The brief twilight over the Azure Cloud Realm didn’t simply fade into night. It was murdered.
High above the stratosphere. There, the outer high sky met the cold empty pocket of the sky gulf, the ten-thousand-mile space-folding rift convulsed. The jagged tear in reality, which had earlier bled thin ribbons of gray static, suddenly snapped open with a soundless shudder that rattled the world-size core. Outside the air, the distant star-patterns didn’t dim gradually. They were put out in vast. They swept swaths, as if a huge bucket of pitch-black ink had been overturned across hundreds of light-years of sky mix.
The surrounding heat at the edge of the air plunged past total zero in a fraction of an instant. Cosmic frost—crystal-hardened out of dead photons and frozen space-time—formed across the outer protective wards of the realm, glittering with a dead, lusterless gray sheen.
“Warning,” the Dao Spirit’s voice rang through Lin Xiao’s mind, devoid of its usual calm distance. “Macro-gravity shifted weight detected. An entity possessing negative mass equivalent to four point eight times ten to the eighteenth pounds is forcing entry through the spatial breach.”
Lin Xiao floated upward from his cloud cushion, his jelly-like azure outer edge firming up. He tilted his upper mass forward, gazing toward the northern edge of the sky.
