As if things took time to heal and finally celebration day with its beauty, it was only after three months that the dawn after Lord Vex Ji’s capture painted Y-Zone Prime in dark purple, blue, gold, mixed with marine green, but Confucius couldn’t sleep. He stood on the edge of the square, the six Nine Li Scripts spread across the ground, their pages now dull and quiet, as if exhausted from the battle. Beside him, the Colossus’ dismantled body glinted in the light—peasants had begun melting its steel to forge plows and tools, a deliberate act of reclamation right after the battle.
He missed Lila so much. He wondered if she is still alive after her last capture. But little did he notice she was standing behind him.
“You’re up early.”
A voice so familiar that he thought he would not hear again finally gave him the hope to continue.
She is wearing a badly torn warrior’s tunic, her hair was loose, mess up , and sweaty as ever—though wearing a metal head band, perhaps made by the remain parts of Colossus. It was a different Lila in front of him: a grown-up girl despite her badly shaken, weak , and dirty look, perhaps accumulated through all these gruesome battles, captures and torments from machine-ninjas, surgeries, starvations, hardships etc., over the unsettling months.
He grabbed and held her tight in his arms. She hugged him tight too. The couple was hugging for a long time, as if the world had stopped turning. Then she broke down to tears , first weeping, then like a baby, as if the whole world has done her wrong while he used his fingers to push the tears away from entering her mouth. She was speechless and he just nodded. It was a silent talk.
Lila said with a soft and weak voice, “Mara says the elders want to see you. They’re voting on who leads Y-Zone Prime now. They want you.”
Confucius shook his head, drank the porridge given to him by the peasant, “I’m not a leader. I’m an archer. A scribe.”
“You’re the boy who gave us back our food,” Lila said, her voice with a touch of sadness. “Unlike me, who was captured numerous times by the machine-ninjas, who outsmarted Lord Vex Ji’s guards? Who made the scrolls work? That’s more than enough.”
Before he could argue, Gareth rushed and limped over, his prosthetic leg clanking. “The defectors found something in Lord Vex Ji’s fortress. A vault beneath his dungeon. Locked with a quantum seal. They think it’s his ‘legacy’—records of every Vex ruler, every crime.”
Confucius stood, folding the scrolls into his satchel. “Then we open it. The people deserve to know the truth.”
The fortress’ dungeon reeked of iron and fear. Lord Vex Ji sat in a cell, his black silk robes stained with mud, his posture still rigid with arrogance. When he saw Confucius, he laughed—a dry, bitter sound.
“Come to gloat, peasant?”
“Come to learn,” Confucius said, gesturing to the vault door behind the cell. Its surface was etched with the Vex crest and a single character: “Legacy.”
Lord Vex Ji’s smile faded. “That vault holds 500 years of Vex history. How we built this realm. How we earned it.”
“By stealing,” Confucius said. “By killing. By burning the First Sage’s words.”
The former tyrant’s jaw tightened. “Power is earned through strength. Your precious Sage was a dreamer. His world would’ve collapsed. Chaos. Weakness.”
Confucius placed his hand on the vault door. The quantum seal flickered, responding to his touch—a side effect of channeling the scrolls’ energy, the Guru had explained. “Dreams build. Fear destroys.”
The seal dissolved with a hiss, and the door creaked open. Inside, rows of shelves held holographic disks, leather-bound journals, and a single bamboo scroll—its surface blank, save for the First Sage’s signature.
Gareth picked up a journal, its pages yellowed with age. “Lord Vex Ji’s great-grandfather’s diary. ‘Burned two of the Sage’s traveling scrolls today. Kept one. The peasants wept. Good. Fear is a better teacher than hope.’”
Mara found a holographic disk, inserting it into a projector. It showed Lord Vex Ji as a boy, his father—a younger, crueler version of him—slapping him for “wasting time” reading a forbidden scroll. “Weakness is contagious,” the man snarled. “Remember that son. Or you’ll end up like the peasants.”
Confucius’ throat tightened. Even tyrants are made, he thought.
But the most shocking discovery was the blank scroll. When Confucius unrolled it, the First Sage’s words appeared, glowing faintly: “To forgive is not to forget. It is to choose a future free of chains.”
Lord Vex Ji watched from his cell, his eyes narrowing. “What does it say?”
Confucius met his gaze. “It says we don’t have to be like you. That we can build something better.”
That night, the elders gathered in the square, and Confucius read from the Vex journals, projected onto a wall of bamboo. Peasants cried as they heard their ancestors’ names—killed, starved, erased. But when he finished, there were no calls for revenge. “Lock him away,” a woman said, nodding at Lord Vex Ji. “Teach his children. Show them there’s another way.”
Later, as he walked the square, the Guru fell into step beside him. “The scrolls have one last message. I translated it this afternoon.” He handed Confucius a piece of paper, on which he’d copied the text: “The leader is not the arrow. He is the hand that guides it—toward justice, toward light.”
Confucius looked up, watching as children chased each other around the Colossus’ hull, now a playground. In the distance, peasants planted crops in fields that had once been battlefields. This, he thought, is the Sage’s world. Finally.