In the third month after the Return Festival, a silent disaster befell the New Era Star Sea.
Harmonic Leaping Note was the first to notice something amiss. She was composing a welcome song for a newly returned civilization when her Thirty-Threefold Fate Harmonics resonated in unison, picking up an extremely subtle "discord"-not in the melody, but in existence itself.
"Tuner." Her voice rang through the consciousness link, carrying a gravity it had never held before. "Something has happened to the Prismglass Civilization."
When Lin Ye reached the starfield where the Prismglass Civilization resided, more than half of that once kaleidoscopically brilliant expanse had already dimmed.
The Prismglass Civilization was the most renowned Artistic Civilization of the Third Era. Its existence was rooted in "color"-seventy thousand fundamental colors, each corresponding to an emotion, a history, a philosophy. Its people had no fixed forms, only masses of flowing colored light. The richer their colors, the higher their level of civilization.
And now, those colors were disappearing.
"Three more vanished today." The Prismglass Civilization's representative-a faint ball of light left with only the three primary colors of red, yellow, and blue-spoke through trembling thoughts. "Five vanished yesterday. Seven the day before. It's happening faster and faster."
Lin Ye stood at the center of the Prismglass Starfield, the 370 million stars on the cloak behind him twinkling silently. He said nothing, only raised a hand and pressed it against that faint ball of light.
What he felt through his palm was not pain, but blankness.
It was neither forgetting nor erasure. The very concept of "color" was being drawn out of the Prismglass Civilization's foundations. Like a painting washed clean of its colors-not because its pigments had faded, but because the word "color" had lost its meaning.
"Order's Dawn, full-spectrum analysis."
An ethereal image