The solitary, fathomless deep space was more vast, desolate, and silent than the congealed red dome of the Myriad Bones Abyss. There were no stars, no drifting clouds—only a boundless expanse of near-absolute void, like a tombstone frozen since primordial times, engraved with the very emptiness of the universe.
Within this suffocating background of the void, the sole "reality" stood out starkly: a pair of binary stars, tearing at and entangling with each other, translating the screams of death into a silent, icy cosmic poem.
A massive red giant burned with bloated futility, resembling a dying beast. Its light was turbid and dark red, its edges flowing with visible cataracts of gas—like the vital plasma gushing from a dying behemoth, savagely pulled away by irresistible gravity to form a viscous, dark-red river of gas hundreds of millions of miles long. Yet this stream of life poured endlessly into its rapidly revolving companion star: a small, dense white dwarf.
Chapter 199