"O little dove, child of the moon,"
"Though dust may stain your fair white feathers,"
"Though you lie down not in a warm embrace,"
"May the moon be with you in your slumber."

A shattered husk falls toward the misty land that never became a moon, their blessings scattered into clear waters and mossy plains.
In a prison beyond the reach of both Time and Wind, the one who traverses backward beholds the eternal slumber of three sisters.
In the eternal and fleeting, unbound by start or cease, the imprisoned Moon Maiden drifts through the night,
Her consciousness gently caressing the hazy, ethereal memories woven in the tapestry of yesteryears…

MTL starts here
A silver-glimmering vessel cruised between mountains and seas at the junction of day and night.
In an age when the pulse of the earth’s bones had yet to submit to the firmament, it guided the souls of the immaculate dead,
ferrying them beyond the tainted mortal realm and the chill upper air, to rest upon the unseen dark side of the moon.
Yet it could not draw the gazes of the three mistresses of the Golden House toward the eyes of mankind.
The sovereign of sevenfold calamity would not permit the gods to soften their hearts for the trifling suffering of the world.
Before the primordial laws once set in place, only submission and reverence could be called true love for humanity.
Even the three sisters who dwelt behind jade-hued veils, spinning silver threads of fate for all beings,
spoke of the ancient peoples and mortals ruined by destiny with nothing more than three layers of silence.
Pity or compassion, admiration or fondness—always separated by a gauze of moonlight stretching hundreds of thousands of miles.


Whether it was to preserve the lives of those on the earth and thus be forced to turn against a former master steeped in black corruption,
or to protect the rebellious spark and thus be forced, amid internal strife, to abandon both sides,
or to avenge themselves upon a tyrannical usurper and thus stain their hearts with deep, abyssal taint—
those who walked the world as she did, the three bright moons that once illuminated countless cold nights,
ultimately failed to light their own paths ahead. At the end of all three roads lay only a night of oblivion.
Such was the tomorrow once lamented by the vanished old moon, in the age when three were still three.

—But are the roads of the night truly limited to only those three they once beheld?
Within memories that belonged to her alone, that golden star not of this world
was reflected in the lonely courtyard of the silver moon. That starlight, ever lingering in her heart,
though separated by tens of millions of years, though divided by countless worlds long since extinguished,
still shines to illuminate the path home behind her—the star that once fell into her eyes…

In the next timeless instant born of such belief begins the moment when three are no longer three.
At the end of utter darkness, the master of the crossroads looks back toward a fourth road beyond the trident fork,
quietly awaiting a promised reunion with companions beneath the stars, amid dream-hued veils dripping like honey.
MTL ends here

"O little dove, child of the moon,"
"Let not sorrow for hardship or parting weigh upon your heart,"
"The flowers will bloom once more by your window,"
"And the moon will be with you in your slumber, tomorrow."

Passing through tier upon tier of jagged stone ridges, the hidden spring of a desolate burial ground unrecorded in any chronicle finally revealed itself at the meeting of day and dusk.
It was a tale preserved only among the sand-gathering tribes: a legend of an adeptus who once forged a sword from flowing radiance and then withdrew into the abyssal depths beneath a water-moon.
The girl who entered the secluded valley in search of those immortal traces carefully leapt down from between the pines, her climbing cleats biting into the rock.
No one was around—only moonlight slipping through impossibly narrow gaps, illuminating faint, half-illusory shadows behind a curtain of bamboo.

“Long ago, before the Heavenly Balance was established and while the seas were still in turmoil, there was a nation called Langxuan, dwelling at the far edge of the Western Sea.”
“They burned millet and split pork, beat earth drums with wicker mallets; its people revered the gods of heaven, sincere and without deviation.”
“Thus did celestial beings descend, teaching them the cultivation of the five grains, the crafts of spinning and weaving.”
“And they proclaimed: ‘Your state shall prosper and endure, sharing longevity with the heavens; blessings shall be bestowed in great measure, boundless as the earth…’”

The great dragon that once stood shoulder to shoulder with the Lord of Geo could not, in the end, escape a sudden and violent downfall, its rampage trampling the splendid gardens of human kings.
The mountain folk could only take up the weapons handed down by their ancestors, following the banners of the yaksha beneath the king, to resist the calamity descending from the skies.
Seeking a sword to avert disaster, the daughter of cliffs and crystal sand followed primordial songs and at last reached the ruined nation hidden within the caverns.
Hearing the girl’s purpose, the silver-lit silhouette seemed to let out a soft laugh, rippling together with the moonlit spring.

“Alas! The Way of Heaven is ever-changing, beyond all knowing; fortune and calamity depend on one another, beyond all foretelling.”
“In that age, a baleful star fell from the east, crashing into the western lands, and from that moment the state knew no peace…”
“So it came to pass that heaven collapsed into the sea’s ruins, the earth sank into the whale’s abyss; the living were wiped out, altars and soil brought to ruin…”
“All splendor and blooming finery are but reflections in a mirror, flowers upon water—how could one ever seek eternal flourishing, never to fade?”

Perhaps the stone strongholds in the mountains would one day, like those azure remnants, be ground down into glazed crystal sand traded by merchants.
But for the girl, that was idle talk for a hundred generations hence—no matter what, it was not a concern of today.
The figure in the shadows casually snapped a wild bamboo shoot growing from the slanted rock wall; before its tip could touch the ground, the girl caught it.
“Waxing moon and waning moon, holding light within; chasing form and pursuing shadow. Enough, enough—once the intent of the sword is grasped, why seek the sword’s form?”

It is said that afterward, the girl trained a hundred elite soldiers in sword and halberd techniques, following the Lord of Geo to suppress the great dragon and pacify the four quarters.
When the miasma was purged and the realm brought to order, the once-martial tribespeople became merchants haggling over every fraction in the grand halls of flourishing dew.
Now, only when they sell exquisite porcelain fired from crystal sand do they speak of those apocryphal tales of antiquity.
The mountains say nothing; only the cold moon hanging high above the harbor city still shines upon every river, just as it did a thousand years ago.