Deep beneath the surface of the now strangely placid sea, Commander Li Jie slowly raised the periscope of the Long Jiao 01. His heart was a cold, heavy stone in his chest. He had heard the distant, thunderous cacophony of the great gun battle, a series of dull, jarring concussions that had vibrated through his hull. He had seen the last, burning hulk of a Qing destroyer slip beneath the waves through his lens. And then he had seen the light.
His entire crew had cried out, shielding their eyes even from the filtered, magnified image in the eyepiece as the impossible star was born in the sky. Now, there was only silence. A profound, unnatural silence that had swallowed the roar of battle whole.
He pressed his eye to the cold rubber of the scope, his hand trembling slightly as he trained it on the last known position of the American fleet. What he saw would be forever burned into the darkest corners of his soul.
There was nothing there.
Where a moment ago sixteen of the most powerful battleships on Earth had been churning the sea into a white foam of war, there was now only a calm, eerily flat expanse of grey, shimmering water. The Great White Fleet was gone. The burning wrecks of his own destroyed Qing ships were still there, pathetic, smoking pyres in the vast emptiness. But the enemy—the victors of the conventional battle—had simply vanished.
The air above the sea was thick with a fine, grey mist, a slowly dispersing cloud that caught the sunlight in strange, prismatic ways. As Li Jie watched, this dust began to settle, dusting the surface of the ocean like a fall of grim, supernatural snow. He understood, with a dawning, soul-crushing certainty, what he was seeing. It was the dust of sixteen battleships. It was the dust of twenty thousand American sailors.
He was a patriot. A warrior. He had been prepared to die for his Emperor, to sink enemy ships, to be a hero of the new China. But this was not war. This was not a battle. It was a divine, pestilential act of extermination. It was a god swatting flies from the air. He had helped his Emperor achieve the single greatest, most absolute naval victory in the history of human warfare, and the knowledge of it filled him not with pride, but with a profound, soul-deep sickness. He felt like an accomplice to a profound sin, a sin against the very nature of reality itself.
He slowly lowered the periscope, the cheering of his crew from the last torpedo hits seeming like a memory from another lifetime. He looked at the faces of his men, their eyes wide with a mixture of terror and ecstatic, religious awe. They were looking at him, their commander, but they were not seeing a man. They were seeing a disciple of the god who had just unmade a fleet.
"Set a course for Dragon's Tooth Cove," he said, his voice a hoarse, unfamiliar croak. "We have… won." The word tasted like ashes in his mouth.
In the pavilion on the mountaintop, the price for this divine victory was being paid in the currency of a single human soul. The moment the connection to the weapon was severed, the last of Qin Shi Huang's borrowed strength fled him. He collapsed back into the chair, not into the blessed relief of unconsciousness, but into a state of shocking, accelerated decrepitude.
The life force required to unmake an entire fleet of steel and men, to tear such a massive hole in the fabric of the world, was exponentially greater than the power needed for the mountain. The backlash was not a wave of weakness; it was a cataclysmic draining of his very essence.
His aide, who had been waiting outside, rushed back in at the sudden silence. He stopped dead just inside the doorway, his eyes widening in sheer, unadulterated horror. A strangled gasp escaped his lips. The man in the chair was not the Emperor he had known.
The Emperor's face, just minutes before so pale but still possessed of a timeless authority, was now sunken and gaunt, the skin pulled tight over his cheekbones, etched with a web of fine lines that had not been there before. His hair, once the uniform jet black of a man in his prime, was now visibly, shockingly, streaked with silver-grey at the temples. The hands that rested on the arms of the chair, which had once been strong and steady, were now thin and translucent, the hands of an old man, the blue veins standing out like rivers on a pale map. In the space of a single, terrible minute, the Emperor had aged twenty years.
"Your Majesty!" the aide cried, finally finding his voice, tears of terror and grief streaming down his face as he rushed to his master's side. "Your life force! The physicians!"
Qin Shi Huang's eyes fluttered open. They were the same eyes—ancient, intelligent, and utterly implacable—but they now looked out from the face of a weary, middle-aged man. He managed a weak, dismissive gesture.
"It is… done," he rasped, his voice thin and reedy, lacking its former resonant power. He tried to push himself up, and the effort left him trembling and breathless. "The path… is clear."
"But the cost, Your Majesty! The cost!" the aide sobbed, falling to his knees.
A flicker of the old, cold fire returned to the Emperor's eyes. "A necessary… price," he whispered, his gaze distant, already looking past his own frail form to the grand strategy that was unfolding. The American fleet was gone. The last great conventional threat to his dominion was a cloud of dust settling on the Pacific. He had paid with two decades of his second life. And he would do it again.
In the humming, vibrating laboratory carriage of the special military train, Dr. Chen Linwei was not celebrating. She was frantically trying to make sense of the torrent of impossible data pouring from her instruments. The cascading regulators she had secretly installed had held, but just barely. They had been stretched to their absolute limit, glowing cherry-red from the strain, but they had prevented the full, unfiltered backlash of energy from striking the Emperor and killing him instantly. She had saved his life, but her relief was instantly consumed by a new, and far more profound, terror.
She was seeing something new on her monitors, something her theories had never predicted. The feedback from the weapon, the psychic echo from the violent unmaking of so many thousands of living souls and so much complex matter all at once, had left… a scar.
The Dragon's Spark, she was now realizing with a dawning, sickening horror, was not just a controllable energy source. It was a fundamental part of the Emperor's being that was intrinsically, mystically tied to the very fabric of reality itself. By using it as a weapon to erase matter and life on such a massive, continental scale, he had not just punched a hole in an enemy fleet. He had torn a wound in the universe.
Her most sensitive instruments, designed to measure quantum fluctuations, were going haywire. They were picking up strange, low-level, but persistent energy fluctuations, a kind of background radiation of pure chaos, emanating from the precise coordinates of the Luzon Strait. She quickly cross-referenced the data from the weapon's first firing. The same, weaker, but identical fluctuations were still emanating from the glassy crater in Burma. The wounds were not healing. The laws of physics, in those specific locations, were frayed and unstable.
Her mind, the most brilliant scientific instrument in the Empire, raced, extrapolating, calculating, connecting the terrifying data points. The weapon didn't just consume the Emperor's life force. The backlash, the terrible psychic scream of a violated reality, was weakening the barrier between their world and… something else. She didn't know what. A place of pure chaos? A void? But she knew, with the certainty of a physicist discovering a terrible new law of nature, that the damage was cumulative.
The power was not just killing him; it was slowly unmaking the world.
She grabbed a slide rule and her notepad, her hands flying as she performed a final, terrifying calculation. She factored in the energy expenditure of the mountain. She factored in the exponentially greater expenditure of the fleet. She projected the power that would be required to achieve the Emperor's ultimate goal: the subjugation and pacification of the entire Indian subcontinent, a land of three hundred million souls.
The answer that her calculations produced made her drop her pencil. Her blood ran cold. She felt a wave of vertigo so profound she had to grip the edge of the workbench to keep from fainting.
The final, horrifying truth was laid bare before her. If the Emperor used this weapon one more time on a continental scale—the scale necessary to break India—the resulting backlash, the final, catastrophic wound in the fabric of spacetime, would not just kill him. It would likely trigger a self-sustaining chain reaction. A cancer of un-reality that would spread from its point of origin and unravel the world.
The final choice was no longer about victory or defeat. It was not a question of empire or freedom. It was a stark, absolute choice between conquest and existence. And the only person in the world who knew it was her.