"Whoosh-"
The wind rose.
One day, the great roc would rise with the wind, Ride the Whirlwind Up Ninety Thousand Miles!
The instant those two lines of poetry faded, everyone felt boundless literary qi sweep down from the unseen beyond.
The vast, surging literary qi became a manifestation of seawater, blanketing the entire Imperial Capital.
The literary qi Qi Ye had just gathered for his Hundred-Li Echo instantly became part of that ocean of literary qi.
And from within that seawater, the silhouette of an enormous creature suddenly burst forth.
"SCREEEEECH!!!!"
With a piercing cry, the enormous creature leaped from the water, its form transforming into a bird.
Kunpeng!
The great roc!
Zhuang Zhou had said: In the Northern Abyss, there is a fish named Kun. So immense is Kun that no one knows how many thousand li it spans; it transforms into a bird named Peng. No one knows how many thousand li Peng's back spans; when it rises in mighty flight, its wings resemble clouds hanging from the heavens.
Now, the great roc's wings covered the entire Imperial Capital and the thirty thousand li surrounding it.
"One day, the great roc shall rise with the wind, Ride the Whirlwind Up Ninety Thousand Miles."
"Even should the wind cease and bring it down, it could still churn the waters of the azure sea."
"The world sees me forever singing a different tune; all greet my bold declarations with cold sneers."
"Even Confucius held the young in awe; a true man must not slight the youthful."
A complete poem resounded through heaven and earth.
Amid that ocean of literary qi, even the screens suspended above the Imperial Capital began to waver.
"Steady."
In the end, only when the short, stout Minister of the Works Department spoke did the screens stabilize.