It was the start of the lunar month, deep into a moonless night. The Golden Wind whistled, audible as it swept through the sky.
Ronan lowered his head and looked down at this metropolitan city, one he could hardly call familiar.
If one looked only at the towering buildings and brilliant lights, it was no different from metropolitan areas like Xia City. Yet the Great River ran through the city, and at night, the various waterways and lakes reflected bands of light around their edges while remaining mostly dark at their centers. Light and shadow echoed one another, giving the city an entirely different overall outline.
Not to mention Hundred Peaks Monarch's dark silhouette in the distant eastern sky, stretching across the vast, murky heavens and earth. Blazing spiritual radiance invisible to ordinary eyes shot straight into the firmament, while several root veins and countless tendrils streamed downward, weaving and circulating across hundreds of miles. Deep within this city, they connected with several thousand living beings. From those several thousand living nodes, they branched outward layer by layer—one becoming ten, ten becoming a hundred, a hundred becoming a thousand, a thousand becoming ten thousand—until they covered one-tenth of the city's population, numbering in the tens of millions, along with nearly all key locations, forming a complete layout.
This was the hierarchical structure of the Hun Dun Order, built through Gao Wenfu's thirty years of work and the great power of Hundred Peaks Monarch—or rather, Li Wei's framework.
Touch it carelessly, and the lives and deaths of hundreds or even tens of millions could be at stake.
This was binding, exploitation, and perhaps dependence... mutual dependence.
Come to think of it, this sort of framework was hardly unique. It was nothing new even on Earth, let alone in the vast universe.