On the morning of the fourth day, the Five-Thousand-Mile Golden Spirit-Rain Cloud finally dissolved into a warm, rainbow-tinted morning mist.
When the golden sun rose over the eastern horizon, two million Dry-Well Metropolis citizens who had been staying in the Outer Ring Resort District walked out onto their hotel balconies, rubbed their eyes, and froze like stone statues.
“Honey...” a human carpenter whispered to his wife, his teacup slipping right out of his fingers and bouncing harmlessly off the elastic street tiles below. “Did... did the Spirit-Bus driver take a wrong turn in the night and drive us to the Upper Realm?!”
“What Upper Realm?!” his wife gasped, gripping the balcony railing so hard her knuckles turned white. “Look up! That’s the Floating Jade Cloud Island with Lord Pei’s thirty-five mud huts right in front of us! We’re still in the Red-Sand Wastes—except there’s no red sand anymore!”
Across the entire five-thousand-mile expanse of what used to be the deadliest, driest desert on Planet Canglan, not a single yellow sand dune remained!
For three straight days and nights, the diluted Rank 6 Liquid World-Origin Qi from Boom-Pot Sun’s defused firework had soaked down from above while the unplugged Planetary Core Geyser pumped warm golden earth-vitality up from fifty miles below.
