The pale blue clouds in the sky had already spread into one continuous expanse. No one knew where these extraterrestrial visitors, suspected to be "living creatures," had come from. The only certainty was that they had chosen this ancient planet as a resting place. Countless blue halos surged and merged high above, until not a single gap could be seen between them. Shimmering light drifted endlessly through the cloud masses, bright points and lines roaming across vast distances, seemingly even leaping from one cloud mass into another. Was that because all the clouds had fused into one? Or... were they exchanging something each carried? No one could say.
"So beautiful..." Qian Qian craned her neck upward, utterly captivated by the strange and magnificent sight. "It looks like the ocean hanging upside down."
Qian Qian was right. It really did look like an inverted sea, or rather, an ocean floating above everyone's heads. The gathered light masses rose and fell much like the sea itself, while the points and streaks of light constantly leaping between them resembled glittering reflections on the waves. There was no atmosphere left on the mother planet, so no sound could be heard, yet as I looked at that blue sky hanging upside down, I could almost imagine the roar of rolling waves.
"These clouds have already covered the entire mother planet, and they're still thickening," Sandora said in astonishment as she looked at the Data Terminal in her hand. The Holographic Projection above it displayed a top-down view filmed from the Empire Admiral in space. In the image, the mother planet had become a shimmering blue sphere, draped in a coat of phantom light until we could almost mistake it for the return of its long-lost oceans. "We've identified the clouds' points of origin. There are