At the time, Yan Dong was standing in front of her own ice sculpture, which she’d just completed. Exquisitely carved ice sculptures surrounded her. In the distance, lofty ice structures towered over a snowfield. These sparkling and translucent skyscrapers and castles were steeped in the winter sun. They were short-lived works of art. Soon, this glittering world would become a pool of clear water in the spring breeze. People were sad to see them melt but the process embodied many of life’s ineffable mysteries. This, perhaps, was the real reason why Yan Dong clung dearly to the ice and snow arts.

Yan Dong tore her gaze away from her own work, determined not to look at it again before the judges named the winners. She sighed, then glanced at the sky. It was at this moment that she saw the low-temperature artist for the first time.

Initially, she thought it was a plane dragging a white vapor trail behind it, but the flying object was much faster than a plane. It swept a great arc through the air. The vapor trail, like a giant piece of chalk, drew a hook in the blue sky. The flying object suddenly stopped high in the air right above Yan Dong. The vapor trail gradually disappeared from its tail to its head, as though the flying object were inhaling it back in.

Yan Dong studied the bit of the vapor trail that was the last to disappear. It was flickering oddly, and she decided it had to be from something reflecting the sunlight. She then saw what that it was—a small, ash-gray spheroid. Then quickly realized that the spheroid wasn’t small—it looked small in the distance, but was now expanding rapidly. The spheroid was falling right toward her, it seemed, and from an incredibly high altitude. When the people around her realized, they fled in all directions. Yan Dong also ducked her head and ran, darting in and around the ice sculptures.

An enormous shadow hung over the area, and for a moment, Yan Dong’s blood seemed to freeze. The expected impact never came, though. The artists and judges and festival spectators stopped running. They gazed upward, dumbstruck. She looked up, too. The massive gray spheroid floated a hundred meters over their heads. It wasn’t wholly spheroid, as if the vapor expelled during its high-speed flight had warped its shape. The half in the direction of its flight was smooth, glossy, and round. The other half sprouted a large sheaf of hair, making it look like a comet whose tail had been trimmed. It was massive, well over one hundred meters in diameter, a mountain suspended in midair. Its presence felt oppressive to everyone beneath it.