The Celestial Academy emerged from the night that followed the convergence profoundly changed, though most of its occupants would not fully understand the extent of that change for days or weeks to come. To the ordinary disciples who had slept peacefully through the event, unaware of the convergence occurring in depths far beneath their awareness, morning arrived as it always did. Bells rang. Students gathered for cultivation. Masters conducted their lessons.
The surface of normalcy remained intact, providing the illusion that nothing fundamental had shifted. Servants carried water to the outer courtyards. Junior disciples argued over breakfast portions. Somewhere in the lower halls, a bell-keeper cursed at a stuck mechanism, unaware that the mechanism itself now hummed with a resonance it had never possessed before.
