Metallists

The Metallists are a sect organized around machinery, cybernetics, and the practical transformation of matter. They stand against the social order that treats people born without a qi core as disposable Scraps, presenting technological manufacture as an alternative route to power. Yet the sect is also heavily armed, competitive, and entangled in the same violent hierarchy it claims to challenge. Its most important appearances connect public ideology, engineered bodies, metallic fabrication, aerial warfare, and the spectacle of the History Road race.

Identity and Doctrine

The Metallists emerge publicly through a speaker accompanied by half a dozen heavily armed cyborgs carrying flamethrowers and rocket launchers. The speaker’s metal frame bears the Magnum Opus mark: a black gear surrounding a green screen. Their message begins with a catalogue of bodily suffering—illness, fractures, heartache, and Scraphood—and attacks the cultivator belief that birth determines destiny. In this argument, people without innate talent are denied not only advancement but the right to survive or prosper in the wasteland created by cultivators. The Metallists therefore present technology as a response to biological inequality, replacing the supposedly fixed limits of birth with constructed capability.

This position directly intersects with Yuan Guang’s history. He learned that he belonged to the half of the world’s population born without the potential for a qi core and spent years working for sects as a Scrap. Although loyal service could sometimes earn a spirit pill, sects usually reserved such resources for Second Coil disciples seeking advancement to the Third Coil. Yuan was rejected as too old and too weakly endowed even when a sect lost enough disciples to create vacancies. The Metallists’ critique consequently gives institutional language to the injustice he has personally endured, even though Yuan’s own path ultimately moves beyond both Scraphood and Metallist identity.

Bodies, Craft, and Material Power

The sect’s characteristic technology makes the distinction between body and machine unstable. Yuan initially mistakes the Metallist speaker’s visible cybernetic construction for the defining form of the sect, but later transformations complicate that impression. After assimilating Gatling Man’s core, Yuan discovers an affinity for Item Materialization, particularly for creating and replicating metallic objects such as gears, bolts, pipes, and pistons. He suspects that consuming the core allowed him to absorb part of Gatling Man’s Metallist training, turning an encounter with the sect’s power into a permanent alteration of his own abilities.

The comparison becomes sharper when Yuan’s body develops its own weapon-like architecture. Steel sheets cover his limbs, which resemble rifles more closely than ordinary arms and legs; his shoulders evoke safeties, his teeth become bullets, and his eyes resemble glass scope implants. Unlike artificial cybernetic implants, however, these features are homegrown. He becomes a living weapon rather than a conventional Metallist machine, a transformation that preserves the sect’s fascination with engineered material while redirecting it through the Gun Path.

The Metallists’ technical influence also reaches beyond combat. Their holographic technology powers public announcements and sophisticated visual displays. In Battletown, green flying eye-drones record the History Road competition and transmit it to countless screens throughout the city, while the Yinyang Khan later manifests through a swirl of qi-powered holographic light. The Metallists thus control not only devices that fight but media that organize mass attention. Their machinery turns technological achievement into public spectacle and political communication.

Vehicles and Conflict on the History Road

The Metallists participate in the History Road race through a flying vehicle, a capability that surprises Yuan because the competition requires vehicles to pass the designated landmarks. The Khan’s Barrier extends upward and prevents the plane from rising beyond shooting range, but it still gives the sect a major tactical advantage over ground-bound competitors. Their entry is one of the race’s notable machines, alongside the Flesh Mansion Sect’s giant centidead and Deathsong’s ghost ship.

The sect’s representation is weakened by events in Fleshmarket. Its expected drivers, Gatling Man and Gayak, are drawn into an elder feud and do not reach Battletown. The Metallists nevertheless field both the plane and a separate vehicle, but the other racers believe that the absence of a strong cultivator at the helm makes the machines easier to destroy. Their technological power is therefore shown to depend on human or cultivator direction; engineering alone cannot guarantee victory in a contest where judgment, qi, and violence operate together.

During the race, Bucket’s artillery cannon strikes one of the Metallist plane’s wings before it can gain too much altitude. The shells are ordinary projectiles enhanced by sutras Holster had carved into their surfaces. Their impact pierces the plane’s protections and sends it off course. Unable to recover, the vehicle veers far enough from the road to collide with the Yinyang Khan’s invisible Barrier, breaking apart into a thousand burning pieces. The destruction is both a tactical elimination and a symbolic reversal: Metallist flight promises escape from ordinary physical limits, but the Khan’s imposed boundary turns that promise into a trap.

Relations to the Wider Cultivation Order

The Metallists are not isolated reformers. They compete with the Flesh Mansion Sect, belong to the wider network of Wayfinders’ sects, and are drawn into the politics of Fleshmarket. Their expected presence in the History Road race reflects the authority of major sects and independent Paths, while their missing drivers reveal how internal elder conflicts can disrupt even a technically sophisticated organization.

Their relationship with Yuan is similarly ambivalent. The sect’s public argument rejects the doctrine that talent determines worth, a doctrine that once condemned Yuan to Scrap labor. At the same time, Yuan’s contempt for unearned reverence from Scraps shows that he distrusts any hierarchy built around exceptional status, including the new status he receives as a Gunsoul. The Metallists’ language of liberation therefore remains inseparable from militarization, sect competition, and visible technological power.

The sect also becomes part of Yuan’s cultivation through the transfer of Gatling Man’s core. His later ability to reproduce metallic components and better understand qi-bullets demonstrates that Metallist knowledge can be assimilated without Yuan becoming a Metallist. His body and techniques retain a distinctly gun-like identity, even as they incorporate material principles associated with the sect. This makes the Metallists a source of capability in Yuan’s development, but not his final allegiance.

Narrative Significance

The Metallists embody the book’s recurring conflict between inherited limitation and constructed identity. Their doctrine insists that a person’s birth should not dictate destiny, while their cyborgs, weapons, aircraft, and holograms show the immense cost of making that principle real. They offer an answer to Scraphood that is neither spiritual acceptance nor conventional cultivation: the body can be rebuilt, and matter can be disciplined into power.

Yet the narrative refuses to leave that answer uncomplicated. Metallist technology expands mobility, communication, and bodily possibility, but it also produces armed enforcers, military vehicles, and a spectacular contest shaped by destruction. The plane’s crash reveals how quickly emancipatory machinery becomes another instrument within a violent order. Yuan’s own endpoint sharpens the contrast. When he declares that the Gun is part of him but that he has become the Gunman, his transformation is neither a return to ordinary cultivation nor an adoption of Metallist cybernetics. He has absorbed their material aptitude while forging a separate identity, making the Metallists an important technological counterpoint to the path he ultimately masters.