The midnight air above the Floating Mountain grew cool. But around the steaming cedar basins, the warmth remained unbroken.
Beside Lin Xiao’s floating blue raft in the Tier 2 pool, Xiao Hei gave a soft, reflex twitch in his sleep. The wolf’s left front paw paddled twice beneath the surface of the stone water, with a faint, muffled whimper deep in his throat. His notched left ear flicked once against the azure jelly, catching a stray droplet of warm cedar mist.
That tiny, unconscious twitch was like a pebble dropped into the still pool of memory.
Through the quantum telepathic bond forged by Lin Xiao’s Dao of True Naming, the emotional hum traveled straight into Lin Xiao’s ancient core. In an instant, the hundreds of years of glory, cosmic battles, and floating sky palaces dissolved away, peeling backward across time like the weathered layers of an ancient scroll.
Lin Xiao closed his curved white eyes. That let his mind drift back five hundred years to Day One.
The Awakening in the Dark Cave.
Before there was a Myriad Spirit Safe hall. Before there were floating mountains, star-iron smithies, or nine-tailed fox empresses.
There was only the dark.
