Otherwise, in a place like Chu State, where the societal ecosystem is relatively intact, the people from the same village, the same town, the same city, would really give you a real-life demonstration of what it means to impoverish a family and to drink human blood.
Regarding such negative social phenomena, Lu Yuan actually had some knowledge and truly abhorred it.
However, in a society lagging in technology, this is just instinctual behavior for the sake of reproduction.
Without a huge explosion in productive forces, even as an emperor, he was powerless to bring about change.
As for inventing technology and executing social reform,
I'm sorry to say,
he's just an ordinary person after all, who, even with a bit of knowledge from a previous life, had returned most of what he learned to his teachers after so many years in society.
Now, to expect him to conjure up an industrial system out of his fragmented and incomplete knowledge is indeed overestimating Lu Yuan.