The low tide had returned to Entry hall 128, leaving the dark rock floor dry, clean, and cold.
Qiao Ming stood before the granite stone base of Master Mason Lu, his bare feet planted firmly upon the gray flags. The lantern light was soft, lighting up the peaceful face of the ancient builder and the dark, rainbow-bright blade of the Primordial Sky-Iron Chisel resting in his stone-hard hands.
On the floor three paces before the stone stand lay the wreckage of the Scholar’s invasion.
There was the flattened casing of the royal gold metal pen, its sapphire tubes crushed, its internal gears ground to brass dust. The bent white-gold needle that Qiao Ming had shaped into a sounding hook. The three fragments of the mutton-fat jade commission. And the two broken halves of the Scholar’s starmetal hand-drill.
Beside the broken tools lay the Scholar himself.
Qiao Ming had carried Ji Mingchuan down from the Choral Tiered hall, washed his crushed shins with cold rain-wash, and bound his fractured bones with splints of seasoned boxwood and clean linen bandages. He had treated the man’s chemical burns with sheep fat and fresh lime-water, neutralizing the last traces of burning acid before the poison could enter the bone marrow.
