“I come from a faraway place, a world you have no way to understand. That world is not nearly as interesting as yours. Originally, I focused solely on the art. I didn’t interact with other worlds. However, seeing exhibitions like this one, seeing so many colleagues, I found the desire to interact. But, frankly, very few of the low-temperature works below me deserve to be called works of art.”

“Why?” someone asked.

“Excessively realistic, too reliant on form and detail. Besides space, there’s nothing in the universe. The actual world is just a big pile of curved spaces. Once you understand this, you’ll see how risible these works are. However, hm, this piece moves me a little.”

Just as the voice faded away, a delicate thread extended from the snowflakes around the ball of ice, as if it flowed down following an invisible funnel. The snowflake thread stretched from midair to the top of Yan Dong’s ice sculpture before dissolving. Yan Dong stood on her tiptoes, and tentatively stretched a gloved hand toward the snowflake thread. As she neared it, her fingers felt that burning sensation again. She jerked her hand back, but it was already painfully cold inside the glove.

“Are you pointing to my work?” Yan Dong rubbed her frozen hand with the other. “I, I didn’t use traditional methods. That is, carve it from ready-made blocks of ice. Instead, I built a structure composed of several large membranes. For a long time, steam produced from boiling water rose from the bottom of the structure. The steam froze to the membrane, forming a complex crystal. Once the crystal grew thick enough, I got rid of the membrane and the result is what you see here.”

“Very good. So interesting. It so expresses the beauty of the cold. The inspiration for this work comes from …”

“Windowpanes! I don’t know whether you will be able to understand my description: When you wake during a hard winter’s night just before sunrise, your bleary gaze falls on the windowpane filled with crystals. They reflect the dark blue first light of early dawn, as though they were something you dreamed up overnight….”

“Yes, yes, I understand!” The snowflakes around the low-temperature artist danced in a lively pattern. “I have been inspired. I want to create! I must create!”

“The Songhua River is that way. You can select a block of ice, or …”

“What? Your form of art is as pitiable as bacteria. Do you think my form of low-temperature art is anything like that? This place doesn’t have the sort of ice I need.”

The ice sculptors on the ground looked bewildered at the interstellar low-temperature artist. Yan Dong said, blankly, “Then, you want to go …”

“I want to go to the ocean!”