In the grand mythology of immortal ascension, fighters who reached the pinnacle of cosmic power invariably sought to make themselves larger.
Ancient Daoist emperors, upon breaking through their bottlenecks, projected golden phantom avatars ten thousand arm-lengths tall, striding across mountain ranges with footsteps that shook the earth. Sky deities showed up crowns of burning suns, wrapping themselves in robes woven from starlight and speaking in voices that shattered mortal ears. To the proud masters of the Upper Realm, power was an exercise in dramatic zoom. If you couldn’t be seen from three provinces away, your divine sovereignty was considered tragically deficient.
Lin Xiao held a profoundly different philosophy regarding personal volume.
To Lin Xiao, being eighty miles in width was an acute supply nuisance. When you were eighty miles wide, you couldn’t sit on a woven bamboo mat. You couldn’t rest your chin on a carved cedar table. You couldn’t dip your toes into a steaming hot spring tub. And, worst of all, Su Ling’er couldn’t hold you in her lap while reading agricultural manifests.
Being a cosmic titan was sometimes useful for catching continent-sized calamari, but when it came to everyday comfort, large bodies were drafty, heavy, and utterly impossible to tuck into bed.
