The five suns shone in full

Dawnlight had hung suspended for a month.

The sea winds along Jinghai's eastern front had changed their nature. The fishy bitterness that once carried salt dust and turbid breath seemed to have been filtered away; when the wind brushed people's faces, it held a long-forgotten dryness and freshness.

The first to notice the change were the scattered fishing villages around Blackwater Harbor.

When the old fishermen put out to sea at dawn, they found that their nets no longer held deformed fish with the gray pallor of death, but ordinary sea creatures with intact scales and clear eyes.

At first, they dismissed it as chance. After three to five days, every household's catch had returned to what it had been in years past, and the clamor of bargaining rose from the docks again.

Stranger still were the children afflicted with "turbid wheeze." The illness had taken root during the catastrophe several years ago. Whenever rain fell, they coughed as though their hearts and lungs were being torn apart, as though a lump of red-hot salt had been stuffed into their lungs.

Medicines were useless, talisman water powerless. They could only endure. Yet ever since Dawnlight had hung above the abyss, the children had slept peacefully at night, their coughing growing quieter by the day.

An old woman who lived at the edge of the salt-crusted land had a grandson who had coughed for two whole years. Holding him in her arms, she knelt at the village entrance and bowed her head to the ground three times toward the golden halo.

On the third morning, the child opened his eyes and, for the first time, said of his own accord that he was hungry. The old woman sank to the ground, sobbing uncontrollably.

This was no miracle, merely the natural outpouring