The cold came without a draft.
It didn’t feel like winter frost or high-sky mountain wind. It felt like a total empty pocket sucking the surrounding warmth directly out of the marrow of Lin Ke’s bones.
The coarse linen bandages wrapped around his right forearm stiffened into brittle ribbons. Beneath the cloth, the lingering burns from the Monolith’s core overload throbbed with a dull, sickening ache.
Beside him, a clay pot bowl of plum wine on the watching terrace froze solid in less than two seconds, the glazed clay cracking with the sharp snap of dry pine.
Across the banquet pavilion, thirty ascendant elders were raising their cups to toast the new dawn of an unchained cosmos.
Then the sky over the Northern Side stopped rendering.
*
It wasn’t an eclipse. There was no shadow, no storm cloud, and no gathering of deep-sea demonic foul fog.
