Six months.
Six months since the Architect had been given a soul. Six months since the war had ended and the long, arduous battle for peace had begun. The city was a landscape of scars, but it was healing. The skeletal frames of new buildings climbed towards the sky, monuments to a defiant, unbreakable hope. The power was on. The water was running. The whispers were gone.
Arden's team, the saviors who had been branded terrorists, were now ghosts. Legends. They worked from the shadows, their actions shaping the city's reconstruction, their names never spoken above a whisper. They were the silent guardians of a fragile peace.
Jian's Reconstruction Corps, a disciplined army of former soldiers and civilian volunteers, was the city's backbone. They rebuilt bridges, restored power grids, and protected supply convoys from the predators who thrived in the post-war chaos. They were a symbol of order in a world that had forgotten the meaning of the word.
