In the mists of Qingxi, three empty skins hung from strands of spider silk, their spiritual cores leaking cold fog. When the fog coiled around the purple markings over his heart, it turned into a faint sound, like the Primordial Firmament knocking from between his bones.
He clutched a scrap of paper soaked in spiritual breath. The words “Guixu” had bled into a pale purple stain. The instant his fingertip touched it, the broken stele of Kunlun split before his eyes: silver threads descended from the patterns carved into the stone, and the spiritual cores of millions of living beings flowed along them like stars. The dome formed by those stars was leaking darkness.
Some said the darkness was the Primordial Firmament’s greed; others said the threads were Heaven’s calamity. But the fox spirit of the East Sea coiled around his sword and said the threads were originally meant to weave a ring. The bone slips in the ghost tomb pressed against his palm and said the darkness was filth from beyond the realms. The stone patterns on the barbarian tribe’s sacred mountain burned his fingers and told him that the character for “Heaven” had originally been the character for “ring,” missing just one stroke.
The broken jades of the Nine Realms trembled in his sleeve, each wrapped around half a sound left unfinished: sometimes a dragon’s cry, sometimes a spirit’s sigh, sometimes the tremor of stone. The purple banners of the Skyvault Palace chased after those sounds, seeking to melt the jades into a lock and carve the purple markings into a seal. They said, “The Primordial Firmament is a prison,” yet dared not look at the light shimmering across the ring when the jades were pieced together, the warmth that sheltered the Nine Realms.
He stood with sword in hand in the seam between mist and light, and heard the purple markings ring once more. It was no call of impending doom, but a summons from the ring: calling to the threads that had fallen loose, to the missing stroke, to restore the character for “Heaven” to its original form, the character for “ring.”
