The entrance to the ancient tunnel was cold, cavernous, and thick with the heavy scent of stone petrichor.
Walking thirty paces into the throat of the granite passage, Lin Xiao, Tie Shan, Land-mapper Lu-Lu, and Gu Qingfeng stood before the main water-system throat of the continent. Lit up by the faint cerulean glow of pre-historic wall stone carvings and the steady amber warmth streaming from Lin Xiao’s core, the true size of the blocked path became terrifyingly clear.
It was a deep-rock monstrosity.
Spanning the entire forty-five-meter bore of the tube-shaped aqueduct was a huge plug of fused lithic material. Over three hundred years of stale heat and trapped stone evaporation, billions of gallons of dissolved underground banded limestone, dense white chalk-stone silicates, star-iron melted rock waste, and stone-hard hardwood roots had piled up against the First Age bronze water gate grates. The mixture had hardened under huge earth-shaking pressure into a massive stone, hundred-foot-thick stone cork that sealed the passage as tightly as a tomb.
And behind that stone-hard plug, the planet was screaming.
THUUUUMP... RUMBLE... THUUUUMP...
The sound deep ring was so violent that the granite floor beneath their boots shuddered continuously. It wasn’t the sound of fire or earth. It was the muffled, claustrophobic fury of a trapped ancient ocean. Billions of tons of sub-crustal ice-slow meltwater, fed by the eternal snowfields of the northern heavens, were hammering against the reverse side of the plug at a sky-high water-pressure head. Every few seconds, micro-fractures along the stone…
