Time/Date: Early Morning, TC1853.01.01
The Prosperous District still wore its festival colors. Crimson lanterns swayed overhead like drops of blood against the pale morning sky, strings of silver firecrackers popped along the boulevards in celebration, and merchants bellowed New Year's blessings over the roar of crowds already deep in their cups. The air shimmered with incense and fried oil, the scents of prosperity and abundance that had never touched her lips.
Raven moved through it all like a shadow, hood drawn low over features that would soon no longer answer to the Brenner name. Her fingers brushed the weight hidden in her sleeve—not much, but everything she had in this world.
One hundred and sixteen bronze tigers. Six years of hoarding. Six years of hunger. Six years of work the Brenners would have sneered at: scrubbing tavern floors until her hands bled raw, carrying crates for market traders who paid in copper and curses, stitching torn boots for soldiers too poor to afford a cobbler's rates. Labor that bent her back and carved lines into her palms, but kept her alive when the Brenner kitchens offered her food that even the rats refused.
She remembered the day it all began, when desperation finally taught her cunning.
A bitter wind bit her skin. She was ten again, knees pressed into the frozen ground of the Brenner courtyard. Her stomach clawed at itself, empty since the previous afternoon when Selene had declared her unworthy of even the servants' scraps. Hours earlier she had dug through the family's refuse bins, desperate for anything—moldy bread, discarded vegetable peelings, meat too spoiled for the dogs. The housekeeper had caught her elbow-deep in garbage, her face streaked with shame and filth.
The lashing had been swift and brutal, twenty strikes across her shoulders that left her gasping. But Selene's punishment was worse: kneel in the snow until her body turned blue with cold, until her lips cracked and bled, until her fingers went numb and her vision blurred with unshed tears.
"You will learn your place," Selene had hissed, standing over her like a carrion bird. "Brenner blood does not grovel in refuse. If you wish to eat like an animal, you may endure like one."
She had sworn then—with ice biting her lips and tears frozen on her cheeks—never again to beg scraps from those who despised her. Never again to starve quietly while they feasted.
Who would believe that a daughter of the Brenners, even a bastard daughter, would dig through trash just to fill her belly? But thanks to that humiliation, that moment of absolute degradation, she had learned to slip away unnoticed. To find odd jobs in the lower districts where questions weren't asked and work was paid by the day. To earn coin to feed herself, buy her own threadbare clothes, even pay her school fees when the Brenner accounts mysteriously came up short for her education.
These one hundred and sixteen bronze tigers were hard-earned. Each one was bought with sweat, blood, and sleepless nights. For six years, she had barely managed four hours of rest each night, slipping out before dawn to work the early markets, returning after dark to collapse on her narrow cot. No wonder she was so short, so thin—malnutrition and exhaustion had stunted her growth.
Never mind. Soon, she would leave the Brenners behind forever and begin rebuilding her strength. If anything had become clear to her through these years of survival, it was this: strength was everything. Not the strength of name or bloodline, but the strength that came from refusing to break.
She forced her eyes away from the festival lanterns, each one worth more than she earned in a month. Somewhere across the city, back at Emberhall's marble halls, the family would still be recovering from the scandal of three days ago. Amara's "injury" and subsequent confinement to her chambers. Kael's explosive fury at the servant girl who had "pushed" his beloved down the stairs. Selene's cold calculations about how to contain the damage to the family's reputation.
For the first time in years, Raven had been genuinely forgotten in the chaos—not because she was forgiven, but because she had become irrelevant to their immediate concerns.
The freedom was intoxicating.
A girl laughed nearby, young and carefree, lifting a sleek communicator to her lips. The device gleamed silver and blue, its surface unmarked by wear or damage. Raven's pulse quickened as she recognized the model—a Quantum Series 7, worth at least fifty gold dragons new. More money than she'd ever held at once.
Yet the thought that struck her was sharp and clear: If I can find enough broken ones, I can build two working units. One to sell for immediate funds, one to keep for recording evidence, hacking security systems, gathering the proof I need to expose their cruelty.
The idea felt both foreign and familiar. In her dreams, she sometimes remembered workshops filled with precise tools, hands that moved with impossible confidence over delicate mechanisms. The satisfaction of bringing broken things back to life. Whether those memories belonged to her final merit world—where she had spent five centuries mastering every conceivable skill—or were simply wishful thinking, she couldn't be certain.
But when she'd repaired old Henrik's broken timepiece at the market, her hands had moved with startling sureness.
She gripped her sleeve tighter, feeling the reassuring weight of her life savings. One hundred and sixteen bronze tigers. Everything she owned in the world. Enough to risk it all on one calculated gamble.
The transport rail clattered and hissed as it descended past the 6th Ring's orderly districts, where smoke began to replace the festival's lantern-light. The car was crowded with early morning workers—factory hands, shop clerks, construction crews heading to their shifts. They avoided her eyes, these people who lived their lives according to schedules and expectations. She was something they didn't want to acknowledge: proof that the system they trusted could discard anyone.
"Threshold Station," the conductor announced, his voice tinged with distaste. "End of the line for registered transit."
Raven paid her fare—six bronze tigers that left her with one hundred and ten—and descended onto a platform that had seen better decades. Here, the empire's careful urban planning frayed at the edges like a tapestry left too long in the sun. Streets narrowed without logic, buildings leaned together like conspirators sharing secrets, and the air tasted of metal dust, industrial runoff, and the desperation of people living on society's margins.
The Threshold wasn't officially part of any ring. It simply was—a buffer zone that had grown organically where the displaced and desperate carved out existence between middle-class respectability and industrial servitude.
Walking through its twisted streets was like entering another world entirely. Here, the empire's rigid hierarchies dissolved into something more primal. Children played in the gutters while their parents haggled over scraps of metal and broken electronics. Vendors sold questionable meat from carts that had clearly seen better days. Music drifted from upper windows—not the refined melodies of the upper rings, but something raw and honest that spoke to the bone.
Iron Mountain Salvage Complex rose before her like a metallic mountain range, towers of broken technology stretching toward the ashen sky. It was simultaneously beautiful and terrible—a monument to waste and want, to the empire's endless hunger for the new built on the bones of the discarded.
The entrance was guarded by a woman whose age was impossible to determine. Her face bore the weathered look of someone who'd seen too much, survived too much, but her eyes were sharp as blade-steel. Cybernetic fingers clicked against a metal counting board as she processed a stream of early-morning scavengers.
"Twenty bronze to enter," she announced as Raven approached. "Pay by weight for anything you take out. No refunds, no exchanges, no questions about provenance. Clear?"
Raven counted the coins carefully, making sure each bronze tiger was properly minted and weighted. Twenty bronze tigers left her with ninety remaining. Still workable, if she was careful.
The gatekeeper's cybernetic fingers moved with mechanical precision as she counted the payment. "First time?"
"Yes."
"Word of advice, girl. The real money isn't in the obvious salvage. Anyone can spot valuable metals and intact components. Look for the broken things that can be made whole again, the damaged goods that still have potential. And watch your back—some of the scavengers get territorial about their hunting grounds."
Inside the complex, Raven understood why it was called Iron Mountain. The salvage yard sprawled across acres of carefully organized chaos. Mountains of discarded communicators rose beside hills of entertainment devices. Industrial equipment the size of buildings sat in neat rows, their purposes mysterious and their conditions ranging from lightly damaged to completely destroyed.
Artificial canyons wound between towering heaps, creating a maze that would have challenged her even with a map. But patterns emerged as she walked. Different specialists worked different areas—Tech Specialists with augmented vision sorting components with inhuman precision, Materials Experts testing alloy compositions with portable scanners, Innovation Scavengers hunting for unusual devices that might spark new inventions.
The sounds were overwhelming at first. Hammering echoed from makeshift workshops where scavengers performed field repairs on their finds. Cutting torches hissed as valuable metals were separated from worthless casings. Conversations in a dozen languages floated through the air as traders negotiated deals, shared information, or complained about the day's poor pickings.
Raven rolled her sleeves back and began to climb the nearest heap. The work was harder than she'd anticipated. The debris shifted underfoot with every step, threatening to send her tumbling down slopes of twisted metal and broken glass. Sharp edges caught at her clothes and skin, leaving thin cuts that stung in the chemical-tinged air.
But there was something almost meditative about the search. Hours blurred into aching hands and sharp cuts, but slowly she gathered salvageable pieces: copper wiring still bright and flexible, intact circuit boards that had somehow survived whatever catastrophe had brought them here, power cells with decent charge remaining and no obvious damage to their housings.
The work reminded her of something profound from her final merit world—not the grand cultivation techniques or cosmic powers, but the simple satisfaction of creation. In that five-hundred-year lifetime, she had mastered every conceivable skill. Not just sword arts and alchemy, but also craftsmanship, engineering, the patient art of taking broken things and making them whole.
Her pile of legitimate salvage grew steadily. Nothing spectacular, but decent components that could be resold to repair shops or electronics markets in the 6th Ring. More importantly, she began to spot the pieces she really needed.
A Quantum Series 5 communicator with a cracked screen but intact internals. A Series 6 with a destroyed interface panel but perfect circuit boards. A Series 7 missing its power coupling but otherwise undamaged. Components from different models, but all compatible. All capable of being combined into working units.
Closing her eyes, she reached inward to her soul space. The cultivation method she'd gained in Merit World 3 had transformed her soul across dozens of lifetimes into something vast as a world itself, but cosmic bindings constrained her to accessing only what this fragile mortal frame could safely contain—barely a grain of sand compared to her true strength. Still, even that fraction was enough for basic storage.
The communicators slipped into that pocket of compressed reality with familiar ease. She had done far worse things than appropriate abandoned salvage—had killed enemies in their sleep, poisoned water supplies to break sieges, used captured weapons against their former owners. Those had been necessities of war, choices made to protect those under her command.
This was barely even bending rules, let alone breaking them.
Her movements remained casual as she gathered additional components—legitimate salvage that would provide good cover for her real acquisitions. Circuit boards, power cells, interface panels that had clearly been discarded as worthless but could be repaired with the right knowledge and tools.
The weight of poverty pressed heavier than her armful of scrap. In her final merit world, she had commanded resources that could reshape continents. Treasuries filled with spirit stones, rare metals, and cultivation resources beyond mortal comprehension. Pills that could extend life by millennia. Weapons that could cleave through the fabric of space itself.
But those treasures were locked away, sealed behind cosmic laws that bound her power until this fragile mortal frame could handle their release. For now, she was reduced to scrounging through refuse like any desperate scavenger.
Patience, she reminded herself. Every foundation starts with the first stone.
When her arms were full of components—more than enough to build what she needed—she made her way to the weighing station. The process was efficient, almost industrial in its precision. Her salvage went onto digital scales that calculated weight to the gram, while scanners analyzed the metal content and estimated purity.
"Eighty-six bronze tigers," the tech specialist announced after running her materials through the electronic analyzers. His augmented eyes glowed faintly as they processed data streams she couldn't see. "Clean copper, excellent circuit boards, those power cells are worth the most. Professional eye for quality."
Raven counted the payment slowly, letting the weight of each coin register in her palm. Eighty-six bronze tigers gained, minus the twenty she'd paid for entry, minus the six for rail transport. Net profit: sixty bronze tigers. More than enough to fund her next steps.
But the real prize was the components themselves. Once assembled and tested, two working communicators that could provide both immediate income and future utility. The kind of devices that could record conversations, store evidence, or communicate across the city's districts without leaving traces in the official networks.
The thought sent a chill of anticipation through her chest. Five days from now, Amara's grand scheme would unfold at the New Year banquet. The elaborate trap involving drugged wine, compromising situations, and carefully positioned witnesses.
But this time, the trap would snap shut on the wrong target.
The scrapyard exit led her into a different part of The Threshold, where the chaos gave way to something approaching organization. Here were the workshops where salvage became useful again, where broken things found new purpose. The sound of hammering filled the air, punctuated by the whine of cutting tools and the hiss of welding torches.
She passed a shop where a woman was rebuilding communicators from salvaged parts, her movements quick and sure as she assembled circuits and tested connections. Another workshop specialized in power cores, their owner testing batteries and energy cells with equipment that looked military in origin. A third dealt in pure materials—metals sorted by type and purity, ready for new construction.
This was where her real work would begin. Not here, where too many eyes might notice and too many questions might be asked, but back in the 6th Ring where electronics markets thrived and refurbished goods found ready buyers.
As the transport climbed back toward the city proper, Raven allowed herself a moment of quiet satisfaction. The components in her salvage bag represented more than just potential profit—they were proof that even with nothing, even stripped of cosmic power and divine inheritance, she could still build something meaningful from determination and skill.
The Brenners had tried to break her, had spent years grinding her down until she was nothing more than an unwanted burden consuming their resources. But they had only taught her to be unbreakable.
Let them recover from their manufactured scandal, she thought as the railcar clattered through the industrial districts. Let them plan their next moves and sharpen their schemes. Soon, they would discover what happened when you discarded something that refused to stay broken.
The components pressed against her side like seeds waiting to sprout. In five days, when Amara's trap was ready to spring, Raven would be ready with tools of her own.
Tools that would ensure the truth, no matter how carefully buried, would finally see the light.