However, amid the oppressive shadows of this underground world, the gloomy, terrifying flame of his soul, suppressed beneath that withered body, suddenly settled down.
Mao Yuanzuo's fingers, brittle as dead branches, brushed along the passage beside him. A faint, ghostly light flickered to life, like a wisp of will-o'-the-wisp on the verge of going out.
In the dim glow, his withered face came into view, lined with wrinkles. He looked tired and stiff, as if even managing a slightly livelier smile would be difficult.
Some time had passed since they last met, and this old monster who controlled the Blue Star Commonwealth's political scene from behind the scenes looked even more decrepit than he had at his birthday celebration. He had actually put on an exoskeleton to get around. Silver-gray neural conduits pulsed along his spine, while the uncovered skin on his neck had turned a distinct ashen gray and dry, radiating the deathly stillness of a corpse.
His hoarse voice emerged like the rumble of a rusty old bell tolling in a dilapidated tower. "My life should have ended long ago. The last twenty years of it have been nothing but an instinctive struggle against despair, like an old dog fighting to stay alive. All the glory and ambition of the past, all that striving and climbing, seem like the embarrassing, dark history of adolescence."
Perhaps this founding father of the Blue Star Commonwealth was summing up the first half of his life in a bitter reckoning.
His sole companion in conversation, a mercenary known as Tinder—one of the Thirteen Faces of the World-Encircling Serpent—fell briefly silent as well.
He was a Skaru, a rare psionically sensitive species in the universe. Once they reached around the third ring, they could unlock a rather wondrous racial gift: their surface cells