My Republican-Era Boyfriend: It Started with an Interstellar Delivery

Shanghai, 1927. Su Wanqing, a physics-mad girl freshly returned from studying abroad, is crouched in a French Concession laboratory, using an abacus to “verify the math on a black hole,” when an “alien delivery box” drops from the sky and crashes through the roof. There are no interstellar souvenirs inside, just a metal egg with a foul mouth that calls itself Qiuqiu, and half an interstellar invoice reading, “Earth is about to be signed for.”

To figure out this pile of “Western curiosities,” Su Wanqing is forced to team up with Gu Yanchen, the newly arrived “returnee elite” next door. He seems to be a trading-company manager, but his suit pocket hides a laser-firing pocket watch, and the way he ties his necktie can be decoded into a cipher. Most bizarre of all, the moment he sees the metal egg, he calls it “Ancestor.”

From then on, Shanghai’s whole vibe goes completely off the rails:

- A warlord’s young heir has his tank refitted by Su Wanqing into an “electromagnetic pancake cart,” with scallions shooting from the cannon barrel.

- Gu Yanchen powers the Paramount Ballroom with a Tesla coil, only to send all the dancers floating up to the ceiling as they tango.

- The mysterious Green Dragon Society comes after them, led by a Qing Dynasty zombie wearing VR goggles who claims to be a “temporal correction officer from 2077.”

- And the metal egg not only peeks at Su Wanqing while she bathes, but also threatens to turn the Huangpu River into a “gamma-galaxy milk tea base.”

When Su Wanqing discovers that Gu Yanchen is a descendant of interstellar couriers, and that her own grandfather was a Republican-era “alien liaison,” the two oddballs finally realize that this so-called “hardcore romance” means not only fighting warlords, spies, and eccentric aliens, but also having to use