The Dragon's New Teeth

The immense design hall at the Tianjin Arsenal was a temple to a new and terrible god of war. Outside its towering windows, visible in the hazy sunlight, was the reason for its existence: the half-finished, skeletal rib cage of the first Dragon-class battleship. It was already a monster of steel, dwarfing every other vessel in the shipyard, its scale promising a future of overwhelming power. Inside the hall, Admiral Meng Tian stood before a full-scale wooden mock-up of the battleship's command center, his new classroom.

His students were the hundred cadets from the Baoding Academy, the best and brightest minds of their generation, now assigned to his new Naval Doctrine Command. They listened with an almost religious intensity as he spoke.

"The bridge of a ship is its brain," Meng Tian explained, using a long wooden pointer to trace the lines of the structure. "But under the British design, the design of every navy in the world, it is also a glass jaw. It sits high atop the vessel, exposed, filled with every senior officer. One well-placed, lucky shell can decapitate the entire command structure, leaving the ship a blind, headless beast. Our design," he tapped the mock-up, indicating a space deep within the ship's armored hull, "is different."

He led them to a cutaway diagram. "The Emperor's design places the true brain, the Combat Information Center, deep inside the skull, protected by layers of the new imperial steel. The men on the exposed navigation bridge are merely the eyes. They guide the ship. But the true command functions—gunnery control, damage assessment, tactical plotting—are conducted from here, safe from all but the most catastrophic, ship-killing damage. We separate the functions of navigation from the functions of fighting."

The cadets, their minds racing, were absorbing not just new tactics, but an entirely new philosophy of survivability and warfare. They were being taught to think in ways no other navy on Earth had yet conceived.

The quiet of the lecture was broken by the silent, sudden arrival of the Emperor himself. QSH entered the design hall unannounced, flanked only by two of his personal bodyguards. All activity in the vast space ceased instantly. Engineers, draftsmen, and cadets snapped to attention, their heads bowed low in a wave of spontaneous reverence.

"Admiral Meng," QSH said, his voice calm but resonant. "I trust your work proceeds well."

Meng Tian strode forward and bowed deeply. "Your Majesty. It does. Your designs are revolutionary. They are a generation ahead of the British plans. But," he hesitated for a moment, "we are encountering challenges that test the limits of our Empire's industry."

"Explain," QSH commanded.

"Herr Schmidt reports that the new steel alloy, while incredibly strong, is proving exceptionally difficult to machine. It dulls our best cutting tools and resists drilling. Furthermore, our engine works at the arsenal cannot yet produce the turbine blades to the fine tolerances you require for the ship's massive power plant. They lack the tools."

Herr Schmidt, the German engineer, stepped forward, bowing nervously, his face slick with sweat. He was a man caught between the awe of his Emperor's genius and the terror of its practical demands. "Majesty, your vision is magnificent, but it is beyond our current industrial capacity. To build these engines would require tools and gauges a hundred times more precise than anything that currently exists in the finest workshops in Germany, let alone in China. It is, with our current technology, impossible."

QSH nodded, unsurprised by the report. He had anticipated this. "I am aware, Herr Schmidt. Our industry must evolve to meet the demands of our ambition. We will not be limited by what is possible today. We will create what is necessary for tomorrow."

He turned to the assembled engineers, his eyes seeming to glow with an inner fire. "You think of a turbine blade as a single piece of cast metal, to be machined into shape. You are wrong. You must think of it as a crystallized structure. The weakness is not in the metal itself, but in the imperfections created during the cooling process. You must control the cooling of the casting not just from the outside, but from the inside out."

He walked to a large, empty blackboard, picked up a piece of chalk, and with a hand that moved with impossible speed and precision, he began to draw. He sketched a complex diagram of a new type of casting mold, one with an intricate network of internal cooling channels.

"We will use super-heated steam forced through these channels to control the cooling rate of the metal to within a single degree at every point of the casting," he explained. "This will create a blade with a perfectly uniform crystalline structure, a blade of immense strength and integrity that requires minimal machining." He tossed the chalk down. "We will not import the tools we need. We will invent them. We will build a new generation of precision lathes and milling machines right here in this arsenal. The challenge of building this ship will, in itself, transform our entire industrial base. This vessel is not merely a weapon; it is the engine of our own, new industrial revolution. Its construction will give us the means to build anything."

He turned his gaze back to Meng Tian, a look of profound, shared understanding passing between them.

"The Americans have made me a proposal, Admiral," QSH said, his voice low enough that only Meng Tian and the nearby ministers could hear. "They wish to divide the world with us, like two emperors drawing a line in the sand. They are bold. I give them that. But they still think in terms of the present. They see our power as it is today. They cannot possibly imagine our power as it will be tomorrow."

He gestured through the massive windows of the hall, towards the shipyard outside, to the immense, skeletal framework of the first Dragon-class battleship.

"When this ship and her three sisters are launched," he continued, his voice resonating with absolute certainty, "the 'Pacific Charter' the Americans so proudly propose will already be obsolete. The balance of power they seek to ratify will no longer exist. It will be a historical curiosity. Our new navy will not just secure our designated sphere of influence; it will give us the ability to project our power anywhere on this planet, at will. Let the Americans and the Europeans draw their lines on their maps. We are building the eraser."

Meng Tian looked from the burning intensity in his Emperor's eyes to the revolutionary new designs on the blackboard, and then to the skeleton of the impossible ship taking shape outside. In that moment, the full scope of the Emperor's grand strategy hit him with the force of a physical blow. He finally understood. The humiliation of his removal from the northern command, the transfer to this 'teaching' post, it was not a punishment. It was a repositioning. It was a move in a game so vast he had not even been able to see the board.

The Emperor was not just fighting a war on the steppe or playing a game of diplomacy in the courts of Europe. He was fighting a war against time itself, using his own supernatural knowledge to accelerate his nation's development at an impossible rate. He was preparing the weapons, the men, and the doctrines for a final, global conflict that only he, in his ancient and reborn mind, could truly envision. And he, Meng Tian, had been chosen not just to be the sword, but the mind that would guide the new thunderbolts of the Empire.