Due to the forces of rotation, the Earth was slightly stretched at the North and South Poles, causing the hollow Earth’s pole regions to maintain their old chilly state. Low-gravity snow was a wonder, loose and foamy, waist-high in the shallow parts and deep enough at others that even Bigtooth disappeared beneath it. But having disappeared, they could still breathe normally inside the snow! The entire Antarctic continent was buried underneath this snow-foam, creating an undulating landscape of white.

Yi Yi and company rode a snowmobile toward the South Pole. The snowmobile skimmed across the snow-foam like a speedboat, throwing waves of white to either side.

The next day, they arrived at the South Pole, marked by a towering pyramid of crystal, a memorial dedicated to the Earth Defense War of two centuries ago. Neither writing nor images marked its surface. There was just the crystal form in the snow-foam at the apex of the Earth, silently refracting the sunlight.

From here, one could gaze upon the entire world. Continents and oceans surrounded the radiant little sun, so that it looked as if it had floated up from the waters of the Arctic Sea.

“Will that little sun really be able to shine forever?” Yi Yi asked Li Bai.

“At the very least, it will last until the new Earth civilization is advanced enough to create a new sun. It is a miniature white hole.”

“White hole? Is that the inverse of a black hole?” asked Bigtooth.

“Yes, it’s connected through a wormhole to a black hole orbiting a star, two million light-years away. The black hole sucks in the star’s light, which is released here. Think of the sun as one end of a fiber-optic cable running through hyperspace.”

The apex of the monument was the southern starting point of the Lagrangian axis, the thirteen-thousand-kilometer line of zero gravity between the North and South Poles of the hollow Earth, named after the zero-gravity Lagrangian point that had existed between the Earth and moon before the war. In the future, people were certain to launch various satellites onto the Lagrangian axis. Compared to the process on Earth before the war, this would be easy: one would only have to ship the satellite to the North or South Pole, by donkey if one wanted to, and give it a good kick up with one’s foot.