Chapter 77

Cold. It was not the low temperature of the environment, but a sense of void originating from the complete draining of the foundation of existence—like a stone hurled into the interstellar darkness, its last trace of internal warmth dissipated, leaving behind only an icy chill identical to eternal, dead silence. The Old Welder's "consciousness"—if this discrete, shattered, incoherent pulse that could form no valid information configuration in the absolute dark nothingness could still be called consciousness—was sinking. There was no sharp pain of bodily feedback, no five senses, no concept of the passage of time. Even the sense of his own existence ("I") had grown as thin as a mist on the verge of evaporation. Only a single chaotic, unformed underlying quantum oscillation, existing since before the birth of life, pulsed intermittently like the core of a dying star. That was the final ember left after the Key Seed Core was completely exhausted and fell silent, barely maintaining this cluster of discrete information so it would not scatter entirely into the void and turn into primitive background noise.