Everyone had braced for the sound of the world ending.
Across the eighteen provinces of the Azure Cloud Realm, millions of fighters shut their eyes, clenching their teeth in excitement of the blinding, burning to ash blast that would turn to steam their flesh down to marrow and ash. In the royal citadels of the mortal dynasties, generals held their breaths. They waited for the ground beneath their boots to liquefy into boiling magma. In the sky spires of the Upper Realm, ancient immortals shielded their faces with stitched silk sleeves, expecting the high sky to shatter like brittle fine china under the impact of the falling apocalypse.
Even the mountain winds had ceased to blow. The entire world-size biosphere seemed to pause on the cliff edge of total oblivion, caught in the choking stillness that always precedes the extinction of a star system.
Yet the sky didn’t break.
There was no ear-splitting roar, no earth-shaking upheaval, and no blinding flash of nuclear total ruin. Instead, when the three-thousand-half-mile pillar of total star-core unmaking struck the little blue slime, the heavens produced a sound that was profoundly, almost embarrassingly gentle.
FWUMP.
It sounded exactly like a heavy goose-down duvet being tossed onto a freshly laundered mattress, or a tired traveler flopping face-first onto a cool water pillow after a grueling trek across dusty mountain roads.
