The clockwork scream of Zhu Heling’s internal engine echoed across the quicksilver lake of Entry hall 882, a shrill, metal shriek that tore at the calm silence of the vault.
The scholar had cast aside his scholar’s robes, exposing the monstrous stonework of his modified body. His torso was a fine, detailed armature of linked brass gears, blackened copper pistons, and high-pressure steam channels grafted directly into his chest bone and rib cage. A tiny coal boiler, fueled by refined spirit-coke, burned behind a plate of thick quartz glass set into his solar nerve web. It glowed with a poisonous cherry-red intensity that threw harsh shadows across his iron-plated skull. With every stroke of his twin walking beams, plumes of oily steam hissed from exhaust ports behind his shoulders, shrouding his iron-framed head in greasy white vapor.
Decades ago, Zhu Heling had been the Chief Scroll-keeper of the Imperial Water Board in the capital, renowned for his treatises on canal dredging and lock construction. But as the years took his hair, clouded his vision, and stiffened his joints, the terror of death had unhinged his intellect. Unable to accept that his mind would decay. Meanwhile, the canals he designed remained, he had allied with the heretical artisans of the Western Marches, carving away his own flesh piece by piece to replace it with gears, boilers, and clockwork escapements. He believed that by replacing frail sinew with brass and iron, he could elevate himself above the natural cycles of decay that…
