Breaking Through the Heavens

Broken Cloud Mountain Range lay at the border between Jin Prefecture and Qing Prefecture in the northern region of the Flying Cloud Empire. Its peaks rose and fell in endless, uneven waves, stretching across thousands of miles—a timeless landscape weathered by millennia of wind, frost, snow, and rain, as if unchanged since the dawn of time.

But all this remained so only until that fateful day. The sky, once a boundless blue with not a cloud in sight, was suddenly split by a tumult of thunder and lightning. Black clouds surged and churned as if intent on devouring the world itself. The people of Jin and Qing, alarmed by this unnatural spectacle, watched in terror as a bolt of lightning, bright as a silver serpent, shot down from the distant heavens. A pillar of blinding white light, charged with the force of utter destruction, struck the heart of Broken Cloud Mountain Range with a roar that shook the earth and the sky. At that moment, the ancient mountains split in two, as if cleaved by some primordial axe.

Heavenly thunder had descended. Whether it was an omen of fortune or disaster, no one could tell, and the people of both provinces lived in fear, burning incense, praying, and examining their own hearts, begging the gods for mercy.

Days passed, then weeks, but no further signs from heaven followed. Instead, that fateful lightning strike had left a lasting change: the merchants who once had to detour hundreds of miles to cross from Jin to Qing, forced by the impassable mountain barrier, now found a narrow path—scarcely a yard wide—where the mountains h