Father of the Virtual Empire

Father of the Virtual Empire is a science-fiction web novel by Mu Heng serialized on Qidian, in the "super technology" subgenre, totaling about 720,000 characters in over 300 chapters. The premise: twenty years in the future, humanity discovers the ruins of a spaceship, and obtaining a "ticket" to enter the ruins requires surviving brutal combat whose outcome will determine humanity's shape for the next thousand years. A consciousness that has traveled back from a thousand years later, armed with information and perspective far beyond the present, returns to the real world of the 2010s to seize the initiative in the future struggle. From scratch he builds a virtual-game base, using games to screen talent of sufficient caliber and turning players into a usable corps. As the base expands, what began as a mere game evolves step by step into a vast virtual empire, becoming the solid rear base from which he contends with his enemies. The story revolves around consciousness travel, the interweaving of virtual and real, the contest over authority, and talent screening, blending the infinite-flow and "main god construction" styles; the protagonist is rational and hard-edged, skilled at plotting and calculation.