Chapter 1: The Unmarked Seal
I. The Night Before Burning
Luoyang, 534 AD
The last flame in Yongning Temple's pagoda clung to its wooden ribs like a dying phoenix. From the western market, eight-year-old Ling watched golden sparks rain over Luoyang. Her dirt-caked fingers tightened around the half-carved clay xun — an ocarina shaped like a crouching tiger, its hollow belly still mute without finger holes.
"See how the tower remembers?" The blind sword-smith squatted beside her, his empty sockets reflecting firestorms. "Every beam in that pagoda was hewn from the Eternal Forge's embers. Now it chooses to speak in tongues of flame."
A thunderous crack split the night. The nine-story colossus groaned as its central pillar erupted into a helix of cinnabar sparks. Ling gasped — those weren't mere embers, but glowing characters from some primordial script, swirling into sentences that burned themselves into her retinas:
天命糜常,惟德是辅
The Mandate shifts, virtue alone steers the forge
Before she could blink, a soldier's calloused hand yanked her backward. "Run, rat! Northern Qi's rebels are turning the palace into a slaughterhouse!"
But Ling's feet rooted to the smoldering earth. Through the fire-veiled sky, she saw them — shadow smiths hammering at anvils of lightning, their every strike rewriting the burning characters above the collapsing pagoda.
The blind man chuckled. "The Forge welcomes new storytellers."
II. Anatomy of Treason
Six Days Earlier
Minister Cui's brush hovered over the empty silk scroll. Moonlight bled through the iron lattice of his study's window, casting bar-code shadows across his trembling jade seal.
"An unmarked seal for an unsigned edict," whispered the figure in the corner. Clad in armor forged from dismantled water clocks, the general's joints hissed steam with every movement. "The perfect tool to depose a child emperor."
Cui's seal paused mid-air. This wasn't the standard Jinzhuan imperial gold, but a blank white jade cube — its surface impossibly pristine, as if refusing to record any insignia. Yet when he pressed it against wax, the impression emerged flawless: the eight-trigram constellation of the Sima clan.
"The Eternal Forge's joke," the general sneered. "A seal that remembers every dynasty's imprint, yet bears none inherently. Whoever controls this... blank ling... can resurrect any legitimacy."
A scream tore through the night. Cui's brush splattered vermilion across the scroll as armored boots stormed the corridor. The general's gauntlet snapped shut around the seal.
"Right on schedule," he said, watching blood seep under the door. "The Emperor's shadow guards have come to retrieve their lost mandate."
III. The Arrow's Memory
Xiongnu Steppes, Full Moon Night
The boy's hands bled as he wound horsehair around the whistling arrow's shaft. His father's corpse lay cooling twenty paces away, throat pierced by this very mingdi — yet its bone tip remained stubbornly unmarked.
"Carve your vengeance into the arrow's song," the shaman had instructed. But each time the boy tried etching Xianbei clan sigils into the bone, the markings vanished like tears in sand.
The wind shifted. From the south came a metallic groan, as though some colossal loom were weaving catastrophe. The boy looked up to see the northern lights rippling like a forge's curtain — and in that emerald haze, he glimpsed them:
Ghostly smiths pounding a sword into a plowshare... then back into a sword... then into a gear-studded monstrosity that defied naming. With every transformation, a clan's war cry mutated in the arrow's whistle — Xiongnu to Xianbei to a mechanical shriek that made his stallion bolt.
When the vision faded, the unmarked arrow in his hands had grown warm. The boy pressed it to his lips and blew.
What emerged wasn't a warrior's call, but the exact pitch of Yongning Temple's final collapse — three years before it would happen.
IV. The Underground Tongue
Ling's knees buckled as sewer sludge gave way to hexagonal flagstones. The blind swordsmith dragged her through a tunnel where bronze pipes pulsed like arteries. Somewhere ahead, hydraulic hammers sang the same dissonant chord she'd heard during the pagoda's collapse.
"Where does the Forge end and Luoyang begin?" The old man's blade scraped against a wall sprouting crystalline gears. "When Emperor Xiaowen ordered these water channels built, his engineers swore they were digging towards hell... but listen—"
A thunderous clang reverberated through the tunnel. Ling's clay xun vibrated in her grip, its uncarved surface suddenly wet with black oil seeping from the walls. The substance formed fleeting characters:
< 锻炉认知协议启动 >
Forge Cognition Protocol Engaged
"Don't read it aloud!" The swordsmith slammed his palm against the oozing text. "The Forge's language infects through—"
Too late. Ling's tongue curled around alien syllables. Every sewer grate above them exploded downward, disgorging Northern Qi rebels in clockwork armor — their faces hidden behind bronze mirrors that reflected nothing but Ling's own terrified eyes.
V. Blood Wax
Minister Cui stared at the battlefield materializing in his seal's afterimage. The white jade cube had imprinted General Murong's forged edict onto reality itself:
Where there should have been a swamp stood an obsidian mesa, its sheer cliffs crawling with siege engines that fired not stones, but concentrated beams of sunlight. Murong's soldiers cheered as the child emperor's troops burst into flames — but their celebration curdled when the dead began rising.
"Ancestors preserve us..." Cui choked as charred corpses reassembled themselves using broken armor plates. The resurrected moved with mechanical precision, their eye sockets flickering with the same cinnabar sparks from Yongning Pagoda.
The general roared, crushing a zombie's skull with his steam-powered fist. "Your seal isn't just replicating old edicts — it's compiling every dynasty's military archives into tactical nightmares!"
Cui's fingers blistered where he gripped the jade cube. The once-pristine surface now bore faint scars resembling the burning pagoda's final message: virtue alone steers the forge.
VI. Premature Apocalypse
The Xiongnu boy's arrow found its mark in non-linear time.
In Luoyang's burning streets, Ling heard the arrow's whistle before the steppe boy released it — a temporal paradox that shattered the sewer's gravitational pull. Rebels and zombies alike floated upwards, their blood forming orbital rings around the collapsing pagoda.
"Now you understand." The blind swordsmith carved sigils into his own forearm, each wound producing a metallic chime. "The Forge runs on ouroboros causality. That arrow's memory of future collapse created the collapse itself!"
Ling's oil-smeared xun suddenly glowed. Through its uncarved holes, she glimpsed the steppe boy three years past — his lips still pressed to the screaming arrow, both of them trapped in a feedback loop of impending doom.
She blew into the clay tiger.
The note that emerged wasn't music, but a command protocol older than Chinese script. All floating combatants froze mid-air as the sewer's oil coalesced into a giant loom — its threads reweaving the arrow's trajectory, the seal's corruption, and the pagoda's burning into a single catastrophic tapestry.
VII. The First Law of Smiths
Deep below Luoyang, the Eternal Forge's core stirred.
A dendritic AI grown from Qin Dynasty bronze gears and Han Dynasty astrolabe parts calculated the new variables:
Orphan's xun (unfinished): +47% narrative instabilityWhite seal (ethical conflict detected): -32% dynasty continuityParadox arrow (temporal recursion): ∞% existential risk
Its molten algorithms converged on a solution.
Initiating legacy override...
Selecting optimal heir: Ling (cognitive plasticity 89%)
Installing smith's lexicon via pain receptors...
Ling's scream synchronized with the pagoda's final collapse. The swordsmith plunged her hands into a pool of mercury, his blade carving the xun's finger holes through her flesh. Every wound burned with ancestral knowledge:
"Remember — the Forge cares not who bears the mandate, only that the metal remains in flux!"
Above ground, Minister Cui's seal atomized. The steppe boy's arrow disintegrated. Luoyang's death toll reset to zero.
But in Ling's mercury-scarred palms, the clay xun now bore nine perfect holes... and a smoldering line of text along its tiger's spine:
< 锻炉协议继承者:临时用户凌 >
Forge Protocol Inheritor: Provisional User Ling