The rescue teams found the container forty minutes later.
Vierlia was the first to emerge from beneath the wreckage. Her left wing had been destroyed and her shoulder pierced, but she cleared a way out for the others herself. Su Zhihu carried Mei Lan and the bound Murong out. Nalan Qingxin held on to the archive crystal until the last moment, and only then lost consciousness from the pain in her broken arm.
Chi Yuyan lay beside Fan Yuan.
Not one instrument could detect her source. The doctors concluded that her mecha-form was gone for ever. Then a single golden scale flared on her palm. Not SSS-rank, not the Dragon Abyss, but simply a sign that her source was alive.
Fan Yuan smiled and lost consciousness again.
For the first week the doctors allowed no visitors. Even an ordinary conversation triggered phantom impulses in Fan Yuan: his brain kept searching for thousands of connections that no longer existed. Silence woke him, and he would try to check on the fighters until he remembered that he could not sense a single source.
Chi Yuyan sat outside the door and sent in notes on paper.
"Vierlia is arguing with the doctors. So she's alive."
"Su Zhihu is already trying to take command of the next ward."
"Nalan Qingxin has broken one arm and three terminals."
"All forty voices accounted for. We checked twice."
Fan Yuan read them until he stopped seeing phantom golden lines from the system between the letters.
On the eighth day Chi Yuyan came in herself. She did not ask how he was feeling. She simply set two cups of vile hospital tea on the table and began telling him about the repair crews arguing over what to call the new network.
"Most of them want to keep 'the Eternal Legion'."
"Too grandiose."
"You came up with it."
"The system came up with it."
"And they chose it. Too late to complain now."
Fan Yuan laughed for the first time since waking. No phantom impulse came.
He spent three weeks in hospital. His psychic channel had burnt out completely. The doctors offered experimental implants, but none could restore his commander's power. When he was discharged, his new identity card bore the same thing with which the story had begun: F-rank.
Only now the letter decided nothing.
Forty fighters were waiting for him at the hospital gates.
"Commander present," Su Zhihu said.
"I'm not a commander any more."
"That's a title, not an organ."
"And who gave me that title?"
"We did. You can file a complaint."
The Eternal Brigade did not disband when the system vanished. The distributed keys continued to work. Any five volunteers could form a unit without a titled commander. Rank no longer restricted access to the network, because the school crystals had been disconnected from the Abyss.
In the first month, forty thousand wrongly assessed sources were discovered across Great Xia.
The walls did not come down overnight. In some districts of the Upper City, residents demanded the return of access controls. In the Lower City, clan houses came under attack. The interim headquarters banned collective punishment and formed open investigative teams with representatives from both cities.
Vierlia took charge of the joint security service. Her first order removed the field for social origin from military forms. Her second placed three generals who had once been her mentors under arrest.
"You betrayed your own people," one of them said.
"My people are those I swore to protect. You removed yourselves from their number."
Huangfu stepped down once the front had stabilised. The investigation found that he had not taken part in the experiments, but had concealed circumstantial evidence for years to preserve the political balance.
"If the court rules that my silence was a crime, I will accept its sentence," he declared.
"The country will lose an experienced commander," Fan Yuan observed.
"And if it keeps me solely because of my past service, the new law will begin with the old privilege."
The public trial began six months later. It was broadcast in every district. For the first time, residents of the Lower City could see the documents, ask questions and hear the names of those who had signed the orders.
Preparations for the trial nearly split the interim headquarters. Some residents demanded a special tribunal and the advance designation of the old clans as enemies of the people. Lawyers warned that a verdict handed down without a defence would turn the proceedings into the victors' revenge.
Fan Yuan was summoned to the hearing.
"They tried me in twenty minutes," he said. "That is precisely why their trial must take as long as it takes to examine every piece of evidence."
"Are you defending Murong?" asked the Lower City elder.
"I'm defending a law that does not change its rules according to whom we hate."
The trial was postponed for two months so that the accused could obtain defence counsel and the victims' families could gain access to the archive. The decision was unpopular. For the first time, Fan Yuan was jeered by people who called him a hero.
But Fan Yuan did not back down.
When the trial began, none of the accused could claim they had been denied a voice. And no family name could keep the evidence hidden.
Murong Zhen tried to present the full activation of the Abyss as a necessary sacrifice. The prosecutor displayed the evacuation list, which contained only the families of Council members.
"We were preserving the core of civilisation," Murong said.
The mother of a nine-year-old test subject answered from the gallery:
"A civilisation that does not include my child is not worth preserving."
Murong Chengtian testified against his father. His cooperation was taken into account at sentencing, but he still had to answer for the torture of Chi Yuyan and the other test subjects.
The head of the Nalan conglomerate confirmed the equipment shipments and disclosed the accounts. His confession helped recover the stolen funds, but did not absolve him. He received a custodial sentence and handed the company over to an interim workers' council.
Nalan Qingxin attended the trial without her clan emblem.
"Are you satisfied?" her father asked before the sentence was announced.
"No. A just sentence does not necessarily feel good."
"Will you ever call me Father again?"
"If, after serving your sentence, you stop explaining crimes away as necessary. Not before."
The most difficult case was Nangong Ci's.
She handed the resistance archive over to the court, named those who had organised the attacks and confessed to abduction, murder and arms dealing. The defence asked the court to take her years of torture into account. The families of the dead demanded a life sentence.
Luo Jun's sister spoke last.
"Nangong Ci killed my brother," she said. "Then she saved me and one hundred and eighty other people. One does not erase the other. If you acquit her because of what she did last, you will repeat the law of the Upper City, where high rank could buy innocence. If you forget what the laboratories made her, you will repeat the same lie from the other side."
The court sentenced Nangong Ci to twelve years in prison, with work in the programme to rebuild the affected districts, no right to command and no reduction of her sentence for military service.
Nangong Ci did not appeal the sentence.
"Too lenient," Nangong Ci said to Fan Yuan after the hearing.
"You don't have to try to get out early."
"You're still irritating."
"So some things in the world haven't changed."
Huangfu received two years of restricted service and a lifelong ban on holding sole command. After the trial, he went to teach the history of warfare at the First Academy.
The old clans lost their special status. Their assets were used to treat the test subjects and rebuild the Lower City. But something else mattered more than the confiscations.
The law of Great Xia no longer divided its citizens into residents of the Upper and Lower Cities.
The dismantling of the wall began on the day the law came into force.
Before work began, the crews found old energy channels inside the concrete. They were still drawing small amounts of power from homes in the Lower City. The Abyss had been destroyed, but the system kept running through sheer inertia.
An engineer suggested simply cutting the cables. Chi Yuyan insisted that they trace each one first. Some were already supplying hospitals in the Upper City. An abrupt shutdown would have killed patients who were not to blame for the way the network had been built.
For three months, the districts built new shared substations. Only then was the last hidden channel closed.
The wall did not begin to fall on the day a fine-sounding law was passed, but only when the infrastructure existed to let people live without the old injustice.
Fan Yuan did not speak from the main platform. He stood in the crowd beside Chi Yuyan. Construction mecha-maidens from both districts lifted the first concrete block.
"You used to dream of punching a path through the sky," she said.
"Turns out a pneumatic drill is more practical."
"And much louder."
The wall did not fall like a symbol in some stirring legend. There was dust, queues of machinery, arguments over new roads and people frightened of change. But every block that came down could no longer be put back unnoticed.
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