Chương 97: Chapter 95 Interlude 18

The first sign was the color. In broad daylight, the Celestial Rift was nothing more than a faint line in the sky, a horizontal scar that someone unaware of its existence could easily have mistaken for a particularly elongated cloud formation. It was a detail at the apex of the firmament that the inhabitants of the Central Continent had grown so accustomed to over so many generations that most of them had stopped seeing it long ago. But that day, something in the sky changed.

It was a sentinel of the Sect of the Eternal Flame who saw it first. He had spent three hours surveying his surroundings with boredom, as he did on the days he had a shift, when a reddish flash flickered at the edge of the Celestial Rift. It wasn't the orange tone that sunlight sometimes painted upon clouds at dusk, nor was it anything the young sentinel could identify as something he had seen before.

It was a deeper, more intense red, the kind that seems to contain its own source of light rather than merely reflecting it. He sounded the alarm before he could even put into words what he was seeing, since the Celestial Rift was not visible at that hour, and yet it had begun to glow. Within minutes, what had begun as a flash had become a sustained glow that tinged the edge of the Rift a burning red, visible in broad daylight as though someone had placed behind it a colossal source of light.

The higher-ranking cultivators who came out into the outer courtyards of the various headquarters in response to the alarms observed it for an instant with that expression that mixes evaluation with disbelief, and then several of them began to speak at the same time.

"It is a Wave of elemental Qi", said the Venerable Elder of the Sect of the Eternal Flame to the elders surrounding him, with the tense voice of someone confirming something he had hoped never to have to confirm again in his lifetime.

"Prepare the defenses for the worst possible scenario." No one asked him of which element, since the color of the glow was answer enough. What came next was the cloud. It emerged from the Celestial Rift slowly at first, as though the phenomenon were taking its time to unfold, seeping through the aperture in the sky with the slowness of something that has all the time in the world.

But the slowness was deceptive, because what seemed a measured advance from the ground was in fact an incredibly rapid expansion measured against the scale of the heavens, and in the time it took the Sect of the Eternal Flame to activate its first Protection Formation, the reddish cloud had already spread across a portion of the sky wide enough to cover the sun. And that made the light change.

Not in a drastic manner, not all at once, but in that gradual way that turns out to be almost more unsettling than a sudden change. The rooftops of the cities stretching beneath the cloud began to take on a soft reddish tone that pervaded everything equally, with no direction or defined shadow, as though the air itself had taken on that color. The grass had it, the buildings had it, and even the faces of those who lifted their gaze toward the sky were tinged with that color.

And those of a certain age recognized it for what it was. Not all those who looked at the sky in that moment had lived through a Wave of elemental Qi, so many of the younger ones knew them only from books or from the accounts of their elders, and in those accounts a Wave of Qi always seemed something manageable, something that happened far away and that the great Masters of the stories handled competently. But those who had indeed lived through them knew that the books and stories lied by omission.

They didn't lie about the facts, but rather about the fear, the haste, and above all, the initial consequences suffered by those who didn't prepare in time. That was why the alarms began to fill the air of the Central Continent as though, somehow, everyone had agreed to do the same thing.

They sounded first at the headquarters of the great Sects, which had protocols established for exactly this kind of situation and which they executed with the efficiency of those who have been rehearsing them for decades without expecting to ever have to use them. Then in the unaffiliated cities, where the Councils of Elders convened emergency meetings that in some cases lasted less time than it took the last elder to take his seat, because when the sky takes on the color of the elements there isn't much to debate.

And finally in the Empires, where the Generals dispatched messengers requesting instructions while issuing orders without waiting for those same messengers to return with them. The Protection Formations activated like a series of flames catching one after another along a fuse, lighting up the horizon with the glows characteristic of each Formation, which in some cases added their own colors to the red that already dominated the sky.

"Reinforce the outer Formation", ordered the Grand Master of the Sect of the Frozen Wind, who had been the eldest of her Sect for decades and had lived through two previous Waves of Qi, both of different types.

"And no one, absolutely no one, leaves the perimeter until I say otherwise." No one questioned the order, since the Grand Master's tone was of the kind that admits no questions, not because she meant to intimidate but because her voice carried with it the memory of what she had seen on other occasions.

The cities, meanwhile, emptied their streets in a matter of minutes while the markets, which at that hour were normally at their busiest, filled with empty stalls with merchandise still spread out on the cloths, the braziers still lit, and the half-finished conversations that had been interrupted the moment the alarms spread through the air, because when one has lived long enough beneath the Celestial Rift one learns, from one's elders or from one's own experiences, that there are situations in which the instinct to take cover requires no justification.

And then the cloud changed as the expansion slowed. It didn't stop, but the horizontal movement that had dominated the first moments began to yield prominence to something different, since at the center of the reddish mass, directly beneath the vertical of the Celestial Rift, the Fire Qi began to concentrate and to condense, as though something were calling it from the earth in a way it could not resist. The column did not take long to form.

A mass of dense red, darker than that which was spreading across the sky, began to descend from the point of greatest concentration of the cloud, narrowing as it descended without losing its density, like a finger of fire extended toward the earth with a precision that seemed almost deliberate. Those who were still on open roads broke into a run upon seeing it.

Those already behind Protection Formations reinforced their power with all the Qi they could channel, and the higher-level cultivators stationed themselves at the critical points of those formations without anyone having to ask them to do so.

"Hold it", said the Venerable Elder of the Sect of the Eternal Flame, watching the descending column with an expression that was not exactly fear but was not very different from it.

"Whatever is about to come, hold it." And finally, the column touched ground. It did so in a region that the maps of the Central Continent marked with a notation that in earlier generations had been a name, then a warning, and finally only a color, that black which the cartographers of every continent reserve for areas in which the continued presence of human beings is not advisable.

It was a territory that no Sect had ever permanently claimed, that no Empire had included within its official borders, and that travelers who needed to cross it crossed quickly and without lingering more than necessary. The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. So at this hour, fortunately, it was completely empty.

The last who had inhabited it temporarily, a group of wandering cultivators who used the area as a passage point, had seen the cloud form in the sky and quickly made a decision that required no deliberation, they simply abandoned everything that did not fit in their storage pouches in order to flee at the highest speed their movement techniques allowed, without looking back. Which turned out to be the best decision they could have made.

When the column of Fire Qi made contact with the earth, the result was not an explosion in the conventional sense of the term. There was no detonation and no single flash of light, but rather it was something more akin to a spillage, to the arrival of something that had been seeking somewhere to deposit itself and had finally found its place. The Fire Qi spilled over the earth with a concentration that transformed the air of that area into something that no living being, however fortified, was designed to breathe.

The vegetation did not burn in the manner it does when a flame is brought near it, but simply incinerated without any visible transition between one state and the other, as though the very concept of burning had been eliminated in favor of the final result. The most resistant trees held out a few moments longer than the others, but even they ended up giving way with a swiftness that made it impossible to distinguish between those resisting and those that had already ceased to do so.

And likewise, the spirit beasts that had not been able to flee fell, and it was not a slow death since there was no prolonged resistance. Their bodies, hardened by years of absorbing Qi, quickly reached the limit of what they could endure before they could do anything about it. The strongest took a few moments longer, but all ended the same way. And then the wave began to expand.

It did so in a manner that, if Sun Wen had been present to see it, upon seeing its shape and its consequences, she would not have been able to help comparing with the images that were broadcast in her old world about how the shockwave of a nuclear explosion behaved.

From the point of impact, the mass of Fire Qi spread in every direction at once, a clearly visible boundary advancing across the earth while the column continued pouring more Qi from the Celestial Rift, feeding the expansion without giving it the chance to weaken. In the zones the front of the wave reached, the temperature began to rise.

Not as catastrophically as at the point of impact, since the wave that reached the nearest cities was a diluted version of what it had been at its source and attenuated enough that the Protection Formations could contain it, but still intense enough that all those inside those formations felt the change, with the air becoming heavy and dry in a way that went beyond mere physical sensation, as though the very atmosphere had decided to remind them of the fate they would have met outside the protections in which they were sheltering.

Soon, the bodies of water began to dwindle. It was a slow process in the zones farthest from the point of impact, slow enough not to be visible to the naked eye at first, but the cultivators who monitored the state of the protected zones began to detect the signs, since the levels of the ponds were dropping, the currents of the smaller streams were diminishing, and the humidity of the air was falling to values that, under normal conditions, were only recorded in the driest months of the year.

"The Five Brilliances River has lost a third of its flow", reported one of the disciples of the Sect of the Frozen Wind to the Grand Master Shen Mingyue, who was still monitoring everything that was happening.

"Record it", said the Grand Master, without taking her eyes off the points of the Protection Formation she was watching.

"And prepare yourselves for worse. This isn't over yet, and very hard days await us." And she was right.

The wave kept expanding for days, sustained by the column descending from the Celestial Rift, which continued feeding it with a constant supply of Fire Qi that gave no signs of wishing to stop, and although the concentration in the zones farthest from the center grew lower and lower as the affected surface area grew, the accumulated consequences of that sustained presence were visible across the entire Central Continent.

The forests that lay directly beneath the zone of greatest Qi density disappeared, and those at the margins of that zone suffered damage from which they would take generations to recover, while the wetlands surrounding the major rivers began to dry up in a manner that, unlike ordinary droughts, did not seem to have any intention of stopping. But the Wave of elemental Qi was not only destruction, it never was.

The first to move were the solitary cultivators, those who had no Sect to hold them back nor orders to obey, and who had spent years practicing rapid movement techniques precisely for situations in which moving fast mattered. They ventured into the zones of greatest Fire Qi concentration with that kind of determination that, viewed from outside, is hard to distinguish from abandonment. They were cultivators in the stage of Harmonization of the Elemental Cores, and they all had Fire cores.

For them, what the rest of the world saw as a disaster was something that, if managed correctly, could accomplish decades of cultivation in a matter of days. The density of Fire Qi in the central zones of the wave was of a magnitude that could not be found anywhere else, and those whose Fire cores were sufficiently advanced to absorb it without succumbing to the attempt could emerge from that zone with their cores transformed in ways that, otherwise, they would not achieve in an entire lifetime.

But as the saying goes, animals die for food and men die for power. Many of those who entered did not return. It was not something that could be seen from outside, and there were no dramatic moments or visible signs of what had happened. Some of those who had entered simply never came out as the days went on, and those who did return did so with their cores transformed and the expression of someone who has been in a place they were not certain they could leave.

"I saw two of those who entered before me", said one of the survivors, a middle-aged cultivator whose clothes bore the unmistakable marks of having been too close to something very hot.

"Both of them had a higher level than I do, and they surely thought they would be capable of holding out." He paused as he looked at his hands and finally said "They couldn't bear it." But even with such stories circulating through the camps of the cultivators waiting at the perimeter, others kept entering, since the temptation was too great for those who had spent years stagnant and who saw before them an opportunity that, in the best of cases, only presented itself once in a lifetime.

The Sects, for their part, were torn between the wisdom of restraining their disciples and the temptation of taking advantage of the situation themselves.

"We could send our Fire disciples to the margins, controlled and with support", argued one of the Masters of the Sect of the Eternal Flame before the Council of Elders.

"The gains could be enough to shift the balance of power of the region in our favor for generations."

"But we cannot forget the losses", replied the Venerable Elder without lifting his gaze from the reports he had on the table.

"They could be enough to do the same, but in the opposite direction." The debate continued for hours, since it was the kind of debate that had no correct answer, only options with different levels of risk and different sorts of consequences, and the Council of Elders of the Sect of the Eternal Flame was not the only one having it at that moment. Several days after the column touched ground, the Celestial Rift finally stopped feeding it. It was a gradual process, not a sudden cut.

The flow of Fire Qi descending through the column began to diminish in a manner perceptible to the higher-level cultivators monitoring it, then was reduced to a trickle, and finally ceased to be detectable. The column, without the source feeding it, began to disperse slowly, but eventually that dispersion became visible even to the naked eye. In the zones nearest to the point of impact, the temperature began to drop slowly, but even so, it was something that was received with relief.

The point of impact would remain uninhabitable for a long time, perhaps generations, but the difference between heat that kills in minutes and heat that can be endured with the proper protections was a difference that mattered. Eventually the reports that began arriving at the various headquarters and capitals in the days that followed painted a desolate picture. Vast expanses of forest eradicated, agricultural zones that would be unusable for seasons, and beds of smaller rivers that had ceased to exist.

And in the intermediate zones, where the wave had passed without the intensity of the center but with enough force to leave its mark, landscapes transformed in such a way that no one who had known them before would have recognized them.

But the mass of Fire Qi that had accumulated over days of constant supply did not disappear with the cutting off of its source, but rather followed its natural course, displacing toward the outer edges of the world with the inevitability of something that obeys laws that existed long before any of those who lived beneath the sky had had thoughts to formulate. Wherever it passed, the climate changed.

The zones the wave had reached in its direct expansion had already spent days under an anomalous temperature, but the mass of Qi that was still in motion continued altering the weather patterns of the regions it crossed, leaving behind a trail of aridity where there had once been moisture and of heat where there had once been coolness. It was the kind of consequence that the historians of previous Waves of Qi described in their texts with phrases that, read in times of calm, always seemed exaggerated.

But to those who were living through them, it did not seem at all that the historians had been exaggerating. The Celestial Rift, once again, had reminded the Central Continent that it existed for something more than providing access to the Celestial Realms. And following that reminder, the Central Continent slowly began the work of reconstruction, as it always had.