High in the upper atmosphere, Bead Number Three flared into an incandescent, blinding white-hot miniature supernova.
It was the Solar-Extinction Bead, three hundred miles wide and supercharged with the stolen thermal core-energy of one thousand stars.
The surface temperature of the sphere reached fifty million degrees.
The air around it did not merely burn; it ionized into screaming sheets of white plasma that melted falling meteors into glowing liquid droplets.
High atop the control bridge of the Supreme Abacus, Ancestor Tun Ri had both his hands clamped onto the ignition valve.
His face was completely bald, blackened with soot, and twisted into a hideous mask of murderous desperation.
“Burn!” Tun Ri shrieked into the cosmic comms, his voice echoing across fifty light-years of space. “Burn their Twelve Dyson-Spheres! Melt their five-star duplex villas into bubbling puddles of glass! Turn their one trillion refugees into drifting cinder ash!”
Tun Ri hated those duplex villas. He had spent three hundred years designing cramped, three-square-meter tenant boxes where mortal families suffocated while paying eighty percent of their monthly grain as rent. Seeing one trillion refugees living in heated duplexes with free dumpling chutes felt like a personal insult to his entire economic philosophy.
