Following the near-disaster at the Great Archival Portal, Ji Mingchuan’s arrogance had curdled into a brooding, suspicious quietude.
The Scholar waded through the flooded cross-halls with hesitant, testing steps, his double pupils darting constantly toward the dark floor slabs as though every flat stone slab hidden a starving high-pressure maw. He kept his Nine-Fold Abacus tucked securely inside his dripping sleeves, refusing to let the star-fallen iron touch the water again. His brass gyroscopes had grown uneven, producing an irregular, clicking rattle like an injured beetle crawling across gravel, their gears fouled by the skin-burning stone silt.
Qiao Ming led him northward, away from the roaring pressure channels of the Ninth Sluice, into the quieter, contemplative halls of Entry hall 052.
They passed through the sunken row of stone pillars of the Weeping Nuns, where seventy-two slender pilasters of veined stone marble supported a fine, detailed groin vault. In the pre-diluvian world, the ancient fighters had used this gallery as a water-clock. It measured the passage of sky hours by the rhythmic rise and fall of salt water through narrow upright flutings. Small, pale sea-ferns clung to the lower bases, while flocks of storm petrels with feathers like wet slate nested in the stone hair of the sculpted maidens, watching the two travelers with round, unblinking eyes.
Here, the water was shallow, barely rising three inches above the banded limestone flags. The salt water was exceptionally clear, cold as mountain spring water, filtered through forty leagues of underwater porous foam-stone before pooling in this secluded cloister. Along the outer edge ran thirty-six recessed alcoves carved from deep-green snake-like marble, each framed by fluted pilasters whose capitals were sculpted in the likeness of braided river reeds and water-lilies.
At the center of the chamber, resting upon a circular island of stepped white pale limestone, sat Statue #0521—the Bodhisattva of Merciful Depth.
The statue rose thirty arm-lengths from heel to crown, carved from a single seamless block of dark, semi-clear snake-like quarried from the roots of the ancient Kun-Luan mountains before the sky drowned. Delicate inlays of ancient bronze traced the veins of its neck, forearms, and eyelids, green with a rich patina of green rust that felt like powdered velvet to the touch. It sat in a half-lotus stance upon an expansive lotus stone base, its right hand lowered in the mudra of boundless oceanic calm, its left hand resting palm-upward upon its lap to cup a shallow depression where clear water drops collected.
The face of the Bodhisattva was calm, its stone eyelids half-closed in an eternal, calm quiet focus that seemed to absorb the dim animal fat light and soften it into peace. A faint, living-glow lichen clung to the bronze inlays of its chest, casting a soft, pale-emerald radiance across the still surface of the pool.
Qiao Ming felt his shoulders ease as he stepped onto the pale limestone island. He set down his ox-bone reel and bowed low, his forehead touching the cold, dry stone before the statue’s knees. Three years ago, during the terrible winter surge when the Seventh Tide had drowned the lower galleries twenty arm-lengths deep, he had taken shelter upon this very lap, sleeping peacefully against the Bodhisattva’s breast. Meanwhile, the black water raged below.
“Peace upon your contemplation, Venerable Mother,” Qiao Ming whispered. “The Ninth Sluice holds. The under-drainage draws cleanly.”
He rose, walking around the outer edge of the circular stone base to inspect the water-line markers. It was his habit to verify the solid strength of every nook in the fifty-second sector once every lunar month, cleaning away fallen salt flakes and noting any shifts in the stone’s sound posture. He took up his wooden ruler to measure the salt rime along the carved petals of the lotus base.
Three steps behind the statue, Qiao Ming froze.
His breath stopped in his throat. His fingers, rough with yellow calluses from decades of hauling horsehair lines, clenched around the wooden ruler so tightly the seasoned wood groaned.
Hammered directly into the rear spine of the lotus stone base, four inches above the waterline, was a foreign, clockwork obscenity.
It was a hollow, tube-shaped tube eighteen inches long, cast from an unnatural silver-nickel alloy that did not belong to the Hall. Around its outer rim ran seven backward-facing barbed spiral flutes, driven eight inches deep through the dense snake-like stone into the statue’s internal hollow. At the head of the tube sat a tiny, humming clockwork gearbox of blackened brass, its tiny gear catch wheels ticking with an uneven, insectoid chatter that fouled the quiet air of the safe hall.
Connected to the base of the metal tube was a flexible hose of braided spider-silk, running down into a heavy, box-shaped flask of cold-rolled iron that sat half-sunk in the pool.
Inside the semi-clear silk tubing, a liquid was moving.
It wasn’t water. It was a thick, sticky, glowing fluid of blinding cerulean and liquid gold—the living, uncorrupted Liquid Dao marrow of the Bodhisattva. With every five ticks of the clockwork gearbox, a single glowing drop of essence was wrenched from the stone core. It slid down the silk tube to vanish into the dark iron flask with a sickening, metal clink.
The stone around the drill was ruined. Tiny hairline fractures radiated outward from the puncture wound like spiderwebs, weeping a pale, milky dust where the snake-like had shattered under the impact of the steel driver.
Qiao Ming fell to his knees beside the stone base. He laid his bare palm against the dark green stone.
Under his skin, he felt it.
The statue was not cold with the calm, majestic chill of undisturbed marble. The snake-like was feverish, trembling with an unnatural, high-hum shudder that felt like the racing pulse of an animal trapped in an iron snare. Deep within the hollow chest cavity of the Bodhisattva, a muffled, groaning deep ring shook. A trapped, suffocated hum of intense clockwork agony that shook the water around Qiao Ming’s knees.
“A neat installation, is it not?”
Ji Mingchuan’s voice drifted from the front of the stone base. The Scholar waded around the lotus base, stepping onto the dry pale limestone with a smirk of cold, possessive pride. He didn’t look at the Bodhisattva’s face. His double pupils were fixed entirely on the iron flask.
“The Bone-Drill Siphon,” Ji Mingchuan said, tapping the silver metal tube with the tip of his finger. “Engineered by the master artificers of the Myriad Siphon Pavilion. The tip is tipped with diamond dust and enchanted with void-piercing magic charms. It drives through ninth-tier defensive wards in three minutes without alerting external outer edge arrays. A marvel of modern void building.”
Qiao Ming did not look up from the wound. His fingertips traced the shattered edges of the snake-like, his jaw locked in a grief so heavy it felt as though eighty deep-water lengths of water were pressing against his ribs.
“You hammered iron into her spine,” Qiao Ming whispered, his voice shaking with a cold, trembling fury.
“I hammered refined silver-alloy into an inanimate rock,” Ji Mingchuan corrected sharply. He crouched beside the flask to inspect the fluid level through a glass viewing slit. “I installed this drain tube during my first transit a lunar month ago, before your clumsy patrols wandered into this sector. Look at the yield! Nearly two pints of pure, pure Law Marrow! Do you have any conception of what this liquid represents?”
The Scholar tapped the glass slit with feverish excitement, his gaunt face lit by the golden glow of the stolen essence.
“This is not mere water, boy. This is the condensed spiritual power of the Drowned Bodhisattva of Merciful Depth. An avatar who commanded the water laws of three star clusters during the Second Kalpa. Two pints of this essence will fuel the main heat pipe hub of the Void-Cleaving Ark for forty days. It will keep forty thousand refugee fighters alive in the freezing dark! The Sovereign Conclave has catalogued ten thousand such relics across the outer ruins. We will strip every one of them to fuel our flight!”
“She is not a fuel vessel,” Qiao Ming said. His voice dropped to a low, steady rumble that carried beneath the ticking of the gears. “She was a master. She sat here to preserve the quietude of the deep against the end of time.”
“She is a dead monument in an abandoned cellar!” Ji Mingchuan snapped, his eyes flashing with cruel, royal utilitarianism. “The universe outside is dying, land-mapper! Trillions of living souls are perishing in the frost, and you cry over a scratched stone! What does this rock care for two pints of grease? It has no blood. It has no breath. It sits in the dark and does nothing while great realms freeze!”
“She feels,” Qiao Ming said, his palm flat against the trembling stone. “Can you not hear her? The core is weeping. The hum has shifted three octaves into sour note. She is choking on the iron you drove into her marrow.”
Ji Mingchuan scoffed, standing up and dusting the green rust from his sleeves. “It is the shaking of the underground pumps, nothing more. Do not touch that drain tube, boy. If you interrupt the flow before the flask is full, the pressure differential will foul the clockwork teeth. I will have to drill a second hole through her neck to clear the bore.”
Qiao Ming slowly took his hand from the stone. His eyes were wide, dark, and clear as the deep-sea depths where no storm could reach.
He looked at the Scholar, then reached down to his harness, unhooking his boxwood mallet and his broad-bladed bone chisel.
“You will not drill a second hole, traveler,” Qiao Ming said softly, his voice echoing in the vaulted quiet of the niche. “You will not even keep the first.”