Chapter 1131 — A Discussion About the Starry Sky
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 5
Dusk was falling. A patch of afterglow in the distance had gradually receded into the mountains, leaving only a faint dark-red radiance in the direction where the giant sun had set, illuminating a small strip of sky, while the broader expanse of ink-blue night seeped in from the opposite direction. Deep within that darkness, starlight was gradually emerging, and the host of stars that mortals had gazed up at for a thousand years was growing ever more distinct within that ink-blue field.
How many splendid imaginings and pastoral fairy tales did those twinkling points in the night sky carry for mortals? Perhaps even the most erudite scholars of the Silver Empire could not catalogue them all. The stars hung high in the heavens, suspended in a realm beyond mortal reach; that distant separation and the unchanging clarity of their light carried, for a species bound to the earth by gravity, an almost divine quality in itself. Thus since ancient times countless tales of a sacred nature had grown up around the stars and taken root in mortal hearts.
And yet these stories that described the starry sky had, in truth, not the slightest connection to the real, vast starfield of the cosmos.
Amoen and Enya had both confirmed it with their own mouths — above the stars there was no kingdom of the gods; the divine realm was merely an otherworldly space constructed from mortal thought, and the countless stories across the world that pointed toward the heavens were nothing but a splendid empty shell. As for the cosmos outside that shell, mortals had never truly touched it, nor had they ever been prepared to.
But the vast starfield of the cosmos would not cease its twinkling because of mortal indifference — it was there after all, all things in the depths of the sea of stars moving without rest, and now at last a voice had crossed the long distances between the stars. Whether or not the various races of this land were ready, that voice had arrived.
Of course, none of this could yet be confirmed, but at least as far as Gao Yang himself was concerned... he believed that voice most likely pointed to the starry sky.
After all, this planet already had starfarers like the Sirens, and the records of the Dragon race even mentioned the ancient Voyager fleets and the alien coalition forces that had set out on an expedition alongside those fleets — so he was willing to believe that among the distant stars there were other intelligent beings, perhaps just now opening their eyes to look up at the sky, and at this very moment sharing the same world as the mortals of Loren.
The evening wind swept over the crown of the Sorin Tree, howling above the monitoring antennae, and the distant giant Magic Web hub and the nearby listening arrays together gave off a low, humming drone. Beylantiya seemed to start suddenly from her reverie and spoke: "Regarding the stars, astrologers have always possessed a vision beyond ordinary people. Since the Gondor era, human mages successfully measured the distances between our planet and the sun and 'Ao,' and determined that the twinkling stars in the cosmos are all high-energy bodies similar to 'Ao.' Around the same period, Silver Elf scholars put forward the conjecture that our 'sun' is in fact also a high-energy body akin to 'Ao,' only gentler, not undergoing violent combustion..."