​The smell of stale ale and vomit was the first thing Julian felt. Or rather, the man who was Julian.​In his previous life, he was Arthur Vance, a man who moved markets with a phone call and collapsed regimes with a whisper. He had died in a high-rise office in Manhattan, a silencer’s bullet through his temple. He expected darkness. He expected the void. ​He did not expect a splitting headache and the feeling of cold stone beneath his cheek.​"Look at him," a sneering voice drifted from above. "The Emperor’s 'Little Mistake' can’t even hold his liquor. How fitting that he dies in his own filth."​Arthur opened his eyes. His vision was a blurred mess of flickering torchlight and shadows. He wasn't in New York. He was in a drafty, damp hall that smelled of wet dogs and burning tallow.​He tried to push himself up, but his arms felt like twigs. His hands were pale, thin, and trembling. This wasn't his body. This was the body of a boy—perhaps nineteen—dressed in silk rags that had seen b

The sun had not yet risen, but the air in the manor’s kitchens was thick with tension. Julian had managed to smuggle Elena into a hidden servant’s quarters—a cramped, dusty room behind the pantry that the original Julian had once used for trysts. Now, it served as a war room.​Elena sat on a wooden crate, sharpening a rusted kitchen knife with a whetstone. Even in her weakened state, her presence was suffocating. "You promised a miracle, Julian. But all I see is a man stealing copper pots and sacks of fermented grain from his own pantry."​Julian didn't look up. He was busy assembling a strange contraption: a large copper pot, a coiled lead pipe he’d scavenged from the plumbing, and a bucket of cold well water.​"In war, General, the most powerful weapon isn't the sword. It’s the supply chain," Julian said, tightening a seal with a strip of wet leather. "The Empire’s wine is weak. It’s watery, sour, and half of it turns to vinegar before it reaches the front lines." ​He lit a small fi

​The Rat’s Nest did not just look like a slum; it breathed like a dying beast. ​As Julian, Elena, and the boy Leo rode their horses through the crumbling stone archway that marked the edge of the capital's lower district, the air changed instantly. The scent of woodsmoke and roasting meat from the upper districts was replaced by the cloying, heavy stench of open sewers, rotting fish, and the sharp, metallic tang of unwashed bodies and desperation. This was the "gut" of the Valerius Empire—the place where everything the city consumed was eventually excreted.​Julian pulled his hood lower. In his previous life as Arthur Vance, he had visited the favelas of Brazil and the slums of Mumbai to negotiate land deals. He knew that beneath the filth lay the most potent political tool in existence: the rage of the ignored.​"Keep your hand on your hilt, General," Julian whispered, his voice barely audible over the squelch of his horse's hooves in the black mud. He didn't look like a prince anymo

​The silver from Isabella Thorne’s first deposit arrived in heavy, unassuming iron-bound chests. It was the first time the warehouse in the Rat’s Nest had smelled of something other than charcoal and fermented mash—it now smelled of cold, hard currency.​Julian sat in the dim light of his "office," watching Elena inspect a crate of standard-issue imperial infantry swords. She handled them with a sneer, testing the balance before tossing a blade aside like a piece of refuse.​"Soft iron," she spat. "The First Prince’s smiths are skimming from the treasury. These would snap against a Northern shield in a heartbeat."​"Which is why we aren't buying from the imperial smiths," Julian said, not looking up from his ledger. He was calculating the "burn rate" of their current operation. "We are buying people, Elena. Not scrap metal. Are they here?"​Elena wiped her hands on a rag and nodded toward the heavy curtain that separated the office from the main distillery floor. "The ones who survive

​The warehouse in the Rat’s Nest had been transformed. What was once a simple, illicit distillery had become a clandestine laboratory. The smell of fermented grain was now joined by the acrid, metallic tang of sulfur and the earthy scent of saltpeter.​Julian stood over a long stone table, his sleeves rolled up, exposing arms that were slowly gaining lean muscle from weeks of manual labor. In front of him lay the ten crates of black powder they had liberated from the docks. To Kaelen and the Ghost Legion, this was a substance used for palace fireworks or crude, unreliable siege mines. To Julian, it was the raw data of a revolution.​"The ratio is wrong," Julian muttered, staring at a small pile of the black dust.​Kaelen, who was sharpening a massive broadsword nearby, looked up. "Wrong? It’s the finest powder in the Empire, boy. The Alchemists’ Guild guards that formula with their lives."​"The Alchemists’ Guild is stuck in the dark ages," Julian countered, not looking up. "They use