The stratosphere over the Azure Cloud Realm was unusually quiet, painted in soft shades of lavender and sapphire twilight. High above the tropospheric cloud decks, thirty miles above the highest jagged peaks of the Grand Desolate Mountain Range, Lin Xiao floated in suspended contentment. His semi-clear azure body had swollen from the size of a honeydew melon to a plump, glowing dome nearly twenty paces across, streaming a gentle warmth that kept the biting chill of the void at bay.
Beneath him, the land-wide crust stretched out toward the curving horizon. The great barrier array of the Myriad Spirit Safe hall shone like a vast network of golden threads, shielding more than one hundred million refugees who had fled the first waves of the void incursion. Only minutes earlier, tens of thousands of void locusts and dozens of jagged dreadnoughts had blackened the sky, threatening to erase reality down to the bedrock. Now, however, those starving invaders were gone. Every last crystal-clear back shell, every tendril of entropic shadow, and every barrage of spatial unmaking had been drawn smoothly down Lin Xiao’s gullet.
Prrrrrr-hummmmm.
A deep, rhythmic shaking originated from the exact center of Lin Xiao’s core. It wasn’t the harsh grinding of gears or the furious roar of a potion-made cooking pot under pressure. Instead, it was an immensely comforting, low-hum purr, humming steadily at twenty-eight cycles each second. The soothing wave radiated outward in nested rings of lavender light, passing through the thin sky haze, washing through the…
