The high-sky winds howled through the upper fringes of the air. But around Lin Xiao, the air was as still as a secluded bamboo garden in early summer.
High above him, the Void Broodmother Nihil-Kraken loomed across six thousand miles of sky space. Its continent-sized black glass back shell drank in the dying starlight. Its ten thousand tentacles drifted through the empty pocket like a waving forest of black serpents. The creature’s giant stone anti-matter eye glared down with cold cosmic malice. It waited for the insolent little blue intruder to cower beneath its ancient shadow.
Lin Xiao didn’t cower. Instead, he decided that proper negotiations needed a slightly more formal presentation. Floating around as a plain sphere of jelly during an inter-realm diplomatic conference had always felt a bit informal to him, especially when meeting a guest of such staggering proportions.
With a soft, fluid pulse of pure Primordial Origin Qi, his jelly-like azure mass shifted. The lower third of his body remained a floating, semi-clear sapphire dome, bobbing comfortably on the sky currents. But from the waist up, his essence condensed into the form of an eighteen-year-old mortal scholar.
He was clad in simple, plain robes of washed gray-blue linen, his wide sleeves bordered with subtle silver cloud-stitching that caught the faint violet surrounding light. His dark hair was tied loosely at the nape of his neck with a strip of blue hemp, a few stray locks fluttering gently in the high-sky draft. His stance was easy, neither…
