The Cataclysm That Split the Heavens

The fifteenth day of the first month in the Bingwu year, the night of the Lantern Festival.

It should have been a night when the world shone as bright as day with lanterns, and all the people celebrated together. Yet without warning, a rift split open across the heavens.

It was no lightning bolt, no storm cloud, but a deep, dark "wound" that seemed capable of swallowing every trace of light.

At first, people thought it was a rare celestial phenomenon and debated its meaning. But when the first breath from beyond this world, a "Primordial Qi" teeming with spiritual energy and destructive unrest, poured from the rift, the entire world began to... awaken, or rather, transform in ways no one could understand.

An old farmer watched his ox raise its head and bellow at the sky, a single horn sprouting from its forehead as it charged into the mountains on a trail of fire.

A child saw the golden scales of a koi in the pond shimmer. It soared into the air, became a streak of light, and vanished among the clouds.

In the deep mountains and vast marshes, ancient trees grew wild, vines writhed like dragons, and demonic miasma spread. The spiritual veins, drained dry and dormant for ten thousand years, began to beat again with a faint but stubborn "heartbeat."