"Let me call the embassy, and you'll find out!"
"It's the middle of the night. There shouldn't be anyone at the embassy!"
"Hah. The embassy has someone on duty twenty-four hours a day, you know?" Tang Changsheng scoffed.
"But you're from Lower River!" another Investigator said weakly.
Tang Changsheng snorted, as though he had heard Xiaohua.
"Shut up. Lower River may not be territory Great Chu annexed outright, but it's within Great Chu's sphere of influence, and the people living there are all Chinese!" someone else explained in a low voice.
In today's world, on this blue planet, North America was a land of commerce and freedom, a glittering Bright Pearl.
But Great Chu was the world's sole superpower, the world's policeman that maintained Order!
It had fifteen carrier strike groups, sixty-three attack submarines, thirty air wings, and roughly two thousand new Fighter Jets.
That was a military force capable of sweeping aside every other country in the world.
In fact, if nuclear weapons had not been invented during World War II and plunged the globe into a fragile nuclear peace, the world might well have looked entirely different!
Nobles of Great Chu were rarer still.
In theory, Great Chu had always maintained its twenty-four ranks of nobility, and every newborn citizen was a noble.
Under imperial law, any citizen automatically received the rank of Knight at birth.
In reality, though, the first nineteen of those twenty-four ranks were merely commoner titles. Only the final five—duke, marquis, count, viscount, and baron—were Noble Peer titles, belonging to the true aristocracy.
Great Han's policy of lowering a title with each succeeding generation also made hereditary nobility exceedingly difficult.
Even a dukedom could pass down for five generations at most before the family lost its noble status.
Great Chu had not created a