Two thousand miles north of Sunset Peak, in the stone heart of the Central Plains, sat the Imperial Capital of the Great Yan Dynasty.
Third watch of the night. The hour of the Ox. Forty million mortals were supposed to be dead asleep beneath a placid silver moon.
A damp midnight fog snaked along the nine concentric walls of the Forbidden Citadel. Sentries in bronze scale armor paced the sixty-foot basalt ramparts, the iron butts of their halberds clicking against stone:
*Clack-clack... Bong...*
"Third watch! Bank your hearths, trim your wicks, sleep beneath the Emperor's grace!"
In the Inner Palace, sandalwood smoke curled from gold braziers. Under four layers of cloud-silk, Emperor Yan Ming lay dead to the world between two concubines, lulled by the quiet drip of courtyard fountains.
Dawn didn't break. Dawn detonated.
*FZZZZZZZZT—FLASH!*
No creeping pink horizon. One microsecond the city lay wrapped in midnight chill; the next, a five-million-degree thermonuclear hammer slammed the stratosphere.
In a tenth of a second, night was wiped clean. Every tallow candle on the parapets, every iron brazier in the barracks, and every street lantern vanished into a blinding, shadowless white-gold blaze.
Up on the ramparts, forty guards dropped their weapons.
Their shadows—stretched south for six hours—suddenly whipped across the flagstones like snapped cables, flipping precisely **one hundred and eighty degrees** to point dead north.
Along the grand avenue, watchmen facing south took the direct blast across bare retinas. Men cried out, slamming calloused palms over their eyes as tears poured down their faces. Every flagpole, stone lion, watchtower, and parapet threw its shadow backward across the avenue, lunging toward the palace. The optical geometry of the world had turned inside out.
"The shadows!" a sergeant shrieked, tripping over his scabbard and hitting the masonry chin-first. "The shadows are marching on the throne room!"
Inside the imperial bedchamber, light cut through the Emperor’s closed eyelids like red-hot wire.
"Gah!"
Yan Ming bolted upright, tearing through silk sheets. The women scrambled across the bed, shrieking as golden glare bled through the screens:
"Fire! The palace roofs are burning!"
"Northern barbarians! An air raid!"
"Shut your mouths! Fetch my steel!" Yan Ming roared.
Clad only in an unbelted dragon nightshirt and slippers, the Emperor leaped from the dais, ripped his seven-ring executioner saber from the rack, and kicked open the terrace doors. He raised the heavy steel blade above his shoulder:
"Who breaches the Citadel?! Imperial Guard, flay every last—"
The roar died in his throat.
His fingers slackened. The blade tipped downward, its point clinking against white jade: *Tink.*
The Emperor looked south.
Two thousand miles away, perched over the jagged teeth of the southern mountains like an insolent god on a barn roof, was a Second Sun.
Three hundred feet across, churning with looping ribbons of five-million-degree plasma. Even across two thousand miles of sky, the brilliance hit like a physical fist. Gazing south brought spiritual tears and stinging blood to the eyes of Golden Core guard captains. The midnight sky was bleached into an unnatural azure. The moon was a faint watermark. The stars were gone.
"Your Imperial Majesty! Close your eyes! Turn away!"
Scrambling up the terrace steps on hands and knees came Grand Astrologer Sima Feng.
The eighty-year-old court scholar was an absolute wreck. His tall jade headdress hung lopsided off his left ear. The knees of his court robes were shredded from crawling across stone, and down in the lower courtyard, his bronze astrolabe lay in bent pieces.
"Sima!" the Emperor barked, shielding his eyes with an embroidered sleeve. "What is that thing?! Did an old immortal from the Void Sect ascend?!"
"That is no mortal ascension, Your Majesty!" Sima Feng wailed, clutching the Emperor’s silk slippers. The old man took one glance south and immediately gagged, vomiting a mouthful of dark spiritual blood onto the pristine white jade:
*Splatter!*
"Ignore the blood! It is nothing!" the old man wheezed, wiping crimson from his chin. "The astral charts are in ruins! The great bronze armillary sphere spun at three thousand revolutions per minute until the jade spindle melted into smoking slag! The constellations are blinded! The prophecy has come!"
The Emperor hauled the astrologer up by his collar. "Stop sputtering! What prophecy?!"
"The **Twin Suns Calamity**!" Sima Feng howled, pounding his frail chest. "The forbidden apocrypha of the First Epoch! *'When an unholy sun rises from the southern mud, cosmic balance shall break, and the kings of men shall wander in perpetual noon until their wits turn to dry bone!'* A rogue star has taken root in mortal soil! The celestial order is dead!"
Down in the capital streets below the citadel, pandemonium broke loose.
Roosters in five thousand backyard coops went wild, crowing their throats raw:
*COCK-A-DOODLE-DOOOOOOO! COCK-A-DOODLE-DOOOOOOO!*
Barn owls and chimney bats dropped out of the eaves, blind and panicked, smacking into roof tiles and cobblestones. Alley cats arched their spines, hissing wildly at their own reversed shadows. Over in the cavalry corrals, three thousand armored warhorses battered their stalls to kindling, whinnying in terror as midday heat baked their winter coats at three in the morning.
Millions of citizens flooded the streets in nightcaps, bed sheets, and underwear:
"The sky is cracked! The sun had a child!"
"Strike the bronze gongs! Ring the temple bells to drive off the southern demon!"
Within forty minutes, the Imperial Throne Room was in total uproar.
Emperor Yan Ming sat on the Dragon Throne in formal robes, though his feet remained stuffed into unlaced bed slippers. Before him knelt eighty court ministers, foreheads to the floor, silk soaked in cold sweat. Outside the arched lattice windows, the southern light streamed through, throwing harsh, inverted shadows across the dais.
*PING! PING! PING!*
In the center of the hall, the Grand Communication Basin strobed with crimson light. Jade message-slips bobbed up from the mercury, projecting frantic text:
*Western Border Command: Perpetual noon along four thousand leagues of passes! High glaciers on Heavenly Spire are melting! Torrents threatening three forward garrisons!*
*Southern Desert Outpost: Midnight temperature jumped fourteen degrees! Giant sand scorpions burrowing ten feet deep to dodge heat! Nomads proclaiming the Day of Judgment!*
*Eastern Naval Prefecture: Midnight tide tables scrambled! Fishermen refuse to drop nets, screaming that reef spirits are boiling alive!*
Then came the dispatch that broke the room.
A communication talisman stamped with the provincial seal of Canglan rose from the basin, expanding into a wavering projection of Governor Zhao.
The governor wore no imperial robes.
Over his shoulders hung a crude neon-orange sash. On his head sat a yellow-painted fiberglass bowl with a webbed chin strap. Across his eyes was a pair of wrap-around green safety spectacles.
Worst of all, Governor Zhao wasn't even facing the Dragon Throne.
His body was twisted south, prostrated on the floor of his mountain balcony, blubbering directly into the communication jade:
*"All glory to the Sovereign of the High Noon! All praise to the Master Contractor of the Firmament! Canglan Province formally submits to Sunset Peak! We pledge forty thousand cartloads of spring wheat, eight hundred hogsheads of pitch, and our unconditional labor to the Divine Builder who controls the daylight!"*
The talisman sputtered out.
A suffocating silence fell over the hall.
"Canglan Province...?" Yan Ming whispered, knuckles white against his sleeves. "That flea-bitten ditch where three thousand starving ditch-diggers rioted over spoiled salt rations last winter? That mudhole has renounced the Dragon Throne... to worship a mountain peak?!"
*CRACK!*
The Emperor slammed his fist onto the jade armrest, snapping the carved dragon snout clean off:
"Who did this?! What southern rogue lit a furnace over my provinces?!"
From the military benches, a mountain of armor stepped forward.
Imperial Grand Admiral Meng. Supreme Commander of the Imperial Void Armada.
Six-foot-four of solid muscle, strapped into three hundred pounds of dark Dragon-Blood Iron plate. His beard was a thicket of black iron wire, his eyes cold with the aura of a Half-Step Divine Transformation warlord. A six-foot crescent halberd rested across his shoulder.
"Your Majesty!" Meng barked, his voice rattling the marble floorboards. "This is no act of nature! Our diviners have triangulated the signature! The anomaly is being anchored by an unregistered, illegal formation on the south summit of Mount Clear Sky!"
Meng sneered, his iron gauntlets squealing against his halberd shaft:
"Whatever southern rogue has erected this optical outrage, he has committed high treason against the throne! He has broken the sleep of forty million loyal subjects! He has driven our livestock mad! He has made our hens lay at three in the morning! And he has dared insult the mandate of the Son of Heaven!"
"Give me a solution, Admiral!" Yan Ming hissed.
"Molecular eradication!" Meng roared, crimson battle qi flaring until the hall smelled of scorched iron. "Mobilize the **Imperial Void Armada**! Deploy all twelve ironclad dreadnoughts of the Sun-Slayer Fleet! We fly south under full combat burn, lock the mountain in an encirclement array, and fire the **Ancient Dark-Ice Absolute Zero Cannons**!"
Meng rammed his halberd into the flagstones, cracking the marble:
"We will freeze their unholy sun into a ball of dead slag, bury their mountain under five miles of cosmic ice, and bring this 'Master Contractor' back to the capital in a titanium dog cage!"
Eighty ministers cheered their approval.
"Seal the edict!" Emperor Yan Ming shouted, standing tall. "Launch the fleet! Drag that southern sun down from the sky!"
***
Two thousand miles south, at the base of Mount Clear Sky.
The atmosphere was entirely different.
While the Great Yan capital was busy having a collective nervous breakdown, the southern slopes were practically drowning in heavenly peace.
Fifty thousand cultivators from three hundred sects lay face down in crushed stone, many with their foreheads pressed so deep into the gravel they were snorting up dirt and moss.
Above them, the three-hundred-foot miniature sun burned with quiet, steady warmth. Thanks to the First Epoch Containment Mesh, ninety-nine point nine-nine-eight percent of the five-million-degree nuclear hellfire was locked up tight inside Austin’s dantian. The only thing leaking out was pure solar life-force—a rich, photosynthetic wash of golden light that bathed the granite ledges, melting the frost and causing thousands of wild white lilies to sprout from the cracks in real time.
Grand Elder Xuan Xiao slowly lifted his face from the muck.
His high-visibility orange vest glowed like a brand against the scree. Thick tears of religious delirium ran through the wrinkles of his cheeks, dripping from his white beard onto his yellow hard hat:
"The Sovereign... he didn't just break through to Golden Core..." Xuan Xiao wept, his chest heaving. "He tore up the old cosmic lease... He killed the night... He brought the eternal daylight to working men..."
Beside him, Patriarch Iron Blood of the Iron Bone Sect lay prostrated, his scarred knuckles buried in gravel. He adjusted the tension on his hard hat chin strap and kissed the soil:
"No more midnight demon ambushes... no more frost rotting the grain... just clean, standardized, twenty-four-hour warmth from the Divine Builder... We walk in paradise..."
Up on the cedar porch of the Timber Lodge, Austin stood at the edge of the deck.
He had on his blue dungarees, his scuffed Red Wing steel-toes, his midnight-blue Sovereign Hard Hat, and the heavy Shade-14 arc-welding goggles strapped tight over his face.
Under his right arm was his pine clipboard, loaded with fresh inspection sheets. In his left hand, his trusty yellow grease pencil.
He looked down at fifty thousand robed cultivators weeping among the sudden crop of lilies.
Then he tilted his head up.
Through the dark green Shade-14 glass, the miniature sun sitting over his roof ridge was reduced to a calm, manageable green ember. But the sky around it was a blown-out mess of blinding white pixels and cheap lens flares that ran clear to the horizon.
Austin clicked his grease pencil with a sharp, disgusted snap:
*Click.*
He took a slow, heavy breath through his nose, his shoulders dropping in total contractor exhaustion:
"I swear to God," Austin muttered into his collar. "How do you push a major lighting overhaul to production and completely forget to include a bloom slider in the video menu?"
He tapped the pencil lead against his clipboard, his jaw tightening:
"Amateur hour. Total amateur hour."