As the chunk of ice continued to rise, Yan Dong finally understood what the low-temperature artist had meant: This was literally a giant block of ice. The dark blue cube occupied two-thirds of the sky. Afterward, radar observation indicated that the block of ice was sixty kilometers long, twenty kilometers wide, and five kilometers tall, a thin and flat cuboid. Its flat surface reflected the sunlight, like streaks of eye-piercing lightning high in the sky.

The giant block of ice kept rising, casting an unimaginably large shadow onto the sea. And when it shifted, it revealed the most terrifying sight since the dawn of history.

The planes were flying over a long, narrow basin, the empty space in the ocean that was left once the giant block of ice was removed. On each side was a mountain of seawater five kilometers high. Hundred-meter-high waves surged at the bottom of these liquid cliffs. At the top, the cliffs were collapsing, advancing as they did. Their surface rippled, but they remained perpendicular to the seafloor. As the seawater cliffs advanced, the basin shrank.

This was the reverse of Moses parting the Red Sea.

What startled Yan Dong the most was how slow the entire process seemed. This was, she assumed, due to the scale. She’d seen the Huangguoshu waterfalls. The water had seemed to fall slowly there, too. And these cliffs of seawater before her were magnitudes larger than those waterfalls. Watching them felt like an endless moment of unparalleled wonder.

The shadow cast by the block of ice had completely disappeared. Yan Dong looked up. The block of ice was now just the size of two full moons.

As the two seawater cliffs advanced, the basin shrank into a canyon. Then the two seawater cliffs, tens of kilometers long, five thousand meters high, crashed into each other. An incredible roar echoed between the sea and sky. The space in the ocean the ice block left was gone.

“We aren’t dreaming, are we?” Yan Dong said to herself.

“If this were a dream, everything would be fine. Look!”

The pilot pointed below. Where the two cliffs had crashed into each other, the sea hadn’t yet settled. Two waves as long as those cliffs rose, as if they were the reincarnation of those two seawater cliffs on the sea’s surface. They parted, heading in opposite directions. From high above, the waves weren’t that impressive, but careful measurements showed they were over two hundred meters tall. Viewed from up close, they’d seem like two moving mountain ranges.

“Tidal waves?” Yan Dong asked.

“Yes. Could be the largest ever. The coast is in for a disaster.”

Yan Dong looked up. She could no longer see the frozen block in the blue sky. According to radar, it had become an ice satellite of Earth.

*

For the rest of the day, the low-temperature artist removed, in the same way, hundreds of blocks of ice of the same size from the Pacific Ocean. It sent them into orbit around the Earth.