My Imperial Advisor is ChatGPT

On the eve of the summer solstice in the 42nd year of Qin Shi Huang's reign, in the western suburbs of Xianyang, at the Great Qin World Expo Center (the expanded area of ​​the "Crystal Palace").

The night was as dark as ink, and the open fields on the western outskirts of Xianyang were shrouded in thick clouds, obscuring the stars and moon.

Valerius, the special envoy of the Roman Republic and an elite member of the Senate, was walking along the gravel path, his proud Tyrian-dyed toga robe tightly wrapped around him.

Although he was one of the most knowledgeable nobles in Rome, at this moment, his heart was filled with unease and restlessness.

"Marcus!" Valerius muttered in Latin, his tone tinged with Roman arrogance. "This is the 'beacon of civilization' you boasted about in your letter? Have the Qin people herded us like sheep into this dark wilderness to hold some kind of barbaric midnight sacrifice?"

Walking beside him was Marcus, a former Roman centurion and now a VIP member of the "Da Qin Xianyang Bath Center" and a "Special Guide of the Court of State Ceremonial".

Marcus was no longer the wretched prisoner of war who ate sand in the desert. He was dressed in a smart Qin-style "Zhongshan suit" (a modified version of Hu clothing, with a stand-up collar, making him look smart), with shiny leather boots on his feet, and holding a folding fan with the words "It's rare to be muddleheaded" written on it.

Hearing his old boss's complaint, Marcus dismissively waved his fan and said in a Latin accent mixed with Guanzhong dialect:

"Your Excellency, please set aside your arrogance. In Qin, this darkness is not poverty, but rather 'foreplay.' Do you know what 'building up to a climax' means? Oh, I forgot you don't understand idioms. It means that only by seeing the darkest night can one understand the brightest light."

"Absurd!" Valerius scoffed. "The Pantheon in Rome has oil lamps burning all night long; that's true brilliance! But here, all I smell is... a strange sour odor."

"That's the smell of ozone." Marcus took a deep breath, as if it were the scent of a god. "It's the smell before thunder strikes."

At this time, envoys from all over the world had gathered in the plaza of the Expo Center.

The Parthian prince, wearing a gold-embroidered turban, was comparing the brilliance of the jewels on his head with that of the Kshatriya Mauryan king beside him; the kings of the thirty-six kingdoms of the Western Regions huddled together in fear, like a group of groundhogs awaiting judgment; and further away, the Xiongnu Chanyu Modu, with his two thousand elite troops, squatted on the ground, grinding his teeth, his eyes fiercely fixed on the huge, dark building in the distance.

The building resembled a sleeping ancient behemoth, devoid of any light, with only its steel skeleton outlining a chilling silhouette in the night.

"The auspicious time has arrived!"

In the darkness, a sharp whistle pierced the sky. It was not a human voice, but the wail of a steam whistle.

Valerius was startled: "What was that sound?"

Marcus straightened his collar, took a half step back, and put on a pair of black sunglasses (a specialty of the Qin Dynasty, made of polished crystal).

"Sir, if it's for the sake of your eyes, I suggest you close them. Because—the future has arrived."

In the control room, Wang Jianguo looked at the clock on the wall; the hands had returned to zero.

"Close the switch."

He calmly pressed the red button.

Inside the basement, twelve massive, heavily modified steam generators were already poised to go. As soon as the circuit was connected, the current surged like a mighty river, instantly rushing towards the hundred towers surrounding the plaza.

"Sizzle—Smack!!!"

There was no warning, no gradual brightening process.

One hundred pairs of enormous carbon rods were violently brought into contact under the drive of a high-voltage current, and then pulled apart. The electric arc exploded in the air, releasing a ghastly white light ten times more dazzling than the midday sun.

That's a carbon arc lamp. The first practical electric light source in human history, and also the most violent.

In an instant, the darkness was shattered by physics.

The once pitch-black wilderness was instantly illuminated as bright as day—no, even more terrifying than daylight. The sunlight of daytime is warm, but this light was cold, pale, and sharp, pinning everyone's shadow to the ground, as black as ink, creating a dizzying contrast with the surrounding paleness.

"ah!!!"

A chorus of screams erupted in the square.

The foreign envoys, who were completely unprepared, were instantly blinded.

Valerius felt a sudden white light before his eyes, followed by a sharp pain as if red-hot needles were piercing them. He instinctively knelt down, covering his eyes with his hands, tears streaming down his face.

"Jupiter! This is Jupiter's thunder!" Valerius's mind went blank, and all he could think of was the mythological explanation: "The Qin people have summoned the thunder god! They are punishing us for our rudeness!"

The Parthian prince immediately prostrated himself on the ground, bowing his head towards the light source with his rear end sticking out, chanting Zoroastrian scriptures—but he was mistaken; the fire was too intense, it was no ordinary fire.

The Mauryan envoys, however, thought that Brahma had opened his eyes and were so frightened that they convulsed.

Only the Xiongnu reacted the fastest. They instinctively drew their scimitars and slashed wildly at the air, trying to kill the "glowing monster." However, this only made them more blind and did nothing to achieve their goal.

"Don't be afraid! Don't be afraid!"

Liu Bang stood on the high platform, wearing oversized sunglasses and holding a megaphone made of rolled-up sheet metal, and shouted triumphantly:

"This is not divine punishment! This is the hospitality of the Great Qin! This is 'electricity'! It's the golden crow that His Majesty has kept in a cage! My fellow comrades... no, my envoys, take a moment to adjust, open your dog eyes... oh no, your discerning eyes, and see the miracle I have prepared for you!"

After a long while, Valerius finally managed to open his swollen, red eyes.

Through his fingers, he witnessed a scene he would never forget.

Under the spotlight of hundreds of carbon arc lamps, the "Crystal Palace" finally revealed its true appearance.

A massive steel frame supports the transparent glass curtain wall, where internal lighting and external spotlights interplay, making the entire building appear translucent and radiant. It doesn't seem to be made of brick and stone, but rather sculpted from a single, enormous piece of crystal.

Compared to this radiant temple, the Pantheon in Rome looks like a rural earthen kiln, and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon look like a haphazardly constructed illegal building.

"This...is this something a mortal could build?" Valerius murmured to himself, his knees buckling so much he couldn't stand up.

Marcus squatted down beside him, smiling as he handed him a pair of sunglasses: "Put these on, sir. In Qin, going out without these might make you blinded by the 'glory of civilization'."

If the impact of light is visual, then the subsequent impact is physical resonance.

Valerius had just put on his sunglasses and hadn't even had time to get up from the ground when he felt the ground beneath him begin to shake.

The vibration wasn't the shaking of an earthquake, but a high-frequency, bone-chilling tingling sensation.

"What...what's wrong now?"

The once empty stage in the stepped plaza in front of the main entrance of the Expo Center is now full of people.

Eighty royal musicians from the Qin Dynasty sat there solemnly, dressed in red and black ceremonial robes (somewhat like the uniforms of a military band in later times).

But what terrified all the envoys was not the musicians, but what was behind them.

Those were twelve enormous, menacingly shaped bronze amplifier matrices.

Each matrix consists of hundreds of horn-shaped tubes made of fine brass, connected at the end to a huge resonating chamber. This is not an electrically driven loudspeaker (it was impossible to build one with such power at that time), but a "physical amplification cannon" designed by the Mohists based on acoustic principles.

Steam-powered bellows supply air to brass instruments, and a special acoustic structure directs and focuses the sound.

Zhao Gao stood on the command platform, holding a gold-inlaid baton in his hand, his waist wrapped in a thick back brace (he had strained his back while moving the locomotive and it hadn't healed yet), and shouted in a shrill voice:

"All hands on deck! 'The Qin King's Battle Song'—the heavy metal industrial version! Play it for us! Let's blast these barbarians' eardrums!"

"boom!!!"

The first sound was not the sound of drums, but the simultaneous firing of twelve oversized steam horns.

The voice was deep, heavy, and resonant with a metallic tremor, like the roar of an ancient dragon. The sound wave, amplified by the sound matrix, transformed into a visible ripple in the air, crashing heavily into the delegation's formation.

Valerius felt as if he had been hit in the chest by a sledgehammer, and his heart skipped a beat.

Immediately afterwards, the war drums thundered.

"Thump! Thump! Thump!"

Each drumbeat was accompanied by a thud in the ground.

Then, the sounds of chime bells, stone chimes, Qin zithers, and the heart-wrenching suona horn converged into a torrent.

"How can we say we have no clothes! We share the same robes! The king is raising an army; let us prepare our spears and shields!"

Behind the loudspeaker array, three hundred burly Qin soldiers roared in unison. Their voices, amplified by the sound, became like rolling thunder, echoing across the wilderness and making the glass of the Crystal Palace vibrate.

This is not music, this is acoustic massacre.

The Romans' prized phalanx marching looked like a joke in the face of this frenzied rhythm; the Parthians' prized mounted archery tactics were impossible to aim accurately in this thunderous roar.

The king of a small kingdom in the Western Regions was standing too close to the front when the sound wave shook him so much that he bled from his mouth and nose, and fainted with his eyes rolling back.

"Too brutal! Too brutal!" Valerius roared, covering his ears and opening his mouth wide (to equalize the ear pressure). "This isn't a welcoming ceremony! This is a declaration of war! They're killing with their voices!"

Marcus roared in his ear (he couldn't hear if he didn't roar): "Your Excellency! This is the 'Voice of Qin'! In Qin, the loudest voice is the truth! A loudest voice is a nation's power! Listen to this melody, can you hear a passion that says 'I want to bury you all'?"

With such overwhelming background music playing, the psychological defenses of all the foreign envoys completely collapsed. They huddled together like frightened quails, trembling with fear.

At the climax of the music, the giant steel gate of the Crystal Palace, five meters high and eight meters wide, slowly rose, accompanied by the hissing sound of the hydraulic system (water-driven).

The real "protagonist" has arrived.

"Ugh—!!!"

A whistle, even more piercing and sharper than the previous steam horn, pierced through the orchestra's accompaniment.

A thick cloud of black smoke billowed out, and then a black, ferocious steel behemoth slid out onto a specially made suspended display platform.

That's the "Daqin No. 1" steam locomotive.

To demonstrate the effect, it was not placed on the rails, but suspended in the air with the wheels half a foot off the ground.

The boiler operator frantically shoveled coal behind him, the flames turning the furnace a fiery red, which looked like hellfire through the observation window.

The huge red flywheel began to turn slowly, and the connecting rods pushed and pulled back and forth like the steel arms of a giant, making a rhythmic "clack, clack" metallic clanging sound.

The speed is getting faster and faster.

The flywheel spun into a red blur, the connecting rods moving so fast it was dazzling. That pure, mechanical beauty, carrying a destructive power, struck straight to the soul.

"Is...is this alive?" Valerius, his face ashen, pointed at the gasping, cloud-spitting monster. "Does it eat people?"

"It doesn't eat people, it eats stones (coal)." Liu Bang stood beside the display stand, patting the scorching hot car body (through gloves) like a salesman. "This is the Qin Dynasty's land cruiser! It's tireless, incredibly strong, and can pull 50,000 jin of cargo, traveling a thousand li a day!"

"Fifty thousand catties?!" The envoys from the Western Regions gasped in astonishment. Their camels could only carry a few hundred catties at a time, yet this monster alone could carry the weight of an entire camel caravan?

Just then, the flywheel reached its maximum speed, and the entire booth began to shake violently, as if this beast was about to break free of its restraints and rush down to devour people.

"Who can subdue this beast?" Liu Bang roared.

"I'll do it!"

A loud shout, like a thunderclap from a clear sky.

Standing nine feet tall, Xiang Yu, shirtless and revealing muscles that looked like they were sculpted from granite, strode onto the stage.

He wasn't carrying any weapons, but rather a specially made steel crowbar that was three meters long.

Xiang Yu stared at the rapidly spinning wheel, a fervent fighting spirit flashing in his eyes. Although he had now studied physics and knew he couldn't fight head-on, he still enjoyed the thrill of conquest.

"Give me a fulcrum!" Xiang Yu roared, inserting one end of the crowbar into the pre-designed braking groove.

"Drink!"

Xiang Yu's muscles bulged, and his veins stood out like coiled dragons. He used the lever principle to press his entire weight onto the other end of the crowbar.

"Sizzle——————!!!"

The brake pads rubbed violently against the flywheel, bursting out dazzling sparks, like a golden rainstorm, instantly enveloping Xiang Yu's figure.

The ear-piercing scraping sound drowned out the gasps from the audience.

Amidst the countless sparks, Xiang Yu, like a war god bathed in flames, relentlessly suppressed the roaring steel monster.

The flywheel's rotational speed began to decrease visibly.

The red afterimage slowed down... slower... Finally, with a final, unwilling screech, the massive flywheel came to a complete stop.

Xiang Yu threw away the red-hot crowbar, stood in the billowing steam, raised his arms high, and let out a triumphant roar.

"Great Qin is mighty!!!"

The foreign diplomats in the audience were completely dumbfounded.

They looked at the steel monster that could pull 50,000 pounds, and then at the man who could stop the monster single-handedly (plus physics).

A deep sense of despair arose spontaneously.

Valerius, trembling, wrote his first sentence in his diary: "The Roman legions before them are like a bunch of children with toothpicks. Their machines are made by God, and their men... are God himself."

If the industrial zone's displays are terrifying, then the agricultural zone's displays are enough to make you question the meaning of life.

After leaving the industrial pavilion, the envoys were taken to the agricultural pavilion.

There are no glaring lights or deafening sounds here, only a comforting...smell of pig manure.

But when they saw the pig, they felt uneasy.

It was a huge pigpen, inside which lay two "Daqin White Pigs" (an improved breed). They were so fat that their eyes were squinted into slits, their bodies were pure white without a single stray hair, and each one looked like a mountain of flesh, weighing at least 500 jin (250 kg).

The envoy from the Mauryan Empire looked at the pig grunting and rooting around in its trough, and tears welled up in his eyes.

"This...this is a pig?" he asked the agricultural student next to him, trembling. "Isn't this just a shaved elephant?"

"These are pigs," the student proudly introduced. "They are a superior breed developed using 'hybrid breeding' and 'scientific feed.' They have a short growth cycle and a high meat yield."

The Mauryan envoy was devastated: "Why? Why are the pigs of Great Qin stronger than the cattle of our country? Our people are starving, yet the pigs of Great Qin are so fat they can't stand up! This is a desecration of life! No, this is a trampling of our dignity!"

Beside them, the Parthian envoy was staring blankly at a giant pumpkin.

That pumpkin was as big as a millstone; it took two people to hug it.

"This is fake, isn't it?" The Parthian envoy secretly pinched it with his fingernail, and juice oozed out. "It's real... My God, this one melon is enough to feed our garrison for three days. How did they grow it?"

"Fertilizer." The student pointed to a bag of white granules in the display case next to him. "Nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, fertilizer... no, compound fertilizer. It's a miracle cure for the soil."

The envoys' eyes turned greedy and desperate.

They suddenly realized that the terror of the Qin Dynasty lay not only in its steel monsters, but also in these seemingly insignificant pigs and pumpkins.

An empire with unlimited food is invincible, because it can wear down any enemy.

While everyone else was still reeling from the shock, only one group remained clear-headed—the Huns.

Modu Chanyu, with his two thousand elite troops, paid no attention to the trains and electric lights, and headed straight for the "food and beverage service area" at the very back of the exposition.

To demonstrate the grandeur of a great nation, Liu Bang promised to provide "unlimited free buffet meals" at this expo.

This became the most regrettable decision of his life.

The dining area had now turned into a battlefield.

"Quick! That black water! Ten more buckets!" Zuo Xianwang shouted at the waiter, holding up an empty bowl.

That was "Qin's Happy Water" (sour plum juice + soda water + caramel). For the Xiongnu people, who drank strong-smelling mare's milk wine year-round, this bubbly, sweet and sour liquid was simply divine nectar.

"Chanyu! This 'roujiamo' is so delicious!" The Right Wise King grabbed one in each hand, stuffing his mouth full, juice dripping down his beard. "The bread is whiter than our faces, and the meat... it's cooked until it's softer than tofu! It smells amazing!"

That was pork belly stewed for three hours with dozens of spices, including brown sugar, soy sauce, star anise, and cinnamon (obtained through the Silk Road). For the Huns, who only knew how to boil and roast, this "complex flavor" was a nuclear explosion for their taste buds.

Modu Chanyu sat at a long table, with skewers piled up in front of him. He ate with sweat pouring down his face, but his eyes remained unusually calm, even carrying a hint of tragic determination.

"Eat! Eat as much as you can, everyone!" Maodun ordered, swallowing a meatball. "Brothers, we can't defeat the Qin's iron chariots, nor can we build their lamps. The only place we can defeat them is right here at the dinner table!"

"Eat their granaries dry! Devour their national treasury!"

"This is our war! We'll crush the Qin Dynasty!"

With tears in their eyes, two thousand strong Xiongnu men began a frenzied feast for the glory of their tribe.

That night, thirty chefs in the food court of the expo collapsed from exhaustion, and five knives were used up cutting meat.

Liu Bang stood by the railing on the second floor, looking down at the group of Huns below who looked like hungry wolves. His lips twitched, and he clutched his chest in heartache.

"Old Xiao... hurry... hurry and triple the ticket price again!" Liu Bang gritted his teeth. "Also, tell the kitchen to slice the meat thinner! The thinner the better! Are these barbarians gluttons?"

"Furthermore," Liu Bang said, watching the Xiongnu people weeping as they ate, "let them eat. Having grown accustomed to braised pork and white flour buns, can they really stomach the dried cheese and air-dried meat of the grasslands?"

"It's easy to go from frugality to extravagance, but difficult to go from extravagance to frugality. This roujiamo (Chinese hamburger) is the most lethal arrow I shot at the Xiongnu."

Section 7: Epilogue - A Roman's Diary

At dawn, the first day of the expo finally came to an end.

Valerius returned to the inn like a walking corpse. His eyes were swollen, the roar of the loudspeaker still echoed in his ears, and his mind was filled with the image of the spinning steel wheel and the fat white pig.

He sat at the table, his hands trembling, and by the light of the kerosene lamp provided by the Qin Dynasty (bright and smokeless), wrote a report to the Roman Senate:

"Your Excellencies in the Senate:"

"Please forgive my illegible handwriting, as my hands are still trembling. Before coming here, we thought the East only had silk and pottery, and that they were a flock of wealthy sheep."

"But I was wrong. Terribly wrong."

"This is not a wilderness, this is the workshop of the gods. They use glass bottles to illuminate with lightning, they amplify their voices with huge bronze throats to terrify souls, they drive fire-breathing steel chariots, and their pigs are stronger than our rulers... no, stronger than our bulls."

"Here, my proud Roman phalanx might not even withstand a single blow from that man pushing the train. Our glory, in the face of their industrial might, is like a castle on the beach, which will be swept away by the waves."

"I suggest the Senate immediately cease all attempts to spy on the East. If possible, send as many people as possible to learn... or, arrange marriages. If we cannot defeat them, then join them."

"P.S. That thing called 'roujiamo' is really delicious, I suggest you introduce it."

After writing the last word, Valerius slumped into his chair, looked out the window at the Crystal Palace, still brightly lit and like a mirage, and let out a long sigh.

"Rome... is the countryside."