FREE USE in Primitive World

Chapter 230: Chapter 230: Multiple Moons?

The canopy had parted just enough in this specific spot to offer a completely unobstructed view of the horizon. And what he saw made him stop chewing entirely.

It was, without a shadow of a doubt, the most breathtaking, mind-shattering scene he had ever laid eyes on in either of his lives.

Back on Earth, the night sky was a muted, polluted thing… a dark canvas dotted with a few struggling pinpricks of light and a single, lonely, cratered moon.

This world was not Earth. He knew that. He knew he was standing in the absolute, primordial center of a vast, uncountable multiverse, and the sky above proudly, terrifyingly displayed that cosmic reality.

The sky wasn’t entirely black, it was a deep, vibrant tapestry of bruised violet and swirling, iridescent nebulae that looked like rivers of crushed diamonds flowing across the heavens. There was no atmospheric pollution here, no artificial lights to drown out the cosmos. The stars were impossibly dense, clustered so tightly together they formed glowing, ethereal clouds of silver, gold, and burning crimson. They felt incredibly close, as if you could reach up and scorch your fingers on them.

But it was the moons that truly paralyzed him.

Yes, “moons” not “moon.” There wasn’t just one. Dominating the celestial sphere, hanging in the sky with impossible, crushing majesty, were nine distinct moons.

Sol froze, the half-eaten fruit slipping slightly in his grip. He felt a sudden, dizzying wave of vertigo, convinced he was having some kind of essence-induced hallucination. He squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed them hard with the back of his hand, trying to clear away any glowing fungal spores or toxic pollen that might have drifted into his face and compromised his vision. He knew, fundamentally, that a planetary orbit like this shouldn’t be possible without tearing the world apart with gravity.

He opened his eyes and looked up again.

Indeed, there were still nine moons staring back at him.

His mind raced, trying to process the sheer scale of the revelation. He had been in this brutal, primitive world for quite some time now, fighting and bleeding just to survive. But the sky hadn’t looked quite like this before.

Then again, his entire reality had just been violently upended. He had just been teleported across gods-knew-what distance into this specific, hyper-magical region… the Great Heartwood, the domain of the Veynar, a place so saturated with raw Primal Essence that it practically overflowed.

More importantly, he had just awakened his core.

Is it the Sun Core? Sol contemplated, his Crimson-Sight involuntarily pulsing as he stared at the heavens. My Golden Liquid completely mutated my biology and my perception today. Am I only seeing them now because my spiritual eyes have finally opened to the true layers of this world? Or is this just what the sky always looks like from this specific continent?

Whatever the reason, the sight was magnificent. They were massive, far larger than anything Earth’s sky had ever hosted, hanging at varying altitudes and phases in a chaotic, beautiful orbital dance.

One massive, dominant orb sat at the absolute center, glowing with a brilliant, pearlescent silver light that cast long, dramatic, daytime-quality shadows over the endless canopy below. It was the unquestionable anchor of the night sky.

Surrounding it in a slow, celestial dance were its eight sisters or (maybe brothers)… smaller, but distinctly, vividly colored.

Hanging low and heavy on the eastern horizon was a deep, bruised purple giant. It possessed a highly visible, majestic ring of shattered, floating continental debris that caught the ambient starlight, casting shifting shadows across its own surface.

Above it sat a violent, blood-red orb that seemed to physically pulse like a beating heart. Even from this impossible distance, Sol could see it weeping faint, wispy trails of crimson essence directly into the cold void of space.

To the north, twin moons of glacial, icy blue… one perfectly smooth, the other heavily scarred and fractured… were locked in a dangerously tight binary orbit. They were spinning around each other so fast they left a lingering, freezing trail of light that was starkly visible to his Crimson-Sight.

Nearby floated a sphere of sickly, toxic green, heavily obscured by its own thick, atmospheric haze. It cast an eerie pallor over the distant mountains, looking uncomfortably like a floating, cosmic drop of plague or some venom.

High above, almost directly overhead, was a phantom moon, that’s right, he had confirmed it countless times and he was indeed not hallucinating within a hallucination. It was pale, translucent, and shimmered like a celestial mirage, phasing in and out of the material plane like a mirage over a desert. He could literally see the burning stars shining right through its ghostly body.

Drifting silently near the phantom moon was its complete opposite… a sphere of absolute, pitch-black obsidian. It didn’t reflect any light, it instead swallowed it. It was a localized void, completely invisible. It emitted no light of its own, visible only by the blinding, razor-thin white corona of starlight it eclipsed, looking like a literal hole punched through the fabric of the sky.

And finally, the ninth. It wasn’t a perfect sphere at all. It was a jagged, fractured crescent of pale bone-white. Its continents looked as though they had been physically blown apart millennia ago, held together in a loose, suspended, shattered cluster by massive, highly visible chains of glowing blue ambient essence.

Their overlapping light bathed the top of the jungle in an ethereal, otherworldly glow.

The sheer gravitational and magical weight of nine moons pulling on the world was staggering to comprehend. It was a sky that loudly declared this was a realm of gods, of ancient magic, and of countless planes bleeding into one another.

It’s a fantasy world, Sol reasoned with himself, finally remembering to breathe as his eyes traced the impossible orbits. I need to calm down. Magic is real. People summon lightning-wielding storm tigers out of rocks, and giant acidic ants melt Behemoths into soup. Of course there are nine moons. Anything is possible here.

But even with that pragmatic, modern-logic rationalization, the sheer cosmic scale of it was deeply shocking. It was a humbling, terrifying reminder of just how little he actually knew about this strange, primordial multiverse he had been dropped into. He was a speck of dust standing at the center of infinity. How many more world-shattering secrets were hiding in plain sight?

Sol took a deep breath, tearing his eyes away from the bruised purple moon, and took another mechanical bite of his fruit.

I’m not going to panic, he told himself firmly. But I am definitely going to subtly interrogate the locals. When he finished his hunt and made it back to the Veynar tribe, he resolved to casually bring it up in conversation with Kira or Chief Veylara. He just needed a quick sanity check. He’d point up and ask, completely deadpan, if they were also seeing nine massive celestial bodies, or if they just saw one normal moon and he was, in fact, experiencing a permanent, core-induced hallucinogenic trip.

If they confirmed the nine moons, great. Worldbuilding expanded. If they looked at him like he was crazy… well, he’d cross that bridge when he got to it.

He then turned his attention to the jungle below.

If the sky was a theater of cosmic majesty, the Great Orrath at night was a theater of beautiful, luminescent nightmares.