Southern Cloud Dream Haven.
There was a stretch of water fifty thousand miles across, its mist rising to meet the sky, its shores nowhere in sight.
Cultivators called this place the Fifty Thousand Mile Great Marsh.
A rather absurd tale about the marsh's origins had been passed down in Cloud Dream Haven.
They said that more than a hundred thousand years ago, this place had been a vast, unbroken sea of drought, a thousand miles of scorched earth where not a blade of grass grew.
Then a down-at-heel scholar carrying a battered wine flask happened to pass through. Parched beyond endurance, he tipped the flask upside down and shook it.
Only a few drops of dregs fell out.
The scholar sighed and casually smashed the flask against the ground.
Who could have guessed that as the flask shattered, an endless torrent of water would gush from its fragments?
It poured without pause for three days and three nights, flooding the sea of drought and turning it into fifty thousand miles of watery land.
As the scholar departed, he used his finger as a sword and carved a doggerel verse into the cliff face.
"One flask of dregs won't run dry; I'll make your parched land a pond. Fifty thousand miles of waves stretch away; I rise and sink by my will, not Heaven's."
And so the Fifty Thousand Mile Great Marsh came to be.
By now, this marsh had become one of the busiest gathering places in southern Cloud Dream Haven.
Islands dotted the water like stars, and markets stood in great profusion.
Human cultivators came here in search of water-attributed spiritual materials, while demons and other strange beings drew in the water's vapor to cultivate.
A motley mix of people had gathered here, from every walk of life.
It