The first to float up were the ice crystals at the tips of his beard, each of which unfolded into a hexagonal fragment of memory.

He saw countless snow-buried dusks in it - sea otters squatting on the frozen shore, gazing at the aurora that never sets, waiting for someone who might never come.

"No...wait!"

Ma Tuan didn't expect this to happen suddenly.

When he pounced, the sea otter's body had become transparent.

He passed through its gradually illusory outline, starlight with a scent of sea salt flowing through his fingers.

The otter's fur transformed into billions of tiny particles of light, each of which held a silhouette from a certain time and space: a cub biting on snow candy, an adult dragging a sacrifice through a blizzard, an old man guarding an ice hole until his beard frosted...

The messenger of the sacrifice suddenly stiffened.

The wriggling tentacles solidified into ice sculptures, their surface adorned with the same starbursts as those on a sea otter's whiskers.

The entire inverted pyramid space fell into absolute stillness, even the drifting dust was suspended in mid-air, like the universe with the pause button pressed.

Otter's final gaze fell on the crack in his mask.

It opened its mouth, revealing a smile that belonged to marine mammals and was impossible for humans to understand.

Following this expression, the rest of its body suddenly burst into a miniature aurora, with indigo light bands winding and rising, gathering into a crystal snow candy at the top of the pyramid.

"Boom—"

The sound of candy falling on the mask is crisper than the cracking of a glacier and more ethereal than deep-sea bubbles.

He felt a chill between his brows, and the candy had turned into a dark blue gem embedded in the mask.

Countless unfamiliar memories flooded in from the point where the gem touched his skin—he saw the giant bronze gate standing on the ice field, the sticky darkness seeping from the cracks in the gate, and the silhouettes of the sea otters who had been squatting in front of the gate for generations...

"Boom—"

When the second heartbeat came from the depths of the pyramid, all the stationary tentacles suddenly turned collectively.

They no longer attacked, but pointed towards the center of the earth like pilgrims. The honeycomb-like holes on their surface expanded to their limits, spewing out mist with the smell of ancient sea.

The gemstone on his mask began to pulsate, perfectly synced with his heartbeat.

But at this moment, where the fog was thickest, time seemed to freeze for a moment.

Suddenly, the mist began to swirl slowly, like a galaxy stirred by an invisible brush.

Countless tiny ice crystals sparkled in the fog, like scattered stars finding their way home, gradually converging into a perfect circular outline.

The edges of the outline glowed with aurora-like colors - green, lavender, and dark blue - these colors flowed and changed in the mist, like watercolors in a dream.

As the rotation accelerated, the center of the fog gradually sank, forming a deep vortex.

Then, it opened.

It was an eye that could not be described in mortal language. The iris was carved from millennia of glaciers, and every line of ice contained ancient memories.

The pupil is a rotating nebula, in which countless tiny stars are born and annihilated.

The white part of the eyes is not flesh and blood, but flowing mist, sometimes showing the outline of snow-capped mountains, and sometimes turning into floating aurora.