At the exact stroke of solar noon, the heavens of the Azure Cloud Realm shattered.
There was no preliminary thunderstorm, no gathering of dark squalls, and no astrological warning from the ancient star tower mirrors. The golden sun had just reached the zenith of the sky, casting brilliant, warm autumn rays across the emerald rice paddies, quiet pine forests, and winding silver rivers of the mortal world. In ordinary mountain villages, farmers were wiping sweat from their brows, laying down their wooden hoes to reach for cool gourds of well water.
Then, space itself screamed.
It was a sound beyond mortal understanding. An ear-splitting, bone-shaking screech like a continent-sized pane of ancient glass being shattered by an iron fist. The bedrock beneath three continents shuddered wildly. It sent deep ground-shaking blast waves through the world-size mantle. In royal capitals thousands of leagues away, ancient brass seismographs and star-globes toppled from their stone stands. Mountain ranges groaned as earth-shaking roots shifted, and ocean tides surged backward toward the deep-sea trenches as the air pressure plummeted in the span of three heartbeats.
Across the highest reaches of the high-sky high sky, a jagged, bleeding space-folding fracture tore open from the eastern horizon to the western rim of the world.
