The dead planet turned slowly beneath him, silent and shameless in its ruin, while behind him Shen Bao sat in a ship filled with puppets, poison, and impossible inventions, trying to understand how to become a Sun without becoming a walking calamity. The timing was unpleasant enough to feel deliberate.
A young cultivator with a domain of Delusion, standing on the edge of the Sun Stage, arriving before a world killed by the Dead Sun. The heavens had a poor sense of humor. Or perhaps they had no humor at all, and what cultivators called coincidence was merely the Dao arranging knives on a table.
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Inside the ship, I knew nothing of the Dusking Sun's discovery. My eyes remained closed, and the world within me had become wider than the one outside.
