Since the first primitive tribes of the Azure Cloud Realm looked upward into the night sky, the twin moons had stood as monuments of cold, unbending silence.
The larger satellite, Yue-Yin, was a stark orb of pale silver dark rock, pitted with jagged impact craters and scarred by ancient cosmic collisions. The smaller satellite, Yue-Yang, was a dull bronze sphere of iron-rich dust, cold and lifeless. She cast a pale, sad light upon the mortal continents below. For ten million years, poets had written mournful verses about their lonely beauty, while high-ranking Daoists meditated upon their barren faces to cultivate detached, emotionless states of mind.
To training scholars, the moons were the ultimate symbol of spiritual emptiness. Airless graves of dead stone where no flower could ever take root, no bird could ever sing. No droplet of water had ever fallen.
That ancient truth was erased in the span of thirty heartbeats.
Riding the radiant solar wind of Lin Xiao’s Primordial Dantian, the extraterrestrial streams of Primordial Genesis Dew crossed the sky-high gulf. Like two vast, glowing rivers of turquoise starlight, the packed life-force wrapped around the sister spheres in glowing, swirling ribbons.
The dead regolith didn’t simply absorb the sky moisture. It awakened.
