Beneath the grand tiered arena, the air grew noticeably cooler. It carried the faint, metal tang of ancient stone and dried stone salts.
Da Shi led the expedition down an arched raised stone road that sloped gently into the mountain’s lower foundation. Behind him marched his eleven titan brothers, their twenty-foot black glass frames moving in steady beat. Despite their collective weight exceeding five hundred tons, their heavy footsteps produced barely a murmur against the bedrock, cushioned by the natural dampening deep ring of their Geo-Lattice footplates.
After traveling half a mile down the spiraling hall, the path opened into a massive underground canyon.
Carved directly out of the mountain’s granite core was an astonishing civil building wonder. A vaulted underground aqueduct hall thirty yards wide. It was flanked by towering rows of stone pillars of fluted dark rock pillars. Along the center of the hall ran a series of deep, tiered stone channels designed to carry raging currents of ice-slow meltwater from the upper mountain peaks deep into the underground city.
Yet the aqueducts were silent and dry.
Hundreds of years of ancient earth-shaking shifting had wreaked havoc upon the pre-historic waterways. Ahead of them, a total ceiling collapse had choked the main channel beneath tens of thousands of tons of fallen granite boulders. Dry, hardened stone crust covered the water gates, and ancient bronze control gates hung skewed in their guide tracks, twisted by long-dormant ground-shaking shocks.
