The underground passage between the central foundry and Annex 4 smelled of sulfur steam, leaking high-pressure oil, and ancient river settled mud.
Arthur Vance ran with long, measured strides. His heavy field boots struck the grease-slicked flags with practiced rhythm. In his cupped left hand, held tight against the canvas bib of his field apron to shield it from the draft, lay forty-two grams of charred feather and splintered bone. The creature barely registered as weight. It was like holding a handful of warm soot wrapped around a wildly shaking watch movement.
At his left flank, Grimm kept pace. The black glass-veined hound moved in a low, hungry crouch, his black claws finding traction on the wet stone without a sound. Every three strides, Grimm’s scarred snout turned toward Arthur’s hand, nostrils flaring as he sampled the scent of burnt quill and distress. Grimm’s notched right ear twitched toward the tunnel behind them. It listened for pursuit from the foundry guard post. But the beast kept a protective outer edge, his heavy shoulder muscles rippling under his coarse black pelt.
“Steady, boy,” Arthur muttered, his voice flat and controlled. “Almost there.”
Arthur took the final turn at the rusted drainage pipe hub, slammed his right shoulder into the heavy oak door of Annex 4, and stepped inside.
The air in the annex was ten degrees cooler. It smelled cleanly of antiseptic wash, dried lavender straw, and distilled petroleum. Arthur kicked the door shut with his heel. The heavy iron latch dropped into place with a solid, echoing thud. Grimm right away wheeled around, pressed his broad back against the lower panels of the door. Then it let out a single low puff of exhaust through his black jowls before trotting over to the central check slab.
Arthur didn’t pause to remove his outer coat. He approached the long zinc cutting-open table beneath the articulating brass razor-sharp lamp. With his forearm, he pulled the overhead balance weight down, bathing the cold zinc surface in the harsh, white bright glare of a blazing bright aether filament.
“Sterile drape,” Arthur said aloud, a reflex from a lifetime spent under theater lights in another world.
He caught himself, reached into the lower instrument drawer, and pulled out a fresh square of bleached linen. He folded the cloth twice. He laid it flat on the zinc to prevent contact freezing sickness, and gently lowered the bird onto its right flank.
The creature was an Ember-Finch—or what the common draymen called a Scorch-Sparrow. Its plumage, which should have been a rich, rainbow-bright russet tipped with copper, was scorched to a matte charcoal across the mantle and main wing coverts. Its left leg was twisted backward at an unnatural ninety-degree angle at the tarsometatarsus, the joint swollen to three times its normal width, skin purple with under-skin blood bruise. The tiny black claws curled limply inward in a spastic claw-lock reflex.
Worst was the breathing.
The bird’s black beak was agape, dry tongue protruding slightly. Every breath in produced a wet, clicking rattle that shook its entire ribs. Avian breathing systems didn’t rely on expanding mammalian diaphragms. They depended on a nonstop, one-way airflow driven through nine delicate air sacs. In an environment soaked with fire smoke, those paper-thin membranes clogged with carbon dust in seconds.
“Severe upper and lower airway blocked path,” Arthur diagnosed quietly, his fingers moving with gut cold and exact economy. “Cyanosis in the buccal cavity. Heart rate exceeding four hundred beats per minute, irregular.”
Grimm placed both front paws on the lower rim of the zinc slab, hoisting his massive sixty-two-pound frame upward. The black glass-veined hound lowered his wide muzzle until his wet nose was two inches from the dying finch. He sniffed with delicate, trembling gentleness, puffing a faint ring of warm air across the bird’s ruffled crest.
The sparrow’s right eye cracked open. The iris was not the dull brown of a common field sparrow. It was a piercing, molten amber, ringed by a micro-thin circuit of gold. Even on the threshold of asphyxiation, the tiny creature bristled. Its beak gave a faint, defiant snap against the air—clack—before the head flopped back onto the linen, overwhelmed by carbon toxicity.
“Grimm, off,” Arthur said softly. “Give me light.”
The hound stepped back obediently, though he didn’t leave the table. He settled onto his haunches, his dark chin coming to rest squarely on Arthur’s left work boot. He anchored his master to the stone floor. Meanwhile, his amber eyes remained fixed on the slab.
Arthur selected his instruments from the alcohol tray. A pair of angled micro-metal tongs, a 0.tiny blunt silver hollow tube attached to a rubber aspiration bulb. A vial of sterile saline buffered with sodium bicarbonate.
“Airway clearance first,” Arthur murmured. “If the main bronchus occludes fully, heart arrest follows in ninety seconds.”
Arthur used a polished wooden depressor no thicker than a toothpick. He gently parted the sparrow’s lower jaw bone. The glottis was coated in a thick, tar-like film of condensed coal grease and fine soot.
With fingers that didn’t waver by a fraction of a tiny fraction of an inch, Arthur slid the silver hollow tube between the vocal folds into the tiny throat pipe. He squeezed the rubber bulb, releasing a micro-dose of warmed saline to loosen the soot plug, then released the pressure.
The bulb swelled with a faint squelch. A globule of black, gummy sludge flowed into the clear glass trap of the hollow tube.
The bird shuddered wildly. A sharp, wheezing gasp whistled through its beak as the main tracheal lumen cleared. The sparrow’s chest bone rose and fell in a rapid, jerky rhythm. He took in its first unchoked draft of clean air in hours.
“Good,” Arthur said, exhaling through his teeth. “Lung tree partially patent. Now let’s see what broke you.”
Arthur set the hollow tube aside and brought his bare fingertips to the bird’s chest cage.
In beast-doctor trauma, palpation was an art of subtraction. He bypassed the charred epidermal tissue, tracing the delicate collar bone down to the sternal keel.
The moment his index finger brushed the carina—the central ridge of the breastbone—Arthur froze.
A normal sparrow’s keel bone was paper-thin, flexible, and ultra-light, designed solely to anchor the pectoralis muscles for flight. The bone beneath Arthur’s fingertip felt like carved pig-iron. It was abnormally wide, thickened into a dense, spade-shaped plate that radiated a dry, feverish heat. It wasn’t the heat of nearby inflammation. It was the steady, deep-seated heat hum of an unignited forge core.
Arthur reached to his collar, unclipped the brass housing of his Monocle Taxonomy Loupe (Mk. IV), and seated the eyepiece firmly into his right orbit.
He clicked the fine-scale ring twice, shifting from macro-sight zoom to living aether-spectrometry. He touched the copper contact plate behind his ear with two fingers, feeding a minute trace of his own spiritual energy into the sight lattice.
The world dropped into monochrome gray.
Across the surface of the zinc slab, the dying sparrow flared with a fine, detailed web of golden tiny blood vessel lines. Amber runes and test lines etched themselves across Arthur’s eye with clean, steady care, resolving into a sharp monospace slate:
Arthur stared at the readout, his pulse quickening beneath his temples.
Nine-Sun Golden Crow.
The Taiyang Jinwu. In the mythological treatises of the pre-Rift dynasties, the Golden Crow was the three-legged solar sovereign. An ancient entity said to carry the sun-hot fire of dawn across the high sky, roosting only in the branches of the world-tree Fusang.
In modern Mega-City 07, the creature was classified as a Scorch-Sparrow: an agricultural nuisance and forge vermin.
Every autumn, thousands of them migrated toward the heavy-duty sectors, attracted by the heat radiance of the smelting cooking pots. The academy’s intake tax clerks tested them with crude brass mana prongs. The needle showed zero surrounding elemental flow rate. Then, the birds were tagged as worthless F-rank strays, trapped in chimney pipe nets, or left to be burned up. Just then, the blast furnaces fired.
The tax clerks were blind.
They looked for free-flowing elemental mana. The cheap, superficial heat wave common beasts squandered on petty fire-spits. They didn’t understand bone thickness. They didn’t understand that an ancient solar beast didn’t circulate mana through veins like water. It tightly packed star-fire within the dense load-bearing lattice of its skeleton.
The bird’s chest bone was not malformed. It was an organic fusion crucible.
The young finch had been denied the rich. Because of that, natural fiery sulfur catalysts needed to trigger its core starting, the internal star-fire remained cold and dormant. Seeking heat to survive the unignited chill in its bones, the fledgling had crept into the fire chimney pipe. It was drawn by the leftover warmth of the brickwork. Only to have the iron damper collapse upon its tiny ankle joint, trapping it in the deadly smoke.
Arthur’s gaze shifted to the countdown timer ticking steadily in the slate’s corner: 00:07:18.
“Viability ninety-one point five percent,” Arthur muttered. His fingers already reached for the next set of instruments. “You have the constitution of an anvil, little one.”
Even with the airway cleared of immediate gross debris, the bird’s tail-end air sacs—the rear reservoirs responsible for storing fresh air during expiration—were scorched and lined with carbonized ooze. At the current rate of gas exchange, anoxia would trigger permanent brain fluid swelling within seven minutes.
“Grimm,” Arthur commanded crisply.
The black hound lifted his head instantly, amber eyes gleaming.
“Open the bottom cabinet on the right. Pull the red leather handle.”
Grimm stepped away from Arthur’s boot, clamped his powerful jaws around the leather strap dangling from the oak storage locker. Then it gave a sharp, backward pull. The heavy door swung open.
Inside rested a heavy glass bell jar mounted on a cast-iron stone stand, connected by braided rubber hoses to a brass chemical oxygenator flask.
“Good dog,” Arthur said.
He lifted the bell jar with both hands, placing it on the zinc slab beside the sparrow. He uncapped the chemical flask. He dropped in three tightly packed tablets of potassium chlorate and a pinch of hard dark metal dioxide spark. He was followed by two measures of distilled water.
A soft, effervescent hiss arose from the flask as chemical reaction ignited, releasing streams of pure, cool oxygen through the delivery tube into the glass chamber.
“First we restore tissue oxygenation,” Arthur murmured. He kept his voice a low, steady hum that seemed to soothe the shuddering finch. “Then we stabilize the bloodline.”
He scooped the sparrow up with practiced, feather-light care. The bird gave another weak, indignant twitch of its wings. Its tiny claws scraped against Arthur’s palm. But Arthur settled it gently upon a pad of clean cotton wool beneath the clear dome of the bell jar.
He sealed the empty pocket ring and clamped the intake valve.
Within seconds, the pure oxygen displaced the stale cellar air inside the glass.
The sparrow’s labored, wild gasps began to slow. The dusky, purplish tint on its tongue pulled back, replaced by a healthy, vibrant salmon pink. The bird’s chest rose and fell in a smoother, deeper rhythm. It drew the packed oxygen into its surviving air channels.
Arthur leaned over the glass, checking the countdown on his magnifying glass. The timer had steadied, the crimson warning text shifting to a steady, cautious amber.
“Stage one complete,” Arthur whispered. He wiped a bead of sweat from his chin with the sleeve of his apron. “Now we have to deal with that crushed foot before the bone-skin dies.”
Before he could reach for his wire cutters and bone resin, heavy, rhythmic footsteps echoed from the vaulted stairwell outside Annex 4.
The iron plate boots clattered with the clear power of academy court guards.
Grimm’s stance shifted in a split second. The hound dropped his front shoulders, his lips peeling back from black glass-veined fangs as a low, rumbling growl shook deep within his barrel chest.
A heavy fist slammed three times against the heavy oak door.
“Arthur Vance!” a harsh, grating voice boomed from the threshold. “Open this door right away by order of Dean Pendelton’s Facilities Board! We know you carried secret foundry property down here!”
Arthur didn’t flinch. He slowly laid his micro-metal tongs down onto the zinc tray, his eyes narrowing into cold slits.
“Right on schedule,” Arthur said softly.