Homeward

Homeward is a science fiction novel by the web author Nuclear-Powered Battleship, serialized on Qidian Chinese from February 4, 2019, and completed on July 17, 2020, totaling about 3.11 million characters and 741 chapters. The story is set in a world after a previous civilization and beings called "god-star life" have both come to an end, with humanity rebuilding a second civilization on the ruins. It spans a world where magic and technological relics intertwine, oceanic battlefields thundering with steam and heavy artillery, an electrical age swarming with airships and drones, an Enlightenment era in which finance, cybernetics, and socialization contend, and finally interplanetary voyages and a Grand Time-Dial calendar in which lifespans are measured in tens of thousands of years. The protagonist, Gunflame Binghe (originally Chang Bing), is the fourth son of the Gunflame family of the Holy Soke Empire. At the novel's opening he is only six, using "intellectual deficiency" as a disguise while gradually awakening to self-awareness in secret. Thereafter, with the help of memories from a past life and the "assistance" of a higher-dimensional being, he starts out as a mechanic, improving mechanical creations, stirring the imperial court, and, after falling under suspicion, travels abroad to drive an industrial revolution, reform education and institutions, and try to remake the lower order through technology. The book's main thread is not personal leveling and monster-slaying but a thought experiment in civilizational evolution: every generation faces the pangs of technological progress and humanistic change, and civilizations that cannot bear the cost stall in place and become ruins. Through successive stages—steam, electrical, nuclear, interstellar—the author repeatedly asks about the dynamic balance between technology and institutions, the individual and the collective, ultimately pointing toward the theme of "the homeward course of a civilization's endless renewal."