Within the chaotic, dark currents of shattered spacetime, storms swept through in deathly silence.
Space fragments as thin as cicada wings split into blade-like edges, drifting disorderly with the "storm" toward the next node in time.
Everything wandered without purpose, like clouds, like wind, carried wherever the currents took it.
As the broken blades traveled, they collided and carved through one another, becoming even finer fragments—crystalline, and occasionally swallowed by black holes.
—It had been so since time immemorial.
Then, at some unknown moment, amid the deathly silence and darkness that had endured for countless years, a faint light flickered somewhere within the currents of shattered spacetime.
"Buzz!"
A sword hum sounded as it emerged from a dimensional rift, then vanished without a trace.
Immediately afterward, a towering pavilion squeezed out from the rift, as though summoned by something.
The lofty building had jade-green tiles and soaring eaves, carved beams and painted rafters. Azure smoke coiled around its eaves, transforming into auspicious clouds. A silver moon hung high beside its peak, scattering clear radiance everywhere. It stood solitary and lofty, untouched by the mundane world, like something from the heavens.
Had anyone been there, they would have recognized it at once. This was the Painted Sword Tower of the Sword Ancestor Divine Court.
Unfortunately, no one was fated to see it.
In but an instant, as the tower entered the shallow layers of the shattered spacetime currents from the dimensional rift, it was immediately stained with the mottled aura of time's vicissitudes.
Everything from moments ago became like an illusion, no longer existent.
The jade tiles decayed, turning black.
The beams and pillars shriveled, cracks spreading across them.
The azure smoke and auspicious clouds took on an ash-brown hue, their sanctity fallen into corruption.
The crescent silver moon lost all