“Are those obscenities?” the low-temperature artist asked placidly. “Our species is one where the same body matures as it evolves. No ancestors. As for treating your colleague like this …” It laughed. “I understand. You’re jealous of me. You don’t have my ability. You can only make art at the level of bacteria.”

“But, you just said that our art requires different tools but there’s no essential difference.”

“I’ve just now changed my perspective. At first, I thought I’d run into a real artist, but, as it turns out, you’re a mediocre, pitiful creature who chatters on about the oceans drying, ecological collapse, and other inconsequential things that have nothing to do with art. Too trivial, too trivial, I tell you. Artists cannot be like this.”

“Fuck your ancestors anyway.”

“Yes, well. I’m working. Go.”

For a moment, Yan Dong felt heavy. She fell ass-first onto the slick ice as a gust of wind swept down from above. The ice block was rising again. She scrambled into the helicopter, which, with difficulty, took off from the nearest edge of the block of ice, nearly crashing in the tornado produced as the block of ice rose.

Communication between humanity and the low-temperature artist had failed.

Sea of Dreams

Yan Dong stood in a white world. The ground below her feet and the surrounding mountains were covered in a silvery white cloak. The mountains were steep and treacherous. She felt as though she were in the snow-covered Himalayas. But in fact, it was the opposite; she was at the lowest place on Earth. The Marianas Trench. Once the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean. The white material that covered everything was not snow but the minerals that had once made the water salty. After the seawater froze, these minerals separated out and were deposited on the seafloor. At the thickest, these deposits were as much as one hundred meters deep.

In the past two hundred days, the oceans of the Earth were exhausted by the low-temperature artist. Even the glaciers of Greenland and Antarctica were completely pillaged.

Now, the low-temperature artist invited Yan Dong to participate in its work’s final rite of completion.

*

In the ravine ahead lay a surface of blue water. The blue was pure and deep. It seemed all the more touching among so many snow-white mountain peaks. This was the last ocean on Earth. It was about the area of Dianchi Lake in Yunnan. Its great waves had long ceased. Only gentle ripples swayed on the water, as though it were a secluded lake deep in the mountains. Three rivers converged into this final ocean. These were great rivers that had survived by luck, trudging through the vast, dehydrated seafloor. They were the longest rivers on Earth. By the time they’d arrived here, they’d become slender rivulets.

Yan Dong walked to the oceanfront. Standing on the white beach, she dipped her hand into the lightly rippling sea. Because the water was so saturated with salt, its waves seemed sluggish. A gentle breeze blew Yan Dong’s hand dry, leaving a layer of white salt.