Cruel Xia lacked virtue; ten suns scorched the sky. Then came receiving Bingrong's tone, turning back the wrath of overweening yang. Its voice shook the heavens, like the toiling people's lament of endless suffering; its might bore down upon the wilds, like Giant Spirit cleaving the peaks of Hengguo.
My Dao rebelled against the yang above, ranked foremost among the ten evils. I obeyed no wicked sovereign's decree, but gave voice to the common people's wrath.
-"Suffering People's Lament"
The Heaven-Pillar snapped, the Immortal Ladder broke. The firmament tore like silk, and the crimson wheel plunged to earth. At first it glimmered like a star; then it blazed like a boiling cauldron, spewing furious flames a thousand feet high and spreading a wicked barrier over the world.
Where the blaze reached, metal and stone flowed, hills and valleys crumbled, and wooden palaces fell.
Thunder and fire gathered unseen; smoke and dust churned. Ashen clouds rose like mushrooms, crimson-crowned and black-rooted, reaching upward to the blue firmament and Azure Heaven, downward through subduing yin and the Yellow Springs. Thus the earth became like glass, and the sky like a curtain of ash.
Crimson lightning rose, demonic baleful intent surged, and for a thousand years nothing grew.
-"Azure-Fall Fire-Blaze Dao Scroll"
Inside the Great Scarlet Hall.
Xu Xuan had roughly read through these Daoist scriptures, but felt a measure of astonishment.
First was the "Suffering People's Lament," which broadly recorded the era when ultimate fire received the Zhi tone. It was unmistakably Ancient Xia-more precisely, the time when ten suns patrolled the sky and the crows rebelled.
It was then that ultimate fire completed its betrayal of greater yang and received dominion over the Zhi tone. The tone it formed was the sound of uproar boiling up to fill the heavens, the