Before a homeowner could truly settle into their armchair for an afternoon nap, there was one deepest household chore that could never be neglected: shutting the front door and latching the windows.
High in the upper stratosphere of the Azure Cloud Realm, the front door of the universe was still standing wide open.
The ten-thousand-mile space-folding tear—the total wound through which the Void Broodmother and her trillions of locusts had poured into realspace—remained slashed across the high sky. Even with the swarm entirely devoured and digested, the margins of the rift were a jagged, ugly mess. Fractured shards of space-time hung like broken window glass in a winter blizzard, their raw edges buzzing with leftover static and leaking a cold, whistling draft of negative empty pocket from the outer-void deep pit.
If left untended, that tear was an open invitation to cosmic trouble. Stray space vermin, astral debris, and cold cosmic winds would continue to seep into the upper air, ruining the newly cleaned air and chilling the stratosphere.
Lin Xiao, currently floating at roughly ten paces in width as he continued his gradual, peaceful deflation, looked up at the jagged black scar with the sharp, disapproving eye of a tidy housekeeper looking at a broken storm shutter.
