The evening meal of the deep halls was an exercise in preservation and stone balance.
When mortal bodies spend their days in lightless stone vaults seventy deep-water lengths beneath the sea, the absence of direct solar heat wave alters the internal chemistry of the blood. The bones crave calcium. The thyroid demands iodine. The muscles need dense, raw salts to prevent the painful night-cramps that strike when the cold moisture leaches potassium from the limbs.
Qiao Ming knelt before the salt-kiln, his bare knees resting comfortably upon the warm soapstone apron.
On the low iron trivet, he placed his second cooking pot—a shallow, two-handled skillet of beaten cast bronze whose inner surface was seasoned with decades of fish oil. Into the skillet, he placed four dried fish cakes, each the size of a scholar’s palm, pressed from minced grey rock-cod that he had caught with horsehair hand-lines in the underwater water tanks of Entry hall 005.
Beside the fish cakes, he laid a handful of dried black kelp fronds, harvested from the tidal shelves during the last spring low-slack. The kelp was dark, brittle as horn, covered in a delicate, powdery bloom of white mannitol—the natural, sweet sea-sugar that crystals upon sun-dried seaweed.
