The heavens of Darkgrande grew darker as fifteen of its stars were snuffed out, dimming till they were no more, and only emptiness was left where they’d been anchored in the night sky.

Resting in a room within a diamond-shaped structure with vast non-euclidean inner-workings, was one Radha Suresh, current head of the Radiant Orrichalcum Gardens.

On the wall of the room was a play of some sort, an opera, that would have been broadcasted on something called “television” in its original world but had been recorded onto the core of the vessel he was in.

Sect Head Suresh wasn’t paying any attention to what the gilled, blue-skinned, actors on screen were doing. He’d mostly just left the recording on because he liked the haunting melodies that served as a centerpiece of the opera.

What he was paying attention to was the board that sat in front of him and the black and white pieces that moved across it. He was playing chess against the vessel’s “com-pu-ter”. If he wished it, the structure would manifest an illusory figure who’d physically move the pieces, but the old sect head was fine playing with the current set up. He was old enough that he’d started to grow fond of his own company.

Besides, the board, and the chess game that was he currently in the midst of losing, Suresh was also paying mind to his own physical state.

Though he seemed to be seated in a room, he was actually floating in some manner of strange luminant fluid. Sitting inert in a blindingly bright, womb-like cell, as his body was taken apart piece by piece and replaced with mysterious elements whose nature he couldn’t even began to understand, and all the actualized and potential energy of the fifteen stars from the night sky was infused his being.

One day, while the Sect Head was making plans for what to do about certain overtures the outsider enemy’s had made to his allies within the continent, the boy had approached him with a suggestion. A small suggestion that had eventually worn at him, eating at his inner-ear like some manner of brain eating insect.

The youth had offered him a hypothetical, speaking of a possibility in which he and his sect would likely not have to fear the plots of their peers at home and abroad, for at least a thousand years time.If not not longer.

Suresh thought it, wishful thinking and said as much.

However according to the youngest elder the plan was simple, all that would have to be done, was for the sect head, and a few chosen members of the sect to undertake a small procedure, and enjoy a few days vacation from their normal duties.

At first it sounded too good to be true, and again old Suresh said as much, but then the youth showed him a sample of the elements, the secret little existences board of power, and mortal innovation, and divine law that flowed through his bloodstream.

When Suresh found himself still skeptical, the younger man let the Sect head test them, and once Suresh had tested the elements, it was like falling in love with a transcendental beauty. Even if the old man had any reservations, he’d already fallen too fast to think of speaking them.

Now here he was. Floating through the void, having taken flight and burst free from the gravitational bounds of his homeworld like an immortal old. Now here he was about to climb to a peak that countless cultivators before him and doing so without even an ounce of true effort on his part.

It reminded him of the first time his father had taken him on his sword and flown the two of them across the great mountain ranges of Harta.

He could remember looking down at the world below and seeing the mountain tops, and thinking, with awe that he was doing in a thrice what countless others had died trying to achieve.

It was same exact feeling, and the same exact situation. The old sect head had never once imagined himself attempting to reach the peak that was true immortality.

Simply being powerful enough not to be threatened or victimized, and having a deep enough a cultivation to live and die without regrets had been enough for him. Reaching the height of a sect head was just something that sort of happened.

Now here he was, about to gain the power to turn mountains into sand with a mere wave of his hands, turn oceans into deserts by just blinking.

It was unfathomable, it was impossible, it was just simply too broken, but if there was a chance that it could be achieved then it would be worth the risk. Some things were worth setting petty things like reason and logic aside for.

Besides that, any doubts that the old man might have had, had been put aside when he saw his young elder’s wife and she showed him and some of the other seniors amongst the sect what she could do, in a place that was now thoroughly unsuitable for habitation.

This was the new plan, the new angle for attack. This was the good old fashioned Jotun way. There was no need for tactics, or strategy, or unnecessary cleverness. All the sect would need was raw power, his raw power, and the power of the majority of the sect’s golden generation.

Thus the Sect Head dreamt playing his chess game in a virtual world, waiting for the day he would emerge from his diamond shaped cocoon. Killing time as he felt his very soul being nourished by the raw power of the cosmos.

Dreaming of a day when he’d emerge with the power to flip the heaven and earth upside down as the jotuns of old had done before the other angels, devils, immortals, gods united to seal them away in a single tiny corner of the universe.