It was midnight, and all seven mansions of the Azure Dragon had appeared, like a winding azure dragon soaring through the vast eastern sea of stars, beautiful and mysterious. Cheng Xinzhan formed a hand seal and activated the altar.
The Azure Dragon Embracing Di, Earth-Subduing Altar and the Azure Dragon Crouching Tail Fire-Settling Altar were both built against mountains. Each had its own characteristics, but they also shared similar designs and spirit restrictions. Above the Root Earth altar were likewise rune-marked points, thirty-five in all, divided into eleven star palaces-the star chart of the Root Lodge.
After he sent a Talisman Order into it, the thirty-five points flickered, as though an invisible figure were performing Gang Stepping and working rites atop the altar. Then the spirit altar came alive. Starlight poured down from heaven like the Milky Way cascading onto the earth, yet even with three thousand streams of starry water, the ritual altar took only a single ladle, accepting only the starlight of the eastern Azure Dragon's Root Lodge. As heaven's earth qi mingled with the earth's earth qi through the ritual altar, it enacted "the way of heaven, taking from excess to replenish deficiency." The starlight above seemed inexhaustible. From remote antiquity to the present, it had never changed in the slightest, shining generously upon the land. Here on Mount Li, however, the earth qi had been depleted by the demonic calamity. Now, through the ritual altar, it silently drew upon heaven's earth qi and gradually improved-a true expression of heaven and earth sustaining one another.
"Heaven and earth are the furnace, creation the craftsman; Yin-Yang is the charcoal, and all things the copper. We cultivators should be thus."
Feeling Mount Li's earth qi revive, feeling the nourishment of the starlight above, feeling the support from Mount Hua's