While the Western world continues its slow, terminal descent into the intellectual equivalent of a toddler’s ball pit—arguing over which spandex-clad billionaire is more 'problematic' on Disney+—a few thousand Chinese nerds have been busy writing a manual for the end of the world. Or rather, the beginning of a much more efficient, soul-crushing one. Enter 'The Morning Star of Lingao,' a collaborative web novel that is millions of words long, written by thousands of contributors, and possesses all the literary charm of a structural adjustment program designed by a particularly vengeful actuary. You haven’t heard of it because your attention span has been eroded to the size of a fruit fly's, but it contains the secret to the modern condition: that progress is a machine that eats people and outputs spreadsheets.

The premise is the ultimate bureaucratic fantasy. Five hundred modern-day 'surpluses'—mostly engineers, history buffs, and people who probably spend too much time calculating the optimal caloric intake of a medieval peasant—travel back to 1628. They don’t go there to find love or discover their true selves in some nauseating hero’s journey. No, they go back to the Ming Dynasty to build factories. They go back to implement supply chains. They go back to ensure that the 17th century becomes as efficiently miserable as the 21st. It is the 'Isekai' genre stripped of its magic and replaced with the cold, hard logic of blast furnace specifications and primitive metallurgy.

What makes this terrifying isn’t just the content; it’s the method of production. We are told that thousands of authors collaborated on this. This isn’t 'art' in the traditional sense—the product of a single, tortured soul trying to communicate the human experience. This is a hive-mind. It is the final boss of Reddit threads. It is a literary termite mound where the individual is irrelevant and only the collective output of technical data matters. In the West, we celebrate the 'individual' until the word has no meaning, usually to sell more personalized sneakers. In China, 'The Morning Star' suggests that the individual is merely a biological unit that needs to be properly calibrated for the industrial machine. Both sides are equally exhausting: one offers the illusion of freedom through consumption, the other offers the reality of purpose through servitude.

The novel is supposedly the 'secret' to China’s modernization and its accompanying 'malaise.' The secret, it turns out, is remarkably simple and deeply depressing: if you treat life like a series of engineering problems, you can achieve greatness, but you will feel absolutely nothing when you get there. This 'malaise' is the inevitable hangover of the Industrial Revolution. You build the high-speed rail so you can get to the factory faster; you work in the factory so you can afford the ticket for the high-speed rail. It is a closed loop of productivity that leads nowhere but to more productivity. The authors of 'Lingao' aren't writing fiction; they are writing an autopsy of the future. They have chronicled the exact moment humanity decided that 'efficiency' was a suitable replacement for 'meaning.'

Naturally, the Western literati would find this unreadable. It lacks the 'human element,' they would say, while they ignore the fact that their own society has been reduced to a series of algorithmic prompts and dopamine loops. We mock the Chinese for their obsession with industrial output, yet we spend our lives optimizing our LinkedIn profiles for ghosts. We are all living in 'The Morning Star of Lingao' now; we just haven't realized that the 500 time-traveling engineers are our current tech overlords, and the Ming Dynasty peasants are us, being 'modernized' into a state of permanent, high-tech anxiety.

Ultimately, this novel is the most honest piece of literature of the century because it doesn't lie about what we want. We don't want 'freedom' or 'enlightenment.' We want the air conditioning to work, the supply chain to be uninterrupted, and the spreadsheets to balance. We want the comfort of the machine. The 'malaise' is just the sound the engine makes when it realizes it has run out of fuel to burn—and the fuel, as it turns out, was us. So, enjoy your ignorance of China’s greatest sci-fi epic. It doesn’t matter if you read it or not. You’re already living the plot, and unfortunately for all of us, there isn’t a single editor in sight to trim the boring parts.