Mechs Decide the Fate of the World

Ling Buyu, heir to a declining family of mechanical engineers, disguises herself as a man and enters the Shenji Battalion, the Great Jing Dynasty’s highest technical institution, to clear her father’s name and restore her family’s honor. Here, national strength is determined not by troops and horses, but by giant humanoid weapons driven by gears, pivots, and mortise-and-tenon joints: mechanical armor. Armed with mechanical engineering principles far ahead of their time and her family’s secret craft, Ling Buyu starts out as an apprentice shunned by her peers. She repairs damaged mechs, designs the new “Azure Phoenix” mech, and foils the schemes of rival workshops, fighting her way through an all-male workplace and bureaucratic system. Along the way, she meets Ye Xuan, a prince of an enemy kingdom held hostage and lying low in the capital. They go from testing and using each other to becoming the only people they can truly trust. When a sealed case from the past is reopened, her father’s wrongful conviction leads straight to the highest reaches of the court, while border defenses teeter on the brink because of the enemy kingdom’s new mechs. Ling Buyu builds the peerless “Torch Dragon” mech with her own hands. Working with Ye Xuan from within and without, she cleanses the court of corrupt officials and brings order to the realm. In the end, though born a woman, she is named the Great Jing Dynasty’s “Master Engineer,” becoming a legend who controls the military lifeline of the empire.