Lev is sitting very patiently in the middle of Milliways, reading a history book from another world and waiting for someone to show up with magic powers that can turn him into a girl.
The digital age has weirdly cheap books and land reclamation and smart phones, but weirdly cheap books at least makes some sort of sense. Woodblock printing is cheaper than writing everything by hand, ???? is cheaper than woodblocks.
"That's still affordable, considering how useful it could be. Though I wouldn't say no to being steered in the right direction." (Yes, person who has been here for subjective(?) weeks, tell me your secrets)
"Um. I think variolation was invented in China pretty early so I'm sorry if you already know this, but if you scratch someone's skin and put in a bit of powdered smallpox scab they'll get a milder form of smallpox and be less likely to die of it. That's very important. Our society has eradicated smallpox. --Also, check whether milkmaids don't get smallpox, if they don't then they have cowpox and you can do the same thing with cowpox and then no one will die."
"You don't have smallpox?" What is up with the digital age?
He can probably convince Leng Yue to try that. Or maybe Jinyu; he's more in favour of experiments but less medically inclined. It won't be easy, but he could. He'd just have to work out a saner explanation than 'a foreigner from the future who I found in my window told me to try it'
"We don't have smallpox! In my country we don't have malaria or hookworm or rubella. We used to not have measles but then people stopped getting vaccines for measles because they were worried it caused-- uh, 'autism' probably doesn't translate-- intellectual disability?"
Picturing a world where you don't have to worry about smallpox and malaria, where you don't have a plan to leave the city if there's an epidemic, where you don't have a plan to avoid going to the southwest at all costs, is strange. "Wow. Good thing I came here when there was someone looking to be helpful."
"Back in my world I'm a chemical engineer-- I have no idea what that translates as--"
"Eh. Close enough. Except I assume alchemists in your world mysteriously never succeed at turning lead into gold."
"They still make themselves useful. Gunpowder, medicines, that sort of thing. Still working on immortality though."
"We're in charge of investigating crimes, or at least the ones big enough to be worth our attention."
"So on one hand I'm like 'yay, cool, you're powerful' and on the other hand this doesn't seem obviously like it would lead to you being able to get people to adopt the Haber-Bosch process."
"I couldn't get a memorial in front of the Emperor directly, but I could get the idea on front of someone who could. --if I know what that process is and can convince people it's worth spending political capital on."
"The Haber-Bosch process allows you to make fertilizer much more cheaply, which lets you grow like four times as many crops on the same amount of land. It's the reason that the world population is almost eight billion people."
"A formal message to the Emperor." It feels odd being so blunt, but this man definitely does not have the context, so blunt it is! "His majesty knows everything he needs to know, so you can't tell him. But he does on occasion need reminding."
It takes a second for the number to hit. "How many?" He's dealt with numbers that big before, but not of people. He tries to picture it in units of Chang'ans and that does not help that much.
"His Majesty can't possibly know what the Haber-Bosch process is! It's from like five centuries in the future!"
This future foreigner is very cute even if he does not get how this works. "We'd still just have to remind him about it."
"If His Majesty knew how it worked all along His Majesty really should have told someone!"
Oh goodness, he really is very naive. "People who work with him-- everyone knows the difference between a reminder and a reminder, it's just... Etiquette."
"Okay, see, in my country we sell candy called National Embarrassmints-- that's a pun in my language-- and whenever the leader changes the people who make them just put a new picture on it and keep selling them."
The pun does not translate perfectly, but well enough to get the jist. "Well, I don't see any reason to do that for His Majesty; , he's quite competent." (The fact he would super die if he tried is so far down the list behind 'but why would I want to.')
"I believe the general consensus in our system is that all of our leaders suck but no one can agree on why so they get replaced with ones that suck differently."