The heavens above the northern borderlands of the Jiuzhou Plane didn’t crack like stone. They shattered like a four-hundred-mile ceiling of frosted stained glass struck by a sky-high sledgehammer.
Across four provinces, the golden sky canopy that had held the cold void at bay for three thousand years gave way in a single, total instant. The sound that followed was not thunder. It was the screech of tearing spatial fabric. A sound so deep and unnatural that every river within three hundred leagues reversed its flow for ten seconds. From the stratosphere, billions of tons of razor-sharp, blazing bright spatial glass began to peel away from the high sky, tumbling down through the clouds in a shimmering, lethal avalanche.
Behind the falling crystal shards, the sky turned a bruised, rotting purple. The howling void of the outer cosmos—raw cosmic heat wave, freezing stellar empty pocket, and rotten-egg entropic wind—poured through the four-hundred-mile breach like a deluge of freezing tar bursting through a rotted cofferdam.
Up on the command ridge, Grandmaster Feng of the Thousand-Rune Formation Guild collapsed onto both knees. It tore at his ritual robes with bloody fingernails. “The Heaven-Locking Barrier is gone!” Feng shrieked, his mind unraveling into pure despair. “The Great Seal of the Founding Ancestors has experienced total, irrecoverable collapse! Four hundred miles of spatial canopy... Gone in the blink of an eye! The northern sky is dead!”
