow. He looked at the "fragile" prince with the pity of a man watching a dying bird.
"Prince Lu," the Governor said. "I hear you are talking to the pillars. Perhaps the fever has taken your wits along with your health."
Li Chen turned. He used the "Executive Stare"—the one he used on contractors who tried to cut corners on a forty-story foundation.
"Governor Wang," Li Chen said, his voice dropping to a dangerous, low frequency. "The North Dike will fail in forty-eight hours. Not because of the gods' anger, but because your slope ratio is a death sentence. When the soil reaches saturation, the internal pressure will overcome the friction. The dike will slide, and your wealth will wash away into the silt."
The Governor blinked, his mouth falling open. "What... what madness is this?"
Li Chen grabbed a charcoal stick from a nearby table and flipped over a silk scroll. With a few sharp, violent strokes, he drew a cross-section of a Gabion Wall.
"Send your men to the bamboo groves," Li Chen commanded. "I want five hundred woven cages by dawn. We are going to build a toe-weight at the base of that dike to increase the resisting moment. If we don't, this province becomes a lake, and you will be the first person I blame when I write to my father, the Emperor."
The Governor looked at the drawing. He didn't understand the physics, but he understood the terrifying clarity in the Prince's eyes. It didn't look like the eyes of a sick boy. It looked like the eyes of a man who owned the earth.
"Now," Li Chen said, dropping the charcoal. "Get me the men. I have a lot of math to do before the sun goes down."