A Brief Stay at Qingxu Palace

Remembering those bygone years, the past had returned to dust and drifted far away.

Bai Yujun stood beneath a red-flowered tree on the mountain peak, gazing toward the horizon. Broad, level concrete roads stretched into the distance toward the new coastal cities of the southern border. As her territory expanded, its focus shifted southward. Shipbuilding, rudimentary steam engines—after hundreds of years, they had finally stepped into the Steam Era.

Though the mechanical products they designed remained crude and antiquated, they still brought epoch-making changes and provided countless conveniences.

For instance, the primitive trains that chugged slowly along amid clouds of white steam transported sulfur, coal, and other minerals from Melt Heaven Ridge. Railways were also built at major iron mines across the land to facilitate transport. Utility poles gradually rose within the cities. Patrol soldiers carried Hengdao and rudimentary firearms, and their lightweight new composite armor made them look all the more valiant.

A steam whistle sounded as a massive steel transport ship billowed black smoke and departed the docks.

Reform was bound to meet enormous resistance, yes, but Bai Yujun swept aside every obstacle with the bearing of one invincible beneath heaven.

She forced the new era forward through absolute military might until development had entered its proper course and become irreversible. Having tasted its sweetness, neither demons nor humans wished to return to those rotten, hopeless years.

People and demons alike had grown accustomed to calling the snake demon territory Dragon Country, and they took immense pride in calling themselves descendants of the True Dragon before outsiders.

She turned to look toward the Central Plains.

The Yan Dynasty had long since vanished, overthrown by the furious old man Zhe. It had failed to escape its three-hundred-year fate.

Strangely, though it was separated from the Southern Wasteland snake demon