For eight hundred years, Celestial Envoy Bai Ming had measured his life by the precise hierarchy of the Upper Heavens.
He knew which grand lords needed nine bows and which needed seven. He had spent eight hundred years wearing astral silk robes, walking upon polished marble, and consuming chalky longevity pills that tasted of crushed mica and dry sand.
Now, sitting upon a moss-covered boulder beneath a blooming plum tree on the lower agricultural terraces of the Floating Mountain, Bai Ming looked at his hands.
His delicate, pale hands were covered in fine red dust. It had never held anything heavier than an ivory court scepter or a royal jade seal. His amazing starry silk robes, stitched with nine solar dragons in gold thread, were torn along the hem and splattered with dark garden mud.
His bound wrists rested on his knees. It was tied with a soft, supple cord of void-silk that felt more like a gentle bracelet than a prisoner’s fetter.
Crunch, crunch.
The sound of footsteps on the gravel path drew Bai Ming’s gaze upward.
Walking toward him was Lin Xiao, dressed in his handsome eighteen-year-old scholar form with his simple azure sleeves fluttering in the mountain breeze. Flanking him was Tie Shan, the nine-foot titan bear beastman whose meteor-iron right arm clanked softly at his side.
