The twenty-fourth bronze leaf of Scribe Chen Yue’s ledger unfolded in three hinged sections, revealing the master cross-section of the Ark’s sub-keel foundations.
Qiao Ming spread the heavy bronze plate across the dry workbench in the nook. The engravings were carried out with clean, steady care, hair-thin lines cut cleanly into the cold metal and filled with silver amalgam to resist rusting.
In the legends passed down through the mortal provinces and the outer sects, the Golden Immortal Vault was described as a treasury of greed. An underground palace where the sovereign emperors of the First Epoch had hoarded three hundred wagon-loads of immortal jade, nine-ring pills of eternal youth. The stone-hard crowns of subdued mountain gods. Wandering fighters sang ballads of its glittering golden halls, dreaming of the day when an earth-tremor or a hero’s sword would crack the gates and flood the world with spiritual wealth.
Qiao Ming stared at the technical height, his jaw tightening beneath his beard.
There were no golden thrones. There were no chests of jade magic charms or jars of immortal pills.
The Golden Immortal Vault was a high-pressure water-pressure ballast pool.
It was a cavernous, elliptical vault carved directly into the dark rock mantle beneath the floor of Entry hall 312. It measured four hundred arm-lengths in length, two hundred arm-lengths in width, and eighty arm-lengths from inverted arch to foundation keel. Its inside volume was exactly calculated: sixty million gallons.
