I sat in my darkened apartment, the grey slate-phone resting on the table like a dormant beast. To any mortal looking through the window, I was just a man in a worn hoodie staring at the wall. But in my mind, the walls were gone.
The smell of ozone from the neon city outside was replaced by the scent of clouds and ancient pines.
This was the world before the Ebb—the Era of the Radiant Peak.
Back then, the sky wasn't a dull blue; it was a shifting tapestry of violet and gold, reflecting the sheer density of Qi that saturated every breath. We didn't walk the streets; we rode the winds. Immortals didn't hide in basements; we lived in palaces made of solidified moonlight that floated above the highest mountains.
I remembered a banquet held on the Heaven-Gazing Terrace.
Beside me sat General Wei, a man whose laughter could literally shatter a glass across a room. He wasn't a bureaucrat in a suit; he was a giant clad in armor forged from fallen stars. To his left was The Weaver of Whispers, a woman whose fans could summon monsoons. We weren't friends, exactly—we were rivals, gods in our own right, carving our names into the pillar of history with every breath.
"Chen Feng!" Wei had roared, sloshing a cup of Jade-Nectar that would make a modern man's heart explode. "I hear you've mastered the 10,000-Leaf Strike. Come, show me! Let's see if you can trim the roses in the Empress's garden from three peaks away!"
I had laughed then. We all had. We were arrogant, yes, but why wouldn't we be? We were the masters of the Dao. We governed the rain, the harvest, and the fates of kings. We were the "supreme reign," and we thought the supply of spiritual energy was as infinite as the stars.
But it was during that very banquet that I noticed her. Yue Qin.
She wasn't drinking. She wasn't laughing. She was standing at the edge of the terrace, her eyes fixed not on the beauty of the celestial realm, but on the horizon where the energy was thickest. She was holding a small, silver compass—the prototype of the devices the Bureau uses today.
"It's too much, isn't it?" she had whispered when I approached her.
"What is?" I asked, intoxicated by my own power.
"The weight," she replied. "We are heavy, Chen Feng. We are drawing more than the world can give back. Look at the lower realms."
I had looked. For the first time, I saw that the mortal lands below were grey. Not because of smog, but because we—the immortals—were sucking the life out of the soil just to keep our palaces afloat. We were the gods, but we were also the parasites.
"If we don't stop," Yue Qin said, her voice trembling with a terrifying foresight, "the world will break. Or someone will break us to save it."
I hadn't listened. I had laughed and offered her a cup of nectar.
I blinked, the memory receding. The violet skies were gone, replaced by the flickering fluorescent light of my kitchen.
General Wei was long dead—his star-armor likely melted down to make components for luxury sedans. The Weaver of Whispers was probably running a boutique in Shanghai, her monsoons reduced to a misting fan in a spa.
The "Sovereign of the Fallen Leaf" was now a "Chairman" in a green apron.
The world before the Ebb was glorious, but it was unsustainable. Yue Qin saw that. She built the Silos to save the world from our greed. But in doing so, she traded our freedom for a cage of glass and steel.
She thought she was saving the foundation. I think she just turned the world into a battery for someone else to use.
My phone buzzed. A message from Xiao Tang, my coworker: "Yo Chen, the espresso machine is acting up again. It's making a weird whistling sound, like a flute? Come early tomorrow?"
I stared at the screen. A whistling sound. The Wind-Pipe Resonance. One of my anchor points under the shop was starting to leak.
The age of the supreme reign was coming back. But this time, I wasn't going to let the world suffocate. I was going to let it scream.