Everything came to an end.
With no Fifth Energy Level interference, the flower bud atop the Heavenly Ladder Tree slowly rose, then bloomed. Crystal petals unfurled one after another, and a brilliant emerald sun slowly rose amid the countless drifting petals.
Emerald radiance, like a tidal sea, slowly spread in every direction. Enormous concentric rings of light expanded one after another, like ripples.
Its range was immense, encompassing the entire New Continent and its nearby seas. Between those concentric circles lay countless fine veins, like the veins of leaves, forming a complex structure akin to a spiderweb.
Scattering green motes fell, becoming a torrential rain that covered the entire continent and washed over all things beneath heaven.
Hovering at the top of the Heavenly Ladder Tree, the Glazed Dragon—or rather, the Stardust Dragon—coiled around Dark Cloud Peak. Fairy Ian and his dragon body overlooked the land below.
As the earth-vein energy accumulated within the Heavenly Ladder Tree over a thousand years was activated with the Gaia Spark as its core and transformed into this rain that filled the heavens, a trace of life began to emerge in the once barren, withered central region of the New Continent.
This rain appeared to be nothing but light, yet it actually contained vast quantities of high-purity Aether Crystals.
Transformed by the Heavenly Ladder, these Aether Crystals became the seeds and nutrients of countless plants.
For a time, as ripple after ripple of aether spread across the firmament, emerald shoots began to emerge from the earth beneath the green rain of light.
Nor was that all. As the roots of the Heavenly Ladder Tree moved without cease, the once level and vast but lifeless Crystal Plains abruptly split apart. Mountains and hills rose, divided east from west; basins and canyons crisscrossed one another. Plant