Ten thousand leagues to the north of the Continental Rift, above the unending sea of clouds that cloaked the Central Plains, floated the Celestial Capital of the Immortal Empire.
Here, in the Nine-Dragon Audience Hall of the Jade Palace, three hundred royal geomancers and high elders of the Celestial Sects stood frozen in numbed terror before the Great Astrological Mirror.
The Great Mirror—a hundred-pace disc of liquid sky liquid silver suspended in empty pocket floating—had mapped the spiritual tribute flows of the mortal empire for five thousand years. Normally, it glowed with thousands of golden rivers of light, depicting the steady, unceasing flow of spiritual energy siphoned from eighty-one country basins and routed directly into the Emperor’s Golden Dantian Array.
Now, an entire side of the mirror was black.
Not merely dark—it was a total, gaping void of unmapped territory.
The Grand Astrologer—a three-hundred-year-old Nascent Soul elder whose silk robes were stitched with cosmic star-patterns—dropped his golden fortune-telling brush onto the jade floor. The ink splattered across the polished white stone, unheeded.
“Your Royal Majesty!” the Grand Astrologer cried out, falling to his knees and trembling like a reed in a winter gale. “The Southern Basin... The entire Seventh Sector has disconnected from the tribute grid!”
