The First Academy opened its doors to a new intake a year after the fall of the Heart of the Swarm.
Opening the gates proved easier than changing the habits within.
Some instructors continued to seat students according to rank. In the dining hall, expensive meals were sold in the former Upper City building, while cheap ones were served in the old dormitory. There was no formal ban, but the children once again divided into those who could afford enhancers and everyone else.
Fan Yuan did not declare another revolution. He and the students calculated the costs and discovered that the academy was overpaying a company owned by an old clan to maintain its ornamental fountains. The contract was cancelled, the water diverted to the laboratories, and the savings used to provide the same decent meal for everyone.
"You have destroyed the historic character of the campus," the former dean complained.
"If history requires children to go hungry for the sake of a pretty jet of water, it belongs in a museum."
They built a training ring where the main fountain had stood. Chi Yuyan sometimes brought younger pupils there and told them how she had once looked at that water as proof that another world existed.
"And now?" a child asked.
"Now it is just a convenient place to fall on a padded floor."
She demonstrated a basic turn and did indeed fall with the pupil. They both got up laughing.
A free synchronisation centre was built where the old assembly hall had stood. Students learnt not only how to coordinate mecha-forms, but also the limits of access, the right to refuse and a commander's responsibility. Every training contract had an expiry date and could be terminated by either party.
The old instructors called the programme excessively cautious. Vierlia always gave them the same answer:
"If you command well only when your partner cannot say 'no', you are not a commander. You are a walking malfunction."
After her injuries, she never regained her former speed. Her left wing was replaced with a standard production module. Vierlia could have received an experimental prosthetic of the highest class, but chose the same one issued to front-line veterans.
"Trying to prove how modest you are?" Fan Yuan asked.
"I want to know it is good enough for everyone else. If it breaks, I will make the engineers improve the entire production line."
She became rector of the academy and still insisted that Fan Yuan address her as his superior officer. He complied only when he considered it reasonable.
Su Zhihu took command of the Eternal Legion. The name no longer referred to a one-man detachment. It was now a rapid-response service open to mecha-maidens and commanders of any rank who passed a public examination.
The first question on the examination was:
"What will you do if an order conflicts with the aim of protecting people?"
"Obey without question" was considered the wrong answer.
Forty former penal soldiers became its first captains. Not one returned to the unit that had once sent them to certain annihilation. Its official designation was preserved in the museum, alongside expired armour and lists of missions from which they had not been expected to return.
Nalan Qingxin declined to lead the conglomerate. The company passed into the hands of a mixed council comprising workers, engineers and victims of its laboratories. Nalan created an independent, open-source registry of awakenings. Every alteration to a result could be seen by the awakened person and three independent observers.
In its first year, the registry did not assign a single final F.
A low result now meant only that a person needed different conditions or further examination. It did not bar them from education, treatment or civilian professions.
The new registry met resistance in the provinces. Local officials were accustomed to taking money to raise people's ranks. Now every alteration was visible to independent observers, and that familiar source of income vanished.
In three cities, the equipment was deliberately disabled. Nalan Qingxin arrived with repair teams and opened temporary testing stations in the public squares. The queues stretched for miles.
The first person tested was an elderly woman who had been considered an F-rank mecha-maiden for forty years. The registry discovered that she had a rare ability to purify contaminated water. She was almost useless in combat. In the post-war districts, she proved more valuable than a strike division.
"It is too late for me to enrol at the academy," the woman said.
"But not too late to teach the engineers," Nalan Qingxin replied.
Six months later, her purification systems were operating in twenty settlements.
The country gradually came to understand that the scale from F to SSS measured only how useful a person was in war. Civilian life required thousands of abilities the old system had never even named.
Liu Ruyan came to Fan Yuan after one of the ceremonies.
She no longer wore the Han corporation insignia. Following the investigation, Han Qingting had been stripped of his illegal implants, and his family had lost its seats on the academy council. Liu Ruyan had completed a course in medicine and now worked at a clinic in the rebuilt districts.
"I have wanted to apologise for a long time," she said.
"For leaving?"
"For why I left. I believed your rank determined your worth. Then, when you became powerful, I decided my only mistake had been throwing away a prosperous future."
Fan Yuan listened without anger.
"You were wrong. But you do not have to spend the rest of your life proving it to me."
"Do you forgive me?"
"Yes. I am not asking you to come back."
Liu Ruyan laughed through her tears.
"Fair enough."
She left without the burden she had carried in. And that was where their story ended: no punishment, no belated romance, only an honest admission of their mistakes.
Chi Yuyan recovered slowly. After eight months, she could summon half of Dragon Abyss. Two months later, she stopped trying to regain her former appearance.
The damage inflicted in the laboratory had changed her source for ever. Instead of an enormous combat form, she now had light armour and the ability to maintain hundreds of independent links. Chi Yuyan was no longer their principal strike fighter. Now she could hear the network and detect the nodes that had been left alone.
Chi Yuyan opened the school she had promised for low-rank awakened. A sign hung over the entrance:
"Here we measure needs, not worth."
Fan Yuan taught beside her.
Without a psychic source, he could not demonstrate a single combat technique. But he could dissect commanders' mistakes, teach students to read the field and ask the question that irritated them more than any other:
"Did you ask your partner?"
In the first lesson, a young S-rank commander said that a strong mecha-maiden ought to trust him without question. Fan Yuan set him against a training team of five low-rank partners.
The S-rank commander tried to direct his mecha-maiden's every movement. She responded perfectly, but to only one threat at a time. The low-rank team divided responsibility for watching the field and surrounded them within two minutes.
"I am stronger than all five of them," the student protested after his defeat.
"Exactly. So you decided no one else needed to think."
"What if my partner makes a mistake?"
"You correct it together. You will make mistakes too."
"I am S-rank."
Fan Yuan showed him his own identity card, marked with the letter F.
"And I once saved you from the Heart of the Swarm. A letter does not protect you from stupidity."
By the end of the term, the young commander had stopped winning alone. His team, however, had become the best in the rescue trials.
Some parents were outraged that the legendary Eternal War God worked as an ordinary teacher. He was offered a government post, a monument and a title for life.
He refused everything except the salary.
"Why?" Nalan Qingxin asked. "With your influence, you could push the reforms through faster."
"A man who has just destroyed an eternal commander should not become an eternal minister."
"You could stand for a fixed term."
"One day. First I want to see whether the new order can stand without my authority holding it up."
He did not withdraw from public life. He spoke at hearings, argued with the military and helped the Eternal Legion. But every time, he returned to the school, where the children had no idea which places they would once have been forbidden to occupy.
Two years later, the first class sat its final examination.
The best student was a girl from the laboratory capsules, the same one Nangong Ci had carried out last. Her source was classified as unstable, with no letter rank. She led a repair team and saved more people during the trial than all the strike groups combined.
At the ceremony, the girl asked Fan Yuan:
"What rank are you now?"
"F."
"So F is a good rank after all?"
"It is just a letter."
She thought about that, then crossed the rank off her training card.
The other children did the same.
Open in the reader