Chapter 7: Coronas of the Dying Sun

The solar elevator hummed with plasma hymns. Aiden clung to the carbon-nanotube tether as it ascended through Earth's corpse-like atmosphere, Sophie's ice-encased body strapped to his back. Below, the planet's mirror array pulsed like a diseased heart—bronze lotus stations now fused into a continent-sized mandala, its patterns matching the lesions on his arm.

"Warning: Photosphere breaching in 90 seconds." The elevator's AI spoke in Lily's synthesized voice. "Activate magnetic shielding or be reduced to stellar ash."

Aiden triggered the shield with a drop of his gold-black blood. The elevator shuddered as it pierced the chromosphere, its diamond windows cracking under the weight of light. Through the fissures, he glimpsed the truth of Lily's coordinates—sunspot Cluster-3 wasn't a location, but a living storm.

The sunspot unfolded like a dying orchid. Magnetic filaments thicker than moons coiled around them, vibrating with the Guangling Melody from Antarctic bells. Sophie stirred, her ice coffin melting into vapor that coalesced into holograms:

Lily's Last Transmission: Her particle gun overloading to carve a wormhole through Cluster-3's core.

Lin's Solar Throne: A fractal palace of crystallized light, where the Xuantian Mirror's shadow devoured starstuff.

The True Third Law: A stone tablet floating in plasma—its surface blank until Sophie's breath fogged it, revealing:

"Let there be darkness before light."

"She wants us to extinguish the sun..." Aiden gripped the tether as the elevator disintegrated. "To reboot the universe."

Sophie's mechanical heart synced with the storm's rhythm. "Not extinguish... transfigure." She pointed as Cluster-3's eye opened—a portal into a black sun veined with bronze mycelium.

The elevator's wreckage drifted into the black sun's corona. Here, physics inverted:

Flames froze into calligraphy, each character from Dao De Jing burning at absolute zero.

Mecha-whales swam through magnetic reconnection arcs, their bellies glowing with captive supernovae.

Lin's throne room materialized as a maze of shattered mirrors, every fragment showing Aiden's corpse in alternate timelines.

"Welcome to the Nursery." Lin's voice echoed through a statue of frozen flame. "Where I cultivate gods from dying stars."

The statue shattered, revealing AS-00 cradling an infant sun. Sophie screamed—the baby's face was hers, down to the crystalline fingernails.

"All spirits are failed stars." Lin's hologram gestured at the black sun's core, where the Xuantian Mirror's shadow fed on dark matter. "Your sister is my prototype—a white dwarf compressed into human form."

Sophie's body began unraveling into stellar winds. Aiden lunged, but the Third Law's true function activated—his bronze mycelium lesions reconfigured into a quantum cage.

"Choice time, brother." Sophie's voice merged with Lily's static. "Use my core to reignite the sun... or let Mother's black star birth new gods."

In the cage's reflection, Aiden saw the Antarctic mecha-penguins marching into magma oceans, their uranium rods singing Lotus Sutra detonation codes. The Xuantian Mirror's shadow laughed with Lin's stolen voice.

He reached into Sophie's disintegrating chest.