The sunset over the Azure Cloud Realm was a breathtaking mix of rose, violet, and molten gold.
Far behind in the eastern valleys, the bustling encampments of Camp Hope were winding down their celebrations. The mortal kings and grand marshals had mounted their carriages to return home, bearing treaties that guaranteed water, grain, and peace to forty million souls. The great panic that had threatened to burn up the continent was broken, washed away into the pages of history.
Here, on the broad, calm expanse of the Heavenly Mother River, there was only the singing of the current and the whisper of the evening breeze through the riverside reeds.
Drifting lazily down the center of the deep, turquoise waterway was a wide raft built from thick, polished green bamboo poles. The raft was thirty paces long, equipped with a low, woven straw awning, soft hemp floor-mats. A pair of gently smoking mosquito-repelling incense coils that smelled of dried lavender and wild mountain mint.
At the center of the deck, resting comfortably upon a plump silk mattress, was Lin Xiao in his true, unburdened form.
He was a semi-clear, three-foot dome of pure, floating azure jelly, speckled with shimmering golden-amber crystal-clear flecks that caught the evening twilight like trapped stars. For the first time in weeks, Lin Xiao wasn’t thinking about heat-powered pressure gradients, non-Newtonian shear thickness, or class-one lever physics.
