The night sky over Linyuan Harbor caught fire.
Year 763 of the Dark Era. Autumn.
Three red flares climbed through the cloud deck and stained half the city the color of rust. Out by the orbital port, hull fragments came down in long trails of fire, wave after wave.
"Seventh Line to Command! Swarm has breached the outer ring! Repeat, swarm breach on the outer ring! Requesting fire support—"
The call cut off mid-word. The channel hissed static and nothing else.
Chen Jin lay flat against the ruined wall of the Seventh Line, an ammo crate hugged to his chest. Nineteen. Third-class trooper in the Linyuan garrison, the lowest rank there was, and the job that came with it: hauling ammo boxes. The kinetic rifle in his hands carried a factory serial number older than he was.
"Heads down!" Sergeant Lei Changgeng roared down the trench, spitting grit with every word. "Make every round count! The supply line's cut—what you burn is what's gone!"
Beside him a baby-faced recruit muttered, "Sarge, I ain't even been paid yet." The words were out before he could swallow them back, and he ducked his head, bracing for it.
"Long as you're breathing, son." Lei Changgeng didn't turn around.
Chen Jin said nothing. He was watching the horizon.
That was not cloud. It was alive—a seething sheet of black so dark it shone, crawling across the dead fields toward the city. Where it passed, abandoned mining towers went down row after row.
The Star-Eater Swarm. The locust plague that had eaten galaxy after galaxy. Tonight was Linyuan Harbor's turn.
"Sarge." He heard the shake in his own voice. "The orbital port... how many runs have the evacuation ships flown?"
Lei Changgeng let two seconds pass.
"The envoy's made three." The old sergeant's voice stayed flat. "Hauling councilmen, officers, and ledgers."
"What about us?"
"You're not on the list. Neither am I." Lei Changgeng flashed a grin, white teeth in a face caked gray. "But the city is. What this garrison holds is the city."
Chen Jin wanted to say something else. Then the ground shivered. Once. Again. A third time, and the tremors ran together, the earth rolling in slow waves under his boots.
"CONTACT—!"
The dark horizon tore open. Four-legged hound-class bugs came shrieking in the lead, carapace scraping on carapace, chitin thunder rolling over the wall. The first wave hit the searchlight beams and every gun on the line went off at once. Chen Jin fired with them.
He couldn't have counted the magazines he burned. He remembered the barrel running hot enough to fry an egg on. The recruit to his left losing half a shoulder to a hound-class that had cleared the wall. Somebody screaming the same word over and over. His mouth was full of dirt—sour, bitter. He spat. Dirt again.
Then the middle of the line collapsed.
"Plug it! Plug it with your bodies!" Lei Changgeng's voice tore itself hoarse.
Black tide poured through the gap. Chen Jin's rifle fired its last round and jammed; he swung the stock and caved in one bug's mandible, and a second slammed him from the flank—a hundred-plus kilos of chitin flipping him into the bottom of the trench.
A hound-class pinned his chest, mandibles spreading wide, its breath washing over his face—sour, hot, thick with blood. Chen Jin jammed the rifle up under its jaws and held, arms shaking past their limit. His forearm bones creaked. He could hear them.
So this is where I die.
And with the thought came something tiny, absurd: today was his little sister's birthday. Chen Xiaosui. He'd promised that after this shift he'd take her east for a hot bowl of synth-protein noodles, extra scoop of sauce. The kid never ate her noodles without an extra scoop of sauce. Plain broth, she said, wouldn't go down.
"Get... off."
Where the strength came from, he couldn't say. Maybe from the noodles he hadn't eaten yet. He drove a knee up into the joints of the bug's underside, roaring, and clawed for the combat knife on his belt.
The mandibles were closing—
[Sovereign soul-signature detected. Verifying...]
A voice like cold machinery went off inside his skull.
[Soul remnant seated. Brand matched.]
[Identity confirmed: Your Majesty.]
[Civilization Archive—Sovereign of Mankind System: bound.]
Your Majesty?
Chen Jin's grip on the knife went dead. He knew every one of those words. Strung together, they meant nothing to him.
Then images burst open behind his eyes and died: a burning sea of stars. A throne tall enough to hold up a sky. A fleet that ran past the edge of sight. And a spear—driven through his chest from behind.
[Memory shock detected. Seal reinforced.]
The pain came fast and left fast, like someone had cracked open the top of his skull, poured in a whole world, and slammed it shut.
Chen Jin staggered half a step. When he looked up, the shaking was gone. His palms were slick, sticky with sweat—and the knife in his hand weighed nothing at all. No reason. It just didn't.
He turned his wrist and put the blade into the seam of the thing's head-armor, sinking it to the hilt. The hound-class shuddered and went slack.
[Kill confirmed: Hound-class x1. +10 Embers.]
[Embers: 10.]
A line of small red characters hung in the air where only he could see it. Not a projection. Not a hallucination. It just hovered in his vision, quiet as anything.
The next bug was already on him. Chen Jin sidestepped, turned his hips, cut—the whole motion flowing smooth, smooth enough to belong to somebody else.
[Kill confirmed: Hound-class x1. +10 Embers.]
[Embers: 20.]
STORE lit at the edge of his vision. He thought about it, and a list unfurled—
Tier-1 Genetic Booster, 50 Embers. Standard Power Armor (reconstructed from archive fragments), 800 Embers. Thermal lance, 150 Embers. Tier-1 Barracks Blueprint, LOCKED [main quest required].
The strange part: he didn't recognize a single item on the list, and his chest burned looking at them anyway, heat rising out of nowhere. These things were his. He didn't remember it. His blood did.
"Redeem—Genetic Booster!"
A faintly glowing vial dropped out of empty air into his palm. Chen Jin didn't think. He slapped it against his own neck.
The cold fluid burst and every vein in his body caught fire. The world slowed down. In the searchlight beams he could read every bug's leap, arc by arc; the gunfire ten meters out came countable, shot by shot. Chen Jin looked at his own hands—veins standing, steady as stone. The old rifle that had jammed solid, he cracked its action open one-handed.
"Kid?!" Lei Changgeng stared at him, swapping magazines. "What did you eat?!"
"Tell you later!" Chen Jin was already up and over the trench.
Passing a collapsed bunker, he hauled a recruit out of the rubble, buried to the waist. A soft pulse crossed his vision:
[Ally saved x1. +1 Ember.]
Kills paid out. Rescues paid too? He froze for half a beat, then grinned. Now that was a decent deal.
For the next three minutes, the defenders of the Seventh Line saw the strangest sight of their lives: Chen Jin—Chen Jin, who used to need two breaks to carry one ammo crate—charging alone against the rout, straight into the gap, a white-hot spike driven into the black tide. Gunfire. Knife work. The popping of carapaces.
[Embers: 310.]
[Kill confirmed: War-hound class x1. +50 Embers.]
By the time Chen Jin backed into the trench over a carpet of dead bugs, fresh covering fire had sealed the gap. The whole line had gone quiet, watching this third-class trooper soaked head to toe in bug blood. Somebody swallowed, and in that quiet every soul on the wall heard it.
Lei Changgeng opened his mouth, worked it, and finally got out: "You kid, what the hell—"
Ding.
A chime only Chen Jin could hear. A line of red characters hung dead center in his vision, and it drowned out every gun on the line:
[MAIN QUEST: LINYUAN SHALL NOT FALL]
[Objective: Hold Linyuan Harbor. On the day the city falls, the humans left alive within it must number no fewer than 10,000.]
[Rewards: Tier-1 Barracks Blueprint x1 · Standard Power Armor x1 · Sovereign's Medal I (unlocks high-tier exchange privileges)]
[Failure: The Civilization Archive will be reclaimed, and the inheritor erased.]
Erased. The system gave with one hand, clean and quick, and left zero room to haggle.
He looked up. Over the orbital port, the last evacuation ship was climbing on a blue-white flame, the Star-Ring Council's sigil bright on its belly. It didn't slow. It didn't turn. It went into the stars without looking back.
[Notice: Current human population of Linyuan Harbor: 110,347.]
A hundred and ten thousand people. The ones who weren't on the list. Chen Jin's hand closed around the rifle, slow and deliberate. The barrel was still hot. Bug blood ran down the stock.
Then the sky lit up again.
Dark-red meteors came down across the whole sky in tails of fire, onto the city, onto the shelter zones—spore pods off the hive ships. Seeds of the calamity. And past the meteors, at the horizon, the black tide was still rising.
The line went so quiet he could hear meteors hitting far off, dull thuds through the ground. Men knelt. Men wept.
Chen Jin slapped his last magazine home. The click was small and clean, and in the silence it carried.
"Sarge. Get the boys together. Count the ammo." He said it level. "Then we move east—shelter district first."
Lei Changgeng's head snapped around. "East is a drop zone! Your sister's there?"
"My sister's there." Chen Jin stepped up onto the ruined wall, the burning city at his back, a sky full of meteors ahead. "And a hundred and ten thousand more."
[First Edict of the Sovereign: Mankind shall not go extinct.]
The small red characters hung quiet in front of his eyes. Chen Jin read them out loud, once, softly. Then he raised his rifle.
— End of Chapter 1 —