Fading Chromaglass

Three months after the Return Festival, the Star Sea of the New Era was struck by a silent disaster.

Harmonic Leaptone was the first to detect the anomaly. She had been composing a welcome song for the newly returned civilizations when the Thirty-Threefold Fate Harmonics resonated at once, catching an exceedingly faint "discord"—not a discord in melody, but in existence itself.

"Tuner." Her voice rang through the consciousness link, carrying a gravity she had never shown before. "Something has happened to the Chromaglass Civilization."

By the time Lin Ye arrived in the starfield where the Chromaglass Civilization resided, that region, once as resplendent as a kaleidoscope, had already dimmed by more than half.

The Chromaglass Civilization had been the most renowned art civilization of the Third Era. Its existence was rooted in "color"—seventy thousand base colors, each corresponding to an emotion, a piece of history, a philosophy. Its people had no fixed forms, only masses of flowing colored light. The richer their colors, the higher their civilization's level.

And now, those colors were disappearing.

"Three more disappeared today." The Chromaglass Civilization's representative—a faint orb of light with only the three primary colors of red, yellow, and blue remaining—spoke through trembling thoughts. "Five disappeared yesterday. Seven the day before. It's getting faster."

Lin Ye stood at the center of the Chromaglass Starfield, the 370 million stars on his cloak quietly glimmering behind him. He said nothing, merely raising a hand and pressing it against that frail orb of light.

What came through his palm was not pain, but blankness.

It was not forgetfulness, nor erasure. Rather, the very concept of "color" was being extracted from the foundation of the Chromaglass Civilization. It was like washing the color from a painting—not that the pigments had faded, but that the word "color" itself