The Starfall Atlas

Xiu was born in the outermost slums of Aubel City. He did not know who his parents were. Nor did he need to know.

Most of the humans living in the civilian slums were nothing more than livestock raised by the Empire to preserve the diversity of the human gene pool. From the moment they were born, their fate was already sealed. They would stumble through life in ignorance, then be forgotten by the Empire that owned them.

Xiu passed a drafty street corner without sparing a glance at the homeless man collapsed on the ground. He only tightened the patched cloak around himself.

Everywhere he looked, there were vagrants lying in the shadows. Some had mechanical prosthetics installed in their bodies, only for the implants to trigger violent rejection. They twitched beside dim storefronts like stroke victims. Scenes like this were most common whenever other districts of Aubel City began recruiting civilians from the slums.

Because of the Empire’s endless interstellar wars, the number of mech cavalry pilots would suddenly drop at certain times. When that happened, the military training district of Aubel City would recruit new mech cavalry from the civilian zones, gathering them as reserve forces for unified training.

The threshold for recruitment was said to be extremely high. As for how high, Xiu only knew what he had heard from rumors.

But there was one thing he remembered clearly. Installing prosthetic enhancements could increase the chance of passing the mech cavalry recruitment trial. And for Xiu, this was the only chance in his life to change his fate.

In his hand, he clutched a recruitment poster he had just torn from a damp utility pole. Carefully, he unfolded it, shook the white cockroach egg sacs from the paper into his right palm, and swallowed them in one gulp. He had just come out of a prosthetic clinic.

The bones in his back had been replaced with a power-type mechanical frame. Now he could only walk hunched over. His exposed flesh rubbed against coarse linen, sending waves of stinging pain through his body.

For this mech cavalry recruitment, Xiu had spent every last peso he had saved since childhood by repairing machines and reselling scrap. Three hundred pesos. All of it had gone into installing this frame. He had no spare money left for food.

To his credit, Mr. Herman from the prosthetic clinic had been decent enough to charge him only three hundred pesos.

After all, most of the surgical equipment in Herman’s clinic had been scavenged by Xiu from the border of the civilian district and resold to him. Xiu had also repaired quite a few of Herman’s devices before, so the man owed him a favor.

Xiu doubled back to a shabby, long-closed shopfront to avoid the rain. While he was there, he wiped the water stains off the parchment and carefully checked the location and time of the recruitment. Five o’clock the morning after tomorrow. Entrance No. 5 of the silos in the western civilian district. Xiu had been there many times. It was the border between the interstellar equipment manufacturing zone, the military training district, and the civilian district. Once inside the silo, turning right would lead into the interstellar equipment manufacturing zone. That passage often had discarded weapons and equipment the civilians rarely got to see. Xiu planned to try his luck there again today. Maybe he could find something useful for the mech cavalry recruitment trial two days later.

The sky gradually darkened. After walking for who knew how long, Xiu began to hear the guards chatting in the distance.

“Old Li, our losses in the interstellar war against the Helion Empire must be pretty bad, right? This is the first time I’ve ever seen a mech cavalry recruitment on such a massive scale.”

A guard who looked only a little older than Xiu leaned over and quietly asked another much older guard about the recent war. His voice was low. But Xiu still caught every word.

The older guard called Old Li saw the young man sticking his head over and showed no mercy. He slapped him across the head so hard the young soldier cried out in pain.

“Ow! Ow! That hurts!”

“Young Cui, cut the nonsense and watch the gate! Can’t you see someone suspicious coming over?”

Old Li’s eyes landed on Xiu, who seemed to be heading toward the silo entrance. He stretched his left arm out sideways to block the path and barked, “You! Yes, you! The hunchbacked little runt! This area is sealed for recruitment. No entry!”

“Sir, please have mercy. I only came to pick up some scrap from the passage so I can sell it at the market tomorrow morning...” Xiu tugged his hood lower, hiding his face. He deliberately lowered his voice, forcing out the hoarse, weary tone of an old scavenger. But he could not fully conceal the youth in his voice.

“Get lost! I said this place is sealed. No one enters before the official mech cavalry recruitment ceremony begins!”

Old Li repeated impatiently. Then he narrowed his eyes, as if noticing something was wrong, and strode straight toward Xiu.

“Come here. Take that hood off.” As he spoke, Old Li reached out to pull Xiu’s hood down.

Xiu immediately realized the situation had turned bad. He turned to run, but the injury on his back slowed him down. Old Li grabbed him and yanked him back.

Knowing he had been exposed, Xiu froze for a long moment before squeezing out an awkward, ugly smile.

“My lord, I haven’t done anything wrong. Could you please let me off this once?” Xiu said timidly.

“You’re young, yet you’re already learning the wrong tricks. Pretending to be an old scavenger? Trying to fool me? You’re still too green for that!” Old Li released Xiu’s clothes. The rough, shoddy sackcloth was prickly to the touch, a low-grade rag even in the slums, and it carried a foul stench.

Old Li kicked Xiu hard in the backside, then quickly shook his hand, trying to fling away the stink clinging to his fingers. Xiu stumbled and fell into the muddy ground in front of the silo.

“Get out of here! If you don’t leave, I’ll beat you to death!” Old Li roared at him viciously.

“Enough, enough, Old Li. Watching the gate is more important. There’s no need to lower yourself by arguing with these lowborn rats,” Cui quickly persuaded him, afraid Old Li might cause real trouble and cost him the hard-earned ninth-rank post he had barely obtained.

Xiu staggered to his feet. His fists clenched. Then slowly loosened. Endurance was the first lesson this world had taught him.

He could not afford to get charged with any crime on the eve of the mech cavalry recruitment ceremony. Any accident could destroy his entire plan. After steadying himself, Xiu turned and walked away without looking back.

Besides, this trip had not been completely fruitless. Just now, the instant Old Li grabbed him, the watch on Xiu’s wrist had detected a hidden energy source. It had been vibrating nonstop. Star marrow crystal? Xiu was shocked, but he recovered almost instantly. With a swift Ghost-Catching Hand move, he snatched the deep-blue energy essence fastened upside down at Old Li’s armored waist. His hand was so fast it did not even leave an afterimage.

“I heard the Aubel Empire and the Helion Empire both suffered badly in this war. Our side lost hundreds of thousands of elites and millions of soldiers. Now neither empire dares to make a reckless move, afraid the others will swoop in and take advantage...” Only after Xiu had walked far away did Old Li continue the topic Cui had started earlier.

“That’s why they’re starting to select mech pilots from the civilian district. If you ask me, this war won’t end that easily. The commander of Aubel City must be planning something big!”

“Hey, hey, you can’t just say things like that. Be careful, Old Li...”

Xiu walked on for a long time. By then, the sky had completely sunk into darkness. Artificial daylight in the civilian district was always short, while the nights were painfully long.

In truth, maintaining the daylight system in the slums did not consume much energy for the Aubel Empire. But the Empire was at war now. More importantly, Aubel had already launched the Cloud Atlas Project. A massive amount of electricity had been diverted to the development of artificial intelligence. The civilian district had never been allocated much energy to begin with. What little remained had to prioritize regional agriculture. Daylight, an unnecessary energy expense in the eyes of the Empire, had long been pushed aside by facilities with higher priority.

That was why most people in the civilian district had dull skin and brittle bones, looking like old men on the verge of death even when they were still young.

But Xiu was an exception. He understood the importance of sunlight. Whenever no one was around, he would slip into the agricultural zone and steal a little of that pitiful artificial sun alongside the plants. That was why he had not fallen apart like the homeless men on the streets, barely able to walk.

Xiu took out his old flashlight, its beam flickering between light and dark. After confirming no one was nearby, he placed the star marrow crystal he had stolen onto his palm.

Star marrow crystal was a portable energy essence. Depending on the amount of energy stored inside, its color ranged from silver-white to pale gold to deep blue. When an object drew near, it would give off an extremely faint electric hum. Xiu had been lucky this time. What he had obtained was a pale-gold star marrow crystal.

The young man quickly checked his surroundings again. Then he removed the nearly drained dry battery from the flashlight and connected the star marrow crystal to the charging port. Before long, the flashlight showed a full charge. Once that was done, he immediately hid the treasure away.

The glow of the star marrow crystal had not dimmed at all. Joy flickered in Xiu’s eyes. Today’s harvest was far better than he had expected. He guessed that the energy contained in this single star marrow crystal would be enough to power the civilian district’s daylight system for an entire day.

Xiu packed up his things and continued walking through the darkness.

And so, a hunched figure holding a broken flashlight moved through the black, ruined streets of the civilian district. He looked like a ghost wandering through a dying city. A ghost that had come to collect a debt in blood.