At 3:00 AM sharp, ten miles beneath the East-Central Industrial District of the 1,000-Sun Astral Academy, the fifty-acre basement dungeon was at its darkest and quietest hour before the dawn smelting shift.
Two thousand eight hundred of the three thousand Soul-Whip Enforcers were snoring at their guard tables after drinking midnight rations. Meanwhile, Foreman Scar-Face Wu nodded off in a chair beside the Soul-Grease Smelting Furnace.
The only things still wide awake in the cavernous basement were the ten thousand miserable, half-starved Ancient Grandmaster Souls rattling inside their cramped brass rings on the ten conveyor belts. The glowing green [Automated Resentment-Drop Alarm] bolted to the wall beside the central Mother Soul-Leash Matrix!
As Warden Gui Suo had bragged before going to bed, that green alarm crystal was hypersensitive: if the ambient misery, coldness. Starvation level across the ten thousand rings dropped by more than ten percent over a sixty-second window, the alarm bells would detonate across the entire industrial sector. Moreover, Trigger the Mother Matrix’s emergency lockdown!
3:01 AM.
High up in the dark ceiling rafters above the Mother Soul-Leash Matrix, space rippled without a sound.
Out of the shadow stepped Empress Luo Qingxue, Gu Changsheng, fourteen-year-old Ye Xiao, twelve-year-old Gu Nian, and the eight-foot, two-ton emerald-and-gold titan of Jade-Turtle Mech #001. Floating weightlessly inside a bubble of Gu Changsheng’s spatial control!
