Prologue

PROLOGUE

In a world teeming with those who wanted him dead, Qin Zheng never thought it’d be a plague that would take him down.

He had crushed Hunduns that dwarfed the greatest of man-made monuments. He had bested legions of Chrysalises commanded by fools who’d refused to surrender to him. He had roused the workers of seven bickering nations into rising against the industrialists, bankers, and landlords who subjugated them. And he was still young. He should have had so many more years to further his revolution. It was absurd that he was now at the mercy of something more minuscule than the eye could see. A virus, ravaging through his every organ, rending him from the inside, making pustules bloom like cursed flowers over his skin. He felt more powerless than when he’d been a gutter child spat on and laughed at for being the son of a whore. It was one thing to gaze up and dream of infinity; it was another to reach the peak, only to plummet with so little warning.

After burrowing the Yellow Dragon under Mount Zhurong, deep enough to access the living energy of the planet itself, he disconnected from the pilot link.

“ Shīfu …This is not how I…” he began to say to the woman coming to consciousness in the yīn seat in front of him, someone he’d never thought he’d pilot a Chrysalis with, for she had always fought at his side in her own unit. Queen-General Mi Xuan, pilot of the Three-Legged Crow, leader of the Iron Widows. His mentor.

“Quit wasting your energy on talking,” she grunted over her shoulder, her words muffled by her protective leather mask, its glass lenses fogging up. She was the only one left in his nascent empire of Huaxia who dared speak to him this way. She shed her temporary Yellow Dragon armor on the yīn seat like a golden husk and stood up in her black conduction suit. She’d brought her usual Three-Legged Crow armor into the cockpit, but she wouldn’t need it for what would come next.

Qin Zheng sprouted thin needles out of his gauntlet palms to let her manipulate the qì flow between him and the Dragon. His Council of Sages had vehemently opposed this experiment, but they had not come up with any alternative solutions. He was showing symptoms of the most aggressive form of flowerpox. He had mere days before his organs began liquefying right in his body. A cure would not be produced within days.

Silently, he cursed the gods. Even after he had resumed tribute to them, they would not respond to his requests for dialogue. His sole remaining option was this audacious attempt to freeze himself in time.

“ Shīfu ,” Qin Zheng said in a smaller voice than he had used in years. It pained him to leave Huaxia in the hands of others, but he could scarcely hold on to his existence, much less his empire. “Do not let them wake me until a cure is made. No matter how long it takes.”

General Mi’s steely eyes glistened behind the glass lenses of her mask. “That, I can promise you.”

She pressed her bare palms into the needles on his gauntlets. Her jaw clenched. Blood trickled out between their hands. The meridians carrying her qì through her body darkened across the few swaths of visible skin on her neck and the backs of her hands. Water was the qì type she had the least affinity for, yet she wielded it like a roaring tide. Its coldness pervaded like slush into Qin Zheng’s blood. His instinct was to control it, the way he controlled everything, but for once he let it happen to him. If a passive stream of qì could be established through the Dragon like a river flowing downhill, while its primal particles were fine-tuned to filter only Water type into Qin Zheng, this coldness could theoretically persist indefinitely.

“Xuan- jiějiě …” he breathed out as his consciousness frosted over. An improper way for a student to refer to their mentor. As improper as the way she, in turn, never used his imperial title.

A slight tremor went through her. Qin Zheng wanted to say more, but could no longer conjure the words to encapsulate everything he was feeling.

“Get some rest, Zheng’ er ,” she murmured. “I will come back to you.”

Please , he pleaded in the safety of his mind, because he would never do so out loud.

The cold closed over him like ice over a lake.

He swore it was less than a minute later when heat coursed through his body again. His eyes stuttered open to a winged blur in the dim cockpit. Had General Mi put on her Three-Legged Crow armor? The pressure of her hand on his gauntlet now pumped Fire qì into him. He momentarily feared the experiment hadn’t worked, but there was someone else with her now, hand on his other gauntlet. Some time must have passed. She had indeed returned to him.

“Where’s the cure?” Qin Zheng croaked out.

She and the other person stood in silence.

“Where’s the cure?” he repeated, stale air wedging in and out of his thawing lungs.

Shouts rose in the shadows further ahead in the cockpit. Had they brought more people into the cockpit?

General Mi snapped into motion, fumbling with something in her free hand. “Open up!”

Her voice was wrong, higher-pitched and less raspy. Her qì felt off as well. And her armor was red and coarse, not black and form-fitting.

Before he could tell if this impression was the fault of his reviving senses, he felt a numbness in the right side of his body and a sagging in half his face. He and General Mi both cried out in surprise. He shook one gauntlet free to morph a mask of spirit metal over that half of his face, because, though he knew she would not care past the initial shock, he did not want her to see him like this.

As expected, she was dazed for but an instant before she stabbed a syringe into his neck. A cold liquid he assumed was the cure to flowerpox seeped into him. Slowly, his vision came to focus.

The sight was not what he wanted to see.

She was not General Mi. They looked remarkably similar, with the same eyes that promised vengeance and bloodshed, but it was impossible that General Mi had gotten younger and shorter.

What was going on? How long had it been? Where was the general?

“Can you pilot?” The girl’s question pierced his spiraling thoughts. She spoke with a strange dialect, one he could not pinpoint. She detached the syringe from his neck and pressed down on the bleeding puncture. “I need your power, your Chrysalis. Now.”

Qin Zheng kept his expression neutral. He could not show vulnerability in an unknown situation.

After feeling for her spirit pressure, he let out a dry laugh. Who did this little girl think she was? Had no one told her who he was? Piloting with him would be her death sentence. He channeled all five types of qì with the full force he could muster, showing her exactly what she’d be getting herself into.

Yet, after a few stunned seconds, she did not relent. She demanded he shift to the yīn seat—the woman’s seat—and threatened to withhold further medicine if he did not. It was preposterous. He told her so.

“Do you want to live or die?” the girl shouted at him. “It’s a simple question!”

“You wouldn’t let me—”

“Qin Zheng, I know two hundred and twenty-one more years of what’s going on than you do, and I have no time to explain!”

Her tirade continued, but his mind snagged on the number she’d spouted. Two hundred and twenty-one years .

Over two centuries .

The world seemed to turn on its axis, tipping Qin Zheng around and around and around. Two hundred and twenty-one times around the sun. Constellations cycling, trees rising and falling, lives beginning and ending.

His General Mi was dead, along with everyone and everything else he knew.