Chapter 179: The Seam of the Void and the Corpse King (Part 8)
The fall through the dimensional fault felt like being violently dragged through the esophagus of a dying titan. Squad 4, the lethal team of spatial manipulation and elemental annihilation, was spat into the deepest, darkest, and most monumental corner of the non-Euclidean labyrinth.
They didn't land in a common stone or dirt cavern. They fell onto an infinite, polished surface of millennial calcium. Upon standing up, they realized they were inside a corridor so vast it looked like an enclosed underground valley. However, the colossal curved pillars holding up the vaulted black ceiling were not rock formations; they were the immense ribs of some extinct primordial beast, each the size of a white mountain range.
Violeta nimbly stood up, flicking her elegant semi-transparent rapier, the [Absolute Zero Needle]. She immediately tried to re-establish physical contact with Kael's vanguard. She channeled her sharp spatial intent, preparing her technique to tear open a teleportation rift and get her team out of there.
But the instant her spatial Qi tried to tear reality, a violent, static, and painful feedback rebounded up her arm, forcing her to cancel the technique with a choked gasp of pain.
"Space here is rotten," Violeta reported through the Soul Nexus, rubbing her numb wrist. "It's like trying to swim with weights in a pool of dense acid. I can't open long portals without tearing my own meridians."
The gloomy silence of the immense bone corridor was broken by a sound that did not belong to the world of the living: the harsh, disturbing crunch of bone grinding against bone.
From one of the colossal ribs forming the right wall of the corridor, an aberration emerged. It was an immense bone dragon, a gigantic wyrm without a single trace of scales, flesh, or tendons. But the most terrifying thing wasn't its macabre appearance, but its impossible movement. It wasn't breaking the immense fossilized rib as it came out; it was peacefully swimming through solid matter as if the primordial bone were mere water.
As the colossal bone beast glided through the stagnant air of the hallway, it began to exhale a grayish, absurdly heavy gas from its hollow jaws that quickly began to flood the corridor floor like a dense fog.
Ciro, the fastest executioner of the entire Morningstar legion, didn't wait for the beast to complete its slow emergence.
Fully trusting his mutated anatomy, his [Wind Marrow Bones] completely nullified his restrictive biological weight. His feet barely grazed the ground; the wings of vibrating light on the ankles of his [Cloud Walker Boots] glided him through the atmosphere without generating a single gram of aerodynamic drag.
In a flash of light that defied air friction, Ciro lunged forward, drawing his short swords, the [Twins of the Silent Gloom], in mid-flight. The vacuum steel blades absorbed all vibration. There was no characteristic "click" of steel leaving wood, nor the whistle of the wind. He executed the [Phantom Gale Slash] in absolute silence, leaving behind only a thin trail of purple ionized air, ready to decapitate the beast before it finished emerging from the pillar.
Halfway there, barely ten meters from the wyrm, tragedy struck.
Ciro didn't hit any visible barrier. There was no magical wall, no claw intercepting him. However, in mid-flight at hypersonic speed, a thick spurt of arterial blood violently erupted from his shoulder and chest.
He was brutally repelled backward as if he had crashed into an invisible meat grinder. Ciro rolled violently across the calcium floor, letting out a muffled cry as his blood stained the pure white. Extremely deep, perfect, surgical cuts crossed his Saint-grade armor; the deepest gash had almost amputated his right arm, stopping millimeters from splintering the bone.
"Ciro!" Voltar shouted, readying his legs to leap toward his fallen comrade.
"DO NOT MOVE!" Violeta's mental scream echoed both in the cold air and in the Nexus, laden with a genuine, analytical horror.
Violeta had fully opened her heretical vision. Her right eye glowed with an intense Neon Violet, tearing through the "seams" of the spatial fabric, while her left eye radiated an absolute Diamond Blue, detecting the kinetic energy and atomic heat of the surroundings.
Through her violet eye, the beast's lethal, diabolical trap was revealed. The grayish gas the wyrm exhaled wasn't a simple poisonous toxin; it was a pure dimensional solvent. Where the fog touched the air, space itself rotted and fractured, creating hundreds of transparent micro-fissures. They were floating spatial rifts, static and sharp as scalpels on a subatomic level.
"Do not take a single step!" Violeta transmitted, breaking into a cold sweat as she saw the dense net of invisible death surrounding them on all flanks. "That damn gas is rotting the fabric of space! It's creating invisible fissures in the air! Ciro wasn't attacked by the beast, he cut himself against the very void when trying to pass through it at that speed! If you run through that gas, you'll be slicing yourselves to pieces!"
The chilling revelation paralyzed the squad. Ciro's extreme, unreachable speed and Voltar's explosive mobility had just been completely and cruelly nullified by the terrain itself. They were trapped in a minefield where the mines were the very space they breathed.
And the Secret Realm does not forgive tactical immobility.
While they were cornered by the net of cutting gas, an overwhelmingly blasphemous and heavy presence manifested at the opposite end of the immense corridor.
An immense statue of sacred appearance, forged entirely of grayish, withered, stitched flesh, rose from the bone floor. The aberration possessed a thousand arms arranged in a macabre lotus flower. Its gigantic empty eyes fixed on the Sequences, and the statue brought its two immense main palms together in a perverse prayer.
The flesh statue began to "pray." A deep, guttural, incomprehensible chant filled every corner of the monumental corridor, making the bone dust vibrate.
Voltar, The Walking Storm, gritted his teeth in rage. He couldn't run toward the statue to destroy it because of the wyrm's spatial gas, but he didn't need to move an inch to wreak destruction. He channeled all the crackling fury of his lightning bloodline into his hands.
The massive [Zenith Knuckles] responded immediately. The heavy coils of Celestial Gold on his gauntlets spun at supersonic speeds, emitting a blue-white glow that made the metal transparent. They began to aggressively compress Voltar's dense lightning, forming a star of black and blue light above his fingers. The energy core became so incredibly dense that visible space began to curve around his hands, preparing the apocalyptic destructive force of [Indra's Hammer] to implode within the statue's chest.
But just as he was about to unleash his arm and release the attack, Voltar fell heavily to his knees.
The atomic compression in his gauntlets stopped and died out with a dull sizzle. Voltar brought his hands to his throat, choking painfully. The bright, furious violet plasma of his energy suddenly boiled, rotting until it turned a thick, nauseating tar-black color.
"Argh...!" Voltar vomited a thick clot of black blood onto the bone floor, his body trembling. "My own Qi... is burning me alive from the inside!"
Beside him, Lirael stumbled, bringing a delicate hand to her chest and coughing up violent spasms of equally dark, corrupted blood. Her beautiful eyes showed true panic as she felt her meridians wither. "The chant..." she managed to transmit in agony through the Nexus. "That thing is corrupting energy! The purer our Qi, the faster and deadlier it poisons us when we try to use it!"
The thousand-armed statue's chant was an absolute Law of Corruption. It was forcing the young warriors' Dantians to assimilate entropy and death. If they tried to use their explosive martial skills or even circulate their vital energy to heal their wounds, they simply fed and accelerated their own internal destruction.
Voltar and Lirael were mere seconds away from their fragile meridians rotting completely and their organs collapsing into a mass of dead flesh.
"Step aside," a supremely cold, raspy voice, devoid of any empathy, cut through the group's despair.
Jareth, the lethal Toxicologist of the Morningstar Empire, walked slowly to the front, contemptuously ignoring the floating bone wyrm and focusing his macabre gaze exclusively on the gigantic praying statue. His eyes, normally dull and devoid of light, now shone with a dark, purely scientific fascination.
"If it's poison... if the basis of its attack is pure corruption and conceptual death..." Jareth transmitted, stopping phlegmatically beside his agonizing comrades. "Then you are stepping on my damn territory."
Jareth didn't raise his hands to launch a ranged attack at the statue. Instead, he dropped to his knees between the twisted bodies of Voltar and Lirael. His hands, covered in neat black gloves, dug brutally, without any delicacy, into Voltar's chest, right over his Dantian, and into Lirael's shoulder.
He didn't attack them; he drained them savagely. Jareth used his own vast Spiritual Sea as a biological sponge. With a violent, tyrannical pull of his toxic will, he absorbed the entirety of the black, thick, corrupted Qi from the statue's chant that was killing his comrades, pulling and swallowing it directly into his own exposed meridians.
Voltar and Lirael took large, agonizing, desperate gulps of fresh air, the murderous pressure and rot miraculously disappearing from their bodies, as Jareth's thin body began to convulse on the calcium floor. The veins on his pale neck and face bulged monstrously, turning completely black and bruised under the weight of the direct corruption from a millennial false god.
Any other brilliant cultivator in the long history of the continent would have exploded into a disgusting puddle of liquid rot in a millisecond upon absorbing so much pure death.
But Jareth was the rare and feared vessel of an Ancestral Basilisk Dragon. His [Immunity to Life] awakened with a ravenous hunger. His twisted biology was a living paradox: he was so absolutely and incomprehensibly toxic that the statue's own millennial corruption was aggressively subjugated, broken down, and instantly assimilated by his system. Instead of killing him, the profane chant became succulent fuel.
Jareth snapped his eyes open. They had lost any trace of a human pupil; they were completely purple, glassy, and overflowing with primordial death. The thick [Entropic Acid Blood] boiled deliciously in his veins, begging to be released.
He stood up gracefully, his entire body smoking, exuding a power so suffocating and toxic that it caused even the temperature of the corridor to drop drastically. He skillfully mixed the dense, corrupt Qi he had stolen from the Buddha with his own ultimate offensive skill.
Jareth opened his mouth and unleashed his destructive exhalation: the [Mist of the Fallen Era].
He didn't expel a simple poisonous gas or smoke. He exhaled a thick, roaring torrent of highly concentrated, super-acidic purple miasma directly toward the other end of the monumental corridor. The mist did not travel at high speed, so it wasn't cut nor did it trigger the wyrm's fearsome spatial blades, but its inexorable advance was a monstrous wave of absolute chemical entropy.
The rolling avalanche of miasma hit the giant thousand-armed statue dead-on, enveloping it in a cloud of purple darkness.
The withered Buddha had no time to stop its infernal chant or change the posture of its divine mudras. The exact instant the super-acid of the Fallen Era, perversely empowered by the statue's own corruption magic, touched the rigid grayish flesh, everything began to melt at an accelerated rate. The ancient stone, the disgusting dissected flesh, and the ancient defensive magical laws of the chant were pathetically dissolved like fragile wax thrown into a stellar furnace.
The immense thousand arms disintegrated and fell to the floor in disgusting puddles of bubbling black liquid. The statue's gigantic, impassive face caved in on itself before Jareth's corrosive purple miasma consumed and erased the entirety of its blasphemous existence.
The deafening, corrupting chant stopped forever.
"One less blasphemy in this world," Jareth spat in disgust, wiping a thick thread of purple blood from the corner of his lips, smiling with overflowing arrogance at the boiling, empty puddle where a deity had stood seconds before.
Violeta didn't waste a single valuable millisecond celebrating her comrade's feat. The corrupting Buddha was finally dead, but the immense corridor was still lethally plagued by the wyrm's static cutting gas, which continued swimming lazily and calmly between the massive ribs of the wall, preparing its lungs to exhale more solvent and attack its immobilized prey at its leisure.
"Space has us completely cornered. I need to see exactly where the hell the fissures are floating to stabilize them and open a path," Violeta ordered quickly, her mind calculating probabilities. "Lirael, project your reflections into the gas mist. Be my damn sacrificial eyes."
Lirael, already recovered from the lethal corruption thanks to Jareth's purge, nodded silently and elegantly drew her invisible scimitar, the [Moon Fang].
She immediately activated her [Silver Mirror Eyes]. Her beautiful, feline amber eyes disappeared completely, turning into two perfect, gleaming surfaces of liquid mirror. At the same time, she bit the inside of her own cheek hard until it bled. Her [Lunar Mercury Blood] flowed hot. The liquid, silver, and spectral metal burst from her mouth, instantly evaporating in the cold air and creating a perfect physical multiplication effect.
Beside her, three identical and perfect clones of Lirael materialized from the silver mist. They were not simple optical illusions or light projections; they were completely tangible physical clones, sharing heartbeat for heartbeat the exact same temperature, shadow, and real Qi signature as the original.
The four Liraels ran suicidally to the front, boldly venturing straight into the bone wyrm's thick sea of deadly, grayish gas.
The tactical sacrifice was immediate, horrifying, and brutal. A few meters in, one of the swift Lirael clones was suddenly sliced in half by an invisible spatial blade, its body bursting soundlessly into a sad cloud of glowing mercury. Another clone cleanly lost both legs at the knees a second later, falling to the floor, and the third was brutally decapitated while attempting to acrobatically leap over a dense gas formation in the center of the hallway.
To the naked eye of the others, it was a desperate carnage, but through the analytical Neon Violet Eye of the space user, the systematic immolation of the physical clones revealed the valuable, exact "map" of the invisible traps. Where the fragile bodies of the mercury clones died and spilled, the light refracted in the suspended liquid metal, briefly illuminating and showing the tiny, sharp, lethal broken seams in the very fabric of the hallway.
Violeta firmly gripped her Absolute Zero Needle. It was time to dominate and subjugate her element by force.
"You don't fucking own space, you old bag of bones," Violeta thought with an icy ferocity.
The stellar silver fractal snowflake that formed the guard of her rapier rotated violently, emitting a sharp vacuum hiss. Violeta thrust the needle directly into the air in front of her and unleashed her [Zero Entropy Pulse].
An expansive, invisible aura of [Conceptual Cold] shot out from her graceful body in an absolute radius of fifty meters. Violeta wasn't looking for the crude trick of physically freezing the beast with ice or frost. In the pure physics of cultivation, heat is movement and kinetic energy; Violeta forcibly imposed the dictatorship of "Non-Vibration," stopping the movement of elemental particles at the subatomic level dead in their tracks.
When the expansive pulse hit the massive bone wyrm, the beast, which relied on extreme dimensional fluidity to move and swim through dense bone and space so fast, suddenly felt the air and reality turn into thick molasses. Its ethereal, undetectable swimming slowed grotesquely and clumsily, remaining almost suspended in the air, trapped in an invisible thermal prison.
With the monster slowed to near-paralysis and the complex map of the lethal fissures fully revealed by the sacrifice of Lirael's clones, Violeta used her own superior spatial manipulation to forcibly stabilize the broken reality. She masterfully traced a perfect straight line through the deadly gray gas with her needle, forcing the spatial micro-fissures in that narrow path to close and scar over, creating a single, safe, blameless physical "tunnel."
"Ciro! Spatial tunnel stabilized, central axis of the corridor! Execute that thing!" Violeta shouted.
Ciro, who had been gritting his teeth hard while his deep wounds slowly stopped bleeding, anesthetized under the passive cold of his leader's environment, didn't need a second invitation.
Even severely wounded and bloodied, his hollow bones and perfect zero inertia allowed him to tyrannically ignore the fragile laws of human biological attrition. He positioned his floating feet on the solid white bone and stared with murderous intent at the wyrm's immense, slow, heavy bone head trapped in the cold.
Ciro drew his ash-gray sword with millimeter precision, activating his ultimate assassination technique: the [Whisper of the Apex].
He pushed the aerodynamics of his own body to the absolute physical and conceptual limit. As he pulled the hilt, his iron will as a Zephyr Dragon abruptly eliminated one hundred percent of the pesky air friction in front of him, creating a perfect absolute vacuum tunnel that perfectly matched the safe space corridor previously stabilized by Violeta.
Ciro did not run. He did not jump. He performed a pure physical displacement at infinite speed.
The monstrous bone wyrm, sensing in its meager intellect the absolute lethality of the imminent attack, clumsily attempted to use its instinctive spatial ability to swallow Ciro, opening a dark, devouring portal in the center of its jaws. But the very instant it opened its gigantic bony maw, Lirael—the real, uninjured warrior—had already stealthily appeared at its side. Her Silver Mirror gaze was fixed, relentless, on the fragile "spiritual shadow" cast by the enormous bone dragon. Her invisible Moon Fang threatened the beast's soul, distracting its defense and its portal for a crucial microsecond of panic.
In that tiny, imperceptible millisecond of hesitation from the wyrm, Ciro simply appeared in the air, floating ten meters high.
No one in the hallway, not even his talented comrades, managed to visually see the trajectory of his dash. They only saw, after a blink, Ciro already solidly positioned right behind the wyrm's immense head, with his dark short sword, covered in a dense, buzzing concentrated wind, already brutally embedded up to the guard directly into the bony nape, destroying the black vital core of the primordial beast.
The physical sound of the mortal strike, a strident, high-pitched tearing whistle that shattered the stagnant air, reached the astonished ears of his comrades a full second after Ciro had already penetrated and shattered the core. The brutal aerodynamic attack of the execution had surpassed the speed of the sound barrier by an absolute, divine margin.
The bone wyrm's enormous empty sockets abruptly lost their faint cursed light. The immense primordial beast shuddered convulsively and then, having forever lost the magical core that held its unnatural structure together, collapsed on itself. Millions of heavy, noisy ancient bones fell in disarray like an immense white waterfall, crumbling into a monumental, harmless inert mountain on the smooth floor of the bone corridor. The toxic, cutting grayish gas, losing its source, quickly dissipated and evaporated into the atmosphere.
The silence was absolute and reassuring in the valley. Ciro landed heavily, doubling over and leaning on his short sword embedded in the bone, his severely wounded right arm hanging weak and limp at his side. Jareth was quietly coughing up the last assimilated remnants of miasma in the rear, and Voltar was struggling to his feet, firmly supported by an attentive Lirael. They were severely bruised, uglily bloodied, and their Qi reserves were almost empty, but the great threat was dead and they were breathing.
The tactical victory seemed undeniable and total.
Through the crystal clarity of the Soul Nexus, Cedric's excited, triumphant voice rang loudly in the tired minds of the forty-five warriors trapped in the Secret Realm.
"I got it! We have absolute control of the damn central matrix!" the proud Runic Architect yelled. "All assault Sequences, prepare yourselves! Initiating spatial convergence immediately! The illusory labyrinth is collapsing on our anchor point, we're going to reunite everyone at once. I'm coming to you, Violeta..."
But Cedric's animated voice cut off with terrifying, hair-raising abruptness, drowned out abruptly in everyone's minds by a crushing, deafening physical sound in the hallway.
BAM!
Suddenly, falling from the immense vaulted darkness of the monumental corridor, immense, thick, impenetrable blocks of solid black obsidian and suffocating curtains of dense red fog crashed violently from the ceiling. They smashed brutally against the white bone floor, kicking up a cloud of dust and slamming shut both exits of the immense hallway.
Violeta stared intently at the newly fallen massive barrier. Her piercing heterochromic eyes widened in genuine stupefaction. Her team's internal Soul Nexus was still active; she could still clearly hear the alarmed voices of Kael, Cedric, and Iris frantically asking what the hell had happened and why their signal had been isolated, but when she tried to read the physical coordinates of the blocked hallway, her infallible spatial eye returned a mathematically impossible piece of data.
Those menacing obsidian walls possessed a conceptual "infinite mass". No one, not Cedric's advanced and genius runic magic, nor Eris's catastrophic force of Ruin, could ever penetrate, break, or pass through them from the outside.
Squad 4 had been isolated from the rest of the clan.
A very raspy, slow, and repulsive sound, like a dirty cloth dragging lazily over millennial stone, broke the fragile, false victory of the five young warriors.
From the deepest, most unfathomable darkness of the sealed corridor, a gloomy, solitary figure emerged. It wasn't a grotesque giant monster, nor the powerful, muscular reanimated corpse of a bestial god. It was simply the withered body of an old man, dressed in traditional orthodox robes that were threadbare, dusty, and stained.
The stolen body of Grand Saint Li was in an advanced, disgusting state of unnatural putrefaction, his parched skin cracked into thousands of pieces like old parchment about to fall apart. But the dense aura his figure exuded did not belong to this mortal world at all. A thick primordial miasma, so dense, dark, and brutally heavy that it made the mere air toxic and the light in the room seem to cower and flee, furiously emanated from every dead pore of the old man.
The true entity had possessed the flimsy vessel completely.
The Demonic Saint King of the tomb had descended in person.
Ciro painfully tightened his grip on his sword, straightening up even though his shattered arm demanded rest. Voltar, ignoring the piercing pain in his meridians, forced his cells to generate furious lightning once again. Jareth took an elegant step forward, destructive acidic blood dripping freely from his leather gloves.
But the supreme, wrathful ancient entity didn't even spare them a simple glance of acknowledgment.
The piercing, abyssal, and terrifying completely yellow eyes of the Demon King, devoid entirely of any minimal vestige of humanity, mercy, or sanity, passed over the four lethal male and female warriors as if they were insignificant dust in his presence. His obsessive, sickly gaze, overflowing with an eternal, macabre greed, locked exclusively and heavily on the slender figure stoically leading the formation.
Violeta.
The tense silence that followed was so unbearably heavy it seemed to have its own gravity, sinking the floor. Finally, the Demon King slowly parted the dry, cracked lips of Grand Saint Li's corpse.
"So much excellent, useless blood spilled today..." the ancient entity's voice was not a sound produced by vocal cords; it was an invasive mental vibration that resonated painfully directly in the Sequences' bones, full of a millennial arrogance and haughtiness. "My beasts have proven to be useless against mortals. But, at least, your pathetic, insignificant resistance brought you directly and without detours right into my own hands."
The ancient monster took a slow, rhythmic step forward. Its glowing yellow eyes did not blink at all.
"But you... beautiful child," the perverse Demon King murmured, very slowly raising a rotting finger and pointing directly at Violeta's expressionless face. "I have seen your fascinating eyes tear the seams of my precious illusory domains. Your fragile mortal body is a perfect sanctuary of extreme Ice and deep Space. You are a Yin vessel so perfect, pure, and pristine that even the miserable orthodox Heavens would weep blood of pure envy if they saw you."
The thick blood-red miasma floating around the Saint King began to spin and swirl furiously, forming dozens of terrifying ghostly faces screaming in mute agony.
"This dark tomb already suffocates and bores me, child," the Demon King continued with a seductive, venomous voice, slowly spreading his dry arms to the sides in a gesture of twisted grandeur. "This weak orthodox corpse I'm wearing is a fragile, pathetic cage. So I will take your exquisite ice flesh, I will eradicate your useless mortal soul, and with the immense affinity you possess over space... the entire outside world will finally be my immense playground. There are no fortified walls or grandiose ancient clans that can hide from my wrath if I am the undisputed master of space. Submit docilely to the King's crown, and your death will be painless."
The overwhelming, oppressive pressure of a cultivator at the pinnacle of the Grand Saint, controlled to perfection by the mastery of an immensely superior and ancient entity, descended physically upon them. The gravity of the aura crushed the hallway, trying to break their spirits, shatter their will to fight, and brutally force them to their knees against the bone floor. It was a despotic power that, in ages past, had extinguished entire continents on a whim.
But the fearsome Demon King made a fundamental, lethal, and stupid mistake in his ancient calculation.
The entity blindly believed he was facing generic, pampered talents from the arrogant orthodox sects of the outside; young crystal prodigies who had never in their short lives known true, abyssal cosmic terror in their own flesh. He failed to understand that these five youths before him had been cruelly raised in the most absolute and heartbreaking darkness of creation. They had been physically shattered, mentally murdered, and violently reconstructed from the ashes of their sanity by the incarnation of the Primordial Void itself, during years of infinite torture in Samael's Mirror.
Voltar, unfazed by the aura, spat a thick clot of blood onto the floor with pure disgust. Jareth, ignoring the murderous pressure, let out a gloomy, dark, and deeply mocking laugh right in the god's face, while Ciro and Lirael simply took a firm, menacing step forward, proudly flanking their leader without showing a single drop of fear, doubt, or trembling in their murderous eyes.
Violeta simply did not feel the supposedly overwhelming pressure of the tomb trying to crush her.
Compared to the icy glare of absolute disdain, the unfathomable immensity, and the suffocating divine pressure her young Patriarch effortlessly emanated when casually walking through the halls of the Morningstar Palace, the pathetic red miasma of this rotting old corpse felt on her skin like a soft, warm, and harmless autumn breeze.
There was no terror, reverence, or surprise in the dark heart of the ice heiress; there was only a deep, cold, and calculating murderous fury at the audacity.
Violeta elegantly lifted her slender chin. Her beautiful, deadly heterochromic eyes, one neon violet and the other unwavering diamond blue, shone with a predatory light in the overwhelming darkness of the corridor.
She slowly, almost lazily, drew her slender Absolute Zero Needle. The deadly, High Saint-grade semi-transparent blade began to hum with a devouring, silent bloodlust, easily cutting and freezing the demon's poisonous miasma with its pure, absolute existential cold.
The young Morningstar Sequence raised her perfect arm and pointed the fine, lethal blade of her rapier directly, without trembling, at the rotting brow of the ancient aberration that dared to believe itself a god in front of real demons.
"Come and get it, fossil," Violeta said, her voice as cold, disdainful, and absolute as cosmic zero itself.