From the flattened wreckage of the central drilling platform in Entry hall 895, a solitary, broken figure began to crawl across the stone-hard silver plain.
It was Zhu Heling.
The grandmaster of the Sovereign Conclave, who had called himself the Architect of the Modern Age and boasted that he would graft his own will into the heart of the world, was reduced to a creeping creature of mud, grease, and shattered copper. The gravity wave had pulled back to a static baseline. It allowed mortal muscles to move once more, but the scholar’s body had been broken beyond the remedies of alchemy or spirit-medicine.
His left leg, crushed beneath the fallen overhead frame derrick, dragged uselessly behind him across the rigid liquid silver floor like a dead branch. The clockwork engine grafted into his chest cavity was fully inert. The polished brass housing had split down its central seam, revealing sixty broken gear-teeth, snapped bronze pinions, and curled balance springs that protruded through his torn skin like jagged metal ribs. Black lubricating oil, mixed with dark blood, dribbled from his shattered breastplate, leaving an oily, rainbow-bright trail across the mirror-bright silver plain.
His single quartz glass eye was fractured from edge to edge by three nested stress cracks. Through that broken lens, the world appeared shattered into kaleidoscopic shards of violet starlight and dark granite shadows.
