CHAPTER 81 — THE WOMAN WHO FELL FROM ANOTHER SKY
Crimson Six moved through the sky like a streak of burning red.
The ruined battlefield shrank beneath her as she accelerated, the wind tearing past her armor in sharp, violent currents. The compass in her hand pulsed faintly, its needle trembling as it searched for direction.
Below her, the world stretched endlessly.
Cities.
Hundreds of them.Silent.
From above they looked almost peaceful..vast grids of streets, towers, and abandoned structures sprawled across the land like the bones of some ancient civilization.
But there was no life.
No smoke rising from homes.No movement in the streets.
No lights in the windows.Only empty stone and wind.
Crimson Six's eyes drifted across the horizon as she flew.
Entire districts passed beneath her..collapsed highways, rusted towers, broken plazas swallowed by creeping dust. The structures were still intact enough to suggest civilization once thrived here.
Billions could have lived in these places.
But now?
Nothing.
The silence of the planet pressed upward toward the sky like an accusation.
Her fingers tightened slightly around the compass.
"Artificial souls…"
Leylin's voice echoed faintly in her mind.
Her jaw set.
So he saw it.
Below her, another city emerged through the haze.
A massive one.
Skyscrapers pierced the sky like blackened spears. Entire highways spiraled around them in broken loops, sections collapsed and hanging like shattered ribs.
As she crossed above the district, something flickered below.
Movement.
Her eyes shifted downward.
At the center of an intersection, a lone streetlight still burned, its dying bulb pulsing weakly against the darkening sky.
Beneath it stood a group of figures.
Perfectly still.
Men.
Women.
Children.
Dozens of them.
From above they looked like people waiting to cross the road.
Crimson Six slowed for a fraction of a second.
Every one of them was staring upward.
Eyes open.
Unblinking.
Watching the sky.
No breath stirred their chests.
No heartbeat disturbed the stillness.
They simply stood where they had been left, like mannequins frozen in the middle of a forgotten moment.
The wind passed through the empty street.
One of the figures shifted.
Not by walking.
Not by turning.
Its entire body collapsed straight downward.
Like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
The others remained standing.
Crimson Six looked away.
Her speed increased again.
The city vanished behind her.
Leylin's voice surfaced in her thoughts once more.
"Cultivated… like livestock."
Her lips curved faintly.
Or perhaps the livestock had finally learned to think.
The wind roared past her as she accelerated.
Below, the planet stretched outward in silent continents and abandoned cities.
Her thoughts drifted backward.
Back to a different sky.
Back to the moment everything changed.
…
The fall had been violent.
The tear in space opened like a wound in reality itself.
Her armor had already been shattered.
Blood filled her lungs.
Behind her, the execution squad had been closing in.
They would have caught her.
They would have dragged her back to the Citadel.
And the punishment waiting there…
Her fingers tightened slightly.
Death would have been mercy.
So she jumped.
Into the fracture.
She remembered the moment the spatial tear swallowed her.
The crushing pressure.
Reality twisting around her body.
For a moment she believed the execution squad had been right.
That the tear would simply erase her existence.
Then the world changed.
She fell out of the sky of a different planet.
The impact shattered the ground beneath her.
Her armor broke apart.
Sand filled her mouth.
The sky above her was unfamiliar.
Too quiet.
Too empty. No orbital defense arrays. . No energy grids.
Only clouds drifting across a primitive atmosphere.
She tried to stand.
Her legs failed.
Blood soaked the sand beneath her.
For several minutes she simply lay there, staring at the sky as darkness crept into her vision.
She should have died there.
But then..She felt it.A pulse.
Faint,yet hard to ignore.
As Deep beneath the planet.
Something ancient.
Something powerful.
Her eyes opened slowly.
At first she assumed it was the planetary core.
But the rhythm was wrong.It was not geological.It was… deliberate.
A signal.
She forced herself to move.
The journey that followed blurred together in fragments.
Endless deserts.
Collapsed ruins swallowed by sandstorms.
Days without food.
Her vision fading repeatedly as her body struggled to survive.
More than once she collapsed, certain she would not rise again.
But each time that distant pulse dragged her forward.
Until finally...She found the cavern.
It stretched miles beneath the planet's crust.
Black stone walls rose around it like the interior of a colossal tomb.
The air itself felt heavy.
As if gravity had thickened.
And at the center of the cavern…
The coffin.
Obsidian.
Massive.
Covered in inscriptions unlike anything she had ever seen.
At first she thought they were carvings.
Then she realized the truth.
They were moving.
Slowly.
The symbols shifted across the surface of the coffin like living things, rearranging themselves into patterns before dissolving and forming new ones again.
Law.
Not fragments.
Not interpretations.
Pure inscriptions of Law itself.
The moment her eyes lingered too long on one symbol..Pain exploded behind her vision.
Her knees slammed into the stone floor.
Blood spilled from the corner of her eye.
Her soul trembled violently as if something inside the coffin had noticed her gaze.
She forced herself to look away.
Even weakened as she was, she understood the truth immediately.
In her civilization, even a single Law inscription could trigger wars between empires.
Entire civilizations had burned for the chance to glimpse one.
Yet here…
An entire coffin was covered in them.
Unprotected.
Forgotten.
Buried beneath a world that should have been insignificant.
She remembered laughing.
Weak.Half-delirious.
But laughing nonetheless.
Because in that moment she realized something very simple.
Fate had not abandoned her.
It had handed her something far greater.
Power.
Not borrowed titles.
Not shallow ranks.
True evolution.
The inscriptions held the key.
But there was one problem.
She was too weak to read them.
Even glancing too deeply into Law without sufficient soul density could destroy the mind.
So she waited.
And the planet provided what she needed.
Crimson Six's gaze drifted downward once more as the memory faded.
Another settlement slid past beneath the clouds.
The compass in her hand pulsed again.
Leylin.
Somewhere on this planet.
Her eyes hardened slightly.
For a brief moment she considered the man whose clone she had destroyed.
Sharp.
Observant.
Dangerous.
A mind capable of seeing the cage.
But the thought ended there.
Because another followed it.
Cold.
Certain.
Cages are designed to break the clever ones first.
Her crimson aura ignited brighter around her body.
The compass needle suddenly stabilized.
Direction locked.
Crimson Six accelerated across the sky like a falling star.
For the first time in years, something on this silent planet had become unpredictable.
Somewhere below, the real Leylin was moving.
And sooner or later...She would reach him.