The third hour after midnight was the hour of the white blizzard.
It didn’t snow from the clouds. In the underwater entry halls of the Drowned Dao, the heat hovered near freezing, but the moisture hanging in the air was stale, heavy with sulfur and hadal salt water. The blizzard that fell across Entry hall 380 was made of calcined bone, charred phosphorus, and boiled away insect shells.
For two nonstop hours, the ninety-arm-length upright curtain of the White Jade Barrier had operated at peak glowing output.
A high-thickness cluster of void-locusts drifted within two arm-lengths of the 114-Hertz deep ring plane. Each time, the intense magnetic shear boiled away the moisture inside their segmented abdomens. The sudden spreading blew their back shells into white-hot sparks. Millions of silver flashes lit up the cavernous darkness, flaring with an intensity that burned the eyes of anyone foolish enough to look directly into the field.
The dead did not vanish.
The burning was incomplete. Stripped of volatile hydrocarbons and nitrogenous grease, the leftover stone framework of the locusts—calcium phosphate, hard-shelled carbon, and trace amounts of void-zinc—settled out of the stale air in a nonstop, silent snowfall.
It drifted down four arm-lengths deep across the entire expanse of the outer avenue.
