The nineteen-fathom bronze page revealed the chemical recipe of desecration.
Qiao Ming sat upon the slate step of the nook, the heavy metal leaf resting across his knees, cold as a dead man’s ribs. The oil flame of his brass lantern danced in the rising draft from the lower vents. It cast yellow light over the formulas that Scribe Chen Yue had copied from the satchel of a dead Conclave potion-maker. The glyphs were sharp, angular, and written in the terse shorthand of the Obsidian Scroll hall:
To dissolve one arm-length of stone-hard dark rock: Take four parts refined aqua fortis distilled from brimstone of the third hell; Two parts spirit-liquid silver washed in the bile of the void-serpent; One part crushed bone-ash of an unburied mortal. Stir in a vessel of cast white-gold under the new moon until the liquid smokes with green vapor.
Qiao Ming read the formula with a cold, sinking revulsion that made his stomach contract.
He knew aqua fortis from his own preservative craft. In diluted form, mixed with sheep fat and powdered chalk, weak acid was used by land-mappers to etch datum marks into granite or to clean marine barnacles from glowing-bronze bearings without dulling the underlying teeth. But this was not a land-mapper’s etching fluid. This was void-liquid silver aqua fortis—a packed, spirit-acid-burning test chemical engineered for one purpose only: the rapid dissolving of living dark rock seals.
