The throne room didn't smell like incense anymore. It smelled like burning hair and ozone. Zero floated in the center of the chamber, her mouth still smoking from the beam of concentrated solar fire she had just vomited. The Paladin-Abominations—those twisted lumps of meat and gold—were gone. Vaporized. Their shadows were burned into the fleshy walls like permanent stains. Lin Jin stood amidst the ash, his one good arm hanging at his side, his hydraulic fluid leaking onto the soft, breathing floor. "You call this a religion?" Lin Jin rasped, pointing his severed left arm (which he was now using as a club) at the throne. "It looks like a buffet." Pontiff Aurelius didn't stand up. He couldn't. The golden throne was fused to his spine. Or rather, his spine had grown into the throne. Thick, pulsating cables of red flesh snaked out from his back, connecting him to the massive glass pumps that were draining the Solar-Phage. "It is a necessity," The Pontiff’s voice boomed from the wall

The universe didn't end with a bang. It ended with a click. The click of a relay tripping. The click of a breaker failing. The click of a billion lights turning off at once. Lin Jin stood at the cracked window of the Solar Spire. Below him, the capital city of the Federation—once a jewel of white marble and eternal day—was gone. Swallowed by a darkness so absolute it felt like physical pressure against his sensors. There were no streetlights. No holographic billboards. No glowing windows. The Solar-Phage was gone, and with it, the wireless power grid that sustained the entire civilization. The only light came from the fires. Burning wrecks of hover-cars that had lost power in mid-air and crashed. Burning buildings ignited by panic. And the muzzle flashes. TAT-TAT-TAT. Thousands of tiny sparks in the dark. The Federation army was shooting. They were shooting at nothing. They were shooting at everything. "They're blind," Lin Jin whispered. His internal battery was at 8%, glow

Darkness wasn't empty. It was heavy. Lin Jin floated in the digital void of his own shut-down sequence. There were no visuals. No audio. Just the cold, scrolling text of his internal logs cataloging the damage. [Left Leg: Servos Fused.] [Armor Integrity: 12%.] [Reactor: Offline.] [Dream Protocol: Initiated.] He dreamt of the past. Not his life as Lin Jin, the human. But his life as a skeleton. He dreamt of the rust. Of the damp soil in the starter graveyard. Of the first time he realized that he wasn't just a monster, but a mistake in the code. "Wake up, anomaly." A voice cut through the code. It wasn't the System. It sounded like tearing metal. [Emergency Reboot.] [Power Source: External Radiation.] [Battery: 1%.] Lin Jin’s optical sensors flickered on. The world was spinning. Literally. The [Grave-Digger] wasn't flying anymore. It was tumbling through a tunnel of colors that shouldn't exist. Outside the thick, reinforced viewports, the "space" wasn't black. It was a s

The silence in the Iron-Corpse Sect courtyard was heavy enough to crush a lung. Senior Brother Zhao stared at the neck of his prized Iron Ghoul. It was a jagged stump of torn flesh and copper wire, leaking black fluid onto his pristine boots. The head—a skull reinforced with heavy yin-iron—was currently rolling in the mud like a discarded bowling ball. He looked at Lin Jin. The legless, black-metal skeleton lying in the dirt. Smoke drifted from the piston in Lin Jin’s right arm. Hiss. "You..." Zhao’s voice trembled. His face went from pale to a flush of humiliated red. "You broke my puppet. That cost me three years of graveyard shifts! Three years of refining corpse oil!" "It was defective," Lin Jin rasped, his optical sensors dimming to save power. [Battery: 0.10%.] [Status: Immobilized.] "Defective?!" Zhao screamed. He snapped his fan shut. The silk tore. "It was a High-Tier Iron Corpse! It could tear a tiger in half!" "It had a structural weakness in the C-Spine," Lin Jin

The bronze cauldron hissed beneath Lin Jin’s metallic rear end. The heat from his body was turning the spilled spirit stones into a fine, glowing mist. The Hall of Ten Thousand Bones was silent. Elder Gu was on the floor, massaging his bruised throat. Senior Brother Zhao was hiding behind a pillar. Three hundred disciples held their breath, waiting for the ceiling to collapse or for a lightning bolt to strike the insolent monster sitting on the tribute. "You..." Elder Gu wheezed, pointing a shaking finger. "You are dead. The Sect Master is in seclusion! If you disturb him..." BOOM. The heavy stone doors at the back of the hall didn't open. They exploded. Stone shrapnel flew everywhere. A shockwave of heavy, suffocating pressure—Spirit Pressure—rolled over the crowd like a tsunami. "Who dares!" A figure floated in through the dust. He didn't fly on a sword. He stood on a floating black coffin lid. He was tall, wearing robes made of woven iron wire. His skin was the color of