(The previous chapter was actually Chapter 122. I was muddleheaded this morning and got it wrong; the chapter title has now been corrected. This chapter is Chapter 123.)
The capital of the Kingdom of Thousand Springs was called "Jade Spring City." Before Void City appeared, this city was hailed as the most beautiful city on the main plane. Its walls were built from beautiful stones like white jade; whenever the weather was fine, beneath the blazing sun, the walls looked like an enormous piece of jade—so beautiful it defied description.
It had always been called "a heavenly kingdom on earth," or "a city as beautiful as a divine kingdom." Not only had bards composed countless ballads in its praise, even the gods often sent down incarnations to linger here. The one who did so most often was the Goddess of Springs.
This intermediate deity of the Nature Pantheon most enjoyed wandering amid mountains, forests, and springs. Her core demands of her believers were simply "cherish the springs" and "create more springheads." She cared about nothing else—good or evil, soldiers or bandits, none of it mattered to her.
It was precisely because of this attitude that the human gods had chosen her as a springboard for driving their influence into the Primeval Forest and the Cloud-Breaking Mountains, throwing their full support behind the Kingdom of Thousand Springs.
As the capital of the Kingdom of Thousand Springs, Jade Spring City was truly filled with springheads everywhere. Unlike that famed City of Springs in the Qi-Lu region on Earth, whose springs came from surging groundwater, these were thirty percent natural and seventy percent man-made—when the city was built, more than a dozen legendary archmages had joined forces to construct a portal beneath it leading to the Plane of Water Elementals. Clear water flowed