The sky didn’t fall.
It turned inside out.
With Magistrate Kui stopped and his flagship reduced to smoking melted rock waste, the self-running defense matrix of the Celestial Court did what any compromised cloud public works does when an intrusion is confirmed:
It started a hard zone purge.
Two miles away, the towering golden archway of the Ascension Gateway groaned with a sickening, grinding shriek of tearing metal.
The shimmering golden light along its pillars collapsed into a terrifying, lightless vortex.
The gateway inverted.
The Ascension portal, once an exit into the Upper Realm, transformed into an unconstrained gravity star-core. A cosmic black hole yawning open at the hundred-thousand-foot ceiling of the world.
