Midnight approached over the Desolation of the Nine Pillars.
Above the plain, the sky was not dark. The nine golden dragons circled in nonstop, clockwork loops. Their radiant scales cast an eerie amber daylight across the barren white clay. From the castle walls of the Great Golden Bastion, the sound of sky drums echoed through the upper clouds—pompous, slow, and arrogant.
Suddenly, the golden radiance above the castle wall packed into a blinding pillar of light.
High on the floating castle, Archon Zhao Xuan reappeared, his spectral form magnified to the height of a mountain by the castle’s projection array. Clad in robes of woven solar thread and crowned with a nine-pointed jade coronet, the Archon looked down upon the mortal trenches with cold, supreme contempt. The golden light of his aura cast sharp, towering shadows across the mountains.
“Rebel vermin of the dirt!” Zhao Xuan’s voice rolled across the valley like thunder, rattling the copper plates in the trenches. “Do you truly believe your cowardly tricks escape heaven’s notice? You threw a spear, and heaven burned up it. You flashed a toy mirror, and our sensors recorded a minor ripple in the breeze!”
In Trench Sector 02, several young militia boys tightened their grips on their weapons. Their eyes were wide as they stared up at the hundred-foot-tall sky phantom.
