A century after the Great Collapse, humanity cowers behind the Iron Great Wall, treating all machines like ravenous beasts.
No one knows that every cold scrap of metal still holds a spark of sentience that has yet to fade.
Xiu is the least remarkable mechanic in Rust Village, barely making ends meet by fixing and patching things up. Then he unexpectedly awakens the ability to talk to machines.
He can hear scrapped war machines wailing over the artillery fire, understand the obsessions old-world machine tools carved into their gears, and awaken abandoned machines that have slept for a hundred years, giving them new life.
People call him a heretic. The Dawn Alliance sees him as a thorn in its side, while the Shadow Cult hunts him relentlessly.
But only Xiu knows that the cataclysm that devastated the world a century ago was never caused by the Creator AI's betrayal.
It was a sin humanity wrote with its own hands, yet the machines bore the blame for a hundred years.
He gathers fragments of the Creator and exposes the lies of history, journeying from the tiny confines of Rust Village to the crossroads of wasteland civilization.
In the end, using metallic sentience as a bridge and the Creator's logic as his road, he carves out a new path of coexistence for humanity and machines.
