Twilight fell gently over the Sovereign Basin.
On the stone porch of their small cottage, perched on the lower slope of Mount Taiyi, Lin Tao and Tie Shan sat together on rough cedar benches. Between them rested a low wooden table holding a steaming clay pot of roasted barley tea and two coarse clay bowls.
Below them, spread across fifteen leagues of valley, the lights of ten thousand mortal homes flickered like warm fallen stars.
There was no curfew. There were no sky patrols gliding silently through the night sky with glowing spirit lanterns, demanding identity jade tokens or dragging young men away to the labor gangs. From the valley floor rose the distant, comforting sounds of peaceful evening life: a mother singing a lullaby, the barking of a farm dog, the clink of a tea kettle, and the soft murmur of neighbors talking across garden fences.
Lin Tao lifted his clay bowl, inhaling the toasty, nutty fragrance of the roasted barley.
He looked up at the evening sky.
The western horizon was painted in long, flawless ribbons of burnt orange, rose, and deep indigo. The colors didn’t step down in discrete eight-bit bands. They blended into one another with total, infinite analog gradients. The first stars appeared in the deepening violet dome. Then, they didn’t flicker with the twenty-four-cycle twitch that had betrayed the Precursor display matrix for a billion years.
