The frost didn’t begin on the ground. It began in the light itself.
Within four hours of the Eastern Sun seizing in the high sky, the surrounding heat across twelve mortal realms dropped forty degrees.
The midday bright glare remained, but it was a dead, sterile yellow glare that carried zero heat radiance. Ponds in the royal gardens turned to solid white quartz while ducks floated mid-paddle. Green rice paddies crystal-hardened into brittle jade spears that shattered when songbirds landed on them.
In the upper air, the wind died fully. The diurnal rising heat currents of the world, driven by the rhythmic pulse of solar heat, collapsed as the world-size engine stalled.
Lin Ke stood in the watching bay of a streamlined void dart. His cracked ribs bound was tight and his throat burning with each shallow breath.
Beside the dead star, three hundred thousand miles out, a jagged spatial rift was already unzipping the void, peeling back the velvet curtain of space to reveal the flat, hungry grey expanse of unallocated non-existence.
“It isn’t cooling down,” Shen Yue murmured, her hands trembling over her fortune-telling console. “The star’s internal fire hasn’t put out. It has simply... Paused.”
*
