Chapter Summaries

Lu Zhi built an intelligence network and considered ways to ease the dynasty’s population and land pressures, but the Emperor rejected overseas migration. At a court assembly, she learned that visitors from Tusi Country wanted to trade for books and caught the Minister of Rites hiding a personal motive for opposing the sale.

• Lu Zhi promoted Qiu Lan, arranged a county post for her father, and had her establish an intelligence network in the inner palace.
• Lu Zhi used peripheral concubines to report on the Emperor and asked him about sending surplus peasants overseas, but he feared they would form rival kingdoms.
• With the Emperor ill, Lu Zhi listened behind a curtain as the Minister of War reported that a group from Tusi Country had arrived beyond Jade Gate Pass seeking books.
• Lu Zhi asked whether Tusi Country could also sell books and suggested trading them books on morality and poetry.
• The Minister of Rites objected to selling books, and Lu Zhi heard his inner thoughts reveal that he wanted to sell his failing bookshops’ stock first.

Lu Zhi reasserted control over the court, welcomed Big Fatty Monk’s cultural exchange mission, and sent him home with Chinese classics. At the border, Nile became fascinated by the dynasty’s Imperial Examination system and began learning how it worked.

• Lu Zhi had the Minister of Rites stabbed after he challenged her, and the court accepted the official claim that he had suffered a stroke.
• Lu Zhi summoned Furball Tuantuan to help her manage the court, and the next day the Emperor issued an edict ordering her to continue ruling from behind the curtain.
• Lu Zhi accepted Big Fatty Monk’s Golden Alms Bowl and sent him away with three chests of the Four Books and Five Classics and other texts.
• Big Fatty Monk met Nile at the border and described the dynasty’s moral governance and Imperial Examination system, inspiring Nile to adopt its methods.
• Big Fatty Monk brought scholars to explain the examination stages to Nile, who praised the system while the lower-ranked scholars silently lamented their struggles.

Nile learned about the Eastern Heavenly Dynasty’s Imperial Examination and imagined founding a nation that stayed vigorous by welcoming ambitious people from poorer countries. At court, Lu Zhi heard officials debate trade with the West, approved several proposals, and left the matter of reform with Principal Secretary Xie; afterward, Wenren Sheng and Little Illusion discussed her future in the court.

• Nile questioned Big Fatty Monk about the Imperial Examination and the rise and fall of dynasties, then proposed a nation that continually absorbed ambitious people from poor countries.
• At the grand court assembly, a Censor opposed most Western books, while Lu Zhi heard his private concern about Western ships and shipping competition.
• Vice Minister Zheng argued that the Western books should be banned, and Lu Zhi had him carried away for treatment after a blade pierced his chest.
• Vice Minister Wang proposed customs offices to raise revenue, officials recommended salt fields and administrative reform, and Lu Zhi approved the proposals and assigned Principal Secretary Xie to oversee reform.
• After court, Wenren Sheng and Little Illusion discussed whether Lu Zhi could succeed, and Little Illusion asked to become the Book of Documents of the Ministry of Works.

Wenren Sheng accelerated the Empress Dowager’s reforms, while Nile and Big Fatty Monk discussed how centralized power and maritime trade shaped the development of civilization. Minister Huang accepted the denunciation of his reforms as protection for his position and legacy.

• Wenren Sheng refused to let Little Illusion handle an entire planet and assigned her to serve as his fan-bearing maid.
• Lu Empress Dowager opened trade with westerners, and Wenren Sheng sped time forward as reforms and official appointments transformed the court.
• Minister Huang investigated corruption, increased tax revenue, rose to Minister of Revenue, and helped establish the Huang Clique’s blended doctrines.
• Nile concluded that he needed to become a powerful King and abolish hereditary lordships before establishing an Imperial Examination system.
• Nile and Big Fatty Monk discussed how the open ocean encouraged science and freedom, while the Empress Dowager used Minister Huang as a political target.
• Minister Huang told his worried wife that harsh criticism made his position safer and would help secure his reputation among later generations.

After Yuan Shi rebelled against the court, Lu Zhi killed a minister who proposed sacrificing Huang Xiong and learned that the rebellion had already collapsed. She withdrew from daily court affairs, then discussed her failed reforms and possible plans for the future with Furball.

• Huang Tong told Minister Huang that Yuan Shi had rebelled and was marching toward the capital, prompting Minister Huang to hurry to the palace.
• The Third Assistant Minister urged Lu Zhi to execute Huang Xiong, and Lu Zhi killed him while Grand Secretary Feng suffered a stroke.
• Huang Xiong recommended Yan Ming to command the forces against Yuan Shi, but a military report revealed that Yuan Shi had been captured after his troops scattered.
• Lu Zhi announced that she would stop attending court and review only promotions for officials of the third rank and above.
• Lu Zhi asked Furball about the sudden passage of time and her reforms, and Furball proposed accelerating development toward a constitutional monarchy and advanced technology.

Lu Zhi realized that entrenched interests and a lack of urgent need would doom her efforts to promote Western Learning, while Wenren Sheng discussed how to motivate reform with his family. The Seed of Mystery then presented a new mystery about whether reason’s emergence was accidental or inevitable, leaving Wenren Sheng to consider civilization’s evolution and the lives of its people.

• Lu Zhi learned of resistance to Western Learning in the capital and concluded that people would not change without urgent pressure.
• Wenren Sheng asked his family how Lu Zhi could encourage reform without supernatural power, and Wenren De explained why landowners would not fund risky trade.
• The Seed of Mystery gave Wenren Sheng a prompt asking whether the birth of reason was accidental or inevitable and linking the question to Game Emulator's Ambition.
• Wenren Sheng reflected that Game Emulator's Ambition sought to master civilization’s evolution and decided to observe how civilization developed.
• Wenren Sheng opened the window and showed his family the ordinary lives of the city’s residents, prompting them to fall silent.

Lu Zhi spread a story that the Fountain of Youth and a reincarnation drug could be found overseas, prompting the Empress Dowager to fund an expedition. A stolen sample killed several old gentlemen, but its power to preserve memories across reincarnation brought about a wave of child prodigies.

• Lu Zhi made Furball convince people that a Fountain of Youth and a Life-and-Death Reincarnation Drug existed beyond the sea and mountains.
• The Empress Dowager funded an overseas expedition, dismissed Zuo Gang’s remonstrance, and told him to prove the drug did not exist.
• Three years later, six battered ships returned from a fleet of thirty, and the shipowner said the Fountain of Youth Water lay in The Deep.
• Imperial guards ambushed assassins trying to steal the fleet’s findings, but one escaped underwater with a bamboo tube of spring water.
• Old country gentlemen tested the water on a dying man, who died instantly, then learned that he had been reborn as an infant with his past memories intact.
• The gentlemen drank the remaining water and died, while child prodigies soon appeared throughout the region.

Rumors and confirmed cases of reincarnation transformed society as wealthy people sought ways to protect their fortunes and ensure comfortable future lives. The chapter ended with a huge surge in demand for reliable doctors to keep children alive, since dying young could cut off a reincarnated master’s path to longevity.

• Storytellers spread accounts of reincarnated masters who revealed their identities and lost their estates, prompting later reincarnations to keep their pasts secret.
• People began hiding treasure in caves and using banks so they could recover their wealth in future lives, and treasure hunting became a profession.
• Landlords including Liu the Skinner eased rent and debt burdens and gave supplies to poor families so their children could survive.
• Wealthy families funded doctors and free treatment for poor children as the masters demanded accurate, dependable care to protect their future reincarnations.

Minister Huang celebrated how sales of the Fountain of Youth had filled the treasury and funded the army, relief, and reforms, while he and Huang Tong worried that maritime expansion would expose the secret. Lu Zhi granted Huang Xiong a bottle, though the supposed Fountain of Youth was actually cyanide and its promise of reincarnation was a scam.

• Huang Xiong explained to Huang Tong how the Empress Dowager’s Reincarnation Tax on the wealthy had supplied silver for soldiers, relief, and government reforms.
• Huang Tong warned that people were preparing to search for the Fountain of Youth as seafaring expanded, but Huang Xiong said the Empress Dowager had allowed the searches to continue.
• Huang Tong asked when Huang Xiong planned to reincarnate, and Huang Xiong decided to request a bottle for his family so he would not have to wait in line.
• Lu Zhi reflected that the Fountain of Youth was cyanide and that Furball’s promise of reincarnation was an illusion, but she accepted the deception as useful to the court.
• Lu Zhi gave Huang Xiong a bottle and told him to use it only when he was old and bedridden, and Huang Xiong thanked her tearfully.

The Doctor exposed the Fountain of Youth as poison and the reincarnation stories as a court scam, but the tavern crowd rejected his evidence and he fled with his family. The Empress Dowager announced public appearances by supposed reincarnated people, while the Doctor planned to find someone the Blue-Clothed Guards could not have investigated.

• Little Illusion watched Furball’s deception spread and asked Wenren Sheng whether it could lead to science and reason, and Wenren Sheng chose to let events continue.
• The Doctor told a tavern crowd that more than a hundred people who drank the Fountain of Youth had died of poisoning, but most listeners mocked him.
• The Doctor revealed that his friend had sold his home and land to buy the Fountain of Youth, leaving his first wife destitute and suicidal.
• The Doctor’s accusations divided the tavern, and he fled overnight with his family after being warned to stop speaking recklessly.
• The Empress Dowager decreed that the court would present three reincarnated people in each provincial capital every month for public questioning.
• The Doctor suspected the court would stage the appearances and decided to find someone beyond the Blue-Clothed Guards’ knowledge.

Xue Wenfa challenged the Governor to verify reincarnation by bringing Wang Member to drink the Fountain of Youth in public. After Wang Member died and the crowd celebrated, Xue Wenfa resolved to expose the court’s deception, even at the cost of his life.

• Xue Wenfa persuaded Old Moneybags to record detailed evidence of his life and cross-checked it with witnesses and physical proof.
• Xue Wenfa brought Wang Member and the Fountain of Youth to a public assembly in Dingwei City and demanded that the Governor verify reincarnation.
• The Governor sent scouts to investigate Wang Member’s hometown, then ordered him to drink the Fountain of Youth.
• Wang Member drank the liquid, collapsed, and died while spectators cheered that he had reincarnated.
• Xue Wenfa condemned the crowd’s belief in reincarnation and decided to sacrifice himself to save the common people from the court’s scheme.

An infant claiming to be the reincarnated Wang Shigui answered Xue Wenfa’s questions about private details from his previous life, convincing the crowd and leaving Xue Wenfa shaken. He then heard a young couple planning to buy the Fountain of Youth and rushed to find them, fearing they would poison themselves.

• A courier arrived at the training ground with an infant who claimed to be the reincarnated Wang Shigui.
• Xue Wenfa questioned the infant about Wang Shigui’s private life, and the baby answered that he had first slept with his chief maid, Chuntao, at age eleven.
• The infant correctly explained the taboo-name mistake that had ended Wang Shigui’s hopes of passing the Provincial Examination, leaving Xue Wenfa convinced the other private questions would be answered too.
• Xue Wenfa collapsed, believing his chance at fame was gone, though he was also spared the possibility of his clan being executed.
• Xue Wenfa overheard a young couple planning to buy the Fountain of Youth and fall in love again in their next lives, so he sprang up to find them and prevent them from drinking poison.

Furball warned Lu Empress Dowager that her empire and status were part of a performance controlled by powerful outsiders, but she dismissed the danger and went to sleep. At the palace, Xue Wenfa persuaded a young couple to abandon their plan to buy Fountain of Youth Water and helped them start a life elsewhere.

• Furball told Lu Empress Dowager that the people behind the world possessed one percent of the Principal's abilities, but she insisted she understood their intentions.
• At Imperial City Square, a Grand Eunuch enforced Lu Empress Dowager's ban on young people using Fountain of Youth Water and required authorization for anyone buying it on another's behalf.
• Xue Wenfa found Chun Ge and Hong Mei in line to buy the drug and warned them it was fake, revealing that he knew they were half-siblings.
• Xue Wenfa convinced Chun Ge and Hong Mei that reincarnating could separate them and put them in danger, so they chose to leave with their savings.
• Xue Wenfa helped the couple settle elsewhere, and a Big Fatty Monk appeared and said his actions were deeply fated with Buddha.

Big Fatty Monk persuaded Xue Wenfa to learn mathematics as a way to challenge belief in the Fountain of Youth, then began teaching it at Great Elephant Mountain Temple. Their debate drew in monks, scholars, and treasure hunters, who discovered practical uses for mathematical methods.

• Xue Wenfa agreed to travel with Big Fatty Monk on the condition that they would eventually discard the word Buddha.
• Big Fatty Monk taught Xue Wenfa basic mathematics and explained how its organized theories differed from the Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art.
• Big Fatty Monk and Xue Wenfa went to Great Elephant Mountain Temple, where the abbot denounced the monk’s claim that a bald head represented zero.
• Big Fatty Monk debated the abbot about Buddha and numbers, then set up a stall outside the temple after being driven out.
• Scholars and treasure hunters gathered around Big Fatty Monk, and treasure hunters learned that trigonometric functions could help locate hidden treasures.

Wenren Sheng and his household entered the evolving Eastern Dynasty as supporting characters while the Empress Dowager maintained her rule and the monks developed mathematics. After seeing the monks lose sight of practical research, Nile and Big Fatty Monk concluded that they needed a reason to pursue knowledge.

• Wenren Sheng created roles for his family and companions, including Sweeping Monk and Washing Nun roles for Wenren De and Ouyang Ling.
• Over sixty years, Old Wu became Grand Inner Old Eunuch and Li Shuangyue joined the Imperial Horse Administration as Lu Old Empress Dowager governed through two emperors.
• Big Fatty Monk and the monks fostered mathematical study through competitions and patronage from treasure hunters.
• Big Fatty Monk noticed the monks were turning mathematics into abstract pursuits rather than applying it to practical problems.
• Nile suggested mathematics alone was insufficient, and Big Fatty Monk decided that the monks needed a fight to motivate them.

Wenren Sheng watched the Eastern court’s wealth and the Fountain of Youth sustain a prosperous but intellectually stagnant civilization through centuries of conflict. Five hundred years into the dynasty, foreign merchants celebrated its longevity while worrying that Great Millet Country’s new technology and naval victories might threaten the Eastern sea route.

• Wenren Sheng concluded that the Eastern court’s prosperity had not created the universities, rational debate, and scientific foundations he wanted to see.
• Wenren Sheng recognized that changing the civilization’s course would require transforming its geography, while the Age of Exploration connected formerly isolated regions.
• Western merchants and colonists turned to harmful trade and piracy, but the wealthy Eastern court divided its opponents and used its money and soldiers to repel them.
• The court encouraged officers to fight by promising that those who died in battle could inherit some of their achievements after reincarnation.
• Two hundred years later, the Eastern dynasty celebrated five hundred years of prosperity as foreign merchants discussed its Fountain of Youth and silver-based economy.
• Foreign merchants noted that Great Millet Country had developed the Steam Engine and defeated Great Tooth Country at sea, raising fears for the Eastern sea route.

Lu Zhi learned that the Great Millet Country had steamships and ordered her court to study and copy Western ships, but the threat became immediate when its fleet attacked the South River Estuary. The officials summoned Lu Zhi to respond as she arrived at their meeting.

• Lu Zhi recognized the report of a smoke-belching monster as evidence of Western steamships and ordered the court to recruit Western-learning experts, acquire ships, and study naval tactics.
• At the Cabinet meeting, Third Assistant Minister dismissed the steamships, while the Minister of War warned that sailing ships could not match them at sea.
• Huang Xiong said the Ministry of Revenue had two million taels of working silver and access to three hundred million taels in flexible funds, and the ministers planned to investigate purchasing and copying steamships.
• An urgent telegraph reported that the Great Millet Country fleet had forced its way past the South River Estuary checkpoint and fired on South City, demanding lower tariffs and free trade.
• The officials condemned the Southern Province governor's report and called for the Empress Dowager; Chao Ying announced that Lu Zhi had arrived.

Lu Zhi heard proposals for resisting the Millet Kingdom and learned that its leaders wanted the court’s true Fountain of Youth. The ministers avoided volunteering for war until Yan Feng Ninth Generation promised to conquer Millet within five years, and Lu Zhi punished Furball for criticizing her.

• The Minister of War advised Lu Zhi to fortify the coast and wait until the court could build a modern navy, while the Second Assistant Minister proposed hiring the Great Tooth people to contain Millet.
• Lu Zhi received Great Tooth envoy Andrew V, who suggested banning Fountain of Youth Water sales and Millet residents to stir up Millet’s parliament.
• Andrew V revealed that a Millet scholar named Dun had proved the exported Fountain of Youth was poison, and that Millet’s leaders sought the court’s real source through war.
• Lu Zhi understood Millet’s motive and challenged her ministers to lead a campaign against it.
• Yan Feng Ninth Generation volunteered to conquer Millet within five years, and Lu Zhi stabbed Furball after it told her she had changed.

Lu Zhi ordered the execution of a Great Millet envoy after he insulted the court and revealed that his people had prepared for war. The Great Millet fleet then sailed north and landed near Fu Hai City, sending the capital into panic.

• Yan Feng Ninth Generation received a bottle of Fountain of Youth Water but no military appointment.
• The Great Millet envoy boasted of his people's strength and their stockpile of Fountain of Youth Water, while Lu Zhi recognized the Great Tooth People's scheme to worsen the conflict.
• Lu Zhi ordered the envoy beheaded and declared war on the Great Millet People despite the Chief Assistant Minister's objection.
• The senior ministers agreed to prepare defenses, secure the borders, and appease the grasslands and west.
• After the envoy's execution reached their fleet, the Great Millet People abandoned their limited campaign and sailed north toward the capital.
• A month later, the fleet landed near Fu Hai City, and merchants shuttered their shops as wealthy residents fled west.

After the Great Millet People fleet crushed the Northern Navy, Lu Zhi’s court rallied inland and eventually forced the invaders to retreat, though the war ended in a draw. In the Capital City, Wenren Sheng heard people blame the defeat on corruption and the Eastern court’s inability to afford an industrial-era navy.

• Lu Zhi raged over the Northern Navy’s catastrophic losses and the deaths of Generals Cheng An and Lu Pang, then rewarded Deng Ming for routing a detached enemy force.
• Garrison units won more victories as the Great Millet People struggled inland against local resistance, supply shortages, and militias.
• After half a year, the Great Millet People failed twice to capture the Capital City and retreated to the southern islands, ending the defensive war in a draw.
• Lu Zhi rebuked her ministers, ordering them to record merits, punish the guilty, and reconsider how the court had failed.
• At a Capital City restaurant, Wenren Sheng listened as patrons criticized the navy’s outdated ships, corruption, and lack of funds for steam warships.