Iron Root wasn't a city.
It was a foundry with street names.
A thousand crucibles burned day and night, their light staining the skyline with permanent dusk. The towers weren't buildings—they were forge stacks, reinforced with bone-concrete and martial alloy. Chi smoke poured from every vent. Conveyor belts cut through roads like veins, transporting implants, grafted ligaments, weaponized scrolls, and freshly printed styles across the city.
Jian Lin stepped off the back of a freight train and into the furnace.
> [LOCATION ENTERED: IRON ROOT – MILITARIZED ZONE]
[SEED PATH SIGNATURE DETECTED – MASKING PROTOCOL ACTIVE]
[RISK INDEX: EXTREME | VISIBILITY: LOW]
The air tasted of metal and burnt doctrine.
This wasn't the Night Market. This was industrialized martial purity.
And every disciple here moved like a gear in a machine—perfect in motion, interchangeable in soul.
---
He passed the outer ring known as The Ash Rows, where Moldforms trained twenty hours a day beneath emission lamps. Disciples sparred in mirrored chambers, running modular style patterns on loop.
None of them wore names.
Only metal masks with numeric ranks burned into the brow:
> "Mold 3."
"Mold 4."
"Mold 7."
Jian paused by a square where twenty fighters drilled Iron Fang Style v3.0 in synchronized precision. Each strike echoed like a factory piston. Not a single breath out of place.
It was deadly.
But hollow.
There was no improvisation. No soul. Just compliance.
He moved on.
---
At a checkpoint, two guards stopped him.
Their chi readers pulsed red against his chest. Jian's implant surged with a forged signature—Wren's last gift.
> [IMPERSONATION ACTIVE: FORGED PATH – JUNIOR ENGRAVER]
[COVER ID: MOLDFORM-DELTA-19]
The guards checked his credentials.
No questions.
They waved him through.
---
He descended toward the city's heart—the Foundry Core.
Here, martial art was not taught. It was manufactured.
Designers in sleeveless lab robes worked beside code-monks and neural cartographers. Every style was broken into algorithms. Every form modeled in combat simulations, then burned onto scroll-filament polymer and sealed in licensing sleeves.
> Whisper Pulse Form v3.2 – Stabilized Chi Flow: 96%
Needle Fang Style v5.4 – Predictive Break Point: 4.2s
Corp-Sealed Combo Trees: "Legally Combat-Approved"
Every wall was covered in charts—chi displacement graphs, neurological wear maps, combat ROI estimates.
There were no masters here.
Only engineers.
Jian moved quietly between them, eyes darting.
Then he heard it.
---
The sound of fists breaking metal.
A snarl. Then a crash.
Jian followed the noise to a side chamber filled with broken sparring dummies and scorched projectors.
A woman stood alone on a scaffold, breath ragged, hands smoking. Her robes were blackened and patched with half-burned sect glyphs. One arm bore chi-scarring like chain-links melted into flesh.
She struck again—this time shattering a training drone in a single palm thrust.
The style was unfamiliar.
No. Not unfamiliar. Unapproved.
It was improvised.
Real.
Jian stepped forward.
She noticed.
"You don't belong here," she growled.
"Neither do you," Jian said.
Her eyes narrowed. "You're carrying a seed."
He didn't answer.
"Don't lie. I can see it in the way you breathe."
She dropped to the floor. Chi rippled from her with raw, unfiltered resonance—something deeper than scroll-encoded muscle memory. Something older than Corp sanction.
"I'm Renya Blackspike," she said. "Leader of the Forged Rebellion."
Jian blinked.
"There's a rebellion?"
"There was," she said. "Now there are only a few of us left. But we're still burning."
Her eyes swept over him. "You look like someone who doesn't know if he's fire or ash."
Jian straightened. "I didn't come to lead anything."
Renya smiled grimly. "Good. We don't want a leader. Just someone willing to strike a match."
---
She led him deeper into the ruined backend of a licensing hall—one buried beneath collapse notices and security overrides. Dust covered prototype terminals. Scrapped implants hung from hooks.
Finally, she stopped before a sealed cabinet—its face covered in warning glyphs.
She unlocked it with a palm-scarred code.
Inside was a single scroll drive, its case marked with heat-warped lettering.
> [STYLE FILE: MOLTEN THREAD FORM v0.0]
[INSTABILITY WARNING: 93%]
[SEED PATH DEPENDENCY: DUAL CHANNEL REQUIRED]
[ORIGIN: UNCONFIRMED | AUTHOR: REDACTED]
Jian's eyes widened.
The style signature… it wasn't his.
But it rhymed with his chi. The same flow logic. Same rhythm. Same burn.
"Where did this come from?" he asked.
Renya's face hardened.
"A rogue designer smuggled it out. We don't know if he survived."
She tapped the screen.
A name flickered across the code header.
> KAI
Jian's pulse froze.
That name hadn't surfaced since Yulan's labs shut down the seed project.
Since the first whispers of pairing—two seeds.
One to evolve.
One to control.
He'd always assumed Kai was gone.
But this?
Proof.
Alive. Active. Writing.
---
Renya shut the cabinet and turned to him.
"You want to burn Iron Root? Then it starts at the top."
"The Grand Forge," Jian said, recalling the rumors.
She nodded. "That's where they built the Chimera Code—a kill-style. Adaptive. Designed to copy you and overwrite your scroll mid-strike."
Jian's jaw tightened.
"They built a weapon… to kill the seed path."
"They built it," Renya said, "because they were afraid you'd write something they couldn't erase."
---
Later, in a room where broken scrolls littered the floor like shattered glass, Jian stood before a furnace.
Renya handed him a lighter.
"Once we breach the Forge, you'll see what they've buried beneath the template walls. The real architecture."
"And if I survive it?" he asked.
"Then we don't survive," she said. "We rise."
Jian stared into the flames.
He'd come for a spark.
But maybe it was time to become the fire.
---