The column rose from Central Heaven Mountain. Green light spread along its sides as it went through the upper air. From the ground, it looked like an aurora standing on end.
At sixty miles it struck the glass dome over Enclosure 109.
The Nine Heavens had put that shell around the world before the present network of extraction anchors existed. Its wards gathered qi and trapped pockets of heated vapor for the collectors. The earth had its own warmth and air beneath it. The shell had never held the whole atmosphere in place. The glass let the brighter stars show through. Where the collectors lit their wards, the shell painted copies of those stars over the gaps. The fainter stars had never come through at all.
The column reached the shell and rang through it. In the Great Yan capital, the emperor came out of the Golden Dragon Hall with his ministers behind him. Along the northern border, soldiers lowered their lances and looked up. In farmyards across the plains, mothers pulled children close.
A ring appeared in the night above Central Heaven. It was three hundred miles wide. Smaller cracks ran out of it in every direction. They caught up with the old seams of the glass and followed them. The pale surface of the sky bent, then came apart.
