The Southern Empire had finally realized that neither wood nor stone could breach the Iron Gorge. Their architects had failed, and their gold-clad infantry had been crushed by men who seemed to have the density of mountains. They had learned the hard way that a fair fight against the Ashina was a death sentence. So, they turned to their oldest and most cowardice weapon: Alchemy.
Alpagu stood atop the hexagonal ramparts, his eyes fixed on the southern horizon. The air had changed. It wasn't the crisp, biting wind of the peaks anymore. It was heavy, sweet, and carried a faint yellowish hue that clung to the valley floor like a dying breath. He didn't need his "görü" to know what was coming. He could smell the sulfur and the fermented nightshade from miles away.
"Bögü, get the men inside the deeper shafts," Alpagu commanded, his voice devoid of urgency but filled with a cold, analytical certainty. "The South has stopped fighting with iron. They are fighting with breath now. Tell them to seal the stone doors and use the damp moss to plug the gaps."
From the ridges, dozens of Southern catapults fired. But they didn't fire the heavy boulders that Alpagu had used to reinforce his walls. Instead, they fired fragile ceramic jars, painted with the seal of the Imperial Alchemists. They shattered against the rocks with a hollow clink, releasing a thick, mustard-colored vapor that began to settle in the low points of the gorge like a suffocating blanket.
"What is this foul sorcery, My Bey?" Bögü coughed, covering his mouth with a thick leather wrap. He watched as a small mountain bird, caught in the path of the fog, dropped dead from a branch, its lungs seemingly turning to liquid instantly.
"It's not sorcery. It's sulfur, chlorine, and crushed nightshade," Alpagu said, watching the gas roll toward them. "They are trying to turn the air into a cage for our lungs. They think our strength comes from our muscles, but they forget that muscles need oxygen to burn. They are attacking our internal combustion."
The Engineering of the Breath
Alpagu knew he couldn't build a stone wall against a gas. To survive this, he had to redesign the way his people interacted with the atmosphere. He retreated to his laboratory—a cave filled with bubbling vats of resin, charcoal, and mineral salts. He didn't have the luxury of modern technology, but he had a deep understanding of Fibrous Filtration and Chemical Neutralization.
"The lung is just a series of branching tunnels," Alpagu explained to Tunga as he worked with thin layers of charcoal-impregnated wool and pine needles. "The poison enters because the tunnels are open and defenseless. We cannot close the tunnels, or we die of suffocation. We must create a secondary barrier—a living filter."
He began to mix a new serum, but this one wasn't for bone density. It was an alkaline paste, thick and black as tar, designed to coat the mucous membranes of the throat and lungs. He added ground limestone and a specific mountain fungus that absorbed toxic particles. It was a crude, biological "active charcoal" filter designed to live within the body.
"Drink it," Alpagu said, handing a bowl of the black sludge to Bögü. "It will burn. It will turn your saliva to ash and make every breath feel like you are inhaling hot coals. But your lungs will not melt when the yellow fog hits. It will neutralize the acid before it reaches your blood."
Bögü drank it without hesitation, his throat glowing a faint, sickly blue as the minerals settled into his tissue. One by one, the Alpha-Squad followed. They stood in the dark of the cave, their eyes glowing, their breathing heavy and metallic. They were no longer just men; they were biological systems optimized for a toxic world.
The Yellow Void
The Southern Alchemists moved into the gorge under the cover of the gas. They wore heavy leather suits coated in wax and carried glass eye-pieces that made them look like giant, predatory insects. They moved slowly, carrying hand-pumped sprayers filled with liquid fire and concentrated acid. They expected to find a graveyard. They expected to find the Ashina warriors clutching their throats, eyes melted by the chlorine.
Instead, they found a silence so deep it felt heavy.
As the first Southern unit reached the base of the hexagonal rampart, a figure emerged from the yellow mist. It was Bögü. He didn't wear a mask. He didn't have a cloth over his face. He stood tall, his skin now a permanent, slate-grey hue, his chest moving in slow, powerful heaves. The mustard gas swirled around him, but instead of burning his flesh, it seemed to simply slide off.
The Southern alchemist raised his sprayer, panicked by the sight of a man breathing poison. He pumped the handle, ready to douse Bögü in naphtha. But Bögü moved with a speed that defied his massive weight—a byproduct of the skeletal reinforcement Alpagu had perfected in the previous weeks.
Bögü didn't swing a sword. He used a Vacuum Strike. By snapping his reinforced palm through the air at a precise, calculated angle, he created a sudden pocket of low pressure.
The physics were simple: the sudden drop in pressure sucked the yellow gas into a localized vortex, and when the alchemist pulled the trigger, the fire didn't lance forward. It was sucked back into the sprayer's own nozzle by the vacuum Bögü had created.
The explosion was contained but lethal. The Southern alchemist was consumed by his own fire in a heartbeat.
The Architecture of the Cell
Alpagu watched the skirmish from a higher ledge, his eyes scanning the battlefield not for glory, but for data. He saw that while the alkaline coating held, his warriors were becoming sluggish.
"The oxygen intake is dropping," Alpagu noted, scratching a mark on a stone tablet with a piece of flint. "The filter is too thick. It neutralizes the poison, but it restricts the gas exchange in the alveoli. They can only fight at peak capacity for eight minutes before the blood turns acidic."
He realized he needed a more permanent solution. The "Usul" of the breath wasn't just about filtering; it was about Oxygen Storage. He began to think of the human muscle as a battery. If he could force the muscles to store more myoglobin—the protein that carries oxygen—his warriors could fight even if they stopped breathing entirely for short bursts.
Usul 9: Anaerobic Optimization.
"Bögü! Withdraw!" Alpagu shouted, his voice echoing through the gorge. "Don't chase them into the flats! Let the fog settle!"
He knew the South had more jars. He knew they would try to flood the entire gorge until the air was nothing but acid. He needed to find the source of the gas. He looked up at the southern ridges and saw the Alchemists' tents—guarded by a new kind of soldier. These men weren't wearing gold; they were wearing dark, matte-black plate.
"Western Mercenaries," Alpagu muttered. "The Mimars have hired protection."
The Sabotage of the Source
Alpagu didn't send Bögü this time. He took Ghost and slipped into the mist. Because his own body was the most advanced prototype of his research, he could move through the gas with minimal discomfort. His lungs felt like they were filled with sand, but his "görü" allowed him to see the thermal signatures of the Southern camp through the haze.
He reached the ridge where the ceramic jars were stored. He didn't try to break them. That would only release more gas. Instead, he looked at the Structural Integrity of the storage platform—a wooden scaffold built over a steep drop.
He knelt at the base of the primary support beam. He didn't use a saw. He used a small, Sky Steel chisel. He didn't cut the wood; he found the Natural Grain and inserted the chisel at a forty-five-degree angle.
"If I strike here," Alpagu whispered to Ghost, "the weight of the jars themselves will do the work. Gravity is the only architect that never sleeps."
He struck the chisel once. A sharp, clean crack rang out, unheard over the bubbling of the alchemists' vats. He waited. He watched as the wood began to groan, the fibers slowly pulling apart under the massive weight of thousands of pounds of ceramic and liquid poison.
As he retreated, the scaffold gave way. It didn't just fall; it folded. The jars slid into the Southern camp's own water supply, shattering and releasing a concentrated wave of gas and acid directly into their own tents.
The screams that followed were not heroic. They were the sounds of an empire being consumed by its own cowardice.
The Toll of the Evolution
By the time Alpagu returned to the ramparts, the yellow mist was clearing, washed away by a sudden mountain rain. The Ashina warriors were sitting on the stones, many of them coughing up black, blood-flecked bile. The alkaline paste was a heavy price to pay.
"My Bey," Tunga said, his hands shaking as he cleaned his tools. "We survived the breath of the South. But look at the men. Their skin... it isn't turning back. It's staying grey. And their voices... they sound like grinding gravel."
Alpagu looked at Bögü. The warrior's eyes were bloodshot, and he was staring at his own hands as if they belonged to a stranger. The cobalt and the alkaline serum were fusing, creating a new kind of tissue—part organic, part mineral.
"We are moving past the point of being human, Tunga," Alpagu said, his voice flat. "The South is forcing us to become harder than the world they live in. If we stay as we were, we die. If we change, we survive, but we lose the 'softness' of the old life."
"Is it worth it?" Bögü asked, looking up at Alpagu.
Alpagu didn't answer immediately. He looked at the shattered Southern camp in the distance. He looked at the hexagonal wall that had held against fire, stone, and gas. He looked at his own hands, which no longer felt the cold of the mountain wind.
"Worth is a calculation of cost versus result," Alpagu said. "The result is that the Ashina still breathe. The cost is that we may never breathe like men again. I didn't choose this war, Bögü. I only chose not to lose it."
That night, as the tribe recovered, Alpagu sat alone. He felt a strange vibration in his chest—a secondary heartbeat. It wasn't his own. It was the Resonance of the mountain. By changing his biology to survive the gas, he had accidentally tuned himself even closer to the frequency of the earth.
He realized then that his "görü" was evolving. He wasn't just seeing the surface of things anymore. He was starting to see the Atoms—the tiny, vibrating structures that made up everything. He could see the chlorine molecules still hanging in the air. He could see the carbon in the wood.
"The Mimars of the West don't know," Alpagu whispered to the darkness. "They think they are building machines. They don't realize that the greatest machine is the one they are standing inside of."
But the South was not done. As the sun began to rise, a new sound echoed from the valley—a sound Alpagu had been dreading. It wasn't the thud of a catapult or the march of boots. It was a high-pitched, piercing whistle.
The High Mimars were coming. And they were bringing the Sonic Bells.
.-.-.