The plains of Varanasi were a sea of men. Under the hazy, white-hot Indian sun, a hundred thousand soldiers—the elite, veteran heart of the New Qing Army—stood in perfect, silent formation. Ten legions, the victors of Siberia and the conquerors of India, were assembled not for a battle, but for a sacrament. They stretched to the horizon, a forest of bayonets and regimental banners, their collective presence a silent, disciplined testament to the absolute will of their Emperor.
At the very center of this vast, living weapon was the altar. The "special artillery unit," transported here with the speed and reverence of a holy relic, was now fully deployed. It sat on a raised, earthen platform, its bizarre and alien assembly of copper coils, obsidian lenses, and silver wiring humming with a low, predatory energy that seemed to warp the very air around it, creating a visible heat-haze even in the cool of the morning. It was a blasphemy of science and sorcery, and it was ready.
Marshal Meng Tian stood in his command tent, a simple canvas structure pitched a respectful distance from the device. He stared at the humming machine, and for the first time in his second life, he felt not the cold certainty of a commander, but the profound, nauseating unease of a man about to participate in a monstrous crime. The Emperor's order had been absolute. The legions were to bear witness as a demonstration was made upon the nearby holy city of Varanasi itself. It was a city of unarmed priests, pilgrims, and civilians. A final, horrifying lesson in terror, designed to extinguish the last embers of hope in the world.
The flap of his tent was pushed aside, and Dr. Chen Linwei entered. She was dressed in the simple, grey robes of a court scholar, her face pale and streaked with dust from her frantic journey, but her eyes burned with a desperate, resolute fire. She had used a forged, high-priority travel pass, a crime punishable by a slow death, to gain access to the military encampment. Now, she was taking her final, suicidal gamble.
Meng Tian's face, an impassive mask of granite, turned to her. His eyes were cold, empty. "You are the Emperor's scientist," he said, his voice flat. "This is a military zone. You have no place here."
"Marshal," she replied, her voice trembling but clear, "I am here precisely because I am the Emperor's most loyal subject. And because you are his most honorable." She did not wait for his permission. She moved to his campaign map, a sprawling chart of the Indian subcontinent, and placed her lead-lined case upon it. She opened it, revealing not a weapon, but a series of data slates. "I am begging you to look at this. To see the truth of what you are about to do."
He did not move. He simply watched her, his silence a terrifying, unreadable wall.
With frantic, precise movements, she laid out the data. She showed him the energy-output readings from the weapon's two firings. She showed him the corresponding biomedical telemetry she had secretly gathered on the Emperor. The data was stark, scientific, and undeniable. The first graph showed a massive, but survivable, expenditure of life force for the destruction of the mountain. The second graph, from the annihilation of the American fleet, showed an exponentially greater drain, a catastrophic expenditure that had, according to her models, aged the Emperor's physical body by at least two decades.
"He is burning himself away, Marshal," she said, her voice a passionate, desperate whisper. "The Dragon's Spark is not an infinite wellspring of power. It is his own life. His own soul. He is pouring his second chance into this machine, and it is killing him."
Meng Tian's expression did not change, but a muscle in his jaw twitched.
Dr. Chen pressed on, her terror giving way to the cold, hard certainty of her science. She brought up the final, most terrible data. The quantum fluctuation readings. The persistent, low-level chaotic energy bleeding from the site of the Luzon Strait and the crater in Burma.
"This is the part he does not understand. The part I did not understand until it was too late," she said, her finger tracing a jagged, ugly-looking waveform on the data slate. "The weapon does not just destroy. It unmakes. It tears a hole in the fabric of the world, in the laws that hold reality together. These are wounds, Marshal. Wounds that are not healing."
She looked up from the slates, her eyes pleading, meeting his cold, dead gaze. "I have run the calculations a hundred times. A third firing, on the scale he is planning—to 'pacify' a city of this size—will require the last of his significant life force. It will kill him. But the backlash… the psychic and physical recoil from tearing such a huge, new wound in the world… it will be catastrophic. It will create a self-sustaining paradox, a cancer of un-reality that will spread from this place. He is not just committing suicide, Marshal." Her voice broke, tears finally streaming down her face. "He is committing deicide. He will kill himself and take the entire world with him."
She was finished. She stood, trembling, having committed the ultimate treason, having laid her life and the lives of her entire family at the feet of this silent, terrifying man.
Meng Tian stood motionless for a full minute, the silence in the tent broken only by the distant, menacing hum of the weapon. He looked at the data slates, at the cold, hard numbers that told a story of impending apocalypse. He looked at the terrified, earnest face of the scientist, a woman willing to die for a truth no one else would speak. He looked out of his tent flap, at the endless sea of his own soldiers, loyal, perfect, and utterly ignorant, ready to witness the end of the world.
And in that moment, the Shinigami died.
The cold, efficient, ruthless machine that had been Marshal Meng Tian, the creature born of duty and despair, finally, completely, gave way to the man he had been in his first life. Meng Tian, the loyal general of the Great Qin, the hero who had built the Great Wall, the man who had sworn a sacred, blood-oath to his Emperor—not to his Emperor's every command, but to his life, his legacy, and the preservation of the Empire, Tianxia, All Under Heaven. He understood, with a sudden, tragic, and soul-shattering clarity, that to obey his Emperor's final order would be to betray that sacred, ancient oath. To protect his Emperor, he had to defy him. To save the world, he had to sacrifice himself.
The emptiness in his eyes was replaced by a deep, profound, and sorrowful resolve. The honorable soldier, the hero who had been buried for so long under a mountain of duty and death, had returned for one last battle.
He looked at Dr. Chen, his gaze no longer cold, but filled with a grim, tragic respect. "What must be done?" he asked, his voice a low rumble, the voice of a man accepting his own doom.
Dr. Chen's breath hitched, a sob of desperate, terrified relief. "The weapon is powered by his Spark," she explained quickly, her mind snapping back to the cold logic of science. "But the device itself is a physical machine. The energy is channeled through a series of regulators and focusing coils at its core. If those regulators can be overloaded at the precise moment he sends the spark, a feedback loop can be created. The containment field will collapse, and the gathered energy, instead of firing outward, will discharge harmlessly, directly into the earth. It would require a massive, conventional explosion, precisely targeted, at the exact moment of activation."
She looked at him, her meaning clear. It was a suicide mission of the highest order. Whoever placed the charge would be at the epicenter of a chaotic energy discharge, vaporized in an instant.
Meng Tian listened, and then he gave a single, sharp, decisive nod. "I will see it done."
He turned, and from a chest in the corner of the tent, he withdrew a long, silk-wrapped object. He unwrapped it, revealing his own personal standard, a heavy silk banner from his first life, depicting a black dragon on a field of crimson. It was a relic he had not touched in this new life, a memory of a man he thought was long dead. He took the banner in one hand and a heavy satchel of German-made high explosives in the other. He walked to the flap of his tent, a man walking towards his own grave, but with the firm, steady steps of a soldier going home. He was Meng Tian of the Great Qin once more, and he was about to make his final, glorious sacrifice to save his Emperor from himself.