Beyond the Timescape

The sky looked like a dark, hazy curtain as far as the eye could see. There was no sun or moon. It seemed like this location existed in perpetual night. However, there were 360 emerald-colored halos above, almost like a gigantic bracelet, that shone with a soft light.

This was a planet in an unknown universe. It had a sea, land, mountains, and islands. The sea was a phosphorescent ocean, the land was made from stellar rubble, and the mountains were made from some mutant amethyst.[1]

As for the islands, they weren’t in the sea. They were actually islands that floated near the cliffs of the amethyst mountains, suspended in the air by means of light-consuming vines. The vines were semitransparent, and their roots dug into the air itself, making it hard to tell where they got nutrients from. And it also made it seem like the islands were suspended from nothing at all.

A person had just appeared above one of those islands. He wore a tattered daoist robe, his hair was disheveled, and his face was splattered with blood. His aura was weak, and he hardly seemed conscious as he dropped down onto the island. When he landed, a space-time breeze seemed to float out from him, causing the vine-covered island to tremble and wither visibly.

The island couldn’t hold the figure that had just fallen onto it. A hole crumbled open, and the figure fell down through the entire island. Down he fell, ultimately landing in the vast forest at the base of the cliffs.

For some reason, even though he didn’t land with much force, all of the trees for 300 meters in all directions collapsed, turning into a dust of starlight that rose into the air and obscured the area. Visible within that glittering dust wasn’t just that one person. He... was holding another person by the throat.

That second person was unconscious, yet the first person maintained a vice-like grip, despite the fact that he was also unconscious.

It didn’t take long for things to become silent again. The dust slowly settled, turning back into trees so that the forest was whole again.

The vegetation in this forest wasn’t actually true and real. It was made from dust! It consumed starlight that drifted in from the surrounding universe. Apparently, the dust operated according to some ancient magical law; it would extract memories from the starlight and display them as moving images within the forest.

Time passed.

Soon it started to rain. However, the rain wasn’t made of water, nor did it behave like ordinary rain. It came in the form of millions upon millions of phosphorescent flying objects in the thin atmosphere of the planet, which would slowly drop down from sky.

From a distance, it almost looked like the result of a god out in the void, ripping up sutra books and tossing the pages down. The ripped pages would eventually catch fire and emit both a bright light and a sound like a godly voice chanting.