The bronze bell atop the Thousand-Floor Celestial Pagoda didn’t toll for war.
For five thousand years in the Azure Cloud Realm, the ringing of a great bronze bell meant only one of three calamities: a royal mobilization, a blood feud between supreme sects, or a starving beast tide dropping from the northern barrens. The bronze mouth spoke. Then, farmers buried their grain, mothers hurried children into cellars, and young fighters tied hemp funerary cords around their sword sheaths. They knew they might never return to their old family halls.
Tonight, however, the ringing shaking that rolled down from the Floating Mountain carried the light, chime-like ringing of sky silver bells.
On the northern plaza of the safe hall, beneath the huge dark rock arches of the Pagoda, the central Heavenly Dao Leaderboard Stele ignited with blinding solar radiance. Carved deep into the black fiery stone, five names flared in liquid gold, their strokes lighting up the sea of thousands of upturned faces:
Floor 050 Conquered. Vanguard Party: Yan Zixuan, Han Xue, Chen Yu, Liu Tao, Xiao Rou. Clear Status: Total Perfection.
For two heartbeats, silence gripped the plaza. Then, across twelve thousand four hundred high-deep ring water-mirrors scattered throughout four mortal empires and seven sovereign mountain valleys, the stillness shattered into thunderous pandemonium.
