Chapter 85

The overture of destruction is silence. There was no whistling roar of a sweeping shockwave, no explosive crack of tearing matter. There was only a sense of void more absolute than death, like the eternal stillness left when the background noise of cosmic radiation is instantly drained away. On the surface of the Purification Core's huge, cold geometric shell, the black-red crack forged by the entropy nest's self-destruction impact—its edges lingering with the furnace's information embers—was not a physical wound. It resembled more a... logical trauma forcibly torn open.