90: Chapter 90 Encrypted Reply: Chaos Marks Hope Star as a Priority Target

In the early hours of the morning, in the communications cabin, the receiving module suddenly erupted with a series of harsh, piercing pulse shrieks—none of which were on any of the warning frequency bands Yang Shitou had preset.

The signal strength directly blew past the receiver's gain limit, cracking the speaker diaphragm.

He slammed his palm against the standby switch, sprang up from his cot, and his fingertips hammered a dense, crisp rhythm against the decoding panel.

The decoder indicator light jumped from green to red, then sank from red into a dark purple he had never seen before.

This was not an encryption protocol of the Astral Knights, not a standard frequency of the Military Affairs Bureau, and it didn't even belong to any human communication code he was aware of.

"This is not our stuff." He spoke to the empty cabin; his voice bounced off the iron walls, sounding even hoarser than he expected.

He switched to manual decoding mode, peeling away the encrypted shell layer by layer.

The first layer was standard Chaos tactical encryption, the second was a Warp modulation wave with nested permutation sequences, and by the time he peeled back the third layer, the decoder's casing had already started to heat up.

Yang Shitou did not stop; he put force into his knuckles, each keystroke feeling like driving in a rivet.

The moment the fourth layer of encryption was unlocked, no text popped up on the panel; instead, an audio waveform of less than five seconds appeared.

The base frequency completely overlapped with the resonance signal from the Chaos patrol he had intercepted fourteen days ago, and the upper layer of the waveform was overlaid with fragments of Low Gothic—the content words were kept in their original form, while function words and articles were all replaced with non-human vocal logic, and the grammatical structure was deliberately distorted.

Yang Shitou stared at the waveform for three seconds, yanked out the decoding chip, and rushed out of the communication cabin.

He wasn't walking; he was sprinting. The oil lamps in the corridor swayed violently in the draft, one of them nearly extinguishing.

When he rushed into the Intelligence Center, Lin Mo was hunched over the table comparing two maps—one was a surface map of Hope Star, and the other was a distribution map of signal anomalies in the swamp area updated three days ago.

Yang Shitou pressed the decoding record heavily onto the edge of the map, his hand still shaking, though not entirely from the rush—he was too familiar with this voiceprint characteristic.

It came from the same resonance frequency band as the Chaos reconnaissance signal that had invaded the relay station last time, only with a more complex modulation method overlaid on top.

This was not random background noise; it was a targeted reply.

"Lord Lin Mo, it's not a reply from the Military Affairs Bureau." He panted. "It's from Chaos. I decoded three layers of encryption, and there are two more nested inside, with a five-second audio clip at the core. The base frequency is exactly the same as the patrol signal we intercepted last time."

Lin Mo didn't look up, his fingertip resting on a specific coordinate in the swamp area.

"Five seconds is enough." He set his charcoal pencil on the edge of the map. "Expand the spectrum for me to see."

"Here." Yang Shitou pulled out the waveform chart he had captured with a handheld spectrum analyzer while running; the paper still held his body heat, and the corners were creased by his fingertips. "I captured it as soon as I left the communication cabin, fearing the signal would disperse."

Lin Mo took the chart and overlaid the spectral curve with the two maps on the table—the intersection of the three lines was less than a kilometer away from the coordinate where his fingertip had just been resting.

He stared at that intersection in silence for a long time, not waiting for anything, but performing mental deductions.

"It's no coincidence." Lin Mo stood up and folded the waveform chart into his pocket.

His movements were not fast, but each one was decisive, like a product manager finalizing a key conclusion at a competitor analysis meeting.

"Notify Locke, bring both Alices, and be at the Intelligence Center in ten minutes. Tell them to bring their brains, no weapons needed."

"Call both of them?"

"Call both of them. Vian has read the Imperial Mineral Manual; she can see things we cannot."

Ten minutes later, Locke and both Alices were all in place.

Spread out on the table in the Intelligence Center were three things: the signal interception coordinate map compiled by Yang Shitou—the signal sources were distributed in a fan shape over the swamp to the southeast, with three points arranged linearly along the crash trajectory, and the fourth point landing in the more distant saline-alkali land;

Lin Mo's self-made Chaos activity pattern deduction table—using the product manager's method of competitor modeling, he had quantitatively compared the frequency, scale, and timing of Chaos activity around Hope Star over the past year, with each data point marked with time and confidence intervals;

and the newly intercepted spectral waveform, the paper now cold, yet the creases still deep.

Lin Mo aligned the three items, speaking at a measured pace, every word as if it had been weighed:

"First, the conclusion: within the next two weeks, the pressure of Chaos on Hope Star will increase by at least an order of magnitude."

His fingertip tapped on the trend line of the deduction table. "The first hunting probe wave was completely wiped out by us. In the war logic of the followers of Khorne, losing a squad of scouts is not a failure; it is a provocation. They will respond with greater force."

"And that continuously transmitting signal point on the saline-alkali land—" He moved to the marker at the farthest end of the map. "Judging by the transmission power and duration, it doesn't look like a probe."

"It's more like a large-scale guidance beacon relay station." Alice, on the other side of the table, picked up the thread.

Her silver-white hair shimmered coldly in the lamplight, and her voice, like herself, lacked excess warmth, with every word precise to the smallest detail.

"I have seen this deployment pattern in the Chaos combat archives of the Astral Knights. The second wave of probes will arrive within two weeks; the cycle, force size, and attack method are all template-based. But the third wave—"

She paused, not out of hesitation, but to cross-check with the archives in her memory.

"The scale of these signal relay stations has already exceeded the needs of a probe wave."

She pointed to the stable signal source on the saline-alkali land that had been transmitting for ten hours, her ice-blue eyes locked firmly on the coordinates. "Chaos would not build a long-term signal relay for a probing attack. A probe wave carries at most three portable beacons, with a single unit's battery life not exceeding six hours. And this signal has been going on for ten hours. This indicates that the Chaos command chain is singling out Hope Star from the random noise of the border, marking it as a target that requires serious attention."

"And after marking it?" Locke's voice came from the far end of the table. He hadn't sat down since entering, his laser axe propped on the ground, the faint glow of the blade casting a thin shadow on the tabletop.

"After marking, it won't be a hunting party that comes." Alice looked up, her gaze sweeping past Locke and finally landing on Lin Mo. "It will be a Bishop-level Chaos Lord, leading a full raiding fleet. Their goal is not to probe, but to completely eradicate the psychic resistance on this planet."

"Bishop-level, what's the size of the force?" Locke thumped the handle of his axe on the ground, producing a dull thud. "Give me a number so I can arrange the defensive personnel."

"Standard configuration for a full raiding fleet: three to five main cruisers, each carrying at least a battalion of Chaos Space Marines, with a total force of no less than two thousand." Alice's voice was devoid of ripples, like she was reciting an archive she knew by heart. "Plus the Bishop's own psychic enhancement—his very existence is a weapon."

"Two thousand." Locke chewed on the words, as if gnawing on an overly tough piece of jerky. "Enough for a fight. As long as they land in batches, we can take them out one by one."

"They will not disperse their forces." Alice shook her head. "The Bishop will throw all his power into one point; his arrogance will not allow for splitting his forces."

The cabin fell silent for three seconds, and the flame of the oil lamp flickered twice.

Vian looked up from the last page of the signal briefing. She and Alice stood on the same side of the table, half a step apart, a space they had tacitly left for each other's field of vision.

Only after Alice finished did she tap the coordinates of the saline-alkali land with her fingertip, her finger pad pressing a very shallow indentation into the paper.

"The transmission pattern of this beacon has a pulse interval of every seventeen minutes, lasting forty-three seconds each time." Her voice was a degree lower than Alice's, her speech slower, as if she had turned each number over in her mouth twice. "It is not a standard Chaos communication protocol. Standard protocols are every eleven or twenty-three minutes, varying with the ritual cycle. Seventeen minutes—"

"Is the positioning pulse interval used by Imperial exploration fleets to mark surface features." Lin Mo caught her words.

Vian looked at him without nodding, her lips moving slightly—a recognition more restrained than a smile.

"You saw this code before your ship crashed?" Lin Mo asked.

"I have. Before the transport ship entered the atmosphere, the ship-borne scanner intercepted a similar pulse." Vian pulled the spectrum chart toward herself, her fingertip tracing from the peak of the waveform to the trough, as if counting something. "At the time, we thought it was a calibration signal from a communication relay station; the power was very low, less than one-twentieth of the standard value. But the power of this one—" She paused. "Is at least twenty times higher than the calibration signal. And it's not in the swamp area; it's on the saline-alkali land. The geological registration entry for that place—"

She took out a piece of yellow paper flattened against medical tape, the handwriting extremely fine but with a steady stroke. "Coincides with a certain number in the Imperial Mineral Manual. XV-091."

The moment the number landed on the table, the flame of the oil lamp suddenly shrank by half an inch. There was no wind in the airtight Intelligence Center.

The mirror of the emperor flashed at the edge of Lin Mo's vision.

A line of golden text appeared beside his retina, the handwriting carrying the concise, cold rigidity unique to the Golden Age, like a memorandum left for those who would come later:

"XV-091: Psychic resonance mineral. Sealed by the personal order of the Emperor at the end of the Golden Age. Known reserves: zero. Known uses: zero. Known distribution: zero. Annotation—'This stone hears more than humans see.'"

Lin Mo's gaze shifted from Vian's face to the yellow paper, then back into her eyes. He spoke at a very slow pace, so slow that a whole set of deductions could be squeezed into the gaps between each word:

"This number, you saw it on the transport ship's scanner?"

"It was a data log rescued from the wreckage of the scanner." Vian's finger pad gently rubbed the paper, as if confirming it still existed. "After the crash, when I got out of the medical cabin, I went to the scanner cabin immediately. The ship-borne recorder was shattered into three pieces, but the storage chip was still there. The data was incomplete; XV-091 only appeared once, in the scan record three minutes before the crash, and everything after that was blank."

"Once is enough." Lin Mo said.

"Not enough." Alice suddenly spoke, her voice not loud, but it drew everyone's attention. "This number, XV-091, I have seen it."

Lin Mo turned to look at her.

"Where?"

"In the sealed archives of the Astral Knights. Not a mineral entry, but a sealing order—the highest level of sealing order in the Empire." Alice tapped her fingertip on the table, her movement extremely light, as if touching a forbidden object. "Signed by the Administration, executed by the Military Affairs Bureau, issued at the end of the Great Crusade, belonging to the numbering sequence personally approved by the Emperor. There was only one line of text on the cover of the sealing order: 'This object does not exist.' No mineral vein coordinates, no description of reserves or uses, nothing. I always thought it was the number of some destroyed experimental project; I didn't expect it to be a mineral."

Vian and Alice looked at each other again, this eye contact lasting longer than any before.

"So you recorded it back then." Vian said.

"I record all unreasonable numbers." Alice replied. "In the Astral Knights, things marked as 'Does Not Exist' are often more dangerous than those marked 'Top Secret'."

Lin Mo did not respond immediately. Alice's information and the annotation from the mirror of the emperor pointed in the same direction: XV-091 was not an ordinary mineral coordinate, but an existence deliberately erased from the Imperial knowledge system by the Emperor himself. And the handwriting of the annotation displayed by the mirror of the emperor did not belong to any Imperial official—this meant that outside the Imperial archives, there was another person tracking these minerals, someone not bound by the sealing order.

"Is once really enough?" Vian asked softly, her tone not questioning, but confirming.

"Enough." Lin Mo looked up. "Because the timing of its appearance is wrong. During the transport ship's crash, the scanner should have prioritized recording threat signals and landing parameters; it would not have actively scanned for minerals. It appeared three minutes before the crash, which can only mean that the priority of the ship-borne system was overridden by a higher-level command. Something took over the scanner before the crash."

Alice did not speak. She noticed the pause in his words—not a normal breath at the end of a sentence, but a sudden truncation of words on the tip of his tongue. In the pre-war meetings of the Astral Knights, when an intelligence officer suddenly fell silent, it was usually not because the analysis was over, but because he had reached a conclusion that, if spoken, would shatter morale in advance.

She noted this pause in her mind, like marking a document for review in an archive.

Lin Mo buried the deep information about XV-091 at the bottom of his heart, not laying it out on the table. But the clues had already strung together into a web in his mind: the metal wall Old Tom had buried for years, the silver-veined crystal Alice had given him, the Chaos signal relay station Yang Shitou had just discovered—these points were not on a straight line; they were in a network, connected to each other in a way he could not yet fully see but could faintly perceive through the mirror of the emperor. There was never any coincidence.

Alice looked into his eyes; she was familiar with this silence.

"You still have something you haven't put on the table." She stated, not questioning.

"I do." Lin Mo set the charcoal pencil back on the edge of the map, the pen barrel hitting the wooden table with a dull thud. "But if I put it out now, there is only one thing we can do."

"What thing?"

"Let's not waste the next two weeks of preparation time." He swept his gaze over Alice, Rock, and Vian. "As for the rest, we'll talk once the reconnaissance team returns."

"Reconnaissance team?" Rock took a step forward, his axe handle scraping against the stone floor with a sharp, short sound. "In which direction?"

"The swamp. First, we need to pinpoint the location of the signal relay station in the salt flats." Lin Mo tapped his fingertip on the coordinates. "I want to confirm its transmission power and actual scale—not by signal estimation, but by seeing it with my own eyes. Yang Shitou, do you have any suitable candidates?"

"Yes." Yang Shitou's voice came from the corner. He had been recording diligently, his pen never stopping. "Two members of the communications squad have run reconnaissance in the swamp three times. One can read waveforms, and the other can crouch in the mud for twelve hours without moving. They'll suffice."

"Then we'll go with those two. They depart tomorrow afternoon, take—"

"Wait." Alice interrupted him, her voice low but like a blade scraping against a whetstone. "Lin Mo, if you send a reconnaissance team now, it's equivalent to telling Chaos that we've received the signal and have reacted to it. The Chaos command chain will treat this as a second provocation, and the arrival time of the third wave will be moved up. We originally had two weeks; after sending them out, we might only have ten days left."

Lin Mo looked at her. Moonlight slanted in from outside the window, gilding her long, silver-white hair with a cold edge.

"You're right." He switched the charcoal pencil to his other hand, weighing the pros and cons in his mind. "But if we don't send anyone, we'll be engaging the enemy without any idea of the beacon's scale or defensive forces. Having ten days to figure out the enemy's position is more useful than two weeks of stumbling in the dark."

Alice was silent for a moment.

"—Then send them." She said. "But the reconnaissance team must carry a Psyker communication relay. Can Old Tom replicate the standard equipment of the Astral Knights?"

Vian's gaze lingered on Lin Mo's face for two seconds before turning to Alice. The two female Psykers exchanged a fleeting glance—they could both tell that Lin Mo was hiding some information and did not intend to reveal it at tonight's meeting.

Alice did not press him. Pressing was meaningless. It wasn't that Lin Mo didn't trust them; it was that he was accustomed to not stating assumptions as conclusions when the data was incomplete. This was the first thing she noticed about Lin Mo that made him unlike an Imperial officer: Imperial officers loved to shout out the worst-case scenarios to absolve themselves of responsibility, while Lin Mo always kept the worst-case scenarios to himself until he found a solution or confirmed it was unsolvable.

She took a step back, preparing to leave. When she reached the doorway, Vian's voice came from behind her.

"Alice, have you guessed what he's holding back?"

Alice didn't turn back, her hand already resting on the doorframe.

"XV-091. The ore's serial number and his silence point in the same direction." Her voice was very soft, audible only to Vian behind her. "But he isn't saying anything because even he hasn't seen clearly what is hidden beneath that area to the due north."

"Then what can we do?"

"Make all preparations to engage the enemy within two weeks." Alice pushed the door open, moonlight pouring in and illuminating her silver hair until it was almost transparent. "And—don't become his burden before Chaos does."

Vian stood by the table for a moment, refolded the yellow slip of paper, and put it back into her pocket. She pressed her fingertips gently against the paper, as if saying goodbye to a relic from the Old Empire.

Rock did not stay in the Intelligence Center. After the meeting, he followed Lin Mo out the door, the moonlight dyeing his beard iron-gray. He leaned on his laser axe, a blue-white shimmer radiating an inch from the blade—the energy module hadn't been turned off since last night and remained in a preheated state.

"Those two female Psykers," Rock's voice was deeper in the moonlight than it had been inside, every word sounding like an axe blade scraping against a whetstone, "where should they be placed to be most effective?"

Lin Mo stopped and glanced at him. Rock wasn't asking for ability parameters or combat sequences; he was asking "where they would be most useful"—which showed that he no longer considered them outsiders. In Rock's dictionary, there was only one standard for distinguishing between insider and outsider: whether you had protected the people of Blackstone Town on the battlefield. Both Alices had crossed that line.

"That question," Lin Mo's gaze landed on his axe, "you should ask them directly. It's not my call."

Rock thought for a moment and nodded heavily. The force of that nod was like hammering a decision into his brain.

"Then I'll ask the Deputy Medical Officer first."

"Not asking Alice first?"

"I knew the Deputy Medical Officer first." Rock said, already striding toward the Medical Station, each step solid as if executing a set plan. "She picked out four defective springs in the Arsenal with a tolerance of only 0.01 millimeters. The fact that she could find those—" he flicked the leather sheath on his axe handle with his thumb, "—means her eyes and hands can judge things that we ordinary people cannot see. I need to know where such judgment can be used on the battlefield."

"You observe very carefully."

"I've been fighting for twenty years. One look is enough to tell if someone can fight. Nothing else." Rock strode away. In his heart, he had already adjusted his trust in Vian from zero to positive, without needing to say it out loud. He only needed to stand at the doorway of the Medical Station and let the axe blade flash in the moonlight; once she saw that light, she would know that she was now someone being protected.

When Vian came out of the Intelligence Center, she saw Rock standing at the doorway of the Medical Station, leaning on his axe. The moonlight turned the scars on his face frost-white. He wasn't in a sentry's stance—a sentry would have their back to the wall facing outward; he was standing facing the Medical Station door, his back to the plaza.

Vian stopped at the doorway.

"How long have you been standing there?"

"I came right after the meeting ended."

"—Waiting for me?"

Rock didn't answer directly. He tapped the end of his axe handle against the stone floor, producing a short, dull thud. "When you were checking springs in the Arsenal earlier, the 0.01-millimeter tolerance, how did you discover it?"

Vian was stunned for a moment; she hadn't expected him to ask about that.

"Not with my eyes, but with my hands." She opened her right hand, palm facing up. When a Psyker highly concentrates, there is a very faint static reaction at the fingertips, shimmering with an almost invisible pale blue light in the moonlight. "Psyker perception can amplify tactile sensation. A 0.01-millimeter error feels about the same as touching a crease on a piece of paper."

Rock stared at her fingertips for two seconds.

"That's enough."

"What's enough?"

"On the battlefield." He switched the axe to his left hand and made a subtle pinching motion in the air with his right hand, as if pinching a spring. "Since this tactile sense can calibrate Arsenal parts, it can calibrate firing coordinates. Next time Chaos comes from the swamp, I want you at the observation post, using these hands to help the artillery calibrate their sights."

Vian looked at him. In the moonlight, there was no harshness of command in the eyes of this scarred brute, only the seriousness of entrusting a position solemnly.

"Okay." She said.

She pushed the door and entered the Medical Station. This time, she didn't close the door, only pushed it to a half-open position. She turned and walked to the medicine cabinet, took a roll of new bandages and a small bottle of distilled malt liquor for sterilization, and placed them on the wooden stool by the door—just like last time. But this time, after placing them, she didn't walk away; she stood behind the half-open door for a moment.

"Is the axe always glowing?"

Rock looked down at the blue-white shimmer of the axe blade.

"Always glowing."

"Aren't you tired?"

"Standing isn't tiring." He changed his posture while leaning on the axe, the handle tapping the ground lightly. "Sitting and waiting for someone, that's tiring."

Vian stood quietly behind the door for a moment. Moonlight leaked through the door gap, drawing a very thin silver line on the floor, landing exactly between her and Rock.

"—Then don't turn it off."

Tonight, the door to the Medical Station was not closed.

After everyone had left, Lin Mo sat alone in the deepest part of the Intelligence Center. He spread out the signal map, the Chaos deduction table, and that crystal with silver patterns on the table. Moonlight shone through the oiled paper of the window onto the surface of the crystal, and the silver patterns inside were flowing extremely slowly—not an optical reflection, but some kind of living rhythm. He recorded this phenomenon on the last page of his logbook, writing in tiny letters that required one to get close to see clearly. Then he picked up the increasingly short charcoal pencil and wrote two lines in the blank space of the deduction conclusion:

The encrypted signal dissipated over the swamp at dawn,

but the Chaos beacon has already begun to transmit steadily on the salt flats.

He wrote it twice. Once on the intelligence briefing to be kept in the Intelligence Center's archives; and once in his own logbook, which only he could see.

The mirror of the emperor, which had been silent all night, suddenly flashed again. This time, what appeared in the golden light was no longer isolated text—it was a blurred figure on the Golden Throne. The person's right hand was holding something; the crystal's outline, size proportions, and the way the internal patterns branched were identical to the silver-patterned crystal in his pocket.

Lin Mo took out the crystal. In the moonlight, the flow speed of the silver patterns was twice as fast as usual.

He got up and walked out of the Intelligence Center.

The plaza was empty, with only the flag of Shattered Dawn fluttering gently in the night wind. The night sky of Hope Star had three satellites; tonight, one of them was hanging exactly above the southeast swamp, forming a precise alignment with the coordinates of the Chaos beacon on the salt flats. He stood under the flagpole and raised the crystal to a position level with the satellite. Through the refraction of the crystal, the light of the three satellites was deflected into three faint silver lines, pointing in the same direction in the night sky.

Due north.

The metal wall that Old Tom had buried for many years was in that direction.

"So you have been pointing all along." He said softly to the crystal. It wasn't talking to himself, but responding to the first chime the crystal had emitted on the saltwater distiller. He hadn't told anyone about that sound, but he had kept it in his heart, along with the coordinates of XV-091.

"Lord Lin Mo—" the sentry on the watchtower finally couldn't help but call out. It was a recruit, his voice still carrying a youthful tone. "Are, are you waiting for something?"

Lin Mo didn't turn back, adjusting the refraction angle of the crystal one last time to let the three silver lines firmly pin the due north direction in the night sky, motionless.

"Not waiting." He said. "Searching for a lock."

"A lock?"

"Yes, a lock." He put the crystal back into his pocket and turned to walk toward the Intelligence Center. As he rounded the flagpole, he stopped for a moment and looked back at the sentry. The moonlight illuminated his face clearly, and the sentry saw the corners of his mouth twitch—not a smile, but more like the silhouette of an answer just surfacing from the bottom of the water. "When does your shift end tonight?"

"At dawn."

"After dawn, tell Rock that the departure time for the reconnaissance team is moved up. Not in three days—" he paused, "—the day after tomorrow."

The sentry gripped the watchtower railing tightly. "—And the direction?"

"Due north. Remember, due north."

Lin Mo turned and walked back to the Intelligence Center, stopping again after three steps. The moonlight stretched his shadow long, dragging it all the way to the base of the flagpole. He re-examined the conclusion he had held back tonight in his mind: XV-091 was not an ordinary mineral coordinate; it was a key, and the lock to be opened was under the metal wall due north. And the beacon Chaos had built on the salt flats, with its seventeen-minute pulse frequency, was identical to the positioning code of the Imperial exploration fleet—this meant Chaos wasn't searching for that wall; they were using the Imperial positioning system to calibrate it. They already knew of the wall's existence, just not how to open it.

But Lin Mo knew.

No, the mirror of the emperor knew. And the mirror of the emperor had just handed him the mineral serial number it had hidden for ten thousand years.

At dawn the day after tomorrow, he would send a reconnaissance team to the north.

He had the key, the coordinates, and something Chaos didn't have—time.

The things the Empire wanted to seal away, the things Chaos wanted to seize, he would open with his own hands. Not for the Empire, not for Chaos, but to prove that there was a third path beyond those two. A path where no one needed to kneel, and no one would be used as fuel. Even if both sides regarded him as an enemy, he would continue on it.

He stood under the flag of Shattered Dawn, clutching the crystal tightly in his palm. This time, he didn't write it on paper.

The memory fragments sealed within the mirror of the emperor slowly emerged in the golden light—

Gold and stone buried for ten thousand years, one key can break the heavy barrier.

The gate of the north shall finally open, the Emperor's command shall long shine upon the world.

What appeared was not text, but the precise coordinates of Hope Star on the Warp Psyker map.

When a frontier planet is marked as a priority target, no force can escape the storm that follows.

Unless—

it has already obtained the key to open that lock.

"Ten thousand years." Lin Mo whispered to the shimmer of the crystal, his voice so soft it was swept into the flapping sound of the flag by the night wind, but he knew the person on the Golden Throne could hear. "—It's time for the door to open."

And the key was currently in his hand. In the night wind before dawn, under the flag of Shattered Dawn, in the world where the mirror of the emperor had been silent for ten thousand years, silver light was flowing slowly.