Most cities had vanished into darkness, but Gotham's skyline was sharp enough to pierce the night. Snow was still falling. To provide heating, smoke from enormous chimneys rose continuously, circling in the sky for a long time without dispersing, like someone had smeared furnace soot across a painting of the stars—filthy in the manner of another kind of art.
All at once, that lead-gray color seeping through the night grew richer. Even the dense blackness seemed to dissolve, and the night sky was coated in a faint silver-blue glow. The global temperature drop had stopped.
Brainiac immediately pushed news of the "successful establishment of the Dense Ice Shield" to everyone on Earth. It was more than an hour later than expected, and the temperature had fallen faster than anticipated. Temperatures near Earth's equator had dropped to around ten degrees Celsius, while many severely cold regions were no longer fit for human habitation.
Because Gotham had its own separate shield, its temperature remained around minus ten degrees Celsius. The rest of the East Coast was not so fortunate, with most areas reaching several dozen degrees below zero. Canada and regions farther north were worse still. Most people could only hide in city shelters, unable to leave at all.
The scene Jonathan had predicted arrived right on schedule. With temperatures in most of the world becoming unsuitable for people to go outside, Gotham became the last remaining utopia. After all, demanding that someone commit murder in an environment colder than minus fifty degrees was asking a little too much.
Just as Britain was the country where mystery novels thrived most, with many great mystery writers being British, because the atmosphere of that country was well suited to writing mysteries. The mood was cold, the environment isolated, and the population relatively dense. If