At the terminus of Entry hall 048, the row of stone pillars ended against a sheer, giant stone wall of polished black hard speckled rock.
The wall rose without a visible joint for one hundred and twenty arm-lengths, disappearing into the cold mist that rolled across the ceiling vaults. Embedded in that massive stone cliff face was the Great Archival Portal. A set of double gates seventy arm-lengths in height, cast from solid deep-sea bronze. Aeons of stone damp had painted the metal in swirling, fine, detailed patterns of pale-turquoise green rust and dark jade crusts.
Across the face of both bronze leaves ran low-relief engravings of pre-diluvian sky-high star-patterns. Stars were represented by circular plugs of inlaid white green jade and yellow amber. Meanwhile, the sky equator was traced in a wide ribbon of beaten gold-silver metal. Around the outer edge of the archway, seventy-two massive bronze bolts, each the thickness of a cedar trunk, were driven directly into the hard speckled rock jambs. Between the two leaves ran an upright seam no wider than a knife blade, sealed with a thick fillet of stone-hard sheep fat and powdered galena.
Ji Mingchuan stopped at the edge of the underwater apron, his waterlogged skirts splashing as he halted. His double pupils dilated until the dark irises almost swallowed the whites of his eyes. From his belt, he pulled out an oval bronze array-plate, its surface inlaid with twelve nested rings of crimson red stone script.
The crimson runes upon the plate were not merely glowing. They were blazing with a wild, blinding intensity. The brass needles mounted at the center shook so wildly they emitted a high, singing whine.
“It is here,” Ji Mingchuan breathed, his voice trembling with an ecstasy that bordered on madness. “The spiritual thickness behind this barrier is off the scale. Pure, unpolluted Liquid Dao. The marrow of an entire Primordial Court, condensed and sealed before the Great Deluge swallowed the realm.”
He turned toward Qiao Ming, his lips parted in a hungry sneer. “And you wished to leave it here to rot in the dark. To let twenty thousand tons of sky power sleep while living worlds suffocate in the void. You are an idiot sitting upon an emperor’s treasury, eating weeds because you don’t know how to spend gold.”
Qiao Ming stood four paces behind him on a dry riser of grey granite. His hands rested upon his ox-bone reel, his gray eyes fixed upon the green rust seam between the bronze leaves.
“That gate has not opened since the Third Moon fell,” Qiao Ming said calmly. “It wasn’t sealed to hoard power, honored guest. It was sealed as an inner wall.”
“An inner wall for cowards who lacked the courage to burn their gods for fuel,” Ji Mingchuan scoffed.
With a sweeping flourish of his wide sleeves, the Scholar unhitched his main ancient object from the leather sword sheath slung across his spine: The Nine-Fold Abacus of Void Measuring.
The implement was twenty-eight inches long, fashioned from a box-shaped bar of star-fallen black iron that drank the animal fat light like a sponge. It had been forged in the deep void-foundries of the Obsidian Scroll hall, hammered from the iron core of a put out white-dwarf star. Set within the iron frame were nine slender rods of cold-rolled star-fallen wire, holding eighty-one floating beads carved from dead white-dwarf jade. The beads were cold, milk-white, each one engraved with a tiny spatial map point in ancient seal script.
As the Scholar held the counting frame aloft, the air around the beads dropped in heat. Tiny frost crystals condensed out of the humid salt water mist, clinging to the iron frame like white fur.
Ji Mingchuan laid the black-iron frame across his left forearm, his long, ink-stained fingers hovering above the jade beads.
“The Obsidian Scroll hall does not need keys, little land-mapper,” Ji Mingchuan said. His voice dropped into the rhythmic, exact chant of a grandmaster solving the stonework of reality. “Every lock is merely a spatial equation. Every barrier is a set of sharp-angled constraints. If one calculates the shear-lines of the spatial boundary, the door ceases to exist. Matter is merely frozen shape waiting for an equation to dissolve it.”
His fingers moved.
The clicking of the jade beads began. It didn’t sound like mundane bone counters clicking upon a wooden counting board. The dead-star jade beads struck one another with sharp, metal chimes that sounded like winter hail drumming against an iron roof. With every flick of the Scholar’s fingers, the air around the counting frame warped.
Lines of faint, violet light—spatial stress vectors—leaped from the star-fallen iron frame, projecting themselves across the bronze gates.
Click. Clack-click. Clack.
The Scholar’s double pupils rotated in opposite directions with blinding speed. The inner pupils tracked the non-Euclidean curves of the portal’s seals. Meanwhile, the outer pupils measured the thickness of the hard speckled rock jambs. His breath became a rhythmic, wheezing hiss as the huge mental strain of multi-space-folding calculus seized his spirit vein network. A thin trickle of dark blood began to seep from his right nostril, but he didn’t wipe it away.
“Nine folds of the void,” Ji Mingchuan chanted, his voice rising in power. “First fold: decouple the inertial mass of the bronze. Second fold: resolve the curved curve of the stone beam. Third fold: sever the spatial holding power of the locking bolts!”
Across the seventy-arm-length portal, the green rust crust began to blister and flake away in turquoise clouds. Hairline fissures of violet light crept along the hard speckled rock top door beam overhead. Small fragments of stone, snapped by the nearby distortion of three-space-folding space, broke free from the wall, tumbling into the water with sharp splashes. The seventy-two bronze bolts began to screech as their crystal-clear lattices were twisted by the invisible arithmetic.
Ji Mingchuan was laughing now—a harsh, triumphant bray of academic supremacy. “See! The seals of your ancient gods unravel before the arithmetic of the Scroll hall! In ten more counts, the main bolts will shear, and the marrow of the Third Vault will belong to the Conclave!”
Qiao Ming did not flee, but his stance hardened. His prehensile toes locked into the granite step, his hand tightening around his knotted horsehair cord.
He had watched the Scholar’s hands. He had tracked the vector lines projected by the white-dwarf jade beads. The mathematics were flawless—in a dry void. Ji Mingchuan was calculating the strength of the bronze, the shear limit of the star-fallen bolts, and the spatial curve of the doorframe with the bright glare of a master builder.
Yet he was calculating for an empty room.
The Scholar did not know what lay behind the hard speckled rock cliff. In his arrogant solipsism, he assumed the space beyond was an open chamber, a dry treasure room waiting to be entered. But Qiao Ming had sounded the upright wells of the upper terrace three seasons ago. He had dropped his animal fat-armed lead into the drain tube shafts eighty arm-lengths above, and he knew the shape of the mountain.
“Stop your beads, traveler,” Qiao Ming called out, his voice cutting through the clicking of the counting frame with the force of an iron bell.
Ji Mingchuan did not pause. His fingers flew faster, sliding three jade beads at the same time to the upper rail. “Silence, peasant! Do not distract the Sovereign Scribe at the threshold of triumph!”
“You are calculating for an empty vault!” Qiao Ming shouted, taking two rapid, splashy strides forward into the water. “Look at the seam! Look at the cried-line at the base of the doors!”
Beneath the central seam of the bronze gates. There, the green rust had flaked away, a thin, needle-like jet of clear salt water was whistling through the gap. It didn’t trickle down. It sprayed horizontally across twelve paces of open water, cutting a groove through the surface foam like a diamond chisel.
“The gate is not held by spatial locks, you fool,” Qiao Ming said. His voice shook with the stern, total power of a custodian defending his home. “It is an inverted water-pressure water gate door! On the other side of that bronze leaf rests forty thousand tons of Liquid Dao, banked sixty arm-lengths high in the pool of the Ninth Step! The bolts you are severing were not designed to keep thieves out. They were designed to keep forty-two sea-weights of head pressure from blowing this mountain into the sea!”
Ji Mingchuan’s fingers paused on the seventh rod, a sneer twisting his lips. “And what if it does? Water will drain, and the marrow will be ours!”
“It will not drain!” Qiao Ming cried out, his arm pointing toward the ceiling vault. “It will decompress! The water hammer will strike this chamber at forty sea-weights of head pressure! The blast wave will travel faster than sound through stone, crushing your bones to pulp against the rear row of stone pillars and collapsing forty thousand arm-lengths of vaulting upon our heads! You are not opening a door, scholar—you are pulling the keystone from a mountain of liquid iron!”