At the second stroke of the lead plummet, the hum doubled to one hundred and twenty cycles.
The sound in Entry hall 349 was no longer an underground shaking. It became a heard, physical presence that filled the sixty-foot-high vault with a deep, golden deep chord. One hundred and ninety-two statues were now singing all at once, their carved stone lips parting microscopically under the pressure of the rising sound draft, their chests shaking like the soundboards of huge harps.
The air pressure within the chamber began to invert. High-wave height sound standing waves formed between the eight-sided columns. That created alternating zones of squeezing and rarefaction that pinned the dust motes in place, suspending them in mid-air in glittering sharp-angled grids.
Qiao Ming brought his Folded brass star-compass to his ear, measuring the sound purity of the field.
The tracking data showed that the sound pressure had reached one hundred and fourteen decibels. The surrounding heat had steadied at eight point four degrees. And the standing wave was forming an impermeable sound barrier behind the Great Iron Arch that absorbed ninety-nine percent of the external psychic shaking.
Through the mica check port, the scene in the outer gatehouse was growing chaotic. Zhu Heling’s star-fire discharge, which had been focusing a huge beam of energy against the center of the iron gate, was beginning to stutter. The one-hundred-and-twenty-cycle ground wave was shaking the floor beneath the scholar’s feet, disrupting his stance, causing his spiritual aura to pulse with violent, uneven…
