Twilight dropped upon the floating realm not with darkness, but with an explosion of sky fire.
At five thousand feet above the mortal earth, there were no distant mountain ranges or thick city smog to choke the setting sun. The vast, uninterrupted tropospheric horizon became an artist’s canvas of impossible glory.
Bands of blazing bright molten gold, burning apricot, deep rose-pink, and rich royal violet stretched across thousands of miles of open sky. The rolling ocean of white clouds beneath the floating cliffs drank in the dying light. It caught the amber rays until the entire cloud deck looked like a boundless sea of liquid starlight and glowed embers. Far below, through the occasional rift in the cloud sea, the distant mortal valleys were already slipping into purple twilight, their tiny village animal fat candles flickering like lost fireflies.
High above the central peaks, the first evening stars began to emerge—not as faint, twinkling pinpricks fighting through mortal haze, but as sharp, diamond-hard lanterns blazing with ancient clarity against the indigo vault.
On the western cliff edge of Sovereign’s Rest, a solitary figure sat on the edge of the world.
Sword Saint Gu Qingfeng sat with his legs dangling casually over the five-thousand-foot drop into the void. His patched green linen robes fluttered softly in the warm, ozone-scented updraft rising from the mountain’s geogravitic keel. Beside him on the dark stone rock lay his battered wooden sword sheath, fully at rest, its rusted iron blade sleeping peacefully within the seasoned…
