Twin Cities

Cloudscreen Wall rose more than a hundred zhang, its sheer cliffs cut like blades. An ancient city had once floated among the clouds above it: Dense Cloud City, one of the seventy-two ancient Cloud Cities.

When the Cloud Path flourished in antiquity, each of the seventy-two cities occupied its own sea of clouds. Drawing on the pure Spiritual Essence of the nine heavens, they laid cloud restrictions around themselves, each forming a little world of its own.

The Cloud Path prized four qualities: purity, buoyancy, emptiness, and stillness.

Purity gathered Spiritual Essence; buoyancy carried one to the heavens; emptiness welcomed it in; stillness secured the foundation.

Thus, the ancient Cloud Cities all stood suspended in the air, removed from the filth of mortal earth and the Turbid Breath of the human world. Only then could they preserve their orthodox traditions and nurture their bloodline inheritances.

But three years ago, the Great Sun erupted with Turbid Breath. The Spiritual Essence of heaven and earth changed violently, purity and turbidity reversed, and yin and yang fell out of balance.

The cloud qi of the nine heavens, which should have been pure and light enough to rise, was tainted by the Mad Sun's lingering breath. It turned turbid and sank, losing its ethereal nature and becoming heavy, foul, and sluggish.

The Cloud-Restriction Formation that kept Dense Cloud City aloft—its cloud-qi foundation and all its mechanisms—was corroded and torn apart by Turbid Breath.

After half a year of trembling in the air, the ancient immortal city finally ran aground atop Cloudscreen Wall with a tremendous crash, little more than a hundred zhang above the ground.

From then on, Dense Cloud Prefecture had an Upper City and a Lower City.

The Upper City was the ancient Dense Cloud City itself, kept barely stable by the