Although the rain had stopped, the acid fog in the Maya district had grown thicker, resembling countless ghostly phantoms haunting the intricate network of narrow alleyways.
Cyrus departed first, carrying the hibernation pod containing Dahlia and heading towards the ruined temple that was supposedly immune to the Council's detection. Aaryan stood alone in the shadows at the entrance to the alleyway, clutching the object that Dahlia had placed in his palm before she lost consciousness.
It was an unfinished metal pendant.
In the Maya district, where ethereal punk was prevalent, most crafts were filled with rough rivets and exposed gears. However, this pendant was exceptionally delicate, crafted from fine brass and a translucent white crystal. It resembled a miniature, wind-up mechanical heart.
"Hiss—"
Aaryan gently flicked the spring-loaded lever on the side of the pendant. A series of fine, rhythmic clicks rang out and the tiny gears inside the pendant began to mesh and turn. This caused the originally dull white crystal to emit a soft glow. The frequency of this movement was perfectly synchronised with Aaryan's rapidly beating heart.
He remembered Dahlia during the countless nights they had spent hiding from capture under the dim light of an oil lamp. She would use her blind eyes to focus on a magnifying glass, her fingertips covered in tiny scratches from polishing these insignificant parts.
"This is a 'Twin Wind-Up Heart'," Dahlia's ethereal voice seemed to echo in his ears. 'In ancient white magic records, when the fates of two souls are inextricably linked, this mechanical contract can share their burdens. Aaryan, if one day you are about to be consumed by that 'devouring' power, open it..."
Aaryan closed his eyes and felt the faint vibration of the pendant at his fingertips. Suddenly, he understood: Dahlia had foreseen this ending the moment she discovered his secret. She was not only healing his wounds; she was also trying to use this mechanical heart to find an outlet for his cursed royal bloodline.
But now, only half of the pendant was rotating. The other half, where Dahlia should have been, was empty and radiated a chilling aura.
Just then, the shadows deep in the alley stirred.
"Hey, big guy! Carrying something that valuable around on the street will get you spotted by the 'Reapers'."
A short figure carrying a cloth bag the size of a person emerged from behind a pile of rubbish. He wore a tattered gas mask and had a cheap, clearly broken mechanical arm instead of a right hand which was constantly spewing steam.
It was Pau, the thug who traded various contraband parts and intelligence in the Maya district. His eyes now gleamed with a shrewd light called 'greed'.
'You were following me?' Aaryan's voice instantly turned cold as his right hand reached for the iron pipe at his waist, which had a purple-gold sheen.
"No, no, no! Don't touch me!' Pau dramatically raised his punctured mechanical hand, emitting a piercing noise. 'I was just passing by, and conveniently helping the Holy Blood Council "pass by". Do you know how much you're worth out there right now? A 'Pure Serum' quota for three districts! That's enough to make half the rabble here sell their mothers for you.'
Aaryan stepped forward and Pau's knees cracked under the strain of the oppressive aura of an ancient royal.
'But I, Pau, am a man of ambition,' the short merchant said, lowering his voice and becoming enigmatic. 'Compared to the Council's bounty, I'm more interested in that "Clockwork Heart" you have. It's the White Witch's original creation, isn't it? I heard it contains the key to the '1969' coordinates.'
Aaryan's pupils contracted sharply. A key? This pendant isn't just a contract?
"Take me to the underground arena." He grabbed Pau by the collar and lifted him up. 'I want to see Balthazar. Since you all know about '1969', let's make this fire burn even brighter.'
In the lamplight, Pau's face was deathly pale. He chuckled dryly and pointed to the exit at the end of the alleyway, which was bathed in a blazing crimson light.
'As you wish, Your Majesty. However, I must warn you: the 'main course' in the underground arena today isn't just that madman from the demon race. There's also an 'old friend' who has been prepared especially for you."
As Aaryan stepped into the shadows of the arena, the 'Twin Clockwork Hearts' in his hand suddenly pulsed violently, its white light instantly turning an eerie crimson. In the distant ruined temple, Dahlia, who had been sleeping peacefully in her hibernation pod, suddenly opened her eyes. Her eyes were no longer a hazy, blind grey, but instead two eerie, constantly rotating, golden, gear-like phantoms appeared.
At the same time, Aaryan felt a gust of wind sweep over him from behind. The face of the traitor he had personally executed in ancient times appeared on the guard list at the arena entrance — it was so familiar it almost suffocated him. Now clad in the council's mechanical armour, he had been reborn and returned.
The wind in the narrow alleyway suddenly picked up, carrying with it the sweet, metallic odour of molten metal.
Aaryan looked down at the 'Twin Wind-Up Hearts' in his hand, which were shimmering with an eerie crimson light. The pendant seemed to control his heartbeat; each click of the spring engaging felt like a hammer blow to the depths of his soul.
'An old friend?' Aaryan slowly repeated Pau's words, his gaze like a sharp blade piercing the cunning merchant cowering in the shadows. 'In my memory, "old friends" all died at their funerals in the Ancient Era.'
'In the Maya District, death is never the end, but rather an imperfect "formatting".' Pau rubbed his deflated mechanical hand. Outside the alleyway behind him, the neon sign of the underground arena glowed a nauseating dark purple. 'The Council's "Holy Blood Laboratory" is the best at salvaging things from ashes, and that lord has been waiting for you for a long time.' Aaryan ignored Pau, clutching the pendant tightly and feeling the faint pulse emanating from the other end. It was Dahlia's vital sign. Though weak, she was inextricably linked to his royal bloodline through this miraculous mechanical contract. Whenever he felt rage surge through him, he could sense the brass gears inside the pendant accelerating, diverting the force that could burn his meridians and transforming it into gentle, white magical energy that fed back to him.
This was Dahlia's sacrifice: she had made herself his 'stabiliser'.
'The exchange contract...' Aaryan murmured, recalling the look in Dahlia's eyes when, in the darkest hour at the diesel depot, she fastened half of the clockwork mechanism to his collar with trembling fingers. It was not a plea for salvation, but a death-defying entrustment.
He strode towards the arena. The entrance.
The guards were two highly mechanised Galatian men with infrared sensors instead of eyes and hydraulic transmission devices attached to their chests. As Aaryan approached, a red light from the sensors swept across the pendant in his hand. The previously tightly closed alloy gates groaned heavily and slowly slid open to the sides.
Deafening cheers and beast-like roars came from behind the gates.
This was the 'stomach' of the Maya district, digesting all sin and madness. The circular arena was sunken deep into the ground and the surrounding stands were filled with dignitaries and lowly gamblers wearing respirators. The central sand was stained dark red and several broken mechanical wrecks were emitting black smoke.
In the most luxurious box, directly above the arena, stood a tall figure with his back to the crowd, watching the slaughter below.
'Welcome to "Judgment Day", Your Majesty.' The voice, like sandpaper, carried a distorted, metallic tremor. The person facing away from Aaryan slowly turned around.
His face was half human and half mechanical: the skin etched with lines of time and the mechanical side composed of finely wound steel springs and vibrating pistons. What chilled Aaryan most was the dark gold emblem embedded in the man's chest — the battle crest of the ancient rebel army.
'Griffin...' Aaryan gritted his teeth as he uttered the name.
Griffin had once been his most trusted captain of the guard, yet on the eve of the capital's fall, he had opened the gates to the forbidden lands himself.
'I prefer to be called "Chief Administrator" now.' Griffin extended his mechanical hand, riddled with high-voltage wires, and pointed to the centre of the battlefield. 'Look at the gift I prepared for you: the soul key to the White Witch you longed for, now locked in that "wind-up strangler".' 'If you win the next match, I'll give you the chance to dismantle it yourself.'
Aaryan followed Griffin's gaze. Deep within the arena, Dahlia's phantom was bound by countless black ethereal chains on a massive, constantly rotating gear rack. This wasn't her physical body, but rather a projection of her soul that had been forcibly ripped from her by the 'Twin Clockwork Hearts'.
'The Twin Clockwork Hearts were originally a pair.' Griffin grinned maliciously as he pulled the other half of the pendant from his robes — a 'Death Heart' radiating a rotting black light.
'You have "Life", and I have "Death". When Life and Death intersect in the arena, that's the moment the '1969' coordinates open.'
Suddenly, the arena floor trembled violently and a massive iron cage rose from beneath the sand. Instead of a monster, inside the cage was a giant with countless steel pipes piercing its body and its eyes rolled back. With each breath the giant took, the clockwork heart in Aaryan's hand contracted violently.
'Recognise him?' Griffin's voice echoed in the stands. "That's your good brother in this life, Balthazar. I've transformed him into your executioner. If you don't kill him, the Clockwork Heart will drain all of Dahlia's life force to keep him powered. Aaryan, will you choose to kill your only ally or watch your lover turn to dust?'
Aaryan looked up sharply and saw a black conduit flashing the serial number '1969' in Balthazar's mechanical spine. A steady stream of energy was being drawn from Dahlia's soul projection and poured into this killing machine.
Meanwhile, in the shadows of the stands, Cyrus slowly raised his bronze staff, a cold, resolute glint in his eyes...
The roars of the arena faded into an indistinct silence. In Aaryan's world, only the cruel rack known as the 'Wind-Up Strangler' remained.
Dahlia's soul projection writhed in agony between the gears; the white magical light emanating from her dimmed with each rotation of the rack. Directly in front of her was the giant Balthazar, pierced by steel pipes and codenamed 'The Executioner', roaring inhumanly. His muscles, forcibly connected to black magic conduits, swelled violently as a purplish-black liquid was infused into them. Each step he took caused the sophisticated sensors beneath the sand to strain under immense pressure.
'Aaryan... kill... kill me...'
A faint glimmer of clarity flashed in Balthazar's murky eyes. His left hand had been transformed into a giant hydraulic clamp and gripped the iron cage beside him tightly, causing sparks to fly. He didn't want to attack Aaryan, but the black conduits on his back were relentlessly draining life energy from Dahlia's soul projection. It was a vicious, one-way cycle: if the connection wasn't severed, Dahlia would be drained dry. The only way to sever the connection was to destroy Balthazar's heart, the 'power source'.
"Griffin, you beast!" Aaryan clenched the 'Twin Wind-Up Heart' in his hand, blood dripping from the brass edge.
'Your Majesty, anger is the lowest form of fuel.' Griffin sat in his luxury box, sipping expensive serum, the red glow on his mechanical half-face flickering. 'In the logic of "1969", only sacrifice is the eternal law of conservation. Do it and see whether your royal blood dries up first or her life is exhausted.'
Suddenly, Aaryan felt the pendant in his palm become scalding hot.
That was Dahlia's wish. Even in her unconscious state and despite the excruciating pain of her soul being torn apart, she was still transmitting her final message to him via this mechanical contract. The clicking of the clockwork mechanism was no longer a jumble of sounds, but a vibration that was like a coded message.
'The contract is not for protection, but for resonance...'
Aaryan suddenly realised. He had always thought that Dahlia was his 'stabiliser', there to absorb the side effects of his power. But he was wrong. As the White Witch, Dahlia's true power was 'harmony'.
He no longer tried to suppress the destructive force raging within him. Instead, he closed his eyes and guided the purple-gold light, capable of destroying an entire street, through his veins and into the half-pendant in his hand.
"Since you want to absorb it, I'll let you suffocate!"
Aaryan roared, not charging at Balthazar but slamming the pendant hard onto the arena's sand. It was the core node of the arena's entire Ethernet network.
Purple-gold royal blood gushed out from the brass gears like a flood flowing upstream. The black conduits that had been greedily drawing energy from Dahlia suddenly began to tremble violently. They had never encountered such pure, high-level energy before.
In that instant, all the neon lights in the arena overloaded and exploded!
"What? What is he doing?' Griffin jumped to his feet, shattering his wine glass in the process.
The black ethereal chains snapped inch by inch under the onslaught of purple-gold light. The conduits behind Balthazar, unable to withstand this level of energy, began to burst in a chain reaction. The strangest change occurred to Dahlia's soul projection: the energy that had almost taken her life harmonised by Aaryan's royal blood transformed into a pure white feather, which once again enveloped her phantom.
The contract exchange was complete.
This was neither a master-servant contract nor a sacrificial one. It was a 'life-sharing' agreement between two of the loneliest souls in this cold, mechanical world.
As blinding white and purple light intertwined, the arena's core clockwork emitted an ear-splitting cracking sound. Dahlia's soul projection materialised in the light and slowly landed on the sand. Her eyes, which were once grey, now shimmered with golden, clock-like markings.
She turned to Griffin, who was groaning in agony from the energy backflow. Her voice was cold as a chilling whisper: 'Griffin, you've spent your whole life calculating, yet you forgot to factor in the most primal driving force of the "1969" coordinates.'
She gently raised her hand and the half-pendant flew back to her neck. Through the gap in the pendant, Aaryan could see a faded, old photograph from 1969. The person in the photograph was none other than a young Griffin before his mechanisation, and a woman who looked exactly like Dahlia.
'Father,' Dahlia uttered softly, plunging the entire arena into a deathly silence. 'This nightmare you started, I will end.'
"Father…"
These two words swept across the entire underground arena like an invisible shockwave, plunging the once noisy stands into a deathly silence. Only the wires at the edge of the stands hissed and crackled with broken blue light from the overload in the rainy night.
Griffin froze, his half-human face twitching violently while his mechanical half emitted a grating grinding sound. He stared intently at the phantom radiating holy white light in the centre of the arena — that bloodline which he had thought had long since turned to ash with the failure of Project '1969'.
'Impossible… you were just expendable material, one of the "containers" mass-produced by the Council…' Griffin's voice trembled with collapsing madness. 'You are Dahlia, but you are not "her"! She died long ago in that ethereal storm!
You pushed her into the storm with your own hands for that illusion called the 'Eternal Core'." "
Dahlia slowly approached Aaryan, her steps incredibly light. Yet with each step, the bloodstains on the sand were instantly cleansed by a white light. She reached out and lightly touched the half of the pendant that Aaryan was clutching tightly.
The instant the two 'Twin Clockwork Hearts' drew near, a miracle occurred.
Aaryan's previously raging meridians and amethyst blood energy, which had almost burst, rapidly became docile upon contact with the white sorcery emanating from Dahlia. No longer dominating each other, they intertwined and coiled within the pendant's brass cavity like yin and yang, ultimately forming a perfect energy loop.
'Is this the contract you wanted?' Aaryan looked at her, his eyes filled with shock at having survived the catastrophe.
'This is not just a contract; it's our only way to survive.' Dahlia raised her head, her golden-scaled eyes gazing at Griffin on the platform. 'Aaryan, your blood is fire; my power is ice. Only when we combine our powers can we break free from the shackles of the Maya District.'
Griffin let out a maniacal laugh. His body began to swell violently and the mechanical pistons on his back started to spew out a dark, green, poisonous mist. 'Sever? In this cage called 'The Council', no one can escape! Since you have chosen this remnant, you will all become sacrifices to '1969'!" He pressed the red button in the treasure chest.
The earth beneath the arena trembled violently. Countless enormous, serrated clockwork shafts rose from the sand, transforming the entire arena into a gigantic millstone. This 'clockwork strangler', in its complete form, was a miniature laboratory covering half a city block. Its ultimate goal was to forcibly fuse Aaryan's royal blood with Dahlia's white witch essence to create fuel capable of traversing time and space.
'Balthazar!' Aaryan whirled around and charged towards the giant, who was still struggling in agony.
Now that the energy flow had reversed, he wanted to save his modified brother. He aimed the clockwork core in his hand at the black conduit in Balthazar's chest and a gentle yet resilient force flowed back into it.
'Wake up!' With a crisp crack, the steel pipe piercing Balthazar's body melted in a flash of white light and he let out a relieved roar. His cloudy eyes cleared and he looked at Aaryan, then at the collapsed arena. He growled hoarsely, 'My King, run! This place is going to explode!'
'No, we'll go together.' Aaryan grabbed Balthazar's mechanical arm and hoisted him onto his shoulder.
At that moment, the sound of Cyrus's bronze staff echoed from the arena's highest point. The mechanical monk stood on the teetering beams, his staff emitting an ancient, calculating frequency that forcibly created a narrow gap between the closing hinges.
'Aaryan, take her! Head to the true entrance at coordinates 1969!" Cyrus shouted.
Dahlia gripped Aaryan's hand tightly; in that moment, their heartbeats synchronised perfectly through the pendant.
They rushed towards the crevice, the deafening roar of the collapsing arena and Griffin's hysterical roar echoing behind them.
When they finally escaped the ruins and stood on the rooftop of the highest slum in the Maya district, the ever-present black acid rain had stopped.
Aaryan, panting, looked down at the pendant in her hand. Within the brass heart representing 'life' on the back of the photograph, a line of micro-engraved text slowly emerged, visible only to those of royal blood:
'1969 is not a year, but a coordinate code. It does not lead to the past, but to another parallel universe that is not yet ruled by the Holy Blood Council. However, the price of opening it is a soul that must remain forever within the gears." Dahlia's hands suddenly turned icy cold. Avoiding Aaryan's gaze, she looked towards the distant 'Holy Blood Tower', a symbol of supreme power, a poignant smile playing on her lips.
'Aaryan, if only one person remains in this timeline one day, you must hold onto this pendant tightly and never look back.'
Meanwhile, on the other side of the city, the cunning merchant Pau, who had been observing coldly, knelt before an old man dressed entirely in pure white silk, trembling as he presented a blueprint of the pendant.
'My lord, I have marked their location. That girl is indeed a replica of the 'First Core.'"
The old man slowly turned around, and his eyes beneath the mask were identical to Aaryan's. He murmured softly, 'Finally… my other possibility has appeared.'