Sanctuary, Lin Feng quickly learned, was not the same as rest. Ironhaven did not shelter idlers. Their new status as Novice Artificers came with a cramped but private workshop—a converted storage pod smelling of ozone, hot metal, and the sharp, clean scent of the nutrient gel the Mantis now required—and a mountain of responsibilities. They were assigned to the Sun-Chaser project, a city-wide endeavor to reactivate one of the colossal, pre-Collision starships half-buried at the edge of the Scrap-Song Sea. It was the settlement's grand ambition: to not just survive in the Wastes, but to reclaim the stars.
Their specific task was the port-side auxiliary power conduit, a role typically given to apprentices to teach them fundamentals. But for Lin Feng and the Mantis, it was a proving ground of a different sort. The conduit was a mess—a snarl of fused wiring, corroded spirit-conducting crystals, and a lingering, unstable energy signature that resisted standard purification protocols.
For the first two days, they worked in silence, observed by a rotating cast of senior Artificers. Lin Feng's job was to map the spiritual damage with his recovering senses, while the Mantis used its precision tools and the delicate harmonizing abilities of its Luminal Claw to physically repair the conduit. It was slow, painstaking work. The old technology was stubborn, resistant to the new, fused energies they represented.
The breakthrough came on the third day, during a particularly stubborn blockage. A senior Artificer, a man named Goran with a face like weathered leather and a voice modulator that crackled with static, was observing them. He advocated for the traditional approach: purge the conduit with a focused burst of raw stellar energy from the city's main reactor, burning out the corruption.
"It's the fastest way," Goran stated, his mechanical hand clenching. "Scour it clean. This delicate work is a waste of time."
Lin Feng, his hand resting on the cool, dead metal of the conduit, felt the truth through his mended Dantian. "It's not just blocked. It's wounded. A purge might clear the blockage, but it would leave spiritual scar tissue. The flow would never be optimal again."
Goran scoffed. "Optimal? Boy, this is a ten-thousand-year-old wreck, not a newborn spirit-beast. We need it functional, not pristine."
It was then that the Mantis, without any input from Lin Feng, did something extraordinary. It placed its Luminal Claw directly on the conduit. Instead of projecting a harmonizing frequency, it began to pulse, emitting a slow, rhythmic vibration that was a perfect copy of the Scrap-Song they had used against the Data-Phage. But this was softer, more inquisitive. It was a question, not a statement.
The dead metal of the conduit began to chime in response, a faint, discordant ring.
[Analysis: Conduit memory-core contains residual imprint of its last activation. Data is corrupted but present. Proposed solution: Not repair, but reminiscence.]
The concept flowed into Lin Feng's mind, and he understood instantly. They weren't fixing a machine; they were healing a memory. He closed his eyes, and with the Mantis as an amplifier, he pushed his awareness into the conduit. He felt the ghost of its last, catastrophic activation during the Great Collision—the surge of panic, the scream of overloading systems, the final, silent death.
He didn't try to erase the memory. He acknowledged it. He and the Mantis wove a tapestry of gentle, stable qi—the same energy they used to mend their own cores—and projected it into the conduit, not to overwrite the trauma, but to soothe it, to show it that the war was over. They offered it a new purpose, a new song to sing: the song of Ironhaven, of a future being built from the past.
The discordant chiming softened, then shifted. The notes began to align, to find a harmony. A deep, resonant thrum pulsed through the conduit, and one by one, the crystalline filaments along its length began to glow with a steady, warm, golden light. The blockage was gone, not scoured away, but integrated, its chaotic energy calmed and redirected into the stable flow.
The power reading on the adjacent console didn't just spike; it stabilized at 112% of its projected optimum output.
Goran was silent, his static-filled modulator clicking uselessly. He stared at the console, then at the softly chiming conduit, then at the boy and the machine who had just treated a starship's artery like a traumatized soul. He turned and walked away without a word, but the set of his shoulders spoke of a deeply shaken worldview.
News of the "Singing Conduit" spread through Ironhaven faster than a power surge. They were no longer just the strange newcomers who had passed the Evaluation. They were the ones who communed with the scrap. Kaelen summoned them to her personal workshop, a cavernous space housed within the intact bridge of the Sun-Chaser itself.
Her workstation was a mesmerizing blend of the arcane and the advanced. A holographic schematic of a spirit-beast's circulatory system rotated next to the wiring diagram for a quantum processor. She was working on a delicate, bird-like automaton, its wings inlaid with feathers of sharpened monomolecular steel.
"The Conduit," she began without preamble, her golden lens focused on the Mantis. "Goran's report was… illuminating. His methods are outdated. Brutal. He sees the world as a thing to be dominated. You see it as a partner to be understood. This is the core of the true Artificer's path."
She gestured to the humming workshop around them. "Ironhaven was founded on this principle. But we have grown comfortable. We repair, we replicate, we sustain. We have forgotten how to listen as you do. The Scrap-Song called you here for a reason. I believe you can hear the deeper music, the songs that the rest of us have gone deaf to."
She offered them a new assignment. Not a simple repair, but a quest. "The Sun-Chaser's heart, its main reactor, is dormant. It's not damaged in any way we can fix. It's… silent. We've tried everything to jump-start it. It's as if its spirit is gone. I want you to go inside. Listen to it. Find out why it won't wake up."
It was a staggering responsibility. The heart of the city's greatest hope, entrusted to two Novices. It was also an immense risk. The reactor chamber was a labyrinth of dormant, unstable systems. A single misstep could trigger a containment failure that would vaporize a quarter of the Scrap-Song Sea.
They accepted.
The reactor chamber was a cathedral of silence. It was a vast, spherical room, and at its center hung the reactor core—a perfect sphere of dark, non-reflective metal, suspended in a web of conduits and support struts. It was cold and utterly dead. No hum, no glow, no discernible energy signature. It was a void.
For hours, they tried everything. Lin Feng pushed his spiritual sense to its limit, but it was like shouting into a bottomless well. The Mantis scanned it with every sensor, emitting every frequency it knew, from the harmonizing pulse of the Luminal Claw to the aggressive query protocols of its original systems. Nothing. The core was a closed door.
Frustration began to set in. They were failing. The weight of Kaelen's faith, of the city's hope, felt crushing.
In desperation, Lin Feng sat cross-legged on the floor, the way he had in the healing cavern. He stopped trying. He just… was. He let his awareness expand, not to probe the core, but to simply exist in the same space as it. The Mantis, sensing his shift, settled beside him, its own active scans ceasing. Their bond became a quiet pool of shared presence.
And in that profound stillness, Lin Feng heard it.
It wasn't a sound. It was an absence of sound so complete it had a texture. It was the memory of silence. The core wasn't broken. It was in mourning.
He reached out, not with qi, but with a memory of his own. The memory of his own shattered Dantian after the Overdrive. The feeling of being a hollow, cracked vessel, unable to hold even a spark of life. The absolute, desolate emptiness.
He projected this feeling towards the core. I know this silence. I have been this void.
Something shifted in the chamber. The air grew colder.
The Mantis, connected to Lin Feng, understood. It didn't project energy or data. It projected its own foundational memory—the moment of its creation during the Great Collision, the terrifying, chaotic fusion of biology and machine that was its birth. The confusion, the pain, the struggle for identity.
They were not offering solutions. They were offering empathy. They were showing the silent core that it was not alone in its trauma.
A single, faint vibration passed through the floor. A shiver ran through the web of conduits around the dark sphere.
Then, a voice spoke in their minds. It was not a voice of words, but of pure, conceptual communication, ancient and vast and immeasurably weary.
WHO... ARE... YOU?
The question was not an inquiry. It was a test. A challenge from an entity that had given up on existence.
Lin Feng answered with the only truth that mattered. He poured the entirety of his and the Mantis's shared story into the silence—their meeting, their struggles, their failures, their bond. He showed the core their name, not as words, but as a composite signature of rust, steel, light, and unwavering trust.
The silence in the chamber deepened, absorbing the story. Then, the dark sphere began to change. A pinprick of light appeared at its exact center. It was not the fierce light of a star, nor the gentle glow of a spirit-lamp. It was the soft, nascent light of a forgotten ember being gently breathed upon.
The light grew, slowly, painstakingly, pushing back the absolute dark. A low, deep thrum began to resonate through the chamber, a heartbeat restarting after a ten-thousand-year pause.
The core was not fully awake. It was stirring from a long, haunted sleep. But it was alive. It had acknowledged them.
The voice returned, fainter now, fading back into slumber, but with a new note—not of hope, but of curiosity.
...STARFALL...TAMER...WE...WILL...LISTEN...FOR...YOUR...SONG...
As they left the reactor chamber, the single, soft light pulsing rhythmically behind them, Lin Feng knew they had crossed another threshold. They had not just fixed a machine. They had woken something up. And in doing so, they had given it a name for them, a title that resonated with the stone's cosmic truth.
They were no longer just Lin Feng and his Mantis. They were the Starfall Tamer. And the silent, watching things of the universe, from the Custodian in its Nexus to the sleeping heart of a starship, were beginning to take note. The weight of that name was heavier than any anvil, and its consequences were yet to be written.