A Sword's Journey Through the Long Night

At the dawn of time, a feast was laid out, and the cosmos became its kitchen. The Heavenly Dao held the cauldron, feeding it stars and moons for fuel; the void became the pot, and chaos was cooked into a dish. The turning of the four seasons set the order in which ingredients were added; the birth and death of all things brought them surging to the chopping block. Its rules stood stern and solemn, named “Nourishing the Feast”; its laws blazed bright, proclaimed as “Virtue Illuminates.”

Above the Nine Heavens, jade pavilions rose in tiered splendor, and vast halls of gluttony stretched on. Clouds and rosy mists wove brocade curtains, veiling jade tables slick with blood and grease; thunderous drums played celestial music, keeping time with the crunch of teeth. Immortals sat in ranked rows, their manifestations towering: some raised cups to draw on the Milky Way, drinking up a century of fortune from the mortal world; others lifted chopsticks to divide the earth’s ley lines, seizing the spiritual marrow and essence of mountains and rivers. Peaches of Immortality glowed, their hearts holding pills made from living souls; imperial wine flowed, infused with blood and tears. Nectar and jade dew were distilled from the flesh and blood of all living beings; phoenix marrow and dragon liver were nothing but the hard-won foundations of heroes, cruelly carved away.

Looking down at the mortal world, one saw a garden raised for the feast. Cultivators toiled to gather spiritual energy into grain, unaware that harvest time was also time to reap them; warriors trained relentlessly to temper their bodies into fine material, never realizing that once their bodies were perfected, they would become ingredients for the kitchen. The storms of the martial world were merely the first bubbles in the boiling cauldron; courtly schemes were all just ways of seasoning the dishes before the feast. Spring blossoms and autumn harvests withered in their appointed seasons, offering up their finest; tsunamis and landslides crumbled under the force of calamity, contributing their very essence. Demons, spirits, plants, trees, insects, and even grains of sand all lived according to the rules, waiting for their appointed hour to perish and become a wisp of fragrance above the feast, or half a reflection of laughter in a cup.

Look again at the strange signs in heaven and earth: On moonless nights, the wails of countless ghosts could often be heard. They were no sounds from the underworld, but the resentment of souls not yet cooked. Blood sometimes fell from a clear sky, not through the Rain Master's fault, but because boiling broth had splashed from an overflowing cauldron. The tides of the Eastern Sea rose and fell in step with the feast; the light and darkness of the Western Mountains shifted with the Heavenly Venerable's fullness and hunger. The Great Dao was a string, lightly plucked by the hand that played the rules of the meal; heaven and earth were like a mill, grinding up remnants wherever the cycle of reincarnation turned.