With six hundred thousand Qin soldiers surrounding the city, Mo Huan’s finger rests on the ultimate lever of the Mechanical City.
Pull it, and Wang Jian and the one hundred thousand refugees from the Six Kingdoms trapped in the maze will all be ground to dust amid the clatter of the mechanisms. Mo Huan holds absolute power over life and death.
But as he looks at the refugees, gaunt and starving, the strength in his fingertip suddenly slackens.
It is not that he dares not kill. He simply disdains using the people as pawns.
The instant he lets go, the entire Mechanical City shakes violently. A thousand arrows roar through the air, yet no one is harmed.
Deep in the maze, Wang Jian looks up. After listening in silence for a long moment to the earth-shaking display, he says in a low voice, “Pass the order. The entire army will withdraw.”
In that battle, the Mohist Mechanical City appeared to have been “destroyed.”
But in the tales of wandering heroes told for the thousand years that followed, there was always a bloodless shadow: a man who, by himself, stayed the blades of six hundred thousand soldiers.
