The hundredth year of the Light Language Era, amid the Eternal Night of the far north.
At the northernmost reaches of the Nine Provinces lay a bitterly cold land called the "Lightless Plain." Neither sun nor moon appeared there all year round. Only auroras drifted across the sky like gauze, yet they could not illuminate the earth. Legend held that this was where an ancient lamp spirit slumbered—when the source of starfire first came into being, before the first ray of light was born, the lamp spirit had used itself as kindling to ignite the thought-flame of the primordial beginning. Then, its light exhausted, it sank into the eternal night and became the "Moonheart Lamp Core" deep within the earth's veins.
For a hundred years, countless Light Language envoys had tried to awaken the lamp spirit, all ending in failure. Then a newly appointed Light Language envoy—Yue Yi—came from the Southern Sea, carrying a Moon-shaped Lamp forged by fusing a "Sea Moon Pearl" with "heart flame crystal," and walked alone across the Lightless Plain.
She was neither the strongest nor the most learned, but she possessed the rare "empathic nature"—she could sense the stirrings of Light Dust within the memories of all things and hear the final whisper before a lamp went out.
"Why have you come here?" asked the old stele keeper.
"Because I dreamed of the lamp spirit." Yue Yi gently stroked the lamp's surface. "It isn't sleeping. It's waiting. Waiting for someone willing to light a lamp for it."
At the deepest hour of the polar night, she stood at the center of the Lightless Plain and laid out the "Returning Moon Lamp Array" with nine hundred and ninety-nine Heartfire Lamps—the array formed a full moon, its lamps linked by threads of Light Dust. A single lamp