High in the mist-shrouded, pine-scented mountains of southern Hunan, hundreds of miles from the nearest front line, stood a simple, newly constructed pavilion. It was a stark, lonely structure of dark wood and paper screens, empty save for a single, high-backed chair and a complex, humming array of telegraphic and electrical equipment. Around it, hidden in the dense forests, a full regiment of the Emperor's personal guard stood in a silent, three-mile cordon. This was not a command post. It was a temple. And the god was about to conduct his first service.
Qin Shi Huang sat in the chair, his posture as straight and unyielding as the day his soul had been forged. He was no longer a general, an emperor, or a statesman. He was a component. Thick, insulated cables snaked from the humming communications array and connected to a pair of ornate, golden bracers clasped tightly around his wrists. He was the conductor, the living heart of a continent-spanning weapons system.
On a simple table before him, there was no scroll of poetry or cup of tea. There was only a single, large-scale military map of a rugged, mountainous region in northern Burma. A single point on the map was circled in red ink. It was not a city or an army. It was a fortress, a brand-new masterpiece of British military engineering, a complex of concrete bunkers, artillery emplacements, and machine-gun nests dug into the very bones of the mountain pass. The British, with their typical, unimaginative arrogance, had named it "Fort Invincible." It was designed to be the immovable object that would shatter the unstoppable force of Meng Tian's legions.
Qin Shi Huang stared at the red circle, and in his mind, he saw it all. He felt the low, resonant thrum of Dr. Chen's device, a distant echo of his own power, traveling through the earth and up through the wires into his body. He felt no fear, only a cold, focused, and profound sense of anticipation. This was the true culmination of his second chance. Not the battles, not the politics, but this: the perfect, terrifying fusion of the mystical power that had animated his Terracotta legions with the raw, industrial might of a new age. He was about to ascend, to become a god of war in a way the world, in its wildest, most fevered dreams, had never conceived.
He leaned forward and spoke into a brass microphone, his voice calm, measured, and utterly devoid of emotion.
"Dr. Chen. Report status."
Her reply came a moment later, tinny and distorted by the long-distance telegraph, laced with an undercurrent of barely suppressed terror. "Resonator… resonator is fully charged, Your Majesty. All systems are green. The focusing lenses are aligned. We are… we are awaiting your spark."
He leaned back in his chair. It was time.
At that same moment, on a watchtower perched on the highest parapet of Fort Invincible, Lance Corporal Arthur Higgins of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers, was complaining about the heat. It was a thick, wet, suffocating heat that seemed to suck the very air from his lungs and leave a permanent film of sweat on his skin.
"Bloody hell, George," he grumbled to his mate, wiping his brow with the back of a grimy hand. "It's hotter than the devil's own furnace up here. I'd kill for a pint of mild. A proper pint, not that warm, piss-weak stuff they serve in the canteen."
George grunted his agreement, his eyes scanning the vast, oppressive green expanse of the jungle that stretched out before them. "Heard a rumor down at the mess," he said, not taking his eyes off the valley. "Big one. They're saying the whole bloody Chinese army, half a million of 'em, are marching down from the north."
Arthur scoffed, leaning his Lee-Enfield rifle against the concrete parapet. "Let 'em come. See this place? Major Abernathy says it's the strongest fortress in the whole damn Empire. Says a million Chinamen could throw themselves at these walls and all they'd do is die. We've got Vickers guns that can sweep that whole valley, and artillery that can turn them trees into splinters. We're safe as houses, we are."
He was right. Fort Invincible was a masterpiece. Concrete bunkers, feet thick, were sunk deep into the bedrock of the mountain. Overlapping fields of machine-gun fire ensured that not a single square inch of the pass was uncovered. Heavy, 6-inch naval guns, hauled here with immense effort, were dug into camouflaged emplacements, their barrels pointing down the valley like accusing fingers. The soldiers were confident, well-supplied, and bored. Their enemy was not the Qing army; it was the heat, the insects, and the monotony.
It was Arthur who noticed it first. A subtle change in the world.
"That's… odd," he said, squinting. The oppressive heat seemed to have vanished, replaced by a sudden, unnatural chill in the air. The incessant, droning buzz of the jungle insects, a constant soundtrack to their lives, had abruptly stopped. A deep, low hum, a sound so low it was felt in the teeth and bones more than heard, seemed to be emanating from the very rock of the mountain beneath their feet.
"What is?" George asked, finally turning.
"Dunno. Feel that?" The hair on Arthur's arms was standing on end. He looked up at the sky. It was a perfect, cloudless blue. But the sunlight… the sunlight seemed to be wrong. High above the fortress, the air itself seemed to be shimmering, warping, as if they were looking at the sky through a flawed piece of glass.
"What in God's name is that?" he whispered, his earlier confidence forgotten, replaced by a cold, primal dread.
In the pavilion, Qin Shi Huang closed his eyes. He shut out the world. He shut out the humming of the machines and the feel of the chair beneath him. He reached inward, into the core of his being, to the nexus of his soul, where the Dragon's Spark resided. He did not summon a torrent of power, not a raging inferno. He sought a single, focused, infinitesimally small mote of his life force—a spark.
He visualized the map. He saw the red circle. He saw the fortress, the mountain, the soldiers. And with a single, focused act of pure, indomitable will, he pushed the spark out of his body, down through his arms, and into the golden bracers.
The effect was instantaneous and shocking. A wave of profound, sickening weakness washed over him. The world behind his eyelids dissolved into a grey, swirling vortex. He felt a sensation of immense, crushing vertigo, as if a vital part of his soul was being violently siphoned away. Dr. Chen's secret regulators were working, buffering the cataclysmic drain, but the price was still immense. He gritted his teeth, his body going rigid, fighting to remain conscious.
In the speeding train, alarms shrieked, their klaxons a chorus of mechanical terror. Dials and gauges spun wildly into the red, their needles vibrating. Dr. Chen held onto a railing to keep from falling as the entire carriage shuddered. The lead-lined containment sphere at the heart of the device was no longer cold and grey. It began to glow, first a dull red, then a brilliant, searing white, a miniature, captive sun of pure, unimaginable energy.
"It's working!" she screamed to her father over the deafening noise, her voice a mixture of scientific triumph and absolute human horror. "The energy is focused! It's stabilized! It's… it's transmitting!"
High in the sky above Fort Invincible, the point of warped light coalesced. For a fraction of a second, it shone with the intensity of a magnesium flare, impossibly bright, casting strange, sharp shadows across the valley. Arthur and George threw their arms up to shield their eyes from the blinding glare.
Then, the light vanished. And from that single point in the sky, a wave of… something… was unleashed.
It was not light. It was not heat. It made no sound. It was a silent, perfectly transparent, shimmering wave of pure, grey negation, expanding outwards in a perfect circle, like a ripple from a stone dropped in a pond of reality itself.
It washed over Fort Invincible.
Arthur Higgins, his friend George, the Vickers machine guns, the concrete bunkers, the heavy artillery pieces, the thousands of tons of ammunition, the Union Jack flying from the flagpole, and the very rock of the mountain into which the fortress had been built—they did not explode. They did not burn. They did not shatter.
They simply… ceased to exist.
They were unmade.
One moment, they were solid, physical matter. The next, they had dissolved into a cloud of fine, grey, homogenous dust, like a sandcastle touched by a silent, invisible tide. In the space of a single, silent heartbeat, the most powerful British fortress in Asia, and the mountain it was a part of, were gone.
Where Fort Invincible had stood, there was now only a smooth, concave, glassy crater, shimmering under a sun that now seemed obscene in its brightness. And above it, a vast, silent, slowly dispersing cloud of grey dust hung in the still air like a funeral shroud.