The crowd's ambient sound stopped.
The fat man's belt-undoing fingers stopped.
Everyone looked up.
The sky above the town's open space was doing something.
The specific, brightening, focal-point-forming, light-concentrating thing the sky did when a cultivator with significant altitude was descending and was not managing the output of their descent.
He was not managing his output.
He was coming down with the flat, present, full-output, completely-unmanaged, intentional-atmospheric-disturbance descent of someone who had decided that the arrival should be visible.
The light.
The flat, full, warm, gold-amber-and-sky-blue, Nascent Soul Mid Stage cultivator's ambient field at full, unmanaged, point-blank broadcast — the specific, enormous, light-from-the-sky quality of something coming down.
The crowd went to its knees.
