People tended to avoid the Tianming Hills largely because of the ruins scattered among them from the time of the Seres Empire. Superstition wasn’t as great as it had been in the old days, when the Serican ruins had been looked upon as haunted and unlucky, and the archaeological excavations at Liqian had taught the people much about their ancient and technologically advanced predecessors.

That didn’t keep people in the sticks from continuing to leave the Hills well alone, and such was fine with Antigua.

When business at her uncle’s machine shop was slow, and it was often very slow, Antigua would take to the Tianming Hills and explore. The Seres Empire had been tottering on the verge of collapse when her Daqin ancestors had arrived centuries ago, and the old empire’s disintegration after being ravaged by Daqinian diseases and the brief but fierce Dusk War meant that even in Antigua’s most scholarly history books there was little but speculation. Many of the settlers had some Seres ancestry–including Antigua herself–but little else was known aside from lists of long-dead emperors and vague tales of automata.

She’d found nothing but rusty mechanical crossbows and other things barely worth tinkering with until the Tielaohu.

There were tales, of course, about the iron automaton tigers that had decimated the Daqin army at the Battle of the Ir. Their immobile, gutted husks were found in the occasional museum. The way to deal with them in a combat situation–surrounding them with burning bales of hay and firing a cannon point-blank into the conflagration–was still in the Daqin cavalry manuals that Antigua’s cousin Barbuda brought home from the Academy.

But that warm summer day when she happened on a moss-covered Tielaohu tiger in the Tianming Hills…Antigua had never dreamed that she would find anything of the sort.

Much less return it to life.

Inspired by this.

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