Inside Ganlu Hall, the air was thick with the scent of expensive ink and the heavy contemplation of a man who ruled the world but realized he knew nothing of the universe.
Li Shimin was currently locked in a mental battle of epic proportions.
Li Shimin stared at the equations still frozen on the light screen. Then he glanced at the crater named Wan Hu. Then back at the equations.
So my options are these, he thought. Spend years learning mathematics that looks like ghost talismans, or tie myself to a rocket and hope for the best.
He paused.
The rocket is starting to sound reasonable.
Du Ruhui, however, had moved past the existential dread of the moon.
He was staring at the gray, pockmarked surface with a look of sudden, crystalline clarity.
"It makes sense now," Du Ruhui whispered, his voice echoing in the quiet hall.
"When the moon is full, we see those faint, shadowy patterns on its face. We used to call them the Moon Goddess or the Jade Rabbit. Now we know the truth. They are nothing but the scars of these ancient craters."
He solved a minor cosmic mystery that had plagued poets for millennia and then immediately went back to work.
He picked up his brush and recorded two more names with the reverence usually reserved for ancestral tablets.
Zu Chongzhi.
Guo Shoujing.
[Lightscreen]
[Aside from naming lunar craters as memorials, we have also reached out into the great sea of stars. We have named various asteroids after our ancient sages to ensure their names drift forever through the void.]
The light screen began to accelerate.
The steady, rhythmic flow of the narration was replaced by a dizzying sequence of celestial bodies streaking past.
Strange, magnificent stars flashed like jewels against the velvet blackness of space.
The camera slowed down and came to a rest beside a rather unremarkable, jagged hunk of rock floating in the silence.
Fang Xuanling leaned in, his eyes narrowed as he read the designation.
"Number 1888. The Zu Chongzhi Asteroid."
The screen did not wait for him to finish.
It took the Tang court and the Chengdu government office on a breakneck tour of the solar system.
One by one, the names of the star-holders were carved into the memories of the watching ancients.
"The Guo Shoujing Asteroid. The Zhang Heng Asteroid. The Yi Xing Asteroid. The Shen Kuo Asteroid."
Fang Xuanling and Du Ruhui recorded every single one of them with trembling hands.
They were literally writing the heavens into their ledgers.
But Li Shimin's mind had already drifted far beyond the mere naming of rocks.
"So, the stars in the sky... every single one of them is as large as the Earth we stand upon," Li Shimin muttered.
During that brief, blurred flight through the galaxy, he had seen it clearly.
Just like the moon, which appeared as a small silver coin from the ground but turned out to be a massive world of gray dust once you got close, those small points of light in the night sky were titans.
Many of them were far larger than the Earth itself.
A cold, primal shiver raced down Li Shimin's spine.
It was a sensation of pure, unadulterated vertigo.
"If we are but a single sphere in this vast darkness," he wondered aloud, "then to an enemy from beyond the stars, does our Earth look like nothing more than a target? Is this what the future meant by a journey to the sea of stars?"
The Milky Way was an ocean of light, containing more stars than there were grains of sand in the Gobi Desert.
If there were barbarians of the stars out there, it would not be surprising at all.
It would be an inevitability.
[Lightscreen]
[In our modern era, the most recent Huaxia citizen to receive the honor of an asteroid naming is the great Teacher Liu Cixin. As for his achievements? Most of you already know. He was the one who discovered the Trisolarans.]
Li Shimin slammed his hands down on the table and stood up so fast his chair skidded across the floor.
For the first time in his life, he felt a desperate, irrational urge to leave his throne behind and flee into the future.
He wanted to see how the future fought wars in the void.
He wanted to see the face of these Trisolaran enemies from beyond the heavens.
But as quickly as the fire rose, it cooled.
He forced himself to sit back down.
He looked at his wife, Empress Zhangsun, and his loyal ministers.
He looked at his generals, the men who had bled to build this empire.
He was the Eternal Emperor.
He could not leave.
His duty was here.
He would do exactly what the future had done: he would build a foundation.
He would create an era of such overwhelming prosperity and peace that the scholars would have nothing to do but study math and the stars.
He would make the name of the Tang Dynasty echo so loudly that even the Trisolarans would think twice before looking at his world.
---
Back in Chengdu, Pang Tong was still having a personal crisis regarding Zhang Heng.
The man had a crater on the moon and an asteroid?
The gap between their legacies was becoming offensive.
They were born less than a hundred years apart, yet Zhang Heng was practically a god while Pang Tong was still just a guy who almost got shot at Luofeng.
"Starting tomorrow," Pang Tong declared, his voice full of a grim, terrifying resolve, "I am going to master mathematics. That is my new goal. If Zhang Heng can have a star, so can I."
Kongming watched his friend's sudden academic awakening and let out a soft, amused chuckle.
He did not even have to use his usual reverse psychology to get the Fengchu to work.
The man's own ego had done the job for him.
However, when Kongming saw Zhang Fei leaning over a piece of parchment with a look of intense concentration, his smile wavered.
"Yide?" Kongming asked cautiously. "Are you... also planning to study the Mother of Science?"
Zhang Fei looked up, a wild, manic glint in his eyes.
"If this math is what builds the Dongfeng Express, then I am going to learn it! How hard can it be? It is just numbers, right?"
Kongming's mouth twitched.
The idea of Zhang Fei trying to solve high-order polynomial equations was a disaster waiting to happen.
The man would likely punch the inkstone in frustration before he finished the first chapter.
---
[Lightscreen]
[And with that, this episode has finally come to its conclusion. We have traveled from the birth of the local strongman in the Han, through the era of the clans sucking the lifeblood out of the Wei and Jin, to the final collapse of both the clans and the dynasty in the Tang.
The common people have endured centuries of oppression, eventually rising up to grind the noble clans into the dirt. The great clans have been swept away by the river of time. The kings, marquises, and generals have all returned to the dust.
But today, millions upon millions of ordinary people are stepping into the sea of stars using their own strength.
Regarding our next episode, I have two potential topics.
Option One: Let us talk about the Three Kingdoms. Specifically, the various wholesale nicknames that Sun Quan, our favorite hundred-thousand-man loser, managed to collect while being embarrassed by the Wei army.
Option Two: A deep dive into the An Lushan Rebellion, using An Lushan as our entry point to see how this single event fundamentally rewrote the entire course of Chinese history.
Do not forget to cast your precious vote! Mwah!]
---
Kongming watched as the light screen froze, presenting the two choices.
He looked around the room, but he already knew what the answer was going to be.
There was no hesitation.
"Come on, ive my Sun Shiwan brother-in-law a break," Zhang Fei said, barely suppressing a grin. "The Great Emperor of Wu has suffered enough. Let us look at the other one."
"It is only right to help the Tang Emperor out," Pang Tong added, his voice dripping with mock-charity. "He looks like he is about to have a heart attack anyway."
"We must see how the course of history was changed," Liu Bei said, his voice heavy with the gravity of a ruler. "We must learn from their mistakes so we do not repeat them."
Kongming did not need to hear any more.
He tore off a slip of paper, wrote their choice in elegant script, and tossed it into the shimmering light of the screen.
Suddenly, the bullet comments began to sail across the screen again, looking like a fleet of tiny paper boats.
---
[Server Chat Log]
[Iron Plow Philosopher: I am just going to say it. The only thing that can defeat an old, rotten system is a new productive force. Science and technology are the ultimate productive forces.
Wandering Swordsman: It is a bit hard to talk about productive forces in ancient times, though. In the end, it always comes back to the land.
Landlord's Nightmare: Exactly. Even after the great clans fell, the new small landlords of the Song and Ming dynasties were just as greedy. They grabbed land as fast as they could. They were just less organized about it.
Hermit of the Warring States: The ancient sages in the Warring States period said, farm the land but do not own it; wait for a better system. But the feudal era was incapable of that. Anyone who tried to change the land system back then was basically asking the local strongman to start a revolution against the Emperor.]
Kongming's eyes widened as he read the comments.
He leaned forward, his brush flying across his notes.
"New productive forces to defeat the old system?" he whispered, his mind racing.
He tried to extrapolate the logic.
If you improve the tools, the plows, the irrigation, the looms, you change how much a single man can produce.
If a single man can produce more, the old rules of the landlords start to break.
"It was a radical, dangerous idea, but I loved it."
[Server Chat Log]
[Observer of the Central Plains: Hearing this discussion makes me realize: America is currently living through its Late Han era.
Drunken Historian: I do not know about that. Based on the way the Geriatric Emperor in the West is governing, it looks like the end of the Han. But based on how they just legalized certain herbal substances, I am leaning more toward the decadent Wei-Jin era.
Northern Barbarian: Nonsense! In the late Han, the central government was weak, but the local regions were full of strong, capable soldiers. The rednecks in America are starting to look as senile as their Emperor!
Teahouse Pessimist: Do not be too optimistic. I think they are more like the mid-Western Han or the early Jin. They have still got enough momentum to limp along for a while.]
Pang Tong scratched his head, looking utterly confused.
"Wait. Do not posthumous titles and temple names only happen after you die? How has this Mei Dynasty already given their Emperor a temple name like Senile Ancestor while he is still breathing?"
He decided that the future's sense of humor was a bit too dark to be taken literally.
But then, he noticed a massive blind spot in the logic.
"Does this Mei Dynasty still have great clans?" he wondered.
This was a question he would have to save for another day.
---
[Server Chat Log]
[Bamboo Scroll Scholar: I think the most impressive thing about the Song was not the tech, but the people. Despite having less land than the Tang, they supported a massive bureaucracy and an army of hundreds of thousands of Forbidden Guards, and they still had enough left over to pay off their enemies every year. That is the power of a developed commercial economy.
Silk Road Merchant: That is the thing about the Song. Before them, being a merchant was considered a lowly profession. You could not even take the imperial exams. But in the Song, they got the right to participate. More merchants entered the government, and their status skyrocketed.
Moonlit Poet: Every time I look at the Song, I feel a sense of split personality. On one hand, the taxes on the peasants were brutal, but on the other hand, the disaster relief was incredibly efficient. On one hand, the culture and entertainment were booming, but on the other, the status of women began to plummet. In the Tang, a woman could wear men's clothes and gallop on a horse; in the Song, they started wrapping their feet to satisfy a twisted, deformed aesthetic.
Jade Pavilion Keeper: There is a theory that the Song's oppression of women was actually a hangover from the Tang. After the Tang went through the An Lushan Rebellion, the national confidence shattered. They started hating outsiders and restricting women as a way to regain control. The Song just inherited that insecurity and turned it up to eleven.
Justice of the Diary: It really is a paradox. Tang law stripped women of inheritance rights, but Song law actually wrote that if parents died early, daughters could inherit half as much as sons. Of course, whether that was actually enforced is a different story.]
---
The name appeared again.
The An Lushan Rebellion.
Li Shimin let out a long, heavy sigh.
He had watched the vote and seen the result.
He knew he had to see it.
He had to know how his glorious empire had been broken.
He had a suspicion, but hearing the cold, clinical analysis of the future was always different.
"Fetch me another letter for the Great Physician Sun Simiao," Li Shimin ordered, his voice weary. "Tell the old master he must come to Chang'an immediately. I have a feeling that once we start this An Lushan Rebellion chapter, my head-wind sickness is going to flare up three times a day."
He knew that if he did not have a reliable doctor on hand to keep his heart beating, the Zhenguan era might end several decades too early.
"How do we convince him to hurry?" he asked his ministers.
"Use the gift we just received," Du Ruhui suggested, pointing at the anatomical diagrams of the internal organs they had just copied from the screen. "Tell him the Song dynasty has sent us a Map of the Five Viscera. He will not be able to resist."
Li Shimin nodded.
The Song had inherited everything from the Tang.
It was only fair that he took a little advance payment back from the future.
---
[Server Chat Log]
[Star Gazing Hermit: By the way, seeing the map of the Earth makes me wonder. Why was Copernicus burned at the stake in the West, while Zhang Heng's Spherical Heaven theory was fine?
Pavilion of Cosmic Truth: Are you an idiot? Bruno was the one who got burned, not Copernicus. And he was burned because the Western kings ruled by Divine Right. If you start messing with their God, you are messing with their power. Of course the believers are going to kill you!
Wandering Astronomer: Also, Zhang Heng's theory was not exactly geocentrism. He thought the heavens were a sphere, but he still thought the earth was flat. The real progress came with the Tang monk Yi Xing. He used math and observation to calculate that the earth was a curved surface. That is why he got an asteroid.
Flask Under the Moon: The funniest example is Emperor Wu of Liang, Xiao Yan. He literally tried to ban the Spherical Heaven theory in the middle of a lecture. He pushed his own Buddhist Canopy Heaven theory and tried to drag history backward. I will just say this about the fall of the Southern Liang. Good riddance! Pop the champagne!
Old Man of the Broken Compass: The Liang Emperor is the perfect warning. Later on, the Song tried to use the I Ching to explain physics. It looked clever, but the core logic was miles off. If you do not respect objective scientific laws and objective facts, you cannot birth true science. Pure imperial whim does not change how a lever works.]
Kongming watched the final comments flicker and die.
He recorded the lesson in his heart.
Science does not bow to emperors.
The laws of nature do not move for the Son of Heaven.
"If the truth is a sphere," Kongming whispered to himself, "then even the mandate of heaven must eventually bend to the curve of the earth."