The roots of the Zhu Foundation are deeply rooted in the history of China's Ming Dynasty. During the Jianwen era of the Ming Dynasty (or the Yongle period), Emperor Jianwen Zhu Yunwen mysteriously disappeared after the Jingnan Campaign. Meanwhile, the court or secret forces discovered a series of luminous metallic anomalies at specific locations. These objects were regarded at the time as elixirs of immortality, serving as the core driving force behind power struggles and secret organizations. Looking back at modern physics, those foreign objects were accidentally exposed to the surface of the Earth's gum sphere—hadron hybrid crystals: gluon self-coupling briefly condensed under extreme geological and cosmic ray conditions, emitting a visible Cherenkovian glimmer. Craftsmen forged it into tools and elixirs; a few people experienced accelerated wound healing and white hair turning black after ingesting it—essentially, the glue ball scaffold briefly triggered partial reprogramming similar to Yamanaka's factor inside the cells, but due to uncontrollable doses, it was accompanied by frenzy, mutation, and sudden death.
The Zhu Foundation is a secret force established under the public/semi-public pretext of "searching for the Jianwen Emperor's legacy + pursuing the elixir." After nearly 600 years of evolution, it has grown from a secret Ming Dynasty society into a super interstellar behind-the-scenes force. On the surface, it sponsors Yamanaka's anti-aging and colonization projects, but in reality, it monopolizes the purification of hybrid states in the glued spheres, cultivation of symbionts, and phase calibration. The original core of Model 37 dates back to the second year of Yongle (1402) when craftsmen crafted the same batch of luminous metal for the device—after thirty-six iterations, each time the "Cleaner" protocol was written more like a rescue.
After the elixir entered the human world, the scientific iteration after the Ming dynasty was compressed to about three hundred years before entering modern civilization; Although the in-game Earth year is written as 2026, humanity in that year has already stood above the threshold of Type II. The foundation's 600-year layout was completed along this accelerated timeline.
In the game's storyline, players will personally experience or reenact key historical fragments of the Ming Dynasty through the second playthrough's "spatial simulation device," gradually uncovering the full thread of how the Foundation evolved from ancient power games to modern interstellar colonial conspiracies: the elixir corresponds to a then previously unknown QCD material event; Six hundred years is a long trial and error from turning a chance reprogramming into a civilization-level immortality field.