The western row of stone pillars of Entry hall 044 did not run in a straight hall. It curved gently toward the underground hollows of the Sieve of Weeping Stone, following the natural contour of an ancient dark rock fault that had settled during the first days of the Drowned Dao.
High overhead, the groin vaulting soared eighty arm-lengths into the dim gloom. Water drops formed in heavy, cold beads upon the carved stone wall-brackets. He dropped in irregular intervals to strike the flooded flat stone slabs like falling coins. In the upper high window row arches, two petrels with wings the color of wet slate rested upon the stone ears of a sleeping giant statue, their low piping calls echoing through the damp air.
Ji Mingchuan waded ahead with stiff, aggressive strides. The scummy salt water reached past his knees now, splashing against the heavy spider-silk skirts that dragged behind him like waterlogged blankets. His chest gyroscopes whirred in wild, high-pitched pulses, their brass balance weights clanking against the lead-foil lining of his inner coat as they fought the uneven pushback of the dense salt water. Every three paces, the Scholar had to hitch his wide sleeves to keep the hems from dragging in the duckweed, his face twisted in persistent disgust.
“Move faster, land-mapper,” the Scholar commanded over his shoulder, his voice echoing off the damp flutings of the giant pillars. “The cosmic rift behind us is anchored to an unstable void-ringing. When the tide rises three arm-lengths higher, the spatial sky-slit will shear shut. I have no intention of spending a lunar cycle marooned in your stale cellar, breathing the stench of rotten weed.”
Qiao Ming walked three paces to the Scholar’s left, his bare feet sunk in the cool green salt water. He moved without splashing. His splayed, calloused toes flattened against the stone flags, feeling for the tiny seams and chisel grooves carved into the banded limestone hundreds of years ago. Where the green slime grew thick and dangerous, his soles locked into the stonework fluting, his balance point resting low over his hips. In his left hand he held his seasoned wooden ruler. At the same time, his right thumb rested lightly upon the horn flask of sheep fat at his waist.
“Honored guest,” Qiao Ming said, his tone gentle and unrushed, “you would do well to lift your chin and observe the flat stone slabs beneath your feet. You are walking along the drainage runnel of the third water gate.”
Ji Mingchuan did not slow down. He sneered, his double pupils scanning the distant shadows where giant stone statues of seated judges lined the gallery. “is Stone, boy. It possesses thickness, crushing strength, and spatial volume. I have calculated the stress vectors of thirty-six mountain gates in the Upper Heavens. Do you imagine a sunken hallway can confound an Elder of the Obsidian Scroll hall?”
“The stone in the Upper Heavens did not sleep under eighty deep-water lengths of Drowned Dao for three thousand hundreds of years,” Qiao Ming replied softly. He pointed with his wooden ruler toward a line of dark, glassy slabs set into the floor ten paces ahead. “Do not step upon the black red stone, traveler. The slabs are punched holes in with underwater drain tube grates. Beneath them, the under-drainage draws water at eight arm-lengths a second into the lower water tanks. If your sodden skirts drift over the grating, the suction will take your legs, and no brass gear will pull you free.”
Ji Mingchuan scoffed, but his rotating pupils flicked toward the dark slabs. He saw the subtle depression in the water’s surface. A faint, concave dimple where the salt water was being pulled downward through invisible slits in the red stone. A cluster of dead kelp leaves drifted near the edge of the dimple, then vanished with a sharp, gurgling suck into the floor. The Scholar veered two paces to the right, his jaw tight with irritation that he had needed a warning at all.
“A simple high-pressure drain,” the Scholar muttered, splashing through a shallower drift of silt. “A primitive under-road drain. You speak of it as though it were an ancient ward.”
“A ward is only an equation inscribed in stone, traveler,” Qiao Ming said. “A drain is an equation inscribed in water. The water does not forget its volume, even when the stars go out.”
They entered Entry hall 045—The Hall of Weeping Flutes.
Here, the stonework shifted from milk-white marble to dense, charcoal-gray hard speckled rock. The columns were huge, eight spans in outer rim, their flutings hollowed out to act as sound resonators. In the pre-diluvian era, when the halls were dry, the ancient fighters had walked between these pillars to tune their spirit veins to the wind. Now, as the draft from the high window row vents blew through the hall, the underwater flutings acted as high-pressure pipes. The pillars emitted a low, sorrowful piping—a hollow whistling chord that sounded like seventy flutes playing in minor intervals beneath the earth.
The water here was shallower, barely covering the ankles, but the floor was carpeted in a thick, slick pelt of emerald-green micro-algae.
Ji Mingchuan took three steps onto the algae. His left heel slipped instantly. The felt sole of his ruined slipper found zero friction on the slimy slate. With a sharp gasp, the Scholar lurched sideways, his heavy lead-lined sleeve swinging wildly to catch the fluting of the nearest column.
“Do not touch the third flute!” Qiao Ming warned, his voice sharpening with genuine urgency.
The warning came a fraction of a breath too late. Ji Mingchuan’s long, ink-stained fingers clamped around the projecting stone lip of the column’s third upright channel.
A dull, metal groan echoed deep within the pillar.
The entire sixty-arm-length column shivered. From the high capitals overhead, a shower of fine, powdered hard speckled rock and dried salt rained down into the water, hissing as it struck the salt water. The stone fluting beneath the Scholar’s palm felt ice-cold, shaking at a hum so intense it numbed the marrow of his forearm. Hairline cracks in the mortar between the arch stones began to cry thin trickles of white powder.
“Let go of the flute,” Qiao Ming said, stepping swiftly beside him. He didn’t touch the Scholar’s person. He simply pointed his wooden rule toward the floor flags. “Step your right foot back four inches onto the red kelp. The red kelp grows only where the bedrock is anchored. The green slime grows over cracked relief joints.”
Ji Mingchuan ripped his hand away from the pillar, stumbling backward into the red weed. His chest harness shrieked as the gyroscopes spun to maximum torque, finally steadying his trembling frame. His breath came in ragged, wheezing gasps, his face pale as sheep’s animal fat.
For four breaths, the Scholar stood frozen in the shallow water, his chest heaving under his gray robes. His chalk-frosted temples were beaded with cold sweat.
Then, slowly, his gaunt face darkened with intense, poisonous paranoia.
In the dying outer universe, sect politics were an endless maze of poisoned tea, hidden needle-traps, and false smiles. No elder spoke without a hidden intent. No guide offered advice that did not lead toward an ambush. Ji Mingchuan reached into his right sleeve, his fingers re-emerging with an eight-inch iron-stemmed metal pen tipped with a gleaming, needle-sharp point of star-fallen steel—the Glyph-Cleaving Brush-Dagger of the Scroll hall.
He leveled the iron point straight at Qiao Ming’s throat.
“What curse was that?” Ji Mingchuan snarled, his voice trembling with furious suspicion. His double pupils spun in wild, uneven counter-rotations, analyzing the young man’s calm face for signs of spiritual activation. “What array did you trigger? You spoke to the column! You laid a sound hex upon the stone to crush my arm!”
Qiao Ming did not raise his hands to defend himself. His gray eyes met the Scholar’s wild gaze with steady, sorrowful composure.
“I spoke no curse, honored guest,” Qiao Ming said quietly.
“You lie!” the Scholar hissed, stepping closer, the iron nib gleaming with faint, toxic vermilion runes. “You told me the stone would take my legs. You told me the column would break. You recite incantations disguised as warnings! Who taught you those trigger words? Was it the leftovers of the Seven Sovereigns? Did your masters leave behind a soul-curse to slaughter anyone who enters their tomb?”
Qiao Ming looked past the iron point at the huge column behind the Scholar. Water was weeping slowly from the fluting where Ji Mingchuan’s palm had pressed, dripping down the dark stone in steady, rhythmic beats.
“The stone does not possess an ear for curses, traveler,” Qiao Ming said, his voice dropping into the deep, calm rhythm of the halls. “And the water does not harbor malice toward your sect. The third flute of that column is a stress-relief bore. It carries the weight of forty-two thousand arm-lengths of vaulting from the gallery above. The ancient masons left relief joints every forty paces so the massive mass would not crush itself under ground-shaking settling. When you clamped your hand over its sky-slit, you blocked the sound vent that relieves deep water pressure. The stone was not trying to slay you. It was merely groaning under a burden it has carried since the sky fell.”
He bent down, plucked a strand of dark-red kelp from the floor, and rolled it between his thumb and forefinger.
“The language of the stone bases is not sorcery, honored guest. It is the language of mass, of friction, and of water finding its level. Look at how the red kelp clings to the granite. Its holdfasts secrete an acid that etches tiny anchors into the stone, creating a surface where a bare foot can run without slipping. The green slime, however, grows over decaying lime mortar where moisture seeps from below. If you treat the House as an enemy, every flat stone slab will feel like a blade. But if you listen to where the tide wishes to flow, the stone will hold your weight without complaint.”
Ji Mingchuan stared at him. The iron dagger remained leveled at Qiao Ming’s throat, but the vermilion runes along its stem flickered and dimmed. The Scholar’s mind, sharpened on hundreds of years of cynical political warfare, struggled to understand the absence of trick in the land-mapper’s eyes. In the Scroll hall, knowledge was currency, hoarded behind ciphered scrolls and defended with blood. Here, the barefoot youth gave away the foundational secrets of the stonework as freely as rainwater.
Slowly, unwillingly, Ji Mingchuan lowered the weapon, sliding it back into his lead-lined sleeve.
“A convenient philosophy for a beggar who owns nothing,” the Scholar spat, though his voice lacked its earlier certainty. He turned toward the dark archway at the end of the row of stone pillars, where a huge dark shape of green rust bronze loomed in the shadows. “Save your sermons for the dead, land-mapper. Show me the portal.”