Beyond the third ring — the Scrap Iron Zone.
Yellow sand swept across the sky, and the metallic smog was so heavy it felt like it could burn through your lungs.
Lin Yueheng carried a tattered scavenger's pack on his back, climbing bit by bit up a mountain of ruins along a fractured maglev track.
Beneath his feet lay the wreckage of war: rusted infantry mechs, shattered security armor, collapsed warship skeletons — even fragments of alien-made geostructure constructs, sprawled across the dunes like the bones of dead titans.
This place was known as — the "Thirteenth Recovery Belt."
The filthiest, most forsaken hellhole on the entire human refugee planet.
From a pile of charred steel beams, Lin Yueheng pried out an engine core that was still salvageable.
Its casing was melted and warped, but the magnetic core was intact — worth a few days' rations.
His hands were thick with calluses, dried blood clinging between his fingers; even with a fingernail torn clean off, he only frowned slightly.
He wasn't a soldier, wasn't a mechanic, and certainly wasn't a hero.
He was just a scavenger —
scraping by at the bottom of this war-torn world by dismantling machines, digging through trash, and selling scrap.
---
Suddenly—
From deep within the ruins came a low, resonant rumble.
The sound seemed to rise from the very heart of the earth, carrying the breath of some slumbering behemoth.
Lin Yueheng's head snapped up — the source lay in a zone he had never set foot in before:
The Core Wreck Field.
Legend said it was the burial site of a war machine never deployed to battle —
Humanity's Final Weapon: Ragnarok 01.
No one knew why it had been sealed away. No one even knew if it truly existed.
But Lin Yueheng knew — because he had seen it with his own eyes.
Ten years ago, during an air battle, his father — chief engineer of the maintenance division — had shoved a blueprint into his hands in his final moments.
That day, he became an orphan, thrown into the wastelands.
And that was the moment he swore:
> "I'll repair that divine machine with my own hands… and turn this broken world completely upside down."
---
In an area where the radiation alone could kill, he had pieced together armor from mech heat-shield panels, strapped a furnace lid to his head as a helmet, and breathed through a crude valve system.
He descended sixty meters down a fault line, passed through collapsed walls and high-energy contamination zones, and finally stopped before a massive metal door.
On the door, three letters were engraved: R-01.
Lin Yueheng pulled out the crumpled blueprint and lined it up against the interface.
Bloodshot eyes locked on his target, he muttered:
"Power input port… here."
He cleared away the debris and slotted in the power core.
— Five seconds later, the ground began to quake.
Boom—!
The colossal gate began to open, chains snapping with a roar like a wild beast, dust billowing in choking clouds.
From the depths of the shadows, a giant figure stepped forward—
A twenty-five-meter-tall humanoid mech, armor scarred from battles it had never fought; its right arm was a Mark III propulsion cannon, its back bristled with seven reactor conduits, like a war god risen from the abyss.
Etched on its chest:
> [R-01]
R-Class Forbidden Weapon —
Status: Dormant
---
Lin Yueheng gazed up at it, as if his ten years of obsession had solidified before his eyes.
Piece by piece, he began inserting the parts he had saved over the years into its ports, hatches, and energy slots.
Every screw, every cable, every circuit board — all scavenged by his own hands from the ruins.
"Starting you up… is like piecing my bones back together."
Finally, he inserted the old neural response chip into the control core.
Bzzz—
From its feet, through the spinal conduits, up into the central processor, red light began to climb.
— The mech's eyes lit up.
A blood-red glow, blazing like fire.
In an instant, the entire wasteland trembled. A distant surveillance satellite exploded on the spot.
> [Warning! R-Class Forbidden Weapon Activated!]
[Signal Source — Unregistered, Unauthorized, Non-Military Access!]
[Identity: Lin Yueheng. Occupation: Scavenger.]
…
[Logic Conflict Detected.]
[Forcing Core Initialization…]
…
[—— Link Established.]
> [Welcome back, pilot.]
Lin Yueheng grinned, blood and engine oil smeared together across his face, and murmured like a madman:
"Come on, my dear war god — let's go for a walk."