The retreat from the Black River was not a rout; it was a disintegration.
General Han stood on the rear deck of his command truck, watching the pride of the Iron City dissolve. A Type-59 Tank, the beast that had smashed the Capital's gates, was currently screaming. The metal groaned as the Entropy Curse turned its armor into red dust. The tracks snapped, the barrel drooped like wilted celery, and the chassis collapsed into a pile of oxidized scrap.
"They don't stop," a gunner wept, clutching his rifle which was already spotting with rust. "We shot them! We blew them up! They just pull themselves out of the mud!"
The Terracotta Warriors marched through the wreckage. They didn't run. They moved with the inexorable, crushing pace of a glacier. Leading them was the First Emperor, a grey giant radiating an aura that turned the air stale and dry.
"This is not a fight," Ye Bai's voice crackled over the radio, sounding strained. "This is an execution. Han, get the men out. The First Emperor... his cultivation is beyond Spirit Severing. He is a World Anchor. He denies the very concept of flight or escape."
Han looked at the grey tide. "We can't outrun them, Saint. They don't sleep. We have to stand and die."
"No," a deep, synthesized voice boomed from the sky. "You have to clear the landing zone."
The clouds above the battlefield parted. It wasn't a drop pod this time. It was a monolith.
The Earth Shaker Golem fell from the belly of the Kunpeng high above. But it wasn't the black steel giant of the past. It had been refitted. Its hull was covered in brilliant white hexagonal tiles—Ablative Lunar Ceramics, the same material used to shield the Moon Base from meteor impacts.
BOOOOOOM.
The Golem landed between the retreating mortal army and the advancing Clay Legion. The shockwave turned a thousand Terracotta warriors into powder instantly.
Inside the cockpit, Jiang Chen plugged his neural link into the interface. The pain of the Ghost Reactor was duller now, managed by the new sub-processors he had scavenged from the moon.
"System," Jiang Chen commanded. "Engage Anti-Entropy Protocols."
The First Emperor stopped. He looked up at the fifty-meter white giant. His eyes, void of life, narrowed.
"A larger doll?" the First Emperor's voice ground out like tectonic plates shifting. "Metal is metal. All things return to dust."
He raised his rusted sword. "Decay."
A wave of sickly yellow light washed over the Golem.
General Han flinched, expecting the machine to crumble.
The yellow light hit the white ceramic tiles. It sizzled. It sparked. But it found no purchase. Ceramics are already oxides; they cannot rust. They are chemically inert.
The Golem stepped forward, unharmed.
"Chemistry," Jiang Chen's amplified voice shook the valley, "has no respect for your curse. I am not metal, Emperor. I am stone burned by the stars."
Ye Bai landed on the Golem's shoulder. He looked down at the First Emperor.
"I will distract him," Ye Bai said. "Administrator, his body is the anchor. Smash it."
Ye Bai leaped. He was a Spirit Severing expert, a being capable of cutting the sky. He condensed his entire lifetime of cultivation into a single, needle-thin point on his blade.
"Dao Art: One Sword, One World."
He struck the First Emperor's neck.
CLANG.
There was no blood. There was no cut. Ye Bai's spirit sword—a weapon that had severed the Kraken's hide—bounced off the Emperor's dried grey skin as if it had struck a diamond mountain.
The First Emperor didn't even look at Ye Bai. He simply backhanded the air.
WHAM.
The air pressure alone hit Ye Bai like a freight train. The Sword Saint was blasted backward, crashing through three distinct hills before coming to a stop buried in a cliff face.
"Ye Bai!" Jiang Chen shouted.
"He... he is heavy..." Ye Bai's voice wheezed over the comms, weak and broken. "Jiang Chen... be careful. He is not Spirit Severing. He has merged with the Dragon Vein. He has the weight of the entire continent in his fists!"
The First Emperor turned his gaze to the Golem.
"You bring a stone shell," the Corpse Immortal rumbled. "Then I shall break the stone."
The First Emperor grew.
He didn't inflate like a balloon. He drew the earth into himself. The soil, the rocks, the shattered Terracotta warriors—they all flew toward him, merging with his body. In seconds, he transformed from a man into a Colossus of Clay, matching the Golem in height.
A Kaiju of History facing a Kaiju of Science.
The Clay Colossus roared, a sound of crumbling mountains. It charged.
Jiang Chen gritted his teeth. "Let's dance."
The Golem engaged its hydraulic pistons. Output: 120%.
The two giants collided in the middle of the river.
CRASH.
The impact measured 7.0 on the Richter scale. The Black River was instantly diverted by the sheer displacement of mass.
The First Emperor punched the Golem's chest. The ceramic tiles cracked, but held. The force threw the fifty-meter machine back, skidding grooves into the bedrock.
"Warning: Structural Integrity 85%," the System blared.
"Hit him back!" Jiang Chen screamed.
The Golem twisted its waist, loading the Kinetic Pile Drivers in its arms. Jiang Chen didn't punch with just strength; he punched with explosive-propelled pistons.
BAM.
The Golem's fist slammed into the Clay Colossus's jaw.
The head of the Emperor shattered.
"Got him!" Han cheered from the ridge.
But the dust didn't fall. It swirled. The Emperor's head reformed instantly, harder and denser than before.
"I am the Earth," the Emperor boomed. "You cannot break the ground by hitting it."
He grabbed the Golem's arm. The clay hands exerted crushing pressure. The ceramic tiles began to fracture. The metal frame underneath groaned.
"He's crushing the titanium skeleton!" Jiang Chen realized. "He's too strong. As long as he touches the ground, he has infinite mass and infinite regeneration."
The Golem was being pushed down. The First Emperor was wrestling it into the mud, intending to bury it alive.
"System! Options!"
[Target Analysis: Subject draws power from the Planetary Crust.][Weakness: Gravitational bond.][Solution: Sever the connection.]
"He won't let go," Jiang Chen watched the clay fingers digging into his hull.
"Good," Jiang Chen smiled, a savage, desperate grin. "If you want to hold on... then don't let go."
Jiang Chen slammed a protective cover on his console, revealing a red button labeled [VTO - Vertical Take-Off].
"Ye Bai! Keep your head down!"
Jiang Chen punched the button.
"System. Ignite the Moon-Transit Thrusters."
On the back of the Earth Shaker Golem, the massive ion engines—designed to lift the machine out of the moon's gravity well—ignited.
But Jiang Chen didn't use standard fuel. He dumped the Ghost Reactor's excess plasma directly into the combustion chamber.
ROAAAAAR.
A pillar of green and white fire, hotter than the surface of the sun, erupted from the Golem's back. The river water vaporized instantly. The bedrock melted into glass.
The Golem didn't step back. It launched upward.
The First Emperor, holding onto the Golem to crush it, was suddenly yanked off his feet.
"What?!" The Corpse Immortal's eyes widened. He felt his connection to the Dragon Vein stretch. He tried to let go, but the sheer G-force pinned him to the Golem.
"You like gravity?" Jiang Chen screamed, fighting the G-force that was pressing him into his seat like a hydraulic press. "Let's see how much you like Escape Velocity!"
The two giants rocketed into the sky.
10,000 feet. The clouds vanished. 50,000 feet. The sky turned dark blue. 100,000 feet. The curvature of the world appeared.
The First Emperor roared in fury. He thrashed, pounding on the Golem's armor, but without the ground beneath his feet, his blows lacked the infinite weight of the continent. He was just a statue now.
"My power..." The Emperor gasped as the air thinned. "The Vein... it fades!"
His clay body began to crack. Without the constant influx of Earth Qi, the vacuum of the upper atmosphere began to suck the moisture out of him. The "Yellow Spring Clay" dried out, becoming brittle.
They hit the edge of space. Zero Gravity.
The engines cut off. Silence.
Jiang Chen floated in the cockpit, blood trickling from his nose.
Outside, the Clay Colossus was floating, drifting away from the Golem. The First Emperor looked down at the blue sphere of Terra-Nova. For the first time in two thousand years, he looked small.
"You..." The Emperor's voice couldn't travel in the vacuum, but his intent projected into Jiang Chen's mind. "You separated the King from his Kingdom."
"A King without land is just a man," Jiang Chen replied via the Neural Link.
He targeted the drifting, freezing statue.
"And a man needs air."
Jiang Chen activated the Golem's Chest Cannon—the focused beam of the Ghost Reactor.
"Goodbye, Your Majesty."
ZAP.
A beam of concentrated entropy and radiation struck the brittle, frozen clay of the First Emperor.
There was no regeneration. Separated from the earth, the First Emperor shattered.
He exploded into a cloud of dust and gravel, drifting into the endless void of space to become a ring of debris around the planet.
The Battlefield - Black River
The Terracotta Army stopped.
One moment, they were an unstoppable tide. The next, the red light in their eyes flickered and died.
Without the First Emperor's will to animate them, they were just pottery.
CRACK. CRACK. CRACK.
Ten thousand statues collapsed simultaneously, returning to innocent piles of clay.
General Han peeked out from behind a rock. He saw the dust settle. He saw the enemy vanish.
"Look!" a soldier shouted, pointing to the sky.
A shooting star was falling.
The Earth Shaker Golem, glowing red from reentry, deployed its parachutes and retro-thrusters. It slammed into the glass crater it had created, steaming and battered, but standing.
Ye Bai pulled himself out of the cliff face. He was broken, bleeding, and exhausted. He looked at the white machine standing victorious amidst the steam.
"He threw him..." Ye Bai whispered, a laugh bubbling up through the pain. "He threw the First Emperor into the sky."
The Imperial Palace
Emperor Xia sat on his Dragon Throne. He felt it instantly. The massive, ancient presence of his Ancestor—the weight that had anchored the Empire for millennia—was gone.
The Dragon Luck of the Dynasty screamed and shattered.
The golden light over the Capital faded. The snow from Jiang Chen's weather satellites finally touched the roof of the Palace.
Emperor Xia looked at his hands. He was still a Spirit Severing powerhouse. He was still invincible to mortals. But he knew the truth.
He had lost the Mandate of Heaven. Or rather, the Mandate had been shot into orbit.
"Minister," the Emperor said softly to the empty room.
"Prepare the Royal Carriage."
He stood up, his shoulders slumping for the first time in centuries.
"We are going to Beiluo. I wish to negotiate the terms of... integration."