Chapter 121

Frozen. Absolutely frozen. The gray-black metal egg wedge stuck deep in the gate's fracture like a rusted specimen pinned to a cosmic corpse. The Cold Fortress's directive of absolute stasis pierced every inch of the egg's structure like billions of invisible ice chains. Time lost its meaning here, and movement was utterly stripped away. The gray-black metallic sheen on the egg's surface solidified at the moment of impact-induced cracking, while the blazing white and ink-black currents of light lingering deep within the fissures were frozen into cold mineral veins. The nascent liquid metal spine inside maintained its arched posture, the faint shimmer of its scale-like vascular network sealed in the absolute zero of a logical amber. The Fortress's repair routines operated quietly around the frozen egg. Along the fractured edges of the smashed gate armor, ice-blue threads of Law spread like living vines, weaving a delicate web of logic. Wherever the light web passed, the broken metal structures silently mended, and the distorted spatial folds were forcibly smoothed out. The space around the egg was reinforced and compressed layer by layer, forming an inward-shrinking absolute cage. Cold streams of energy acted like janitors, scrubbing away the peeling metal debris and solidified energy residues from the egg's surface. The Fortress's will sought to completely seal off and isolate this stain, ultimately assimilating it as part of its own cold structure.