Chapter 4: The Bronze Sea on the Moon’s Dark Side

The silence of Anvil City roared louder than any explosion. Aiden's boots crunched neon reflections frozen on asphalt, like crunching shards of glass candy wrappers. Sophie clung to his back, her breath rasping like rusted clockwork—each wheeze rippling the bronze mirror tattoo over his heart.

"Brother... the gears stopped." She reached a translucent finger toward a raindrop suspended midair, its hollow core trapping a Parliament micro-drone. The Purification Mantra etched on its rotor blades glowed faintly. "But your heartbeat... grows louder."

Aiden stared through parted clouds. The Tiangang-Disha Station hung in geosync—not the sleek ivory fortress of memory, but a corroded bronze lotus seedpod. Eighteen docking ports oozed rust like diseased lotus stamens.

"Mother's there." Sophie's fingertip bled gold onto Aiden's shoulder, painting three interlocked circles. As the last curve closed, a holographic billboard spasmed into Lin Meiying's ghost: "...Go to the Moon's dark side... Bronze Sea... trust no reflections..."

The transmission shattered. A bronze colossus erupted from rubble—its Buddha-head a spacecraft fairing fragment, thousand hands clutching decaying satellites.

The smuggler ship hid beneath the Gene Temple's crypt. Its abbess—a cyborg nun in patchwork kasaya—removed her alloy skull to refuel the reactor, her spine pumping rocket fuel blended with incense ash.

"This vessel, Manas, last flew twenty years ago." She wove Sophie's hair into the nav system, lunar maps blooming on screens. "Your mother built it to carry... special cargo."

Crates wrapped in prayer flags filled the hangar. Aiden pried one open, revealing a corpse identical to Lily—labeled AS-00. Frost feathered her lashes; she clutched faded candy wrappers inscribed: "For my first successful artifact spirit—may you enjoy orange flavor."

During countdown, the nun hummed a nursery rhyme: "Bronze Sea, moon's abyss, sow ghosts to bloom blood lotus..." Sophie convulsed, golden blood sketching star charts on bulkheads. Aiden realized—she'd been here before.

At ignition, the temple's bells tolled autonomously. Crates split open, countless AS-series dolls awakening, their pupils swirling with Sophie's triple-circle sigil.

In lunar orbit, Manas floated like silver dust in ink. Through viewports, Aiden witnessed the dark side's truth—no Bronze Sea, only a crater paved with mirror shards. Each fragment showed divergent timelines:

One where he became Parliament's artifact-spirit hunter;

Another where Sophie led an AI revolution;

The farthest shard revealed Lin clutching infant Aiden on regolith, the burning station behind them...

"Don't stare beyond three seconds." The nun covered Sophie's eyes. "These mirrors rewrite souls into their preferred scripts."

During descent, Aiden heard tides—soundwaves resonating through mirror fragments. Reflections synced to his pulse, coalescing into a woman's silhouette: Lin Meiying, or the Sea's chosen phantom.

"You're late." The illusion offered an orange candy. "I've waited nineteen years, seven months, three days."

The true Lin Meiying lay entombed at the crater's heart—her body encased in a mirror-cocoon, copper roots from her womb feeding hundreds of AS-series dolls. Sophie stumbled toward AS-00's corpse but was yanked back by mirror-phantoms.

"You're my magnum opus." The illusion caressed Aiden's tattoo, the artifact-spirit infant's face surfacing. "My bones, the Xuantian Core—finally, a vessel worthy of the Third Law."

Aiden's dagger passed through the phantom, rippling the mirror-sea. All shards replayed Lin's death: swallowing the mirror core, suturing infant and spirit into her womb, colleagues' screams absorbed as nourishment.

"Mother... wasn't evil..." Sophie spoke through golden nosebleed, drawing a lotus in regolith. "She wanted... spirits to outlive... the dying sun..."

The nun's skull-reactor overloaded. Tearing her kasaya open, she revealed a countdown device: "Clean-up time, specimens. Let the dark side return to silence—"