The third leaf of the bronze ledger was dated to the fourth moon of the final year of Cycle Seventy-Four.
Qiao Ming rested his forearms on the slate stone base, his bare feet curled beneath him, his eyes tracing the bright scratches of Chen Yue’s iron metal pen against the black thick tar ground. The air in the nook was cool and still, the only sound the faint, distant hiss of his oil lamp’s cotton wick.
The Ark is not a ship, Chen Yue had written, the strokes cut deep into the metal. It is a seed.
When the Grand Teacher and the Thirty-Six Clans laid the keel-plates across the dark rock bedrock of the ancient trench, they didn’t intend to navigate the waters of the mortal earth. They knew the Great Flooding was not a seasonal flood that would retreat after forty days. The Nine Heavens had fractured. The conceptual laws of reality were dissolving into chaotic salt water. And the universe itself was entering its long, end-post desiccation.
They built the Hall of Ten Thousand Statues to serve as a library of last resort.
Each of the ten thousand statues was sculpted from the living stone of the deepest seabed, and into each stone was anchored the complete conceptual soul of a master, a sage, a sovereign, or a craft-guild of the First Epoch. We didn’t bury them. We crystal-hardened them. We turned their understanding of fire, iron, medicine, astronomy, and agriculture into permanent dark rock and stone-hard…
