On a stormy night, Qin Yuan awoke in a stinking heap of medical waste. Ice-blue blood from his right arm burned through the concrete. In his left hand, he clutched a bloodstained marriage contract; in his right, the shattered bones of thirty corpses remained, the mark of a killing spree he had committed unconsciously. When he caught Lin Xuewei as she fell from a height of 228 meters, the white magnolia pendant at her neck shattered, revealing the chilling glint of a god-slaying gene.
“Your blood is the key to opening the gates of hell.”
Lin Xuewei’s genetic pen pierced his neck, and a scarlet warning flashed: 99.9% nonhuman.
The Dragon Marshal of Huaxia, who had fallen three years ago, had become the Black Gold Society’s number-one experimental subject. Beneath the sights of his former adjutant Xiao Ce’s sniper rifle, the dragon-scale battle scars on Qin Yuan’s back began draining the power from the entire city. Most damning of all was the military insignia at the scene of the Lin family massacre: it matched the remnants of his armor exactly.
When the alien murals deep inside Mount Kunlun awoke, the Dragon Marshal corpses in twelve ice coffins opened their slit pupils. “The ninth cycle. You are the final variable.”
On the night gene missiles tore through the clouds, Lin Xuewei’s blood bloomed into a forest of white magnolias on the streets of New York. Her heart was gradually crystallizing, while each enemy Qin Yuan killed took another fragment of his memory. It was only when the countdown to a nuclear explosion rang through the imperial capital that he realized “god-slaying” was merely an observation game devised by a higher civilization.
The bloodstained marriage contract floated in the core of the alien supercomputer, its golden threads wrapped tightly around their wrists.
“Kill me, and your blade can sever the Star Ring.” Lin Xuewei’s fingertips sank into her crystallizing chest.
Qin Yuan’s battle blade keened amid the radiation, its oath-bound hilt resonating with the inscriptions left by twelve annihilated civilizations:
May the realm endure, and may all know peace for a thousand years.
When a snowstorm of memories covered the Earth, a story spread through the slums: whenever a blue-eyed man tore through a mech, the scent of white magnolias drifted from his wounds.
