When the great World Tree awoke from two thousand years of slumber, its branches tore through the earth as they grew and spread. Before long, they blotted out the sky, while dazzling spears of light pierced the entire world, splitting the clouds and bringing dawn to Midgard. Sap flowed from the World Tree once more, dripping onto the ground, and all kinds of plants immediately sprang up. In the blink of an eye, mountains, forests, and vegetation took shape, forming vast stretches of fertile land—"The Book of New Origins? The Dawn Chapter"
This was how the people of Midgard described the scene of dawn's arrival many years later. The literati had used the grandest and most imposing words to portray this momentous event, but Hao Ren's account in his work notes was much simpler:
Little Black's tentacles were everywhere across the mountains and plains. They scraped and dragged until the sky grew bright, and then those tentacles filling every hollow and valley turned into the Central Plains and the Black Forest along the borders...
The members of the Steam Council and the leaders of the various fields in Twilight City stood on the steel platform, staring dumbfounded as the entire world underwent earth-shaking changes before their eyes. What was happening beyond the Twilight Barrier had completely surpassed the limits of their understanding. In fact, aside from a small number of traditional and obscure scholars, most people in the city had never even imagined what the end of the Long Night would actually look like. In the popular education they had received, "the end of the Long Night" had always been a vague concept, described with nothing more than dry phrases such as chaos dispersing, light shining everywhere, and all things reviving. But how could generations who had lived beneath an