Another hundred years passed.
The Nine Provinces changed the way they reckoned time.
No longer did they mark its passage by emperors' ascensions and dynastic succession, nor solely by the courses of stars and the cycles of seasonal markers. People began measuring time in an entirely new way—light dust.
Light dust became civilization's unit of measure.
It weighed nothing, measured no distance, and counted no energy, yet it recorded the things most difficult to quantify in the human world—the flow of benevolent thoughts, the passing of heartfelt intentions, and the warmth of lamplight.
One unit of light dust was defined as: the ripple of light stirred when a benevolent thought arose in one person's heart and, through lamplight, reached another soul.
It could be as tiny as the pity a child felt while lighting a lamp for a stray cat, or as vast as the collective compassion of ten thousand people keeping lamps burning for the dead on the same night. It neither grew nor diminished with the scale of the deed, but shone or faded only according to whether the intention was pure.
From then on, the Nine Provinces entered the era of the "Light-Dust Calendar."
Its first year was set at the thousandth day after "Source Return Night"—the night when the first Spirit of Light returned to the source of starfire and the Starfire Bridge spanned heaven and earth. History called it the "First Year of Light's Dawn."
From that point onward, every city erected a "Light-Dust Stele." Neither stone nor metal, it was a transparent crystalline monument formed from pure light dust, suspended at the city's center. Its surface bore no words, yet reflected traces of benevolent thoughts left by passersby—when someone walked past, an image appeared upon it of a lamp he had lit one night;