Year 200 of the Light Dust Calendar, midnight at the Spring Equinox.
When the lamps of the Nine Provinces and the sunken civilization achieved their first worldwide synchronization in the Boundless Sea of Lamps, an unprecedented tide of light suddenly erupted deep within the source of starfire. The entire lamp core pulsed like a beating heart, its patterns of light spreading like blood vessels into the depths of the earth's crust, all the way to the bottom of Ruin Abyss Lake. In an instant, a crystalline fissure of light opened at the lake's center, and a colossal stele carved entirely from primordial light crystal slowly rose from beneath the ground.
The stele bore no words, yet billions of motes of light dust swirled within it like a galaxy turning inward. Sometimes human figures appeared on its surface; sometimes they became arrays of lamps; sometimes unfamiliar runes emerged—not any known script of the Nine Provinces, but a language composed purely of light and emotion.
The Heart Flame Messenger Corps immediately sealed off the center of Ruin Abyss Lake. Zhaoming's successor—Grand Light Language Messenger Yunqi—led the Nine Provinces' foremost codebreakers, Light Language Scholars, and Astral Priests to gather there. Using Heart Flame lamps as guides, they poured their own memories and emotions into the stele's surface, attempting to resonate with it.
For three days and three nights, no one could decipher it.
Not until the fourth night did an old messenger from a fishing village in the Southern Sea silently take out an ancestral seashell lamp—an ancient relic his forebear had found in Sunken Ship Bay, its wick ground from a Sea Moon Pearl. He gently pressed the lamp against the stele's surface and murmured:
In an instant, the stele of light shuddered, its runes rearranged, and the first readable line appeared