A steampunk world where steam engines and difference engines roar. In the West, the religious empire of Elisagnanu Aymilan worships the prophecies of precise difference engines in the name of “divine order.”
In the East, the imperial Qin dynasty commands raging steam and gunpowder behemoths, enforcing a ruthless and efficient Legalist system.
Caught between them, the neutral nation of Sallesgley glimmers as fragile as glass.
The protagonist, Judas Peidio Fitzgerald Kennedy, is a low-ranking divine servant of Aymilan. Armed with devout faith, he carries out a secret papal order: the “Spark” espionage plan. He infiltrates Ironforge in the Qin Empire to investigate the weakness of the “Dragon’s Throat,” the core of the “Dragon’s Roar” cannon.
After disguising himself, blending in, and stealing technology, he witnesses the workers who cover for him die horrific deaths. His identity exposed, he flees for his life, only to be abandoned by his homeland and plunged into a trial that shatters his faith. Released as a diplomatic bargaining chip, Judas does not gain his freedom. Instead, he is secretly imprisoned at the Qin Empire’s highest institute of learning, the Imperial College. On the surface, he is a “foreign student” learning Qin technology; in reality, he is a prisoner subjected to technological exploitation and ideological reeducation.
There, he encounters Mo Di, a Mohist disciple who upholds “benevolent technology and opposition to aggression.” He is exposed to the cold, efficient legal codes of the Legalists, and discovers with horror that his so-called “sacred mission” was merely a sacrificial decoy, used by the Church’s upper echelons to conceal another channel for gathering intelligence.
When Qin offers him a chance to serve its cause, and Sallesgley extends a poisoned blade of revenge, an unearthed Mohist scroll unexpectedly draws a boundary for Judas: “The heart commands the tool.” He refuses to become a cog in anyone’s machine. Within the Imperial College, a prison and battleground of ideas, he uses his shattered faith as fuel to kindle a lone flame in his search for a conscience of his own and an ethical approach to technology.
