It was said that one of the standards for measuring the level of a civilization's development was the size of the "mark" it could leave upon the world.
Primitive people who practiced slash-and-burn farming could not leave lasting footprints upon the land. The fields, cottages, and villages they built over the course of their lives could barely fill a river valley, while a powerful kingdom could raise magnificent stone cities amid mountains and plains. Their densely packed houses and roads stretching in all directions would leave humans of the primitive age utterly awestruck.
Yet if one looked down upon the world from above the clouds, the cities built by kingdoms and the roads crossing the wilderness would blend into the earth as well, becoming insignificant smudges against a blue-green backdrop.
But some scholars said that Mortal Civilization was now creating an unprecedented miracle. The Alliance was attempting to transform a magnificent mountain peak into an eye gazing at the stars, while constructing a megastructure on the plains around it to listen to the voices of distant stars. The scale of this miracle would far surpass Helm's Deep City, the pride of the Augurey for generations; it would surpass the crashed aerial sanctuary of the Silver Empire; it would even surpass the magitech capital built by the Cecilians—it was so grand that even from distant space, the radiance it emitted would be clearly visible, like a bright candle in the night.
It was a highly abstract description, for no human had truly left this planet, nor did anyone know what the land looked like when viewed from space. Scholars used formulas and magnificent imagination to describe it, but to the countless ordinary beings who lived unremarkable lives, those beautiful words were merely a Dream Weaver that seemed somewhat related to them,