The revelation of vast iron reserves on the so-called Jue Dao Island, known to future generations as Australia, drew Zhuge Liang from his seat.
He took up a wooden straightedge and bent over the sprawling map dominating the table.
Laying the ruler flat, he measured the span between Chang'an and Luoyang, scoring the scale into the wood with a piece of charcoal.
Then he slid the instrument south, pivoting toward the coastlines.
He walked the tool end over end across the parchment, his eyes tracking every measured length.
The room held its breath.
Zhuge Liang finally straightened, letting out a slow breath. "If we launch a fleet from Yangzhou and sail to this Jue Dao Island, a single round trip will cover no less than thirty thousand li."
The sheer distance made the reality undeniable. Colonizing the iron continent was, for the moment, beyond their reach.
It was like dreaming of building a bridge to the moon. Nice idea. Not happening anytime soon.
Liu Bei, however, refused to let the vastness of the ocean extinguish the fire in his chest.
"We do not need to reach the ends of the earth by tomorrow," he said, his voice steady. "Our focus must be mathematics. We need to begin drafting prototypes for new classes of ocean-going vessels. If we advance step by careful step, naval supremacy will eventually fall into our hands."
He began to pace the length of the room, his gaze fixed on a future he knew he would likely never live to see. "Once that foundation is laid, forget Jue Dao island. We will dispatch armed fleets to patrol the Western Oceans. We will project the glory of the Han across the entire globe."
The logic was unassailable.
The broadcast had already provided a grim case study: the Qing Dynasty, with its hundreds of thousands of land troops, got absolutely wrecked by just two dozen Western galleons. They were beaten so badly they probably wished they had never been born.
That single historical data point proved the uncompromising dominance of advanced warships. It was like watching a heavyweight champion get knocked out by a featherweight with a better strategy.
Their path forward crystallized.
Internally, they would turn mathematics into the new state religion. Kids would be force-fed numbers until they saw digits in their sleep. They would dream of multiplication tables. They would wake up to algebra problems. By the time they were adults, they would not even remember a time when math did not haunt their every waking moment.
Externally, they would steal every useful text the West had ever written. Euclid's Elements? Stolen. Astronomy? Copied. Oceanography? Plagiarized. They would build a navy so terrifying that other nations would start learning Chinese just to beg for mercy.
If they committed to this course, the resurgence of the Han Dynasty would cease to be a distant dream. It would become a tangible reality.
Or at least a reality they could start working toward before they all died of old age.
Feeling his blood quicken, Pang Tong let out a low chuckle. "Wherever heaven and earth meet,' huh? Emperor Wu had a real talent for making conquest sound like a nature walk. Not that he was wrong, though."
His mind drifted to the history behind those words. Centuries ago, the southern kingdom of Minyue had sparked a rebellion, prompting the loyal Han vassal of Nanyue to report the chaos to Emperor Wu. Seeking to avoid a costly jungle campaign, the King of Huainan had cited classical texts to dissuade the Emperor from deploying the military. He basically wrote a whole essay on why fighting was a bad idea.
The historical records noted the Emperor's response in just three words: He ignored him.
Three words, Pang Tong thought, grinning. That is all it took. No long-winded rebuttal. No philosophical debate. Just "nah, I am going anyway." Classic Emperor Wu.
The Han war machine rolled south regardless. The mere rumor of imperial banners marching had caused Minyue to fracture. A coup erupted, and to appease the advancing Han forces, the ministers of Minyue severed their own king's head and offered it on a platter. They did not even wait for the Han army to arrive. They just killed their own king and sent his head as a gift. Talk about overachieving.
Once the dust settled, Emperor Wu sent a decree to the pacifist King of Huainan, informing him of the victory and cementing that boast as the eternal mission of the Han Empire. It was basically the ancient equivalent of "I told you so." Except with more official seals and a lot more blood.
Pang Tong chuckled again. Sometimes the best argument is just showing up with an army.
Hearing Pang Tong murmur the ancient boast, Zhuge Liang let out a rare, booming laugh. It was the kind of laugh that made everyone in the room jump. Not because it was loud, but because they had never heard it before.
He countered with a passage from the historian Ban Biao: "The Han wields majesty and trust, commanding ten thousand nations. Wherever the sun and moon cast their light, all are our humble subjects."
In Zhuge Liang's mind, the foreign policy of the Han Empire had always been brutally simple: My lands. My rules.
It was that uncompromising demand that had allowed the Han Empire to endure for four hundred years. Generations of scholars and warriors had marched into the northern steppes, fighting until they broke the Xiongnu and secured the frontiers. They did not ask nicely. They did not negotiate. They showed up with swords and basically said, "We are taking this. Any objections? No? Good."
Now, despite his own lingering doubts, Zhuge Liang swore a silent oath. He would exhaust every ounce of his intellect to restore that imperial lineage. He would establish academies of mathematics, champion rigorous research, systematize engineering, and elevate science to the highest echelons of the state. He would secure the first advantage for their descendants.
If I have to spend the rest of my life teaching math to muscle-brain generals, he thought, so be it.
The stifling pressure of their civil war seemed to evaporate from the Chengdu office, replaced by the electric thrill of global strategy.
Zhang Song adjusted his robes, a spark of ambition in his eyes. "Once Yizhou is pacified, I am taking a trip. I fully intend to inspect the southern island of Zhuya for myself."
Leaning against a wooden pillar, Liu Ba flashed a sly grin. "If you are already heading to the southern coast, Ziqiao, why stop there? Charter a proper vessel and keep sailing. I hear the silver craftsmanship in East Timor is something to behold. Wang Dayuan certainly would not shut up about it."
Zhang Song narrowed his eyes. "You just want me to bring you back souvenirs."
"Obviously. Silver ones."
"Of course you do."
Over by the window, Zhang Fei was not listening to the travel plans. He was still chewing on the modern history they had just witnessed. Arms crossed, he shook his head in sheer disgust. "A million people," he grunted. "Just wiped out. By British colonists in a place called Australia. Disgusting."
"Wiping out bloodlines, burning shrines, seizing territory," Pang Tong drawled, offering a colder, pragmatic perspective. "Sadly, Yide, that is just the standard operating procedure for tribal conquest. The brutal reality of it."
Zhang Fei glared at him. "That is your takeaway? That it is standard?"
"I am saying it happens. I am not saying I approve."
"Then what are you saying?"
Pang Tong shook his head with a faint, cynical smirk. "Fortunately, our civilization has a bit more class than naked barbarism. Besides, even a thousand years from now, that continent's population barely hits a million. In our current era? It likely holds no more than a few tens of thousands of scattered tribesmen."
Liu Ba raised an eyebrow. "So, how does the Han Empire handle a few tens of thousands?"
"We have far superior methods," Pang Tong said, ticking the options off on his fingers. "We can mandate cultural assimilation. We can bribe the locals off their coastal lands with shiny manufactured goods. Or, we can simply ship in loads of Buddhist monks to pacify the warrior tribes. The options are endless."
Pang Tong shot Zhang Fei a sideways glance. He had absolutely zero intention of explaining grand geopolitical strategy to the muscle-brain general. The concept was centuries away from reality, anyway.
Yet, as he looked at the vast possibilities unfolding on the map before them, a new, fierce determination hardened in his chest.
I absolutely refuse to die young, he thought, Ihave a global empire to scheme into existence.
---
Hundreds of miles away, inside the Ganlu Hall, Li Shimin let out a long, shuddering breath.
The great mystery of the ocean's true value had just been answered, and frankly, it had completely shattered his composure. A ravenous, almost unhealthy hunger for maritime dominance had just taken root in his mind, and there was no putting that genie back in the bottle.
"A legacy of a thousand years," Li Shimin whispered, staring at the fading screen as if it held the secrets of the universe. "And it all starts from the sea."
His lingering anxieties about overextending the empire's borders? Poof. Evaporated.
He used to worry that stretching his reach too far would trigger a bureaucratic collapse. Now, a grand, beautiful strategic framework had just locked into place.
He would turn the Western Regions into a fortified overland trade corridor, and the South China Sea? That was going to become the Tang Dynasty's private, members-only inland lake.
If he could actually pull this off, who in the annals of history could even dare to compare themselves to him? Nobody. That is who.
Li Shimin slammed his fist onto the polished desk. Thwack.
The sharp crack made Liu Rengui jump about a foot in the air. "Your Majesty?"
Li Shimin waved a hand, flashing an apologetic, slightly manic smile as he turned to the young official. "Zhengze, the future records state you achieve great fame in naval warfare. Be honest with me. Did some hidden, eccentric master secretly teach you the dark arts of naval tactics during your youth?"
Liu Rengui blinked. Once. Twice. Then he shook his head. "Your Majesty, I am but a simple man from Bianzhou. As a boy, I learned to keep my head above water in the local rivers. I know absolutely nothing about water combat, let alone commanding floating fortresses on the open ocean."
So the man who is supposed to become my greatest naval commander learned to fight at sea by... swimming in a river. Fantastic.
A flicker of profound disappointment crossed the Emperor's face.
Liu Rengui was a brilliant political talent who constantly surprised him, but looking at the sheer, absurd scale of the naval blueprint they had just witnessed, relying on a man whose maritime experience peaked at river-swimming was insufficient.
Li Shimin had genuinely hoped to uncover some hidden, ancient society of naval tacticians. His imagination had simply run away with him.
He chuckled at his own folly. After witnessing the staggering, headache-inducing depth of modern science, it was obvious that true knowledge required generations of institutional study.
There were no sages born with the innate, cheat-code ability to just spawn a dreadnought into existence. He needed to pour the entire imperial treasury into education.
As he pondered the massive administrative overhaul required, his gaze swept the hall, mentally drafting his starting lineup. Li Ji for military logistics. Liu Rengui for future command. Fang Xuanling to handle the endless paperwork. Yan Lide for engineering.
The broadcast had made the formula brutally clear. Building an armada required three pillars: naval academies to train officers, mathematical research to design the hulls, and industrial facilities to actually build the damn ships. Missing even one pillar meant catastrophic, empire-ending failure.
So basically, he thought, we need to build schools, teach math, and build shipyards. Simple. Just completely overhaul the entire empire's education and industrial system. No pressure.
If they were going to conquer the oceans, leaving blue-water vessel construction under the traditional Ministry of Works was a joke. Their mandate was already broad enough to give anyone a migraine.
He needed an independent Ministry of Naval Affairs. He would just have to keep these men behind after court to hash out the details.
Snapping out of his grand reverie, Li Shimin realized Liu Rengui was still staring at him, clearly unnerved by the Emperor's erratic, rapid-fire questioning.
Li Shimin softened his expression, offering a warm, reassuring smile. "Tell me, Zhengze. Do you have any understanding of mathematics?"
Liu Rengui flushed, sweating slightly. "I understand very little, Your Majesty."
Li Shimin nodded, entirely unfazed. "Very well. Your first assignment is to enroll in the Imperial Directorate of Education. You will master mathematics."
Liu Rengui's face went pale. His mind raced. Mathematics. The numbers. The equations. The stuff that made his head spin just looking at it.
I am a civil official, he thought desperately. I handle paperwork. I review memorials. I write reports. I do not do math. I have never done math. I have spent my whole life avoiding numbers. And now the Emperor is telling me I have to learn them.
He wanted to argue. He wanted to protest. He wanted to explain that he was perfectly capable of commanding a fleet without knowing how to calculate the hypotenuse of a triangle.
But one look at Li Shimin's face told him this was not a negotiation.
Lacking any legal, moral, or physical grounds to refuse an imperial mandate, Liu Rengui bowed deeply and gracefully accepted his new fate.
"Your will be done, Your Majesty."
[Lightscreen]
[Shortly after the British Empire systematically dismantled the Qing government during the Opium Wars, a prominent Chinese statesman named Li Hongzhang made a chilling, historically accurate observation.
He stated that China was currently facing "a great paradigm shift unseen in three thousand years."
His strategic assessment was absolutely correct. However, he was centuries late to the realization. The terrifying gears of this global shift had actually started grinding long before the British arrived.
In the modern study of geopolitics, there is a legendary quote by naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan that gets constantly repeated in military academies: "Whoever controls the sea, controls everything."
The brutal corollary to that rule is equally true. The moment you lose control of the ocean, you lose everything.
For East Asia, the absolute chokepoint of maritime dominance is a place we are all intimately familiar with: the Strait of Malacca. And if we track the historical timeline, we can pinpoint exactly when China lost its grip on the world. It happened during the Ming Dynasty.
Centuries prior, during the Song Dynasty, the maritime chokepoint was controlled by a powerful kingdom known as Srivijaya. They maintained a highly lucrative tribute system with the Song court and commanded a highly respectable regional navy.
Eventually, the Song Dynasty became trapped in a desperate, grinding war for its own survival against northern invaders. Without Chinese backing, Srivijaya was systematically dismantled and conquered by local Malay powers.
By the time the mighty Ming Dynasty launched Admiral Zheng He's legendary treasure fleets, the power structure in the strait had shifted. A new nation had emerged, controlling the critical ports. The Ming records called it Manlajia. We know it today as Malacca.
Malacca controlled the physical ports, while the massive Ming Empire provided absolute diplomatic backing and terrifying military protection. The two nations forged an incredibly deep, highly profitable strategic alliance. According to the official History of the Ming Dynasty, starting from the first year of the Yongle Emperor's reign, the Kingdom of Malacca officially sent tribute to the Ming capital an astounding thirty-two times within a single century. Five of those massive diplomatic missions were personally led by the King and Queen of Malacca themselves. That is how deeply intertwined their survival was with Chinese naval power.
However, this golden era of geopolitical stability was entirely dependent on a mutual exchange of power and wealth. We all know the tragic ending to this story. The Ming court succumbed to vicious internal politics. The grand voyages of the treasure fleets were permanently terminated. The massive shipyards were left to rot. China's ability to project lethal force across the ocean completely evaporated. Naturally, the diplomatic ties withered and died.
The exact moment the world order fractured can be traced to the year 1511. A Portuguese expeditionary force, utilizing merely seven hundred heavily armed soldiers, sixteen modern warships, and a few thousand local mercenaries, launched a brutal assault on Malacca.
Initially, the royal family of Malacca was not terribly concerned by these strange, hairy men on their wooden ships. They held the ultimate trump card. They essentially told the Portuguese to enjoy their temporary victory, because the wrath of the Great Ming Empire was going to descend upon them and wipe them off the map. It was the ancient equivalent of "Wait until my big brother gets here."
They sent desperate pleas for military intervention to Beijing. It took eight agonizing years for those letters to finally reach the desk of the reigning Ming monarch.
Unfortunately for Malacca, the man sitting on the Dragon Throne was Zhu Houzhao, the Zhengde Emperor. A man who unironically held the self-appointed titles of the Leopard Quarter Emperor, the Romantic Playboy of the Capital, the Grand Lama of Great Qing, the Chief Director of the Royal Zoo, and the Supreme General of the Armed Forces. The man had more titles than actual accomplishments.
While the letters were slowly making their way to Beijing, the Portuguese had actively moved ahead. They arrived in the Ming capital and launched a massive, highly coordinated bribery campaign, flooding the imperial court with unimaginable amounts of silver.
The strategy was flawlessly effective. The deeply corrupt eunuchs surrounding the eccentric Emperor pocketed the silver and spent their days aggressively whispering praises about the wonderful, highly civilized Portuguese merchants. They made the Portuguese sound like the most polite, well-mannered guests East Asia had ever seen. The Zhengde Emperor was entirely enchanted. He even invited the Portuguese diplomatic envoys into his private quarters to play chess, gleefully promising to send a royal delegation back to Europe.
Against this backdrop of absolute imperial absurdity, the desperate envoys from Malacca waited in Beijing. They waited through the brutal winters. They waited as their funding dried up. They waited until they and their wives literally coughed themselves to death from illness in the freezing capital. They never received a single Ming soldier. Not one.
The only actual geopolitical response the Ming Dynasty mustered occurred years later, when the subsequent Jiajing Emperor finally grew annoyed and formally expelled the Portuguese embassy. But he still refused to dispatch a single warship to reclaim the strategic strait. He was far too busy hiding in his private chambers, getting high on toxic mercury pills provided by Daoist alchemists. Priorities, apparently.
And just like that, with a whimper instead of a bang, the Western powers violently kicked open the maritime doors of East Asia. The Portuguese seized control of global trade using heavily armed galleons. Three hundred years later, the British Empire sailed up the Chinese coast in slightly larger, heavily upgraded galleons, and systematically blasted the Qing Dynasty into a state of semi-colonial subjugation.
The brutal truth of history is undeniable. The exact moment Malacca fell to the European cannons, China's loss of global maritime supremacy became a permanent mathematical certainty. The catastrophic paradigm shift spanning millennia began the moment those sixteen Portuguese ships opened fire. The only question left was exactly which century the rotting paper walls of the empire would finally collapse.
But history is not a static tragedy. The tides have finally turned. Today, fueled by the staggering industrial rise of the new Republic, the sovereign sea power that slipped through the fingers of our ancestors has been violently wrested back into our hands.
The journey was forged in blood and steel. We started with absolute poverty, cobbling together a fleet from scrap metal. We evolved into a formidable coastal defense force. We expanded our reach, sending highly advanced escort task forces deep into the Gulf of Aden to protect international shipping lanes off the coast of Africa.
And now, we stare down the horizon of absolute supremacy. The Liaoning carrier strike group commands the waves. The Shandong carrier strike group stands ready. With the imminent commissioning of the electromagnetic catapults on the mighty Fujian, we are formally crossing the threshold into the era of the three carrier armada.
We endured a thousand years of shifting maritime power. We survived a hundred years of bloody, desperate resistance against foreign naval bombardment. Today, the sailors of the modern Chinese navy stand tall and unyielding. The golden age of our maritime supremacy is no longer a distant dream. It is an approaching storm.
That concludes our historical analysis for this session. Thank you for watching.]
Zhuge Liang had always found the futuristic perspective on history fascinating.
To a man of his era, history was often viewed through the rigid lens of static text on bamboo slips.
But when the historians of the future analyzed the timeline, they stripped away the dogma. They dissected the mechanics of logistics, geography, and systemic failure, revealing truths hidden in the smallest details.
Yet what captivated Zhuge Liang was not their analytical skill, but their spirit.
Unlike scholars who wallowed in complaints about past dynasties, these descendants possessed an unyielding pride. Words like struggle, resistance, and relentless effort formed the core of their worldview, and that pride bled through the screen.
They understood the difficulty of their position. They carried a cultural memory of the century of humiliation, the treaties signed at gunpoint, the foreign warships anchored in their rivers. But they refused to let the trauma break them. Instead of drowning in despair, they channeled the spirit of their ancestors. They embodied the willpower of Su Wu, who survived decades of captivity eating snow and holding his imperial staff. They struck with the speed of the young cavalry genius Huo Qubing. They displayed the pragmatism of Ban Chao, who threw away his scholar's brush to conquer the western frontiers with a sword.
They did not waste time crying over spilled milk. They put their heads down, fired up their blast furnaces, and worked with silent efficiency until they shocked the world and reclaimed their throne.
"Good lads!" Zhang Fei roared, slapping his thigh hard enough to make the table jump. He shook his head, a flurry of emotions flashing across his scarred face.
He understood the pride dripping from the narrator's voice. It was the same arrogance he and Guan Yu had felt when they first carved a bloody name for themselves on the battlefields, defying impossible odds and refusing to kneel to aristocratic warlords. It was the pride of men who had been dragged through the mud and emerged forged in steel.
Zhang Fei's recent foray into academic study actually paid off. A quote from the ancient sages snapped into his mind, and he delivered it with booming conviction. "As heaven maintains vigor through eternal movement, a gentleman should constantly strive for self-perfection without rest!" he bellowed. "They are truly good lads!"
Zhuge Liang remained silent, though a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. Zhang Fei's blunt assessment lacked elegance, but it struck the very core of the truth. Zhuge Liang felt no need to add rhetoric to such a perfect summary.
Maybe I should let him give the speeches more often, he thought. The man has a talent for getting straight to the point.
The audio from the broadcast had faded, but the screen was not finished. An epilogue began to play in silence.
The imagery shifted to grainy, shaking black and white footage. A crackling recording of a man's voice filled the room.
"The tide of the world is vast and mighty. Those who ride the wave will prosper. Those who resist the current will perish."
The audio shifted, jumping decades forward. The new voice was fierce, metallic, ringing with urgency, like a man screaming a warning into a storm.
"To fight for the naval supremacy of the Pacific is to fight for the very right to keep the gates of China open!"
The voice fractured, aging instantly, transforming into the exhausted whisper of a man carrying the weight of a dying nation.
"The naval forces of China cannot be allowed to remain under a hundred vessels. If, heaven forbid, a foreign power launches a naval invasion, then China is truly in mortal danger."
A roar of cannon fire shattered the audio.
On the screen, a yellowed map materialized. The archipelago of Japan morphed into a sprawling claw, reaching across the ocean to gouge into the Chinese mainland. Before the claws could sink in, a fist materialized from the west and smashed the hand into dust.
The fist unclenched. Two fingers reached down and pinched a calligraphy brush. The brush dipped its tip into the shattered ruins of the Japanese islands, drawing up dark ink. It danced across the screen, leaving behind a mandate:
We must build a powerful navy. This navy must be capable of defending our coastal borders and effectively neutralizing any potential imperialist aggression.
The calligraphy faded. The visual transitioned to footage of a fledgling naval force. Tiny, unarmored patrol boats bobbed in heavy surf, resembling children trying to hold back a flood.
A crisp female voice cut through the ambient noise. A radio broadcast, delivered with absolute authority:
"Attention all foreign aircraft and military vessels. Unauthorized entry into the territorial waters and airspace of the Chinese government is strictly prohibited."
The grainy footage dissolved. Color flooded the room.
The camera swept upward, soaring into the clouds before plummeting back down. A naval armada blanketed the surface of the ocean, stretching to the horizon.
The moment the central vessels came into focus, Zhuge Liang identified the apex predators. The aircraft carriers.
Carrier. The mother ship of aviation weaponry. A moving fortress of steel.
The concept crystallized in his tactical mind. This was not a ship. This was mobile, fortified sovereign territory.
Zhuge Liang locked onto the tiny figures of the crew moving across the flat flight deck. Using their height as a baseline, he calculated the dimensions of the leviathan. The length from bow to stern was at least three hundred paces. The width stretched nearly a hundred paces across.
A behemoth. A mountain of steel defying the laws of buoyancy.
Staring at the culmination of a century of blood, sweat, and engineering, Zhuge Liang exhaled. "The descendants of Han in the future. They are remarkably resilient. They are remarkably brilliant. And they have suffered remarkably."
He understood the trajectory. They started with nothing. They were bullied, blockaded, and bombarded. Yet they clawed their way out of the abyss to forge an armada that blackened the horizon. Zhuge Liang remembered the tone of the narrator from weeks ago, when they first introduced the aircraft carrier. The pride had been absolute.
We have finally mastered the pinnacle of human military force!
He understood the price they had paid for that boast. The shared bloodline, the shared language, the unbroken thread of civilization connecting them across time allowed Zhuge Liang to feel that hard-won pride burning in his own chest.
"The children of Han," Pang Tong whispered, his voice thick with conflicting emotions. "They finally grew up."
---
In the Ganlu Hall, Li Shimin sat in silence, bathed in the glow of the final images.
The historical detours, the internal rot of the Ming, and the century of struggle had tied his stomach in knots.
But the final aerial shot of the modern carrier strike group had robbed him of speech.
Yet, as the screen faded to black, it was not the image of the steel leviathans that echoed in his mind. It was the crackling voice from the beginning of the montage.
The tide of the world is vast and mighty.
Li Shimin closed his eyes. He did not see the ocean. He saw the river of time itself, a roaring torrent where countless empires, dynasties, and civilizations were caught in the rapids, fighting desperately to stay afloat.
"What does it mean to ride the wave?" Li Shimin whispered to the empty hall. "What does it mean to resist the current?"
He opened his eyes. The hesitation was gone, replaced by the focused ambition of a man who had forged an empire with a bloody sword.
"My Great Tang Empire will not wait for the future,"
Li Shimin declared, his voice hard as iron. "We will steer into the strongest currents. We will become the vanguard. We will shatter the timeline of those Western barbarians, and we will ride the crest of the waves for a thousand years!"