The climb into the sky was as majestic as the rising of a new dawn.
At a steady, uninterrupted speed of fifteen miles per hour, the fifty-two billion tons of the Five Sacred Peaks lifted through the lower troposphere. The cut dark rock keel beneath the landmass. It was wrapped in glowing rings of amber ozone and ancient starlight vapor, pushed upward against the world-size mantle with easy, floating grace.
As the height climbed past two thousand feet, the surrounding scenery underwent a dramatic transformation.
The warm green forests and golden harvest fields of the safe hall entered the low-hanging cloud deck. The dense, sullen blanket of gray autumn rain clouds that had shrouded the mortal plains for weeks.
In the mortal world below, such a height was a realm of howling gale-force winds, freezing sleet, and disorienting fog that could rip the wings off a migrating crane. But around the Five Sacred Peaks, the ancient First Epoch sky envelope held total sway.
A dome of warm, invisible force—an energetic keel anchored to Lin Xiao’s Primordial Chaos dantian—encapsulated the entire fifty-square-mile outer edge.
Inside this protective bubble, the air was warm, sweet, and perfectly calm. The leaves on the spirit-peach trees didn’t even rustle in alarm. Butterflies with semi-clear azure wings fluttered casually from blossom to blossom, and swallows perched upon the roof edges of stone cottages. He watched the swirling gray mist press against the invisible boundary barrier like water sliding past an underwater glass bell.
