The tribulation of Dao transfiguration

Only a sliver of that Great Sun had emerged.

Above the firmament, the churning silver waves of the Lunar Vast Sea had yet to settle when that sliver of the solar disk broke free through layer upon layer of moonlit fissures.

It had not revealed its full form. It was not even half a circle, merely a blade-thin line, like the gleam of a pupil leaking beneath the eyelid of a great beast opening its eye.

Yet the instant that thread of golden light descended, a third of the entire sky was gone.

That sliver of the solar disk hung above the Lunar. Its rim lacked the gentle contours of ordinary sunlight; instead, it twisted and curled, writhing like a living thing.

Scarlet-gold flames piled atop one another without fixed shape, sometimes surging outward for millions of feet to tear through the stagnant Lunar yin energy around them, sometimes collapsing inward into a faint speck, swelling and shrinking without cease.

What flowed across its surface was not magma, but some searing current poised between "substance" and "law."

Those currents surged and converged across the sun's surface, forming countless distorted patterns: sometimes densely packed eyes, sometimes overlapping mouths, sometimes arms reaching from the flames to claw blindly at the void.

Those patterns were not still. They arose and perished, shifting without end.

At first glance, a hundred eyes opened together. At the next, a thousand mouths screamed. Before anyone could focus and distinguish them, they became countless arms grasping wildly into the void.

Every breath brought something different. Every breath brought something stranger.

Was this still the sun?

Perhaps, after sleeping beneath the Lunar's eternal night, imprisoned for hundreds of millions of years and corroded by the empty Sea of Ruins through countless cycles, it was no longer the Great Sun