Iron Widow

Chapter 1 introduces Wu Zetian, an 18-year-old peasant girl from the Sui-Tang province of Huaxia. Once a month, she sneaks off to the woods to meet Gao Yizhi, the 18-year-old son of the richest man in Huaxia, Gao Qiu. Yizhi teaches Zetian how to read and lets her use his internet-connected tablet, which women are usually forbidden to access. Zetian gets Yizhi to pluck her monobrow under the pretense that she wants to look conventionally attractive. Unbeknownst to Yizhi, Wu Zetian’s plan is to become a concubine-pilot for Yang Guang to exact revenge for the death of her only sister, Ruyi, who also served as a concubine-pilot for Guang and died under suspicious circumstances. Zetian plans on getting her family to sell her off as a concubine-pilot for Guang so she can murder him in his sleep.

As Yizhi plucks her eyebrows, the two witness a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. This particular butterfly is a species where the males have black wings with white dots (yang) and the females have white wings with black dots (yin). This butterfly has one of each kind of wing, and Yizhi explains that it is intersex, neither male nor female. Zetian wonders how that may apply to humans and how the piloting system might work for such a person. She wishes she were like the butterfly and not labeled female. Ultimately, Zetian cannot keep up her ruse and tells Yizhi the truth about her plans. Before Yizhi can stop her, she flees, believing she will never see him again.

After her meeting with Yizhi, Zetian walks home with difficulty, as her feet have been bound since childhood: a common practice for frontier girls who wish to become a concubine-pilot or attract a man who can take care of them. Those who do not bind their feet are considered crude and barbarous, like the Rongdi nomads that the Huaxians despise. As a member of a frontier family, Zetian has met plenty of Rongdi and admires Rongdi women. Zetian’s family is originally from the Zhou province beyond Sui-Tang. Two centuries ago, Zhou fell to the Hunduns, and the Zhou people fled to the Sui-Tang province. Zhou is now home to both Rongdi nomads and Hunduns.

Zetian walks past rice fields tended by men on her way home. Although she expects to be harassed by them as a lone woman with a disability, they are too distracted by watching a Chrysalis fight on their tablets to notice as Zetian’s cane breaks and she tumbles into the mud. She fantasizes about piloting a Chrysalis and being free of her disability. When Zetian returns home, the men in her family are watching the battle. She sees the Vermillion Bird, piloted by the convict-turned-pilot Li Shimin, in the fray.

Zetian is set to be sold off to the army in the morning. Her father is worried about her virginity because if she cannot pass a “maidenhood test” then she cannot become a concubine-pilot (31). Zetian explodes with rage because her family does not care about the danger she is entering into as a concubine-pilot but instead seems to care only about respectability and following tradition. Zetian’s treachery will likely get her entire family executed after she kills Yang Guang, but after this incident with her father, she no longer feels guilty about their potential deaths.

The next day before the hovercraft comes to take Zetian away, Yizhi arrives unannounced at her home. Zetian’s parents have never met him before and do not recognize him. Yizhi tries to buy Zetian as a bride to save her from what he thinks is a suicide plan. Zetian drags Yizhi into a private conversation away from her family and informs him that their relationship can never work out because she would never give him children like Yizhi’s father would demand, and Yizhi is worth more as a political tool. His father would never let Yizhi squander his political worth by marrying a peasant girl. Zetian kisses him for the first time and leaves him with her confused family as she gets on the hovercraft.

Zetian is taken to the Great Wall, the defensive perimeter of the Sui-Tang frontier that faces out toward the Zhou province. She is tested to gauge her spirit pressure, alongside several other potential concubine-pilots. Spirit pressure is a measure of one’s ability to exert qi, which is used to pilot the Chrysalises. Zetian discovers she has a spirit pressure of 624, which is remarkable because only three percent of people surpass 500. If Zetian were a boy, she would immediately be made a pilot. Instead, she is appointed as a full-fledged consort to Yang Guang, a step above concubine-pilot.

Auntie Dou, the woman who tests and inspects the potential concubines, tells Zetian that she lives to serve and please Yang Guang so that he can dedicate himself to the war effort. As Zetian waits for the testing to be over, another girl named Xiao Shufei comments on the out-of-place hairpin in her elaborate outfit. Zetian’s hairpin was a gift from Ruyi, and Zetian has fashioned it into a hidden stiletto dagger with which she plans to kill Yang Guang. Zetian panics when the other girl snatches her hairpin, and Yang Guang enters the room, stopping the imminent fight between the two.

Guang, like most pilots, wears spirit metal armor attached to his spine through small needles. The spirit metal armor gives him a small fraction of his Chrysalis power outside of the Chrysalis and lets him channel his qi more easily. Zetian manages to retrieve her hairpin as she notices the two-tiered crown Guang wears. Pilots wear two interlocking crowns as a symbol of the Balanced Match they might one day meet. (A Balanced Match occurs when a female pilot is matched with a male one and can withstand his spirit pressure to stay alive through battles. If this rare match occurs, one of the two crowns is given to the female pilot in a Crowning Ceremony, a special marriage arrangement.)

Guang is pleased with Zetian’s unusually high spirit pressure, and Zetian accompanies him back to his lofty apartments above the Great Wall, a vantage point that gives him immediate access to the Nine-Tailed Fox, should Hunduns suddenly attack. Zetian begins to doubt her plan for revenge as she finds herself unexpectedly attracted to Guang and his seemingly harmless demeanor. Despite her moment of indecision, Zetian resolves to seduce Guang in order to manipulate him into taking off his armor and giving her a chance to execute him, but as he takes her to his bedroom, the Hunduns attack.

Zetian is unprepared to pilot the Chrysalis with Guang and tries to flee, believing she will die like every other girl once inside the Chrysalis. Guang assaults and restrains her, then strips her nude. He drags her into the Chrysalis and forces her into the yin seat and the spirit metal armor that awaits her.

Struggling to remember who and where she is, Zetian awakens in a jungle with a child crying in the distance and feels compelled to seek out the child and comfort him. As Zetian comes to her senses, she notices that the jungle is teeming with fruits. Touching them, she relives Guang’s memories and watches as he physically abuses, torments, and violates other women. Every line and disarming charm he used on Zetian to cause her to doubt herself has been used on other women, all of whom Guang has killed. Zetian finds the crying child and discovers it is a child-version of Guang. Enraged, she kills the child.

After murdering the child-version of Guang, Zetian is dragged into the shared consciousness space of co-pilots. This world is comprised of a circular floor with the yin-yang symbol on it. As Zetian rifles through Guang’s thoughts, he looks through hers and discovers her plan to kill him. Guang attempts to subjugate and restrain Zetian in their shared consciousness, but Zetian uses her Metal-based qi to overpower his Wood-based qi before murdering him in the yin-yang realm. Doing so kills him in reality and gives her full control of the Nine-Tailed Fox.

Zetian struggles to learn how to control the Nine-Tailed Fox in the midst of battle. While piloting a Chrysalis, pilots join with the Chrysalis itself and lose all consciousness of their physical human bodies. The other Chrysalis pilots realize that something is wrong as Zetian slowly gains control of her avatar. For the first time, Zetian can walk as the Fox without experiencing pain in her feet, and she pushes the Fox to its Heroic Form. Resembling a humanoid that seems to be a costumed version of the Chrysalis’s animal form, a Heroic Form requires an immense amount of spirit pressure to manifest and is normally only achieved through the joined energy of a Balanced Match. Zetian takes on a duke-class Hundun by herself so that the other Chrysalis pilots will not need to exert themselves and thus will not run the risk of killing their concubine-pilots.

After the battle, Zetian passes out briefly, and when she regains consciousness, she is once again in her own human body. She realizes that Guang is dead and that the dormant Nine-Tailed Fox is surrounded by cameras and other Chrysalises who are worried about Yang Guang. Zetian emerges from the Chrysalis with Guang’s body as a trophy that she proudly displays to all of Huaxia. Zetian proclaims that Huaxia has been “living a dream long enough” and welcomes Huaxia to “their nightmare” (80).

Zetian is dragged to Kaihuang Tower, the central command space for the Sui-Tang frontier on the Great Wall, and despite her small size and physical disability, all of the male military personnel are clearly afraid of her, causing Zetian to relish this new power that she has gained over the men of her society.

The pilots drag her into a teleconference with Zhuge Liang and Sima Yi, two strategists from the central command of Huaxia’s military, who grill her over the events that led to Guang’s death and determine that she is an Iron Widow, a woman capable of overpowering and killing her male pilot. Liang and Yi leave the call temporarily to report to the other strategists and the Sages, the council of men that rule Huaxia from the capital city of Chang’an. Liang and Yi return shortly afterward to inform Zetian that she will be partnered with Li Shimin, the pilot of the Vermillion Bird.