In the universal calendar year 0,079 U.C., after approximately half a year under siege, control of the capital of the western tetrarchate was finally wrested away from the foederati usurpers as the city fell to the forces of the western imperial legion, aided by their eastern tetrarchate counterparts and the remainder of the foederati forces still loyal to the western senate. However, the pyrrhic “victory”, if indeed it could be called that, came at a great cost as the cornered foederati and the Vitruvian usurper, prepared to fight to the death if it meant even a snowball’s chance in hell to prevent the western senate from retaking power and reinstituting the dreadful tax policies that had crippled the economies of the vassal states under the suzerainty of the western empire in the name of “rebuilding public infrastructure” following the wake of the war with the Saghdid empire, the foederati in a last stand against the allied forces of the imperial legion set about cultivating mycorrhizal matrices to grow throughout the bricks and mortar of the towering calcinators of the capital.

Having been erected centuries past by the emperor Redivivus, the first emperor of the Empire of Daqin before it was split into bureaucratic tetrarchates of east and west, according to the disciplic succession of the principles of the Huange-he sutra matrix thus disseminated to him by kenotic-minded of the dreaming Brahma, the jellyfish god Akashic Catfish, the towering calcinators were created to counterbalance the imbalanced qi flow of the leylines beneath the plains the city was built on, narrowly averting calamity in subduing the power in the tremors of an earthquake that otherwise would have decimated the capital long before its fated time! Upon these same towering calcinators the foederati now cultivated snaking mycorrhizae through metal and mortar, reaching deep into the earth below the streets of the capital, transforming the calcinators into towering dantians of metal and stone masonry to be manipulated like the electric organ of a zapfish. Feeding alchemical reagents to the mycorrhizal matrices and using their thaumaturgical dominion over plants, the sages of the occupying foederati forces, hierophants of the Order of Acarya, beseeched the souls within the mycorrhizae to manipulate the elemental qi flow of the leylines like dantian in a spell of electrogenesis to cast a moat of magic lightning around the outer walls of the city and fell the legion besiegers.

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And indeed, the foedarati’s ploy seemed to pay off at first, as many legionaries were vaporized by lancing bolts of lightning! However, even the thaumaturgical casting of spells release anti-qi as a byproduct. On that day, the skies above the capital of New Ketumati city were so congested with mass quantities of anti-qi released by the foedarati’s misuse of the leylines beneath the earth that a vortex amassed within the darkening clouds and devoured the city from above; dealing a crushing to defeat to the foederati, as well as a crippling blow to the legion’s forces. As even if the east could muster the strength to send reinforcements and hosts of excavating parties enough to sift through the rubble, the loss of the capital and all the lands around it in a 30-mile radius rang the death knell for any hope of salvaging the last dynasty of the western tetrarchate.