Huang Ji spoke with easy confidence before the assembled experts, looking every bit an authority on ancient culture and history.
In wider society, mainstream scholars would have torn his claims to shreds. Without physical evidence or any knowledge of aliens, a "divine artifact" as extraordinary as Torch Dragon could only be fiction.
But to members of the Illuminati, who knew aliens had roamed Earth in ancient times—and to the Great Light Ball searching for the Environment Modifier—his words sounded like irrefutable truth.
Science was a way of thinking, not a body of knowledge.
No knowledge was beyond question, and no understanding remained unchanged forever. Science constantly questioned and overturned its own conclusions, keeping pace with new discoveries. Calling an unrefuted hypothesis unscientific was itself unscientific.
Once it was established that aliens had visited Earth, human history was turned on its head. Everything people thought they knew had to be rewritten.
Newton's classical mechanics sounded impressive when called "classical." Put bluntly, it was wrong. Yet everyone still recognized him as one of the greatest scientists in human history.
Whether the knowledge he produced was correct had nothing to do with whether he was a scientist. What mattered was that his way of thinking was scientific. His incomplete theory became a stepping stone, giving later generations the foundation and tools to complete it—or even overturn it.
Huang Ji knew what the "Classic of Mountains and Seas" was, but he could only present it as a hypothesis.
Luckily, he had an alien Great Light Ball to back him up. Luckily, the text's author had added the phrase "as an object."
That was how he could convince everyone that the "Classic of Mountains and Seas" was not a work of invented monsters.
"How interesting. So it's called Torch Dragon," the Great Light Ball said.