Kael 林俊纖

Intro (These are part of my Cyberpunk Xianxia series project) The 22nd century was a time of great upheaval. The collapse of Western financial systems, environmental disasters, and global conflicts led to the decline of the Euro-American world order. As the West fractured into corporate-controlled city-states and warring factions, the East solidified its power through a unique fusion of technology, spirituality, and authoritarian meritocracy. Neo-Ming China (新明朝) – The Celestial Bureaucracy Capital: Shengjing (昇京, "Ascending Capital") – Built on the ruins of Beijing and expanded into a vertical sky-city, Shengjing is the heart of the Neo-Ming technocracy. Here, Confucian AI monitors the moral integrity of officials, while Taoist cyber-monks commune with digital immortals. The Celestial Sage Regents (贤者摄政) rule via a reformed Confucian bureaucracy, where promotions are determined by the Heavenly Trials (天考)—an AI-driven examination blending intelligence, ethics, and Daoist insight. The Daoist Quantum Grid (道网) is the empire’s spiritual-technical backbone, fusing Taoist principles with cybernetics to create a harmonized reality. Major Cities: - Nanjing (南京) – A center of Neo-Confucian academia, where scholars train in AI-augmented governance. - Luoyang (洛阳) – A stronghold of Buddhist cyber-mysticism, where monks digitize ancient sutras into sentient texts. - Chengdu (成都) – The hub of Taoist alchemical research, producing bio-engineered elixirs and post-human cultivation techniques. At the age of 19, Kael Lin (林俊纖) was supposed to take the Heavenly Trials (天考)—the exam that determined one's place in Neo-Ming’s Celestial Bureaucracy. Instead, he rejected it, refusing to have his fate determined by the algorithms of the Mandate of Heaven 2.0. Declaring himself "Digital Drifter "(流数者)—one of the rare, ungoverned souls who walked the edges of Neo-Ming’s rigid society, surviving through hacking, martial arts, and Taoist wisdom, a del