The wooden porch of the ancestral Gu Family Courtyard was hushed in sacred stillness.
Outside the courtyard walls, across the Nine Continents, the Western Demon Lands, the Endless Ocean, and the Four Heated Poles. All one point six billion citizens of Planet Canglan stared up at the live golden sky-projections without making a sound.
High above in the clouds, the three-mile Upper-Realm Punitive Warship drifted like a frozen iron ghost. Its forward tracking array was smoking, its deck was littered with black mirror shards, and the three Rank 7 Nascent Soul Enforcers stood paralyzed by the railing. Not daring to breathe too loudly while the woman who had cleaved star-fleets in half wept on a mortal porch below.
On that sunlit wooden porch, time seemed to stop.
Empress Luo Qingxue’s slender arms were locked so tightly around Gu Changsheng’s neck that her knuckles were white against the dark blue cotton of his shirt.
She did not feel like an untouchable sovereign of the stars.
In Gu Changsheng’s arms, she trembled like a weary traveler who had walked barefoot through a ten-year blizzard and finally stepped inside a warm kitchen with a roaring hearth.
Her cheek was pressed firmly against the rough, familiar weave of his kitchen apron.
