The Gate of Technology

"Gate of Technology" is a long-form urban tech fiction web novel by Kuangben de Heiyi. Serialized on Qidian starting September 28, 2015, and completed on February 14, 2021, it spans 1,160 chapters and roughly 3.24 million Chinese characters. The story begins in the library of Yanguo University of Science and Technology: freshman Cheng Yuan faces two doors in his mind—"magic to the left, technology to the right." He strides left without hesitation, only to be turned back by a voice saying, "Your intelligence is too high; please choose again." He then enters the technology door on the right and obtains a "Technology Crystal" packed with a vast repository of civilizational knowledge. From there, Cheng Yuan draws on film and television for inspiration to extract futuristic tech, starting with holograms and artificial intelligence. He registers a company, secures startup loans, and, with an academician's endorsement, completes technology transfer and accumulates capital. He then advances projects in robotics, genetic enhancement, antigravity, and spaceports, moving lab results step by step into real society. The later arc expands to an interstellar scale, involving satellite launches, a Mars base, and alien civilizational ruins, and concludes with the global diffusion of elemental energy. The work emphasizes the self-consistent logic of technological evolution, and its restrained, rational protagonist makes it one of the representative titles in the "black technology" genre that foregrounds technological chains and realistic extrapolation.