The crash of total origin and total oblivion was supposed to tear the mortal universe apart.
In the counts of every ancient astronomer who had ever mapped the movements of the high sky, the meeting of ten to the twenty-fourth power blasts of heat of negative mass with an unbending surface should have created a cataclysmic star-core flare. It should have stripped the ozone layer into wisps of burning hydrogen, boiled the world’s oceans into steam clouds. Then it blasted the world-size mantle into jagged asteroid fragments drifting across the dark void.
Yet the last hundred miles of the Broodmother’s Star-core Obliteration Beam rushed into Lin Xiao’s Primordial Chaos Maw. Then, the world remained bathed in deep, sacred stillness.
There was no ear-splitting thunder. There was no earth-shaking shudder. There was not even a puff of gray ash to dirty the high-sky cirrus clouds.
The total beam flowed downward into Lin Xiao’s open sky-slit in a smooth, nonstop, zero-drag clouded eye. It was thick, dense, and pitch-black, resembling a huge stream of velvety dark chocolate fudge being poured straight from an artisanal copper kettle into a high-powered blender. The negative breakdown molecules contacted the swirling azure chaos fluid within the maw. Then, the destructive tension dissolved into pure liquid nourishment.
