The sky didn’t rain water. It emptied an ocean of liquid black night onto the Jiuzhou Plane.
Billions of gallons of reality-erasing black ink roared downward from the curdled heavens in an unbroken, ear-splitting sheet of solid liquid darkness. Outside the Hall of Ten Thousand Sages, the total impact was instant.
The Seven-Star Pavilion of Ancient Records—a three-hundred-foot library pagoda housing four hundred thousand jade scrolls of old family history—was struck by the leading torrent. There was no sound of wood splintering, and there were no falling tiles. The moment the black liquid drenched the roof, the entire top three stories of the library simply ceased to be. The cedar beams, the gold-leaf carvings, the precious scrolls, and the ancient librarians within didn’t dissolve into mush. They un-existed. Where a towering pagoda had stood for twelve hundred years, there remained only a flat, box-shaped stump of raw mountain granite, fully smooth, as if the building had never even been drafted.
Down in the outer courtyards, hundreds of fleeing students were caught in the open. A young sword prodigy from the Nine-Cloud Sect was struck across his right shoulder by a splash of black spray. He didn’t scream from physical pain. He screamed from existential amputation. His sword-arm vanished. Along with his arm, thirty years of sword techniques vanished from his mind. His memories of his master, his childhood home, and his own name dissolved like sugar in boiling water. Within three breaths, he collapsed onto his knees, an empty living…
