The Yongle Starship

In 2026, Chen Long, the forty-year-old owner of a machine shop, was sorting through the belongings of his 106-year-old grandfather, Chen Qiming, when he unexpectedly discovered a "stone book" that could not be opened. By chance, he smashed his childhood piggy bank, and the mysterious triangular piece of metal hidden inside fit perfectly into a groove on the back of the stone book.

The triangle slid into place, and the stone book opened. It turned out to be the original Yongle Encyclopedia, a wondrous artifact documenting an ancient civilization and advanced technology. The book revealed that the strange beasts in the Classic of Mountains and Seas were actually genetically modified creations. Ancient cultivation methods had long since become useless due to Earth's depleted spiritual energy, but astonishing technologies that required no spiritual energy remained: the super-energy "Thunder Pool," antigravity devices, invisibility field generators, and even blueprints for interstellar spacecraft.

Meanwhile, the international situation was changing dramatically. The newly elected president of the White Eagle Nation wielded the stick of hegemony with abandon, detaining foreign officials and using tens of thousands of "Starlink" satellites to create a strategic deterrent. The Dragon Nation faced unprecedented technological containment and strategic threats.