The sound began not as a roar, but as the deep, ancient thrum of an ocean breaching its basin.
Deep within the three-mile-wide bronze throat, the inverted vanes of the Great Sluice Gate hummed with pure, open discharge. For ten thousand years, the Upper Realm had hoarded the spiritual marrow of the mortal plane. It packed the life-force of millions of climbing fighters and world-size leylines into the private reservoirs of the Third Heaven.
Now, with the thirty-pace star-iron spindle locked at one hundred and eighty degrees, the entire piled up weight of Heaven’s stolen treasury came plunging downward.
It wasn’t a trickle. It wasn’t a modest fountain.
It was the Great Return. A massive, thundering clouded eye of liquid-crystal-clear sky origin qi measuring billions of gallons!
The torrent dropped through the bronze channel at hypersonic speed. It glowed with the combined, blazing bright radiance of liquid amber, molten jade, and semi-clear sapphire. It cleared the lower rim of the Throat of Heaven and entered the open stratosphere. Then, the sheer volume of dropping liquid threatened to bend the laws of world-size physics.
Conventional mortal wisdom held that if an ocean of high-thickness sky essence crashed into the air from a height of twenty miles, the moving impact alone would strike the earth like a shower of falling moons. The sky blast wave would flatten mountain ranges, boil coastal seas to steam, and scour nine million square miles of fertile topsoil down to bare, smoking granite.
