When it came to stealing a moon, it sounded like a great idea until you were floating in front of it wondering what to do with it.
I didn’t know how often someone stole a moon, but I could guess that it wasn’t exactly common. At least, there wasn't a manual for what to do with one, there wasn't a senior disciple who had been through the same situation and could walk you through the steps. All there was the moon, and me, and the sounds of my inner world going about its business below.
The good news was that I wasn’t completely clueless.
The practical benefits were something I actually knew quite a bit about, though not from any cultivation text, the knowledge came from my previous life, from school lessons and documentaries.
A proper moon stabilized a world's axial tilt, which meant it created seasons. Without tidal forces, there was no gradual cycling that made ecosystems complex and resilient. This basically meant that you got a world that either baked or froze. The Leech-kin had lived without seasons for thousands of years, which was one of the main reasons why their world had looked flat with unchanging decay.
But that wasn’t all that a moon did, it also created tides.
This was especially useful because I had a lake, a proper one fed by mountain streams, and tides would change everything about how that lake functioned as an ecosystem. I’m sure the Dawn Ripple Fish wouldn’t be particularly pleased about that, but this was an important step in the right direction.
Beyond tides and seasons, a moon gave a world a reliable calendar.
At the current moment, the Lithari measured time by stone cycles while the Leech-kin measured it by the pulse of blood qi. And the more the population grew with the introduction and creation of other beings, there needed to be a method that all beings could use.
So yeah, having a moon meant everyone in my inner world could look up and agree on what the date was, which was a small thing that turned out to matter an enormous amount once a civilization got complex enough to need to coordinate across distances.
Then there were the spiritual benefits, and this was where things became very interesting. It’s also where my webnovel knowledge started feeling both useful and limited.
In xianxia cosmology, heavenly bodies embodied Dao.
The sun generated Yang qi, the active principle, expansion, heat, motion, the masculine polarity of the universe's duality. The moon generated Yin qi, the receptive principle, consolidation, depth, and stillness.
A world with three suns, a star, and no moon was a world drowning in Yang. I hadn't fully appreciated what that meant for my inner world until right now. If I didn’t balance them soon, then the inner world would eventually become unstable. And since the Genesis Seed seemed to specialise in stability, an unstable inner world couldn’t be beneficial for its growth.
Beyond Yin qi, there was soul energy to think about.
In most cultivation novels, moonlight had a specific relationship with spirits, souls, and consciousness. It nourished things that existed at the edge of the physical. This was very convenient for me considering that I now had an unusual number of souls in my inner world. I’m sure the four Stellar Realm cultivators tenants, and the now mortal Ke Jun, would appreciate its presence.
Then there were the Dao – Water Dao, Dream Dao, Illusion Dao.
In cultivation novels, moonlight almost always touched at least one of those. These were seen as the hidden truths visible only in reflected light. Whether any of them would manifest here, I didn't know yet.
But none of that was the most important factor.
There was the fact that this was more than a moon.
This was a Blood Moon.
And Blood Moons, in the world I had just finished dismantling, had powered an entire cultivation system.
I had learned about the Path of the Sanguine Pulse during my time in Ke Jun's world.
The system was built entirely around the Blood Moon's radiation.
At its earliest stages, practitioners learned to synchronize their heartbeat with the moon's pulse to draw in tiny amounts of blood qi. As they advanced, they absorbed that qi into their circulatory system, which made them physically durable in ways that normal cultivators couldn't easily match. The most advanced practitioners could condense blood qi into a secondary heart, a construct above the natural one that pumped refined Sanguine Qi through the body continuously.
Beyond that, at the equivalent of Elemental Realm, they could corrupt basic elements using their blood, turning water acidic and crystallizing earth with their own essence, and at the peak of that stage they could manipulate gravity through controlling blood density in the environment.
There had been a third realm somewhere beyond that, but the Stellar Blockade had made it unreachable. Nobody in Ke Jun's world had gotten there in the past millennia, so I didn't know what blood cultivation looked like past Elemental Realm equivalent.
I could ask Ke Jun, and I probably would, eventually, but I had a feeling the Blood Moon's effects in my inner world wouldn't map cleanly onto what it had done in his. They had different foundations, different circumstances, and different intent behind the cultivation. The only way to know what it would actually do was to find out directly.
"Are you ready?"
Azure had appeared beside me at some point, which I had stopped being startled by.
I looked at the Blood Moon again.
Right now it was just floating there, occupying space.
It hadn't connected to my inner world at a fundamental level yet. It was like a stone dropped into a pond before the ripples had started. The moon existed in my inner world, but my inner world hadn't yet responded to the moon. That would only happen once the Blood Moon was integrated into my cultivation system at the root level, and the root level of my cultivation was the Genesis Seed.
"Yeah," I said. "Let's do it."
In Ke Jun's inner world, he had been incapacitated inside his statue, which meant the Weeping Root had been responsible for maintaining the connection between the Blood Moon and the world's core.
I didn't have that problem. I was here and I was conscious, which meant I could do this directly without Azure’s help.
So, I stretched out my arm and sent my intent downward, and the roots came up.
I didn't command them individually; I didn’t have to.
The Genesis Seed understood what I wanted before I could put it into complete sentences, which was occasionally unnerving and usually convenient. The roots rose from the earth like pale silver ropes, and then drove into the Blood Moon at nine different points.
I felt the impact as a vibration through the connection as pressure, but the Blood Moon didn't crack or bleed.
This made sense because the Genesis Seed wasn’t trying to pierce it the way it would pierce a hostile spiritual entity.
What the roots were doing instead was something more like threading, the roots finding pathways through the moon's substance and weaving themselves through those pathways until the connection was stable and complete.
Integration was the right word for it.
It didn’t take long for me to feel the changes.
The first thing I noticed was temperature.
My inner world had temperature, of course, I had fire essence and water essence both integrated, but they had always balanced each other into a pleasant neutral warmth that didn't change much across the inner world.
Now I felt the air shift slightly near the lake, and I understood instinctively that this was the beginning of a tidal cycle. The water was responding to the moon's gravitational influence, and waves that had never existed before were forming at the lake's edges, small ones, but real ones.
The second thing was the sky.
My inner world had the beginnings of a day and night cycle already, governed by the positions of my three suns, but it had always been approximate, my inner world's version of sunrise and sunset based on orbital mechanics I hadn't fully worked out.
With the Blood Moon integrated, something about the cycle snapped into alignment.
I could feel it in the Genesis Seed, a rhythmic pulse, like a clock that had always been running slightly wrong and had just been corrected.
Seasons would follow, I didn’t mean immediately, but the potential was there now, the axial stability that would let temperature and rainfall vary in predictable patterns across the year. My inner world was going to have its own version of spring and summer and autumn and winter, eventually.
The Lithari were going to have very particular opinions about winter.
The spiritual changes arrived more slowly.
I had to reach for them, extend my senses in a direction I hadn't used before, feeling for something that I knew should be there but couldn't immediately find.
It was the first time that I had ever sensed it – Yin qi.