Stars.
Stars in the crimson sky.
An Jing and Grand Preceptor Hong's battle had thrown the heavens into turmoil and scattered the stars.
It was already nightfall. In the other regions of Huaixu, it was deep in the night; countless stars shimmered in the pitch-black sky, their light staining rings of deep blue across the sable curtain as they followed their eternal, unchanging paths.
But in Beixuan Jizhou, everything was somewhat different.
At the continent's center, the crimson of Shenjing was spreading in every direction.
Light-veins like blood vessels and rosy radiance like roots spread without end. And along with those colors, all the stars began to fall silent, halt, and then drift away.
Gradually, every star—the ancient constellations with names and those without, the lights that bore distant Dao resonances—departed from the vicinity of Shenjing.
They stopped at the edges of the great region, forming an enormous ring of silver Heavenly River. At the heart of that ring lay a vast hollow, where only the sun, moon, and five planets moved in defiance of their natural courses.
The myriad stars stood guard; the sun and moon paid homage—this was Heavenly Fate's [Fated Moment].
The stars were, after all, phenomena formed from the laws of heaven and earth, so when they encountered a greater phenomenon, they would retreat. And for everyone living upon this land—farmers and hunters, peddlers and wealthy merchants, martial artists and experts from the many sects, as well as every beast and Demon Spirit—the sight of that ring of silver Heavenly River filled them with reverence, trembling, or such tension that their hands clenched tight.
Because they all knew that a great battle, or a great calamity capable of shaking all Huaixu, was beginning. Yet whether it would end so simply or grow ever fiercer until it