When Leon Stone's carving knife slipped for the third time along the edge of the prism, the glass skylight at the top of the workshop leaked its seventh thread of twilight. The glowing moss, hanging from the underside of the floating city, swayed in the eternal mist of Selena, like the nerve endings of gods descending. He tore off his protective gloves, soaked in nano-solvent, and let the night wind lick the burns on his fingers—this was a badge only glass artisans understood. The crystal shards that danced in the photon flow always left marks on the skin, like constellations.
"May the old geezers of the Radiance Council choke on their own energy towers," he cursed at the air, his tweezers trembling as he picked up the last shard of regenerative glass. The antique prism sent by the client was half the height of a person, and the Baroque-style frame was covered in double-headed eagle reliefs. The olive branch held in the eagle's beak had long since oxidized to a dark green. This emblem should have disappeared forty years ago, since the blood tide of the Red Purge drowned the first council hall.
As the restoration fluid was injected into the third crack, the mirror suddenly shimmered with vein-like ghostly blue patterns. Leon recoiled as though electrocuted, watching his reflection twist into twelve overlapping shadows within the prism. Each shadow wore a silver leaf crown, their snow-white robes dyed red by the energy tower's rainbow light. He heard the glass breathing.
"Holy Glass…" The dull thud of his wrench hitting the ground woke the dormant cleaning robot. The metal sphere rolled halfway, then suddenly braked, its optical lens flashing frantically: "Detected level III entropy contamination, immediate activation of level three isolation recommended."
The bubbles in the mirror were clustering into faces. Twelve scholars were pinned to the observation platform atop the energy tower by photon lances, their blood rushing down the tower's transparent pipes, solidifying into crimson ice spikes eight hundred meters above the ground. Leon recognized the prismatic pendants hanging from the scholars' chests—he had seen the same tokens on the collar of Dr. Colvin, the current Chief Energy Officer, during his speech on sky dome maintenance last night.
The dying Colvin suddenly turned to face the lens. This motion caused blood to gush from his ear canals, instantly vaporizing in the thin, minus-ninety-degree atmosphere. Leon's temples pounded, as if an ice pick were drilling into his optic nerve. When Colvin's bloodstained fingertip pierced the mirror's surface, every glass vessel in the workshop screamed in high-frequency agony.
"Warning! Aurora-class memory retrospection!" The cleaning robot extended six mechanical arms to lock itself to the ground. "Immediate injection of sedative…" Its voice cut off abruptly. Leon watched the restoration fluid in the test tube bubble into mercury-silver, the liquid photons crawling along the wood grain of the table like a swarm of transparent leeches searching for a host.
His right hand began to crystallize. Blue veins glowed beneath his skin, and his nails were slowly transforming into multi-faceted crystal. This was the forbidden illustration on the front page of the "Hazardous Materials Handling Manual"—when living tissue shows signs of photon mineralization, it means your genetic chain is collapsing into a glass-like state.
The old-fashioned display in the corner suddenly erupted in a snowstorm. Half of Alicia Witt's face appeared, flickering in and out amid the interference. Her bright red lips held the beauty of a carnivorous plant: "Craftsman, I suggest you press the red button under the workbench with your left hand—unless you want to become Colvin's latest living specimen."
Leon's pupils suddenly contracted. The emergency escape device's location in this model of Stone Workshop was only known to his father and him. When he tumbled into the explosion-proof chamber, the last thing he saw was Alicia's image being torn apart by an electromagnetic pulse, and behind her, the backdrop was unmistakably the Seventh Energy Station, which had been swallowed by magma forty years ago.
The moment the first resonance bomb pierced the glass dome, the 800-kilogram photon furnace began to dance its death waltz. The glass orbs containing clients' memories crashed on the shelves, releasing countless fragments of broken lives: a newlywed couple's first kiss, the last words of a dying soldier, the cries of a newborn, all blending into a colorful quantum noise. As the explosion-proof chamber fell into the underground pipeline, Leon saw his workshop shatter like a glowing water balloon crushed by a child, thousands of glass shards floating in mid-air, each prism reflecting Colvin's frozen smile.