The pitch-black ice of absolute apathy crept across the void like frozen oil.
Around the pinned Chairman, the Eternal Cold-Heart Ice Shell thickened by the second. The temperature dropped past minus two hundred and seventy degrees, reaching the absolute floor of physical reality.
Nearby stars turned gray, their burning fusion cores freezing solid like drops of cooling wax. The spatial ether itself crystallized into jagged, needle-sharp black diamonds that drifted through the dark.
Across the decks of the Taichu fleet, the mooring cables creaked and groaned as thick rime coated the titanium hulls. Even the white-gold merit armor of the crew began to gather a thin, stinging layer of dark frost.
Inside the debtor cage on the terrace, former First Director Mo-Suan leaned against the golden bars, his neon-yellow vest freezing stiff as cardboard. His teeth chattered with uncontrollable violence:
“The Cold-Heart Shell... Even when immortal god-kings threw supernovas and solar flares at it during the Second Epoch, the fire froze into black crystals. Heat requires a reason to burn. And in the void, there is no reason. There is only cold balance.”
Second Director Hei-Zhang blew onto his frozen knuckles, his breath puffing in gray smoke:
“Nothing can melt it! It was forged from eighty thousand epochs of cosmic indifference! When people give up on each other, the universe freezes. That is the fundamental law of entropy!”
