To the right of the huge World-Tree portal, half-shrouded in the cool, glowing starlight vapor that drifted across the round hall floor, stood a towering massive stone stele.
The stele rose fifteen meters into the air, carved from a single slab of unpolished meteorite iron. Its surface was weathered by the slow passage of ten million years. But the deep, sharp-angled grooves carved into its face still pulsed with a faint, faded gold soft glow. The writing was not the modern script of the Great Qian Dynasty, nor the stylized calligraphy of the traditional training sects. It was the ancient First Epoch seal-script, where each character looked like a tiny star-pattern of stars and terrestrial trigrams.
Su Ling’er stepped forward toward the monolith. Her nine snowy-white tails fanned outward in a protective arc. It glowed with soft, pale fox-fire that lit up the ancient runes. She drew upon her royal sky fox heritage and the ancient linguistic matrices Lin Xiao had downloaded into her mind from the Great Scroll hall. She traced her slender fingers along the deep incisions.
“Can you decipher it, Ling’er?” Lin Xiao asked, stepping up beside her with hands clasped behind his back.
“Yes, Lord Xiao,” Su Ling’er murmured, her voice hushed with respect as she read the glowing characters. “The stone carving is a sovereign proof. It was left by the last ruler of the pre-historic great realm before their ascension into starlight.”
