bungenlee
For millennia, the Celestial Court ruled with perfect, stifling order. But when a strange "Silent Rain" begins to bleach the world of color, sound, and memory, the gods discover an enemy they cannot fight.
Jian, the weary Jade Emperor, watches as prayers fall silent and villages turn to serene, grey stone. The invader is Hades, a god of a foreign pantheon, who offers not destruction, but a chilling gift: an end to all strife, all pain, all noise-an eternal, peaceful oblivion. As divine armies shatter against this uncanny foe and heaven's own court fractures with fear and treachery, Jian realizes the old ways are doomed. To save a world worth saving, he must become what he once despised.
He will forge an alliance of the unfit.
A mortal cartographer who maps despair. A bound trickster spirit who trades in chaos. A besieged king of the dead. The wretched, hungry ghosts of the underworld. With these unlikely allies, Jian must wage a war not of force, but of memory, of noise, of fragile, stubborn life. He will bargain with nightmares, wield time as a weapon, and sacrifice his own purity to outmaneuver an enemy whose ultimate goal is to make the universe forget it ever existed.
The Cracking of Heaven is a breathtaking epic of cosmic diplomacy and intimate sacrifice, where the fate of all things hinges not on a hero's blade, but on a gardener's patience, a cartographer's insight, and the defiant, beautiful noise of a single, off-key song.