The cold of the Outer Void was different from mountain ice.
It wasn’t a heat. It was the total absence of heat-powered permission.
Lin Ke stood at the bridge railing, wrapped in a thick wool mantle lined with wolf fat. Beside him, the bronze heating fire bowl gave off a pale, sputtering orange flame, fed by tightly packed spirit-oil that had to be continuously stirred to keep it from freezing into solid wax.
Three days had passed since the Void Breaker had crossed the high sky.
Outside the watching quartz, the landscape had changed from black empty pocket to an eerie, silent graveyard of dead reality: the Driftwood Sea.
Shattered land-wide plates drifted through the dark like broken icebergs. Frozen oceans of violet liquid silver floated beside fractured mountain ranges that had belonged to the forgotten Second and Third Epochs.
There were ancient, decaying cities carved from white jade, suspended upside down in the void, their towers snapped like dry twigs. Millions of years ago, entire great realms had lived, fought, and loved on those stones.
Then their epoch had crashed, their memory blocks had been marked as unindexed garbage. Their worlds had been dumped into the unallocated void gutter.
