At seventy degrees north, the blizzard clawed at everything that stuck out of the ice—until it hit the Wall of Sighs.
By the time Li Xing dragged the sled over the last frozen ridge, the wind didn't just die down. It vanished, swallowed by the shadow that covered half the sky.
They all had to tilt their heads back. And keep tilting. Necks aching, eyes tearing in the cold, just to get a rough sense of the thing's size.
It wasn't a "base" in any normal sense.
At the far edge of the gray-white world, an enormous ring-shaped industrial ruin sat wedged between frozen ground and low clouds, like a black gear some god had jammed into the horizon and forgotten.
Its outer wall rose like a cliff, stabbing up through the cloud layer. Beneath the flaking black metal skin, pale load-bearing ribs jutted out—huge arcs of support structure, each one thick enough to hold up an old-world skyscraper on its own.
In front of it, people didn't even qualify as ants. They were dust motes floating in its shadow.
But that wasn't what made Li Xing's chest lock up.
It was the "river."
A moat several kilometers wide ran around the base. Once, there'd been something in it—coolant, fuel, who knew. Now it was dry.
Dry, and full.
The riverbed was packed from edge to edge with corpses of steel.
They were mechs.
This place was a mass grave for iron titans.
Thousands—no, tens of thousands—of S-class, A-class, and ultra-heavy engineering frames sprawled one over another, a solid mountain of wreckage that rose a hundred meters high.
A broken mechanical hand lay across their path. Just one finger was the length of a bus, the joints like half-closed rusted city gates, snow filling the grooves where fingerprints used to be.
Further off, a massive mech head had landed upside down in the permafrost like a fallen lighthouse. Its empty eye socket was more than five meters across, full of black ice water that reflected the low, dirty sky—a dead eye staring at nothing.
Wind forced its way through empty chest cavities the size of canyons, weaving through ribs and torn armor. The sound rolled back over the wasteland, low and drawn-out, like some giant pipe organ being played by invisible hands.
It didn't sound like wind.
It sounded like dead giants singing.
This wasn't a supply outpost.
It was a whale-fall of steel—a graveyard where machine gods had come to sink and rot.
"Holy…"
Little Stone's jaw dropped. The snot hanging from his nose froze into a crystal strand. He forgot to wipe it.
He felt like a rat that had taken a wrong turn into a land built for giants. His knees went weak under that sheer sense of smallness, the kind that came from your body finally understanding that nothing here cared if you were crushed.
"H-how many Big Huangs got buried here…?"
The old man just folded.
He let himself collapse into the snow, forehead slamming into the frozen ground in frantic bows, each impact a dull thud.
"Sin… sin upon sin… this is the ruin of the tower that reached the sky… a place of punishment…"
Li Xing said nothing.
She simply stood there in front of all that silence, thin as a paper cut-out, like one bad gust could blow her away.
Inside the sense field she called Deep Space Echo, there wasn't any wind.
There was only weight. A weight measured in dead tons. The despair here sat on her sternum like a slab of lead, squeezing the air out of her lungs.
Click—THUD.
The sound snapped across the quiet like a snapped wire.
Li Xing spun around.
S-09—Big Huang—had stopped.
On the road here through the blizzard, the four-meter-tall mech had been their invincible moving fortress. Now, with that mountain of corpses at its back, it looked small. Like a child who'd wandered into the wrong room.
Its huge frame shook, hydraulics whining in every joint. One massive foot hung frozen above the ground, piston locked, refusing to come down.
Because under that raised foot was a crushed breastplate.
From a mech of the same model.
It was standing on its own kind's bones.
"Big Huang?" Li Xing called, careful, testing the edge of the moment.
The roar that came out of S-09 didn't sound like anything she'd heard from it before.
A ragged, metallic scream tore out of its throat, sharp enough to buzz in their skulls. The sound bounced from wreck to wreck, knocking loose sheets of snow from dead armor.
The mech dropped the sled line from its jaws. The huge frame lurched backward, steps heavy and wild, like a stray dog that had just realized the "walk" ends at the slaughterhouse.
CRUNCH.
One panicked step shattered a boulder. Its shoulder slammed into a discarded transmission shaft thicker than an old-world tree trunk, sending a shower of rust into the air.
The barrel on its back lifted and swung in a spasm, muzzle sweeping between Li Xing, the two refugees, and the towering wall of dead frames.
It was losing it.
Faced with this ocean of death, this one machine that had somehow made it this far finally broke.
—
In the half-finished tower block that passed for his base, the system's warning screech ripped Lu Jin out of drugged sleep.
He lurched upright on the moldy mattress. Pain ripped across his chest, hot and blinding, stitches screaming. His vision whited out for a heartbeat.
"Gh—k…"
He clamped a hand over his bandaged ribs, dragging air through his teeth, and grabbed for his phone with the other.
The S-09 icon on his HUD had gone past red into an ugly purple. A huge exclamation mark pulsed over it, almost filling the whole corner of the screen.
[Warning! Logical plague detected: extreme terror!][Observed unit S-09 is undergoing cognitive collapse!][Environment: super-massive mech graveyard (Megalophobia triggered). Unit classification: "End of All Things".][Hazard alert: Unit attempting to initiate "indiscriminate defense mode" to avoid dismantling!][Translation: it's about to blast everything alive in range to scrap!]
Lu Jin stared at the feed.
Even through the shaky drone view, the scene punched him in the gut.
Li Xing was a speck. One pixel in front of Big Huang's bulk. Behind them both, the mountain of metal bodies stretched up and up, a wall of dead armor under a sunless sky.
Just watching it made his throat tighten.
There was no such thing as "betrayal" in S-09's logic tree. That line of code didn't exist.
It was just scared.
The base-level lines in its brain that knew what it was made from, that knew what those mountains were… that fear of being stripped down, melted, turned into parts—that was chewing through the loyalty he'd forced into it with a couple of batteries and some brainmeat.
It didn't want to end up as one more chunk in the pile.
"Useless big mutt," Lu Jin muttered. It came out more as a broken cough. There was blood in it.
Right on cue, Deep Space Echo's favorite ad overlay smashed into his view with all the grace of a pop-up porn banner.
[Honey! Your big doggo just saw the afterlife and peed its circuits! Biting mode imminent!][Recommended solution: B-rank Logic Reset & Format (factory settings).][Limited offer: ¥50,000.00.]
Lu Jin didn't even get to swear before the ¥50,000.00 flickered gray and ghosted out, replaced by a new line in cheerful red:
[Detected real-world account balance: ¥0.10.][Notice, broke-ass user: You are bankrupt! Money is no longer a valid solution because you don't have any!][Auto-switching payment method: Holy Resonance Energy (yes, the stuff that keeps you alive; yes, it's the only thing you've got left).]
Lu Jin's eye twitched.
Right. He'd dumped all ¥12,000 he'd stripped off Hound plus his own last scraps onto Old Yan's table to not die on that operating slab. After that little "investment," all he had left in cash was ten miserable cents and a body one thread away from unraveling.
"Wait for me to go broke and then spring this crap…" he growled, teeth grinding.
His thumb flicked through the higher-tier options anyway, skimming past all the glittering traps he couldn't afford even if he sold his bones—advanced logic patches, emergency teleport, full-frame spiritual reboot, all tagged with price tags that looked like phone numbers.
If he couldn't pay in cash, there was one other wallet.
He didn't want to die, which meant he had to spend like a miser.
His finger slowed over the bottom of the catalog. There, at the very end, shoved into a section that most people would never bother opening:
[Livestock & Veterinary Services]
The cheapest item blinked up at him.
[C-rank Mechanical Tranquilizer (Veterinary formula · High potency)][Price: 5 Holy Resonance Energy][Note: Due to insufficient real-world funds, this purchase will draw directly from your "Life Energy Pool (Holy Resonance)". Spend carefully, sweetie, this is your lifespan burning~]
"Talk less," Lu Jin said through his teeth.
He hit confirm hard enough to make his thumb hurt.
[Payment confirmed. Holy Resonance: 27 → 22.]
—
Out on the wasteland, on the outer ring of the Polestar ruin, S-09's cannon was already charging.
A core of blue light gathered deep in the barrel, pressure building until it warped the air around the muzzle. The sound it made wasn't a whine so much as a rising, teeth-on-edge buzz.
Little Stone shrieked and dove under the sled. The old man went flat, face mashed into the frozen ground like he was trying to bury himself.
Li Xing didn't move.
She stood between two mountains—one of dead frames, one of living steel gone feral. Snow whipped her hair into a mess; she could barely feel her cheeks.
She tipped her head back, met that wild searchlight eye.
There was no hatred in it. No malice. Only raw, animal panic, the kind that made you want to crawl into a hole and vanish.
"Don't be scared… Big Huang, don't be scared…"
She spread her arms, starting forward.
Before she could take a second step, the air split open above S-09's neck.
A metal injector gun dropped from nowhere, as thick as her arm, trailing a flex cable that faded into light. It slammed into a bare spot where armor didn't quite cover the neck hydraulics.
WHOOMP.
Pressurized gas rammed pale blue fluid into the mech.
Every actuator in S-09's frame seized at once.
The blue glow in the barrel flickered twice, then died. Its eye stopped rolling, the rage-red in the lens washing out into a murky, exhausted amber.
It still shook—tiny, involuntary spasms in the leg joints. A low, uncertain sound rattled out of its throat-block. The giant shell looked like a high-rise after an earthquake, one gust away from collapse.
New text slid across Li Xing's vision in smooth, golden script.
[Oracle: It just had a nightmare. Go hug it.]
She didn't question it.
She took a breath that bit her lungs and walked the last few meters, right up to the mech's front leg.
Next to that brace of armor plates, she barely came up past the midpoint of a single hydraulic rod. She wrapped her arms around it anyway. The metal was slick with coolant and a thin film of oil; it burned her cheeks with the cold.
"Hey…" She patted the armor like she was soothing a frightened cat instead of a tank-killer. "It's okay now. Big Huang, it's okay."
She pressed her face against the steel, trying to leak what little warmth she had into it, and started humming.
No words. No proper tune either. Just a clumsy, gentle line of sound that wobbled here and there with the shiver in her throat.
That small voice bled into the giant's frame. Through armor seams, along bolts and welding scars. It seeped down into S-09's core processor, into whatever was left of its living brain.
Something shifted.
The violent, jerking tremors eased. The giant machine exhaled a long, rasping hiss as its knees slowly bent. Hydraulic vents screamed, dumping pressure, and then the war machine that towered over her lowered itself down.
Kneeling.
Massive knee plates sank into snow and armor scrap until its skull-sized head sat level with Li Xing's eyes.
The light in its lens stabilized, settling into a warm, steady amber.
One enormous claw rose—each pincer heavy enough to pulp her torso with a twitch. But it didn't grab. It held still, shaking only a little, then reached forward with extreme care.
The very tip of the pincer tapped the crooked red cloth bow tied to Li Xing's hair.
Like a giant that knew it'd done something wrong, asking a butterfly if she'd forgive him.
On Lu Jin's HUD, new prompts rolled down like ticker tape.
[System Notice: S-09 logic core partially rewritten.][Current mental state: Attachment (lock-on).][Analysis: It has pushed through its instinctive fear of colossal objects. At this moment, your hug (Li Xing) weighs more on its scale than all the steel corpses in this field.]
In the rotting skeleton of the tower, Lu Jin watched that tiny figure hugging the giant leg, the kneeling mech framed by a mountain of dead metal.
In a world that colorless and dead, that small patch of motion was the only thing that felt alive.
Warmth crawled up his spine, cutting through the lingering ache of the surgery and the ever-present itch of collapsing genes.
[Holy Resonance Feedback: Calming a rampaging unit (+15).][Holy Resonance: 22 → 37.]
Another pane unfolded beside it, green text updating:
[Observed Target: Li Xing][Emotion conversion: In fear, she learned to soothe another. "Guardian" divinity: first sprout.][Growth: +15][Current Progress: Mortal Echo Realm · Microglow stage – LV3 (60 → 75 / 1000).]
The ache that had been gnawing his bones like rats fell back to something duller, fuzzed at the edges by that surge.
Lu Jin let out a long breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. Muscles unknotted one by one.
"Stupid dog," he muttered. The words sounded rough, half-laugh, half-cough.
On the wasteland, Big Huang bit down on the sled line again.
It rose, frame steady, armor plates clinking. The war machine turned to face the metal mountain—and the dead river of mech corpses—once more.
Its lens flickered. This time, there was no frantic skitter to the movement. Just a heavy, resigned kind of calm.
It stepped forward.
Each step landed on crushed armor and frozen cables, climbing over the bodies of its own kind toward the black ring of the ruin.
On Lu Jin's screen, the mech's eye never left the path ahead.
Its attention, though, snagged on something else.
Every few seconds, the camera feed caught the subtle shift in that amber lens, the way it slid sideways—not to Li Xing, not to the refugees, but toward the deepest part of the base.
Toward the main tower.
No lights burned there. Just solid, featureless black, a shadow thicker than the storm clouds above it.
But somewhere inside that slab of night, something watched them back.
Silent.
Hungry.