A bitter wind howled over an endless expanse of white. Above it stretched a sky like night, and hanging high in it was only a single blazing sun that gave no sense of heat.
It had only been a matter of time before things became like this. Huo Gu's actions back then had merely accelerated the process.
This planet was too far from its star. The light it received was not enough to maintain the surface temperature. The reason liquid oceans had been able to form during the Hadean Eon was, on one hand, the planet's own geothermal heat, and on the other, the presence of a methane atmosphere capable of locking the vast majority of heat at the surface for secondary use.
When the effects of both were no longer obvious, this planet became the giant snowball it was now.
However, from Huo Gu's perspective, it was another strange and wondrous sight entirely.
The sun rose quickly from the horizon, reached noon before long, then set beyond the horizon on the other side. After the sun went down, stars appeared one after another in the sky, and only then did true night descend. Then the night also passed swiftly, the cycle repeating again and again.
The white condensate gathered on the surface by the low temperature surged along the lines of latitude like a tide, rushing from the end where the sun rose toward the end where the sun set.
The reason this phenomenon appeared was entirely due to the consequences of "thought deceleration." Once the sense of time had slowed to an outrageous degree, this was the scene one saw.
[The carbon dioxide has basically frozen into dry ice and mixed with the snow and ice. The atmosphere is too thin, so there's no way to complete refraction