The last winter snow still clung to Mount Kunlun's jagged peaks when the mist began to move against the wind. Xuan Yuan—not yet called the Yellow Emperor—felt the marrow in his bones vibrate as the white-furred Zhibei beast emerged from the swirling vapors. Its lion-like body moved with the unnatural grace of celestial bodies crossing the night sky, each pawstep leaving frost patterns that shimmered and died like dying stars. The creature's golden eyes held the condensed wisdom of three millennia, pupils slit vertically like a dragon's.
The young chieftain fell to his knees, his bearskin cloak soaking in the melting snow. He had climbed the sacred mountain for forty days without sustenance, surviving only on hoarfrost and the prayers his shaman had etched into his tongue with bone needles. Now the divine creature exhaled, its breath smelling of lightning-struck pine, and spoke verses that branded themselves into his mind:
*"When copper drinks the blood of kin,*
*And ghosts walk clothed in human skin,*
*The chosen son of dragon's line*
*Must wield the sword of stars divine."*
As the Zhibei vanished, Xuan Yuan's hands found the meteorite shard he'd carried since childhood—a black stone that always stayed warm. It burned now with sudden ferocity, searing his palm with the image of nine bronze tripods.
**The Bronze Catacombs**
Twenty harvests later, the massacre at Youdu Village stank of scorched metal and charred marrow. Ying Long, the Emperor's chief tactician whose left eye had been replaced with an obsidian orb after the Battle of Fiery Cliffs, kicked over one of the metallic figures. The hollow bronze shell cracked like an egg, revealing the petrified human core within—a farmer's face frozen mid-scream, his beard transformed into copper filaments that still twitched as if alive.
"Chi You's shamans are binding prisoners to molten copper while their souls still cling to flesh," Ying Long reported, wiping soot from his scarred cheek. The soot left black streaks that resembled the cracks in ancient oracle bones. "One in ten survive the fusion... to become these abominations."
Around them, hundreds of bronze statues stood in grotesque tableaus—a mother forever shielding her child with copper-veined arms, warriors mid-swing with weapons fused to their hands, elders kneeling in prayer with molten metal pouring from their eye sockets. The rising sun reflected off their polished surfaces, creating a dazzling hellscape where every gleam carried the echo of a scream.
Feng Hou, the court astronomer whose fingers were permanently stained with star-chart ink, crouched to trace constellations in the blood-flecked dirt. "This isn't ordinary bronze," he murmured. The stars he drew pulsed faintly red before fading. "The Copper Mother ore they're using comes from only one place—the cursed mines beneath Mount Buzhou, where the sky pillar shattered during Gong Gong's rebellion."
A visceral shudder ran through the war council. Even the bravest warriors—men who had laughed while pulling arrows from their own flesh—made the ancient warding sign of crossed spears over their hearts. Only the Yellow Emperor remained still, his fingers brushing the bone flute at his belt. Legends claimed this was the very instrument Nuwa had used to mend heaven after the flood, its holes drilled with the teeth of the cosmic turtle Ao.
The jade cong at his waist—a cylindrical ritual artifact passed down from Shennong's lineage—pulsed faintly warm against his hip. Within its translucent green depths, shadowy forms moved: the Zhibei's prophecy coiling like smoke, the nine tripods of his childhood vision, and something new—a girl with firebird tattoos dancing at the edge of perception.
"We march at dawn," the Emperor decreed, his voice echoing strangely as if two people spoke simultaneously. Above them, a flight of cranes abruptly changed direction midair, their formation now spelling a battle rune from the lost Xia Dynasty.
The wind carried the scent of burning mulberry trees from the west, where Chi You's war drums had begun their ominous thunder. Somewhere beyond the poisoned rivers, the first copper golems were waking from their bloody slumber.