The world that the Flower Mist orbited was a beautiful gem. The large half-moon ship was orbiting the world just far enough that the ship's mass did not impact the planet's gravity too severely, but still close enough that the Blue-Green Star was visible through most portside windows.
They had been orbiting the planet for several days now, and Farborn had seen as much of it as he could, in the process of acclimating himself to being on a natural world again.
The Flower Mist was a half-moon-class ship, which meant that it was mind-bendingly large. Much of this was due to the fact that the ship itself was built from hollowed out asteroids that had been connected together, forming a large space in the heart of the half-moon that humans could freely live in.
The pressurised inner heart of the Flower Mist was teeming with greenery and animals, but it lacked a true sky, receiving much of its sun energy from Solar-Conceptual treasures.
For two years, this skyless ship had been Farborn's entire world, and now that he was leaving it, he was left with conflicted feelings.
On the one hand, he was eager to feel true sunlight on his face and inhale fresh air that had not been recycled a hundred thousand times before. To say he was 'eager' for this, grossly misrepresented the depth of his hunger for a living, beating, true world.
On the other hand, Farborn had forged true friendships with the astraji crew members on the halfmoon. Rovin, Roja, and Harok, those three had grown to be his most steadfast of companions. Leaving them now, felt like leaving a part of himself.
The past three weeks since exiting conceptual space had been spent saying goodbyes, and now that it was finally time for him to leave, Farborn felt that it was still too soon.
The trio themselves did not have any problems with his departure.
The astraji were an ethnic group that spent their whole lives traversing space in half-moons much like the Flower Mist.
For them, saying goodbye to good friends for decades at a time was normal. In fact, to them, relationships only had meaning because one day they would inevitably end. So they had individually said their final goodbyes that morning and had not seen him after.
The astraji were capricious, and they did not linger on matters which they could not control. They were travellers led by the winds of trade and whim.
An exception to that rule was the captain of the Flower Mist. Old Jana was an elusive figure in the inner cabins where Farborn had chosen to stay. She kept herself to herself in the outer layer of the halfmoon that served as the 'deck' of the ship.
In truth, Farborn had seen her only twice in the two years and four months he had been on the Flower Mist.
Now, she stood before him, explaining the way space tokens worked. Her eyes were green and stern. Her hair was silver-grey, and her face was artfully dappled by small floral tattoos. The tattoos were an interesting complement for her wrinkles, and made her seem less like a strict grandmother and a little bit more approachable.
"Are you listening, kid? Good. The token will take you to the corresponding Passway Array on the western supercontinent. After that, the natives will probably confiscate it." she stopped to turn her stern green eyes to his golden, relaxed ones. "This world… kid, we astraji make sure we never land on worlds like this, it is just too backwards, and you're too worldly. Heck, I don't think this world is even connected to the greater galaxy beyond this starhold."
She paused to let him grasp the severity of her words before continuing. "We've got the money from the Jaitar Commerce Guild, and they've gotten their goods. I don't know why you've decided to settle down here, but you could come with us. We'll be taking a jump back into the advanced parts of the galaxy, and maybe there you can find a better world to settle on."
Farborn bowed and shook his head. "I am honoured you would offer this to me, captain, truly, I am. But, I can only move forward as my intuition tells me, and my intuition is telling me that this world is the path forward."
Old Jana pursed her lips and shook her head. "I forget how you young conceptualists are. Well, then, I'll not hold you any longer."
She placed the violet-jade token onto Farborn's hand. The words, Blue-Green City were embossed into the surface of the space-token. Farborn tightened his fist around it and bowed.
"I thank you for your fire and your shelter these past two years, captain." He finished the traditional goodbye more than a little emotional.
"This matriarch is honoured to have held a guest of your calibre. 'Farborn'." Old Jana said with a silent smile in her eyes. Farborn frowned. What did she mean by that?
The token vibrated once. In a flash of white light, Old Jana, and the Flower Mist disappeared, leaving Farborn falling through conceptual space.
A ghostly wind blew his hair and around him, his clothes rippled in its wake. His rucksack nearly flew out of his hand, as did the token. He held on to both through sheer luck.
The sensation of falling persisted for longer than a minute as Farborn whizzed through the white void. Immediately, panic set in.
The token should have taken him directly to the Passway Array in Blue-Green City. The fact that he was instead floating through non-space either meant that the array had been destroyed, or it meant that another bend in spacetime was pulling him towards it.
He felt his falling tilt and knew that his second hypothesis was correct.
There was a more powerful spatial transportation array on the world, and it had been closer than the one in Blue-Green City. The fact that the token had not been proofed against spacetime distortion showed just how unskilled the ones who had arranged it were.
They were absolute idiots who were mucking around with reality's principle concepts. Now he was paying the price for their stupidity and carelessness!
Farborn forced himself to calm down. Being diverted to another array was a far better option than the alternative. Another Passway meant an exit from non-space.
After another minute he spied the Passway. To him, in non-space, it looked like a roiling ball of orange energy, half a metre wide.
That was bad.
Some part of him, whether it was the small store of information kept in his Seal or the few memories from his uncle he had successfully processed, knew that an orange ball of energy in non-space meant that the Passway had reversed its bend. But! This reversal had likely only just happened or else the Passway would never have been able to pull him in at all.
There, in an infinite void of white emptiness, Farborn smiled.
If the Passway's bend had only just reversed, that meant that it was not stable. An unstable bend could be tampered with, especially from the non-space side of it. To do so, however, required an object filled with dense Conceptual Principle, and an energy source to bolster the conceptual energy required to push through non-space and into the Corporeal.
For most people, that would have been death. Dense conceptual principle was insanely rare. It could only be harvested from young neutron stars or old black holes, and even then, a single volatile drop of the Principle would be produced.
Most people did not have anything that had been imbued with dense conceptual principles –Farborn, did. In fact it was tied to his wrist with black leather cord.
As for the energy source, well most people had access to this. Men had it in greater amounts than women, and it could be absorbed by just standing outside on a sunny day. Positive conceptual energy, or Yang, would serve well here.
What many people did not have, however, was positive conceptual energy refined so pure as to the point of being self-replenishing and self-sustaining.
But Farborn did, and it was spinning around in his barely half-formed soul sea, right above his navel.
Farborn had all the tools he needed to break through the array. In fact, it almost looked as though the situation had been manufactured purely for his particular skills.
He laughed as he began unstringing the profound gold coin from its leather cord.
He laughed as he removed the Pure Yang from his soul sea and began funnelling its energy into the gold.
Then he laughed as he laid the charged gold at the centre of the ball of energy.
The orange ball flickered once or twice before continuing its idle revolution. Farborn smacked his forehead. Of course it would take a while before the gold broke through, what he saw as a half-metre wide ball was probably a wide passage through space and time.
As incredible as the profound gold was, it was still just an inch or so wide, it would take some time for it to cut through the compressed non-space at the centre of the passway.
Farborn could manage to be patient, so he crossed his legs as he floated through non-space, and began directing more of the Yang into the profound gold. His progress was slow, but it was still progress.
*****
Venerate Luong was surrounded by sycophants.
They fluttered in around him and begged for his attention, bowing so often they seemed like chickens dipping into seed.
Their names melded into one another after the one hundredth or so supplicant. 'This Xin' and 'this Kim' and 'this Hideo' eventually became the same formless, spineless, mouse.
When Xie Ke arrived, Venerate Luong made way directly to him, sparing no time in meaningless propriety to the little cultivator who was begging for aid in saving his insignificant valley from one demonic sect or another.
"Xie Ke, old man, how long has it been?" Venerate Luong asked when he reached his silver-bearded old friend.
"Old man?" Xie Ke asked, smiling, "Were it not for your white moustaches drooping below your chest, I would almost believe you, Luong Tai."
The two old masters embraced like the old friends they were, and when they parted, the people around them were aghast. Venerate Luong did not care; they were lone-world children, and kept their minds as narrow as you would expect.
"Six decades. Away in some hole, and when I come out, you're still just as ugly." Venerate Luong joked.
Xie Ke laughed quietly. "No, I think your eyes have just begun to fail you, old man. Those spectacles on your nose are not just for show, are they?"
Venerate Luong dipped his head in mock acquiescence. "How is the old master?" He asked. "I have not been long out of seclusion and the matters of my Merchants company have kept me from calling."
Xie Ke shrugged. "The Founder is as well as one would expect of a three-thousand-year-old master. He keeps mostly to the Yellow Sun Peak, not venturing out as much as before." He paused, clearly distressed. "He arrived in our Ancestral Elder Peak some four years past and bid me accompany the foreign disciples again this year. However, one of our disciples failed to arrive." Xie Ke's expression was one of heavy concern, and seeing it, Venerate Luong became acutely aware of how old the two of them had gotten. "I would not ask this if this were not a mission entrusted to me by our master, but I was wondering if Luong Tai would use his connections to enquire about the location of said disciple."
"Xie Ke need not ask more. I will send out seekers immediately, we two know best how unreliable spatial arrays are on Blue-Green Star. Is there anything more you can tell me about this missing disciple?"
Ancestral Elder Xie Ke shook his head slightly, saying, "That we may do in a more private setting, for I fear too many ears must not hear what must be said."
Venerate Luong stroked his moustache in thought. So the missing disciple had strong backing, strong enough for the usually calm and level Xie Ke to be worried.
"This disciple…" Venerate Luong began, "does he, as master was fond of saying, 'touch the sunset edge of a green tree-leaf'"
"Master bid me to be silent to any but the ancestral elders, but you are one of the master's oldest disciples, so he shall not mind me telling you that this foreign disciple, "bears the outer flickers of a moonlit blade."
Venerate Luong froze whilst stroking his beard.
An Imperial! An Imperial had gone missing somewhere on the Blue-Green Star!
Venerate Luong ran his eyes over the disciples that stood around his old friend. He saw the slitted yellow eyes of the Spirit Tiger bloodline, the red hair of the Burning People, the blue eyes and dark skin of the Machine-Mind Clan and finally the Silver-Grey eyes of the Ghostbloods.
Assembled before him were the most powerful youths in the Starhold. They had backers with nearly endless pockets and ancient sects and factions as kin, but all of them amounted to a fraction of the worth that a single Imperial had.
The Imperials were all who bore even a drop of The Great Jade Emperor's blood. They numbered only in the tens of millions – in a universe filled with trillions of lives – with many choosing to spend their entire lives near the Central Starholds.
When an Imperial entered an unclaimed Starhold, it became theirs. As simple as that.
Any who resisted would be slaughtered by the Imperial themself, as every single Imperial was a master at the martial and mystical arts. Every world, even those as isolated as the Blue-Green Star, heard the accounts of a single Imperial exterminating an entire world over a minor offence.
Worse, though, were the tales of a world successfully slaying an Imperial. Those tales would quickly be followed by entire Starholds blinking out of existence. Silently, they would disappear, as if they had never existed in the first place.
In the Golden Milky Way Empire, an Imperial's will was absolute. The idea that one was loose somewhere on the planet, or even worse, dead due to some malfunction in the spatial array made Luong Tai's knees buckle.
The six hundred year old martial master would have collapsed had his old friend not held him upright.
"Calm down, old friend. This disciple is young and has likely wandered off. He has not been harmed in any way or else the sect master would have felt it and informed us all."
Venerate Luong swayed slightly before leaning away from Xie Ke's balancing embrace. "Over which spring does winter's breath flow?" Luong Tai said, asking how close to The Heavenly Jade Emperor the missing disciple was.
Xie Ke replied, "The cicada's evening chirrup."
Venerate Luong sighed in relief. A minor Imperial from a small Starhold. Were anything to happen to him, there would be retribution, yes, but it would be minimal, likely an exile of the Two-Point Starhold from the greater galaxy for several generations.
Relief flooded the centuries old martial artist and colour returned to his face.
Unfortunately for him and Ancestral Elder Xie, the Founder had been misinformed by Tian Wei nearly four years past.
Four years ago the Ancient Divine Entity had disguised himself as a lowly major-domo of a small Imperial clan in order to gain admittance for his nephew.
No one in the world knew that the disciple was not a cicada's evening chirrup. He was the sky's forward turn. He was the Heavenly Jade Prince, and he was about to rip straight into reality.