Last Rites of Battletown

Last Rites of Battletown was a region-shaking burial ritual that turned the History Road and the artificial leyline beneath it into instruments for sealing Battletown’s ruins underground. Its immediate purpose was to lay the dead and the city to rest; its wider consequence was to destroy the Yinyang Khan’s monuments and loosen the hold his regime had exerted over the wasteland. The ritual lasted only minutes, but its effects remade the landscape on a scale that made years of construction seem momentary.

Background and Purpose

By the time the ritual was proposed, the devastation of Battletown had left more than rubble behind. Pale, emaciated hungry ghosts haunted the ruins of the slave market, striking their heads against hastily drawn Barriers intended to keep them away from refugee camps. Yuan regarded such ghosts as pitiful remnants, shadows held to the living world by unfinished business. The dead presented a practical problem as well: burying the corpses individually would take too long.

Orient and Holster proposed an alternative. By altering Battletown’s artificial leyline, they could make the land collapse and bury the city in a single Last Rites ritual. The same act would cover the remains, allow the hungry ghosts to rest, and free the trapped Human Pillars that sustained the leyline to pass on to their afterlife. Burial was therefore not merely cleanup after a battle. It was meant to address the dead, the infrastructure built upon their captivity, and the landscape that preserved the Khan’s power at once.

The ritual also carried a political intention. The Khan’s legacy would be buried with Battletown, and Yuan expected that, within a few years, few people would remember his tyranny. The scale of the act gave that hope a stark physical form: monuments and a road that had stood as visible works of power would disappear beneath earth and water.

The Ritual and the Collapse

When the final ritual was triggered, an earthquake shook the region. The spirit-train had already left the area, but the tremors remained powerful enough to be felt from miles away. From his window, Yuan watched Battletown sink beneath the waves of the Oil Sea, with Holster clapping her hands on his lap as the destruction unfolded.

The spectacle began at dawn. Fireworks blazed, and the landmarks along the History Road all lit up together, shining brighter than stars. Their lights formed a circle that engulfed Battletown’s ruins. An immense surge of qi travelled through the circuit, then shattered the road on which it had been built. The sequence transformed the History Road from a collection of landmarks into the visible path of a single, connected working: its lights joined, its qi surged, and the structure gave way.

The ground sank beneath a tide of sand and mud, burying the monuments. Then a large portion of the region collapsed into the nearby Oil Sea. A black flood swept through, washing away what remained above ground. The ritual’s climax thus combined burial with inundation: the city and its commemorative landscape were first swallowed by the earth, then overtaken by the sea.

Aftermath and Significance

The cataclysm took mere minutes, yet buried years of work and construction. The contrast matters to the event’s scale: the History Road’s elaborate circuit could devastate a region, but it required a prepared infrastructure and a triggering ritual. Yuan saw in that gulf a measure of how far he remained from powers such as Arc and Manhattan, neither of whom needed such an extensive setup to lay waste to the world. The spectacle was therefore both an act of closure and a warning about the disparity between his abilities and theirs.

Last Rites of Battletown gave a single destructive event several intended consequences. It would bury the dead, end the ghosts’ attachment to the ruins, release the Human Pillars, and obliterate monuments associated with the Khan’s rule. The work’s terrible efficiency also recalls the book’s wider use of rites surrounding death: earlier, a murderer gave his victims funerary rites so that they would not return as hungry ghosts. Here, however, burial is undertaken on an immense scale, with the land itself made the instrument of the rite. Its promise of rest and its political erasure are inseparable from the catastrophe that brings them about.