Nuclear Age

The Nuclear Age names the catastrophe that may follow if the world’s surviving nuclear weapons are awakened. In a landscape already living with the aftermath of an earlier world-ending upheaval, it represents a further escalation: not simply another battle, but the possible release of destruction on a scale that could leave even the strongest survivors inheriting an irradiated grave.

A Threat Still Underground

Mordiggian explains that the weapons are the Children of the Nuke, able to exert influence over the weapons that sustain their violent existence. Nuclear weapons are rarer than guns but vastly more destructive: a report he recalls estimated that four hundred could wipe out humanity, while more than twelve thousand existed before Lord Kou’s ascension. Some were not destroyed or rusted away. Mordiggian suspects that many remain dormant underground, waiting for a signal that could begin the Nuclear Age.

The threat is therefore both immense and incomplete. The weapons have not all been activated, and their continued dormancy offers no guarantee of safety. Their hidden presence makes the catastrophe difficult to measure or locate, while the possibility of a signal turning that latent arsenal into an active one gives the prospect a sudden, world-altering edge.

The Cube and the Struggle for Control

Mordiggian suspects that the Cube of Natho was designed to bind The Nuke only partially through a summoning contract. Whoever controlled the artifact might be able to influence its prisoner, forcing it to disable hostile nuclear weapons or sabotage an enemy arsenal. In Mordiggian’s account, the seal on The Nuke may also explain why the buried weapons have not been triggered without the proper ritual.

That possibility makes the artifact a political weapon as well as a supernatural one. Yuan recognizes why Yinyang Khan would want it: control over the Children of the Nuke could make the Khan the most powerful warlord in the Unmade World, allowing him to destroy opponents and compel others to obey. Manhattan has also claimed that the cube could bring salvation. Yuan’s vision of the endless desert leads him to glimpse how a Nuclear Path cultivator might regard the remaking of a broken world as salvation, even when the means threaten everyone living in it.

What an Awakening Might Leave Behind

Mordiggian cannot say what would happen if the nuclear weapons detonated together. The worst possibility he describes is a wasteland scorched by searing light, where only the strongest cultivators and spirits survived to inherit an irradiated grave. Yet he leaves open other outcomes: life might endure and recover, or the damage might remain localized if time, the seven ascendancies, and constant battles had already destroyed enough of the dormant bombs.

This uncertainty does not reassure Yuan. The earlier unmaking of the world supplies a precedent for catastrophe, but not a reliable measure of what another one would do. Mordiggian can warn that the world would become less safe as The Nuke spread nuclear death; he cannot promise that anyone would survive its full release.

Demonstration Without Confirmation

Yinyang Khan’s appearance at the History Road race gives the threat a vivid, terrifying frame. From a qi-powered hologram, the Khan announces a countdown and snaps his fingers; an explosion far out in the desert produces a vast column of dust and smoke rising like a mushroom above a collapsing stone mountain. Its shockwave reaches the contestants, sending hot air and dust across them and shattering vehicle windows, including some aboard Orient’s train. The blast also knocks the eye-drones off course and ends the holographic projection.

The scene establishes the scale of the Khan’s destructive power, but does not identify that particular explosion as a nuclear detonation. That distinction matters: the Nuclear Age remains a threatened future, not an era the narrative confirms has begun. The prospect of buried weapons, contested control, and spectacular demonstrations of force keeps that future close without collapsing warning into proof.