The stone walls of Santa Fe kept out the scorching heat of Granada, but the restlessness of war seeped right through the masonry. I, a Genoese, stood inside this fortress built for a siege. The family crest upon my chest might have carried some weight back home, but here, under the scrutinizing gaze of generational dukes, its significance was easily shaken. I felt like a pawn cast by the hand of Fate onto a chessboard near the endgame—insignificant among the major pieces. They were the masters of this land, while I was merely a lowly navigator, waiting like a hyena for them to toss me a scrap of opportunity.

Outside, a holy war that had lasted centuries was grinding on. In the veins of every Spanish noble present flowed the memories of hundreds of years of battling the Moors. Now, the finish line was in sight. Following their gazes as they unconsciously glanced out the window, I looked toward the dust-choked land scorched by war, where the silhouette of the Alhambra stood like an exquisite, fragile dream. The fanaticism of imminent victory and the gloom of an empty treasury mixed on every lord’s face like two incompatible pigments. They spoke loudly of God’s glory and the surrender of the Sultan of Granada, as if the volume could drown out the hollow echo of their dry purses.

The Treasurer, the Duke de Guzman, whispered to Cardinal Mendoza and fell into deep thought. His weather-beaten face was harder than the stones of Santa Fe. Finally, he rapped his knuckles on the wooden table, silencing the great hall instantly. His grave voice cut through the crowd’s fantasies of war booty: “Your Majesties, with the new loans from the Genoese bankers, the soldiers have bread for the week. But fodder for the knights’ horses has been halved, and we haven’t scraped together the coin for the next cannon volley. Fighting like this… we are merely competing with the heathens to see whose granary runs dry first!”

The temperature of the room’s fanaticism plummeted at this cold report of reality. Everyone’s eyes, intentionally or otherwise, began to drift toward me, and toward another—a “Sage” from the East. At this moment, they hoped that we, these humble travelers, could conjure a miracle that turned stone into gold.

Only then did I focus on this Eastern Sage. He wore silk robes cut in the local style, heavy wooden prayer beads around his wrists, and sported the characteristic goatee of an Oriental. His sparse hair was pulled into a strange bun atop his head, secured by a wooden hairpin. He looked neither like a priest nor like any heathen we knew.

The Duke de Guzman turned his gaze to the “Sage,” his eyes passing over me without even a pause. “Master Zheng, you are the adopted son of the Great Ming Empire’s Imperial Voyager, Zheng He, and you have conducted trade in the West. There should be no one better suited to explain the essentials of navigation and commerce.”

These words drew looks of amazement from the nobles. They had heard of Zheng He’s name, and the miracles of the Ming’s great voyages were legendary across the four seas.

Master Zheng began to speak, his voice slow and steady. “We have an old saying in the Great Ming: ‘Kuafu chased the sun and died of thirst on the road; but he who waits by the stump for a rabbit can at least fill his belly for a meal.’ It means one should not pursue things that are ethereal and void…”

As soon as he said this, the surrounding nobles nodded meaningfully. Some cast contemptuous glances at me. Hearing this argument from the Master was exactly what the nobles wanted; the subsequent evidence didn’t matter anymore. He went on to say that going south and east was the true “Mandate of Heaven.”

After a speech on destiny, Master Zheng slowly stroked his goatee, tracing routes on the map. A shrewd, merchant-like light gleamed in his black eyes. As if revealing a cosmic secret, he whispered mysteriously: “My Lords, the African route that the Portuguese have spent sixty years and countless lives of excellent sailors to open up—that is the greatest treasure. Let them continue to round the Cape of Good Hope like blind men. We shall be the clear-eyed ones following behind to pick up the gold scattered everywhere.”

A ripple of low laughter spread through the hall—the knowing laughter that belongs to smart people. The heavy oppression regarding the fate of the nation vanished, replaced by a bloated sense of cleverness.

“You mean… copy their route?” A young baron leaned forward from the crowd, asking uncertainly.

“Not at all,” Master Zheng smiled, his tone carrying a hint of arrogance and affectation. “It is to ‘borrow’ their wisdom. This wisdom is God’s gift to all mankind.” Upon hearing the Master invoke God, the baron dispelled his doubts and nodded slowly.

“Since the routes are charted and the ports built, we need only send nimble small vessels to avoid their main fleet. While they push south and east into unknown waters, we will stay in the safety of their rear ports, buying ivory and gold at ten percent less than they pay. Let them bear the risks of the unknown seas; we shall reap the profits of the known ports. This is also a wisdom from my home, the Great Ming, called ‘Borrowing a Hen to Lay Eggs’…”

Amidst this torrential instillation of Ming wisdom, I wanted to say something, but the gaze of the Duke de Guzman cut me off. When Master Zheng finished, the Duke commented, “This is a mature and prudent suggestion. Master Zheng’s foresight is admirable, far surpassing certain… shortsighted and untimely individuals.” The deliberate pause made my face burn. “What our Empire needs is certain gold, not ethereal legends from beyond the ocean. I trust no one disagrees. Now, let us discuss the details of the voyage.”

It was then I remembered: in this palace filled with inflated arrogance and hubris, my weight was like a feather, while the ministers who held power and wished to reuse existing routes were the solid lead weights.

Yes, the plan was too perfect. To the nobles, it required no massive upfront investment, bore no political risk of exploring the unknown, and promised quick returns. And if anything went wrong, it could be dismissed as the personal actions of subordinate merchants.

“Young man,” Duke de Guzman looked at me, tossing me a scrap of conversation like charity. “You are too young. You must ask yourself more often what the country needs right now.”

I agreed meekly, yet I didn’t believe the Portuguese were fools. But I wavered—the current situation did seem to demand profit as the core objective. Was exploration truly right? Remembering the nobles’ skepticism, I felt lost.

Sure enough, a year passed, and all of Santa Fe was immersed in a sweet poison named “Following.”

One only needed to trail behind the fleets flying the Portuguese flag, dock at the ports they had supplied, sweep up spices for a slightly higher price, and offload rugs and muskets for a slightly lower price, to bring ships full of gold back home. There was no need for navigators who could read the stars; the Spanish captains now only needed to learn one skill—watching the Portuguese masts.

In the Royal Shipyard of Seville, oak originally meant for keels was hauled to the court for new dance floors; the best sailcloth was used for ladies’ sunshades, because “since we don’t need to cross the ocean, we don’t need such sturdy keels and sails.” The old shipwrights were fired, replaced by a group of painters skilled in lacquer. These painters dragged old coastal fishing boats ashore, painted them in bright colors, hung the most ornate Spanish royal crests on them, and carved giant lions for the prows—even though the wood inside the lions was already hollowed out by worms.

“This is called ‘Overtaking on the Bend’.” Duke de Guzman once told me proudly after some wine, “We bear no risk of the storm, yet enjoy the calm after it passes.” Beside him sat Master Zheng, smiling with satisfaction. I was drowned in the laughter of Santa Fe, watching through the window as the heathen city of Granada, with its solid walls, was slowly leveled by the Spanish army. Cannons could indeed breach the stone walls of Granada, but as we demolished their walls, we built a higher one in our own hearts. Inside this wall, there was no need for thought or adventure, only following.

Finally, one day, the special envoy of King John II of Portugal stood before Queen Isabella, burning with rage.

I will never forget that scene. The envoy slammed a roll of parchment—the Treaty of Alcáçovas we had signed long ago—onto the table, roaring that our actions were “vile thievery.” They had detained all our smuggling ships and threatened to completely cut off all our routes south of the Azores. If we wanted to avoid war, we had to pay an astronomical sum in reparations.

That compensation not only wiped out all the profits from two years of the Master’s “Borrowing a Hen” scheme but also saddled the treasury with a deficit heavier than that of the Granada campaign.

It was the same hall, but the atmosphere was more suffocating than two years prior. Master Zheng was behind closed doors, claiming illness; the wisdom of his homeland surely told him to “stay away from a place of trouble.” Duke de Guzman looked ten years older. He could no longer look at me with scrutiny, but rather with the expression of a desperate gambler with no cards left to play.

“Young man… that plan to go West you mentioned,” the Duke’s voice was hoarse. “How much money does it need?”

A wave of tragic pleasure rose in my heart, interlaced with helplessness, blending into a bitterness like roasted coffee. “My Lord Duke, if you had asked me a year ago, I would have swiftly prepared three brand-new Caravels and eighty elite sailors.”

I paused, looking around at these nobles with their ashen faces, and cruelly unveiled the words they couldn’t say: “But now? We have no money to build new ships, and no time. The Portuguese have blockaded the road south; we can only go West. The giant ships capable of crossing oceans that we didn’t build to save money, the mindset of earning from known routes formed back then—these have now become the noose around our necks.”

“I can only give you three ships,” Duke de Guzman gritted his teeth, every word slicing flesh from his own body. “The Santa Maria, plus the Pinta and the Niña. This is the absolute limit we can scrape together. The other trade ships have been seized by the Portuguese.”

I almost laughed out loud. Those three ships? The Santa Maria was a clumsy cargo ship, slow and sluggish; the other two were little more than oversized fishing boats. This was all they had for me to conquer the unknown ocean. When they had a choice, they embraced the so-called path of “borrowing,” relying on late-mover advantages and petty theft. And when caught, they remembered that their backbone had always been given by the Portuguese. They could only seek miracles in the weak mud of their own making.

I couldn’t say these words. My emotions finally converged into a disheartened response.

“Yes. May God bless us.”

I stepped onto the clumsy cargo ship named Santa Maria. It creaked like an old man with arthritis. In my hand was an expired chart—drawn based on Portuguese knowledge from twenty years ago—and I didn’t even have a precise compass. The moment the ship vanished into the darkness, I looked back. The walls of Santa Fe still stood tall. We had breached Granada, yet locked ourselves inside a yet stronger fortress. In that city, there were no stars or vast seas, only shrewd calculations and endless following.

NCC woke with a start. There was a lecture by a professor on paper writing this morning. When he rushed in, the professor was using a cyber-style PowerPoint to expound on Artificial Intelligence.

“Students, do not think about how to train a foundation model from scratch. That is for OpenAI and Google. That is a bottomless pit of burning money, an ‘unknown risk,’ and you will absolutely not get research funding for it.” The professor paused, pushing up his glasses. “What we need to do is Application-Layer Innovation, it is Prompt Engineering. As long as we call their APIs and add our own UI, we can achieve… Overtaking on the Bend, at the lowest cost.”

A burst of cheerful laughter erupted in the classroom—the knowing laughter that belonged to smart people.

The students took notes earnestly, while the “AI Rapid Paper Writing Mind Map” sent by the counselor in the group chat was downloaded hundreds of times.

Listening to these familiar words, watching events that seemed to have happened in the past, NCC’s thoughts drifted further and further away on the Atlantic Ocean. Left behind in the distance were only Master Zheng, the besieged city of Santa Fe, and the nobles who remained trapped inside, waiting for someone else to open up new routes for them.