Under the leadership of the founding ancestors of the Yavuztürk Dynasty, the Kök-Turan Birliği (KTB) is established. Nations fractured across millennia are gathered beneath a single order and justice — the boundaries drawn across the earth erased.

The KTB extends its boundaries beyond the earth, into the depths of space. Vast, transparent-domed silver trading stations are established on the Moon's Sea of Tranquility (Mare Tranquillitatis). Mountain-sized Atmospheric Creation Engines are constructed to render the red dead sands of Mars habitable and to weave an artificial magnetosphere around the planet. Humanity lives through the most resplendent era in the history of the known universe.

KTB engineers attempt to integrate the finite mortal human mind directly and by force into the cosmos's Absolute Will — the Unity network — without filter or consent. The cosmos's unwavering immune system identifies this arrogance as a virus, engages, and violently locks the entire network. The nervous systems of billions directly connected to the network are incinerated within seconds by Sensory Overload. Only those spared from the network survive: underground labourers, exiles severed from all communication, and a handful of sages who had foreseen the catastrophe and already disconnected themselves. These sages — the ancestors of the Ak-Kams — activate the Ergenekon Protocol to prevent the system from ever being forced open by brute strength, and seal its awakening ciphers within the Chrome Kurgan at the summit of the Altay Mountains for eternity. The golden age of humanity wakes that day into a darkness without easy return.

To preserve the uncorrupted technology, the Root-Tongue, and the traditions of organic healing belonging to the last sages who survived the fires of the Great Blackout, a retreat is made into the steep valleys of the Altay Mountains. The valley is sealed from the world by an immense rotating electromagnetic storm shield — the Crying Rocks — and preserves the pure memory of the cosmos in silence for centuries.

Masses fleeing radiation and the catastrophe of acid rains begin an unending nomadic existence across the corroded surface — assembling vast mobile cities from the joined hulls of old nuclear cargo trains and the superstructures of decommissioned warships. These drifting mega-settlements become known collectively as the Rusted Silk Road.

The irreversible philosophical abyss between the thirty-one-year-old Aral — possessing a shamanic nature, seeking truth and free will — and the forty-year-old İlteriş culminates in a legendary duel beneath acid rain. İlteriş loses half his face. To keep Aral from the Kurgan, he places him aboard an autonomous train bound for the freezing glaciers of the north — and sends him into exile.

This is the year the historian's pen breaks — and the rusted gears of the old world stop turning. In the shadow of a Cosmic Quarantine that has stretched for centuries, on the freezing summit of the Kurgan, a mortal stands with an ancient tablet in his hands. The return from the Altay Mountains of the exiled Seeker Aral — following ten years of the Quantum Ordeal — is on the verge of triggering the war of reckoning that will shake the entire Solar System, from the red fortresses of Mars to the silver oligarchs of the Moon. The sky shall either be illuminated by a new order — or the universe shall burn this time in its own ambition beyond all return. The records of the old world end here. The epic of reckoning and resurrection begins with the first step the Seeker takes.