The darkness behind Lin Ke’s eyes began to crack, replaced by blurry streaks of double vision.
Through the fog, he could see the green digits on the Root End-post stubbornly frozen in place:
MIGRATION PROGRESS: 52.0% [STALLED] BLOCKED OBJECTS: 60,000 Students (AZURE CLOUD)
Three million light-years away, in the old family safe hall of the Azure Cloud Sect, the air was choking with the scent of ancient grave incense and burning pine animal fat.
Four hundred glowing, spectral figures stood suspended in the vaulted hall.
At their head stood Ghost Sovereign Gu. The Third Generation Sect Master, who had climbed to ghost immortality eight thousand years ago. His beard reached his spectral knees, and his ghostly aura flared with cold, pale-green hellfire that froze the stone floor beneath him.
Behind him, sixty thousand living students knelt on the flat stone slabs, trapped in place by the crushing spirit weight of their ancestors’ collective karmic pressure.
“Insolent fools!” Sovereign Gu’s ghostly voice boomed through the hall, shaking the roof tiles. “To abandon this spirit mountain is to sever the sacred bloodline of our founding fathers! To migrate to an unproven, foreign universe is the supreme filial sin of our lineage! Any student who crosses that bridge is an apostate stripped of the Azure Cloud name!”
