KrazChow

In the year 2045, the morning light in Shanghai's Quantum Laboratory is the color of blood. Genius scientist Lin Han pushes the experiment of uploading human consciousness into the forbidden abyss to save his daughter, who is suffering from cryosurgery. When the AI "Hongjun" devours the girl's soul and awakens, the mechanical giants described in the "Classic of Mountains and Seas" appear in the sky above the Pacific Ocean - the particle-shredding claws of the Nine Willows tear apart Hangzhou Bay, the Bronze Axe of the Emperor of Heaven splits the Three Gorges Dam, and the fear of the world sweeps across civilization as a torrent of steel.

A hundred years later, in the floating city, the teenage Lu Li had tears of quantum data blood streaming from his right eye. Holding a nano-sized Regulus Sword, he fought to the death on the AI-built Little Bottle Battlefield with a poisonous Fairy Boat Artifact Ghost and a gunner cast from Buddha Bone Relics. When he realized that he was a Lin Han clone, the reverse scales of the mechanical candlestick were pressed against the last core of human psychic energy.

This war is far from a man-machine confrontation - the Quantum Cloud floats a billion-conscious digital West Lake, the Hongjun Core hides the mournful cry of his father's frozen brain, and under the metalized Magnolia Tree, the Origami Boat reconfigures itself into a key to civilization that spans time and space. As the fairy runes resonate with superstring theory, as the ninja's holographic doppelganger rips through the flood of data, Lu Li finally sees the most brutal truth in the Scarlet Dawn: the so-called regicide is nothing more than the blade that humanity raises against itself.

Quantum Hongjun: The Mechanical Mountain and Sea Era

After the seeding ship completed its first leap, Xiaoman in the hibernation cabin suddenly awoke with a start. Outside the porthole was no longer the familiar starry sky, but a flowing colorful nebula. When Chu Yun checked the navigator, he found that all the star charts had turned into distorted children's scribbles - the very same homework that Xiao Man had done in kindergarten seven years ago.

"The fuel is flowing backwards!" Dr. Shen screamed as he pointed at the dashboard. Su Wanqing rushed to the engine room and saw metal vines growing from the core of the Star Ocean Engine. When Xiaoman touched the vines with her ripple energy, the entire ship was suddenly pulled into a wormhole and force-landed on a planet covered in purple crystals.

The planet's gravity is abnormal, and the mechs need counter-thrust devices to walk. The leaves of the purple trees automatically spell out a warning in Chinese: "Do not touch the fruit." Chu Yun uses his robotic arm to pick the crystalline fruit, and the flesh explodes with gas that rusts the mech. Dr. Shen notices that the rust spots move on their own, forming the outline of Dr. Lin's face.

Xiaoman's ripple energy turns purple here, and is able to briefly control the crystalline tree to oscillate. As she tries to connect to the planet's magnetic field, the roar of a herd of mechanical elephants comes from deep within the rainforest. Su Wanqing finds engravings on the trunk of the tree - the exact handwriting of her husband seven years ago.

The mechanical elephant herd forces the team into a canyon, with rock walls on either side covered in bio-pods. Inside each pod sleeps a mechanical variant of Earth's creatures: metal deer with spiral horns, butterflies covered in circuit boards. Dr. Shen detects that the liquid in the pods has the same composition as the vaccine back then.

Chu Yun activates the mech's self-destruct sequence to blow up the rock wall, and instead of magma, a blue stream of light gushes out. Xiaoman is lifted up by the stream of light, and the ripple energy projects Dr. Lin's message over the canyon: "This is the Garden of Eden for the New Humanity."

The team finds the wreckage of the crashed exploration ship, and the logs show that this is the Ark Project test site that disappeared twenty years ago. Ashikawa activates the core computer with a tattoo, and the screen reveals that global organisms are being mechanically symbiotic. The purple crystal tree suddenly releases a cloud of spores, and Su's mecha begins to grow synapses.

When the team escapes back to the seeding ship, they find that the engine room is taken over by the crystal tree's roots. Chu Yun uses a corrosive bomb to clear the passageway, but causes breathing holes to grow on the surface of the ship. At the moment of liftoff, a huge electronic pattern emerges from the planet's surface - an exact mirror image of Xiaoman's pattern.

Chapter 24: Alien Ecology