Iron Widow

The pain from losing the wing rips Zetian and Shimin’s minds apart temporarily. Shimin ejects both Zetian and Yizhi from the Vermillion Bird to save the two of them from the Black Tortoise.

Zetian catches Yizhi as they are both ejected from the Vermillion Bird. Zetian is stunned by Xiuying’s betrayal and filled with anger. Shimin pushes his body to impossible limits and pilots the Vermillion Bird alone to fight back against the Black Tortoise. Zetian seeks out the White Tiger for help while Shimin’s heart rate becomes erratic due to exertion. She manages to find White Tiger pilots in the fray and convince them to grant her and Shimin entry into their cockpit. Just as she secures this assistance, Shimin flatlines.

The White Tiger turns on the Black Tortoise just in time to watch it smash the Vermillion Bird’s head, killing Shimin. Grief, guilt, and anger consume Zetian. Without a Chrysalis of her own, she cannot avenge him, and she leaves Yizhi with the White Tiger and sets off to find the mythical Yellow Dragon.

Zetian meets a nomad woman similar to the nomad she met earlier. These nomads were Huaxians of the Zhou region before it fell and are still able to understand Zetian’s language. When Zetian asks about the Yellow Dragon and shows her antidote for the Flowerpox, the woman takes her to a large gathering within her nomadic community, and they travel to a massive underground mausoleum beneath the volcano. There Zetian finds the Yellow Dragon and the stasis-bound Qin Zheng, still awaiting a cure for his disease.

Zetian awakens Qin Zheng and dangles the cure for the Flowerpox in front of him. She needs his cooperation to pilot the Yellow Dragon, and the cure for the disease is her bargaining chip. As the most powerful qi user in existence, Zheng has mastery over all five elements, while most living pilots only have access to one dominant element. Knowing what she does about the rigged Chrysalis seats, Zetian is aware that she will not survive the flight if she allows Zheng to take the traditional yang seat, so instead, she forces Zheng into the yin seat and sits in the yang seat for the first time, claiming complete control of the world’s most powerful Chrysalis.

As the flight begins, Zetian finds herself in Zheng’s mind-realm. There, she fights off ghosts that want to drag her into icy water and is saved by Shimin, whom she does not remember in this moment. She encounters Zheng and finally realizes that she is in his mind-realm. Zheng is surprised by her ability to exert enough willpower to remain conscious in his mind-realm.

The Yellow Dragon effortlessly defeats the Water emperor-class Hundun. The Chrysalis pilots successfully defeat the Hunduns and destroy their nest on the volcano, freeing the Zhou province from the Hundun presence. Zetian broadcasts the truth about the Chrysalis pilot seats before smashing the communication lines, cutting off the Chrysalis pilots from their commanders at the Kaihuang tower. In the chaos, Zetian attacks the Black Tortoise. She learns that Xiuying only betrayed her because the military threatened to kill her sons if she didn’t. Far from being inclined to show to mercy, Zetian suspects that Xiuying wanted her to reconcile with her family so the government could use them as leverage. Zetian ruthlessly crushes the Black Tortoise, killing Xiuying and her partner before heading toward Kaihuang and Chang’an, determined to use the power of the Yellow Dragon to seek vengeance for Shimin’s death.

Zetian retrieves Yizhi before destroying Kaihuang tower and everybody within. She then sets her sights on Chang’an and the Sage’s temple. When Zetian arrives in Chang’an, the military tries to use her family as a bargaining chip to stop her from destroying the Sages and government, but Zetian remorselessly crushes her family along with the Sage’s temple. With the Sages destroyed, there is no governmental body left, and Zetian is untouchable due to the power of the Yellow Dragon.

Gao Qiu confronts Zetian and demands a place of power in the new government she plans to create now that she has destroyed the Sages. Zetian cannot kill Qiu because he has brought dozens of innocent girls with him as bargaining chips, and Zetian will not destroy his hovercraft because she cannot bring herself to kill the girls. Qiu threatens to show his son the extortion video of Zetian if she refuses to comply. Yizhi demands that Zetian let him out of the Chrysalis to talk to his father. When she does, Yizhi surprises her by killing his father instead of talking. Yizhi comments that they are now free to shape the world as they see fit, though they can no longer have the cabin in the mountains that he wished for.

In the aftermath of Zetian’s rampage, Zetian returns to the field of battle to find that Shimin’s body is missing. The other pilots report that a strange hovercraft appeared and took the shattered remains of the Vermillion Bird’s head while she was gone. Yizhi contacts Zetian to tell her about top-secret documents he found in the ruins of the Sage’s temple. The documents reveal that the Hunduns are the true natives of this planet that the humans are in fact the invading force, and that Huaxia is actually a colony of an unnamed inter-planetary empire. The Heavenly Council is a commanding government that oversees the harvesting of the Hunduns for precious spirit metals. The Heavenly Council interrupts Zetian’s call with Yizhi to show her Shimin’s mangled body kept on life support. They warn her that if the true nature of Huaxia is revealed to the general public, she will never get Shimin back, but if she rules as they direct her to, then they may return Shimin to her.