A lump of rotten flesh flew free of the wing-blade, like a decayed fruit shaking loose from a branch.
Within the Central Celestial Realm grew the golden, resplendent, immortal Heaven-Guarding Branch. Then it draped itself in moon-gauze, so that those who looked up saw a hanging moon.
The living beings of the Divine Firmament beneath the Fanque Heavenly Realm looked up to see a moon. And where there was a moon, there was a shadow—vaguely like Gui, as though someone were felling Gui.
Across the four continents, high mountains shed their snow and put on green with moonlight and moon-darkness. The five seas surged on, carrying white and suspending black with the rising and falling tides.
The full and waning moon each came in their proper season; all twenty-four solar terms were just as they were in The Present World.
The native lifeforms of the Divine Firmament World were still passively receiving messages from the heavens. At the boundary between ignorance and civilization, a gate that had long ceased to exist stood raised, welcoming the visits of all races from the heavens.
That span of development within the Chaos eggshell, that fleeting play of light and shadow before the sequence of time had aligned... the Divine Firmament World had developed Demon Realm civilization, with city-states, divine cults, and sects.
Yet, as the Heavenly Demon Lu Zhi had said when expounding the Dao—"Demon Realm civilization is also The Present World's civilization."
Jailers had always received the entirety of their prisoners' pasts; prisoners lived in the shadows of their jailers.
Racial wars had endured from antiquity to the present. Everyone influenced and permeated one another. No one could claim to have wholly broken free of another and built a civilization alone.
Everyone knew that The Present World was the center of all