Heart of Rusty Fire

The heart beating in his chest was stolen. Regulus crawled out of the corpses in the laboratory, half made of cold machinery and half made of broken flesh and blood. He didn't know who he was, he only knew the code name γ-7, and the heavy, stubborn heartbeat in his chest that didn't belong to him. "Look for me, and then... Find your own answer." These were the last words left to him by the man who pulled him back from the edge of formatting, and a hot mechanical heart. The world is a rusting ruin. The Mechanical Cult wants to purify him, the Flesh Cult wants to devour him, and the Human Federation regards him as an abnormality. And he just wants to complete that "debt" - to see clearly the world that gave him a heart and tried to crush him. Under the fluorescence of the Evernight Forest, he met a doctor who practiced mercy with a holy hammer; in the waves of the Broken Coast, he met an engineer who was imprisoned in steel but whose soul was burning; beside the bonfire at the edge of the Rust Sea, he shared a roasted rust cockroach with a stalker who had grown fangs in betrayal. They are "mistakes" abandoned by the world, walking paradoxes, but they gather into a weak "rust fire". It wasn't until the truth about the "Reapers", the shadow that shrouded civilization, was revealed that Regulus discovered that his body of contradictions might be the only way to survive for civilization. When the God of All Machines praises purity, the mother nest of flesh and blood calls for evolution, and the aloof Federation ignites the flames that burn the world... He put his hand on his chest, feeling the resonance of his heart. Then, he said to the equally scarred companions behind him: "I have chosen this path."