Dawnbringer's Blade

Dawnbringer's Blade is a long science-fiction novel by the web author Yuan Tong. It was serialized on Qidian Chinese Network from April 10, 2018, and completed on March 16, 2022. The main text and extras total roughly 6.33 million characters and 1,600 chapters, and it was named one of the top 100 works of the year at the fourth Chenggua Online Literature Awards. The story begins with a "gone wrong" transmigration: the soul of the protagonist, Gawain, drifts above a continent in another world for more than a hundred thousand years, observing the world almost like an astronomer watching the stars, until, just when he feels he can endure no longer, he falls into a body that has slept for seven hundred years—that of Gawain Cecil, founding duke of the Kingdom of Ansu and ancestor of the Cecil family. Thus an "ancestor" who should have been recorded in the history books climbs out of his coffin, only to face two terrified great-great-great-…-granddaughters and a declining world about to meet the end of an era. After his resurrection, Gawain holds the right of development and starts anew from the Cecil territory amid ruins: building roads, clearing land, founding schools, recruiting people, and establishing academies. He combines the rational thinking of Earth with the magic runes of the other world, promoting the magic net, magical devices, and industrial production, so that extraordinary power truly benefits ordinary people for the first time. At the same time, relying on the vast information and hidden knowledge accumulated during his "satellite career," he pursues the truth about the magic tide, the Black Trap, the bones of gods, and the relics of the "Pathfinders." Amid farming, power struggles, and puzzle-solving, his personal story of restoring his kingdom gradually becomes a grand narrative about how civilization can break out of its cycle. The work continues some of the settings and the light, humorous style of Yuan Tong's "Xiling" worldview, while many readers regard it as one of his representative works for its more mature epic feel.