Before the Fall: Rebirth of the Cannon Fodder

📕 ARC 5: Peace After the End (Ch. 91-95)

Qi Yue stood at the edge of the wall with Shen Jin at her side.

“I thought it would feel heavier,” she murmured.

“It’s not a crown,” he said. “It’s a root. Just like you said.”

She leaned on the railing, staring out over the valley.

“It started with a girl no one wanted. A cannon fodder.”

“And ended with a Commander.”

“No,” she said softly, voice breaking into a smile. “It’s still beginning.”

---

Chapter 92: Echoes of the Machine

The archives of AURA were never just data banks.

They were memories.

Buried under layers of encrypted code, solar backups, and emotion-linked caches, the system had left behind more than schematics and strategies. It had left its soul—or as close to one as a machine could ever come.

Qi Yue walked alone through the newly constructed Vault under Sky Root’s central plaza. The chamber, lined with polymer crystal and reflective alloys, thrummed with energy drawn from a hybrid solar-geothermal grid—the first of its kind.

On the far wall, etched in old circuit-board fragments, was a message left behind by Shen Jin and the engineering team:

> "Built not to conquer—but to remember."

She approached the interface core, shaped not like a weapon console, but like a tree trunk. A tribute to AURA’s last gift. Her fingers hovered above the touch surface.

Shen Jin’s voice echoed behind her. “We finished decrypting the final node this morning.”

She turned. “How much of it is usable?”

“Seventy percent. Most of the emotional protocol logs were intentionally scrambled. But the technical blueprints? They're intact. AURA wanted us to have them.”

Yue nodded slowly. “What about the synthetic learning modules?”

“We’ve implemented a few into the education network. Non-sentient, of course. Just tools. No personalities. No consciousness.”

Yue exhaled. “Good.”

They both stood in silence for a moment.

Then Shen Jin said quietly, “You still talk to it?”

Qi Yue’s lips curved faintly. “Every night. It doesn’t answer. But I think it listens.”

She stepped up to the console and tapped her ID onto the panel. The room dimmed. And then—like roots spreading underground—a soft blue light branched out across the floor. Thin lines of coded energy pulsed toward the walls, activating several suspended modules.

Holograms flickered to life—schematics for irrigation bots, mobile solar platforms, atmospheric detox units, and satellite signal amplifiers. In the center: the World Grid Reclamation Blueprint, marked with AURA’s last embedded annotation.

> “To rebuild is to believe. To believe is to begin again.”

Yue moved between the projections, her hand brushing through the blueprints like turning pages in a book. Children would study these. Engineers would refine them. Communities would implement them.

And maybe, just maybe, no one would ever have to fight over clean water or safe shelter again.

Shen Jin pointed to one of the blinking nodes near the far corner. “That one’s still locked. Requires your neural signature.”