Construction of the History Road

The History Road was Yinyang Khan’s monumental highway and artificial leyline: a route from Battletown to six replicas of Lost Age landmarks, powered by the sacrifice of nearly a hundred children. Its grand imitation of the past disguised a system that damaged the land and turned human lives into infrastructure; when battle came to Battletown, that same system carried a tremendous surge of energy into the city.

Setting and Design

Yuan Guang and his companions first observed the road from a rocky hill overlooking the region. The desert ended several kilometers ahead at the gasoline waters of the Oil Sea, where refinery outposts pumped fuel along the shore. Beyond them, Battletown spread beneath neon lights and machine towers, dominated by a metal pagoda as large as a small mountain. The highway began and ended at this immense settlement, making the city both its point of origin and its destination.

Six strange landmarks stood apart from one another along the route. They did not form a continuous urban landscape: each was isolated, like a stop or attraction arranged beside the highway. Yuan Guang could make out a rusted-metal spire on four legs, a stone pyramid, and a palace with a bulbous roof; the others were too distant to distinguish. Orient recognized the spire as a copy of the Eiffel Tower, a landmark she had encountered on earlier itineraries. Arc identified the structures as copies of Lost Age monuments and condemned the whole arrangement as a murderous mockery of the past. She also recognized the Taj Mahal among the imitations.

The Artificial Leyline

The road’s construction was not only monumental in scale. Yuan Guang sensed qi radiating from the highway in the manner of a leyline, but the energy felt unnatural, as though a circuit had been forced onto the land and was harming it. His unease sharpened as he understood how Yinyang Khan had redirected enough qi to produce an artificial leyline around Battletown. The road thus bound the city to its outlying landmarks through a system that resembled a natural energy channel while, in Yuan Guang’s perception, violating the land that carried it.

The route’s paired endpoints and scattered landmarks gave the circuit a regional reach: its energy extended between Battletown and monuments distributed along the highway. The novel does not show the construction process itself, but the arrangement and its unnatural qi reveal the result. This was not simply a road built to connect places. It was an engineered channel imposed on the landscape, one whose apparent order concealed damage beneath the surface.

Human Cost

The circuit’s power had a human price. When Yuan Guang asked how many people had been used to create it, Orient looked away in sorrow before answering that there were at least thirteen Human Pillars for each landmark, with a seventh group for the city. With six landmarks and Battletown included, the scale was close to a hundred children. Yuan Guang recognized that the arrangement of the road and its monuments was inseparable from those sacrifices: the artificial leyline had been made possible by turning children into the supports of a political and engineering project.

The revelation also made the road’s grand display newly legible to his companions. Holster, who had previously endured enslavement, paled and clutched Yuan Guang’s sleeve, shaking with the dread she had once lived with as a slave. Yuan Guang placed his hands protectively on her shoulders and repeated his question in cold anger. The scene connects the road’s enormous public scale to intimate bodily fear: from a distant hill, its landmarks looked like a ruler’s extravagant collection; the count of Human Pillars exposed the violence embedded in that spectacle.

Use and Significance

The History Road later proved capable of carrying force as well as qi. During the battle in Battletown, phantom rails and cross-ties appeared across the devastated streets, tracing a line within the enormous Barrier. A blinding star rushed toward the combatants along the artificial leyline that connected the city to its landmarks. The surge of energy was powerful enough to astonish Manhattan, who had expected no such arrival. The road’s remote circuit had become an active route into the battlefield, turning the infrastructure Yuan Guang had judged unnatural into a channel with immediate consequences for the conflict.

That later use sharpens the contrast at the heart of the History Road. Its replicas invoked a vanished age, but they did not preserve that past: Arc saw them as a murderous parody, and the revelation of the children made the cost of the imitation literal. Nor was the highway a neutral monument. It damaged the land, fed an artificial leyline, and could bring immense energy into Battletown. Its grandeur therefore served both as a display of Yinyang Khan’s dominion and as evidence of what that dominion consumed—land, children, and the past itself.