The shudder in the snake-like stone base did not shrink. It grew into a painful, rhythmic convulsion that made the pale limestone island tremble under their feet.
A low, deep hum, shaking at forty-eight hertz, began to radiate from the Bodhisattva’s core. The surface of the ankle-deep pool, earlier glass-smooth, broke into thousands of fine, shivering ripples that raced toward the outer edge walls like fleeing minnows. In the shallow water, two small salt water-crabs curled their legs and rolled onto their backs, stunned by the sound pressure.
Then came the tears.
Across the chest and shoulders of the thirty-arm-length statue, the inlaid bronze lines began to glow with a faint, angry dull-red heat. The friction of the trapped spiritual essence, churning against the foreign silver drain tube, was superheating the metal armatures within the stone. From the inner corners of the Bodhisattva’s closed stone eyes, two thick, thick, sticky streams of black stone salt water welled forth.
The black salt water trickled down the carved green cheeks, hissing as it touched the cold air. Where the droplets fell from the chin into the pool below, they didn’t mix with the water. They curdled into dark, oily nodules that gave off thin plumes of rotten-egg white smoke that smelled of boiled copper and burnt marrow.
The air grew heavy with the terrifying, ozone-heavy dread of an awakening deity.
“Step back, fool!” Ji Mingchuan shouted, his face draining of color as his double pupils caught the red glow in the bronze veins. His hands flew to his wide sleeves, withdrawing his glyph-cleaving dagger. “The stone is undergoing a reactive Law-Inversion! It is waking as a Law-Weeper! If that entity awakens prematurely, its sound wail will liquefy our organs in three breaths! Back away!”
“She is not waking to destroy,” Qiao Ming said, kneeling beside the drill. His bare knees rested in the shallow water, his hands steady as he adjusted his grip upon his bone chisel. “She is weeping in agony. You drove barbed teeth into her heart, and she can’t breathe.”
“Touch that drain tube and I will drive this dagger through your spine!” the Scholar snarled, leveling the star-fallen steel nib. The red runes along the iron stem blazed with toxic bright glare. “The drain tube belongs to the Sovereign Conclave! Under the Blood-Pact of the Final Ark, the Obsidian Scroll hall holds total supply order rights over every pre-diluvian relic! You are committing high treason against the surviving sects!”
Qiao Ming did not glance at the blade. He set his flat boxwood mallet upon the stone, took his whale-bone chisel in his left hand, and leaned close to the silver contraption.
“A sect that must drink the marrow of its sleeping ancestors to live has already forgotten how to survive,” Qiao Ming said, his voice quiet, steady as the deep bedrock. “You will build your arks of cold bronze, traveler. But you will arrive at the new shore with hollow chests and dead souls.”
He knew that if he simply yanked the drain tube with brute force, the backward-facing barbed teeth would tear away a cubic foot of ancient snake-like. That would permanently rupture the Bodhisattva’s marrow pool, venting forty thousand years of condensed water law into the chamber in an explosive pressure drop that would wipe out them both. The drain tube was a machine. It obeyed clockwork constraints, and machines could be disarmed.
Qiao Ming placed his ear against the cold silver casing, listening beneath the wild ticking of the clockwork gears.
Tick... Clink-tick... Whir.
He closed his eyes. In the darkness of his hearing, he separated the noise of the gears from the ringing hum of the stone. He heard the exact tooth where the locking pawl engaged the ratchet ring inside the silver barrel.
“Third tooth,” Qiao Ming whispered. “Four degrees counter-clockwise.”
He placed the rounded edge of his whale-bone chisel against the silver retaining collar. With his right hand, he brought the boxwood mallet down in a light, rhythmic tap.
Clink.
The clockwork gearbox skipped a beat. The barbed spiral flutes rotated a tiny fraction of an inch backward, aligning their teeth with the internal release channels.
Clink. Clink.
Two more measured taps followed, perfectly timed with the lull in the statue’s internal shakes. Qiao Ming did not strike with anger. His blows carried the deliberate, gentle rhythm of a stonemason dressing a soft marble molding.
On the third tap, the internal release spring snapped open. The barbed teeth collapsed into the metal tube with a sharp click.
With a wet, nauseating hiss of escaping spiritual vapor, the eighteen-inch silver drain tube slid cleanly out of the stone base, splashing into the pale limestone pool.
A geyser of glowing, cerulean steam erupted from the open puncture wound, smelling of crushed lotus blossoms and ancient mountain ozone. The Bodhisattva’s entire frame shuddered wildly, its stone head tilting downward by half an inch as the internal pressure vented into the hall.
Ji Mingchuan leaped backward into the salt water, shielding his face with his lead-lined sleeve, screaming in terror that the statue was about to strike.
Qiao Ming did not move. He was already working.
From his bridle-leather harness, he retrieved his horn pot of sheep fat. With a swift, practiced gesture, he scooped out a lump of white fat and rolled it across his palm, mixing it with a measured handful of fine white Carrara marble dust and dried kelp ash taken from his pouch. He worked the mixture with his calloused thumbs until it formed a dense, pliable stone mastic, warm from the friction of his skin.
Leaning forward, his forehead resting gently against the trembling stone of the lotus petal, Qiao Ming packed the paste into the eight-inch drill hole.
His fingers worked with tender, razor-sharp speed, driving the mastic deep into the channel to seal the burst marrow channel. As his palms smoothed the compound flush with the snake-like surface, he whispered into the stone:
“Seventh Fathom. Slack water. The tide is kind, Mother. The weed holds the weir. Sleep.”
The cerulean steam ceased to escape.
Under the warmth of his bare palms, the mastic hardened instantly, chemically bonded to the ancient stone by the skin-burning salts of the stone mist. The dark hairline fractures that had webbed outward from the wound ceased their creeping spreading, sealed beneath a smooth, gray layer that matched the natural grain of the snake-like.
Slowly, like a sleeper settling back into a deep, untroubled sleep, the Bodhisattva’s shakes began to slow.
The forty-eight-hertz hum dropped to thirty, then twenty, then dissolved entirely into the background murmur of the distant deck drains. The red glow in the inlaid bronze lines faded back into dull, peaceful turquoise green rust. The black tears upon the cheeks dried into dark, harmless streaks of stone salt.
Qiao Ming reached into his pocket, retrieved a handful of soft, moist river-moss, and gently wiped the dried black crusts from the statue’s cheeks. With each wipe of the moss, the green bronze cooled beneath his touch, until the calm, half-closed eyes seemed once again to gaze upon a calm, eternal sea.
The pool fell flat once more. The pale-emerald light of the lichen glowed soft and steady across the green water. High in the high window row, the slate-gray petrels settled back into their stone nests, tucking their heads under their wings.
Qiao Ming remained kneeling for twelve long breaths, his head bowed, his hands resting upon the sealed wound until he felt the cold, calm peace of the stone return to its natural baseline.
Only then did he stand, wiping his animal fat-stained fingers on his oilskin apron.
Ji Mingchuan stood fifteen paces away, standing in the shallow water near the archway, his dagger trembling in his white knuckles. He stared at the sealed stone base, then looked down at his ruined silver drain tube resting in three inches of salt water at Qiao Ming’s feet.
The Scholar’s face was a mask of furious, blank hatred.
He had watched this ragged native disarm a ninth-tier royal extractor in three taps of a wooden mallet, seal an ancient deity’s wound with sheep fat and stone dust, and soothe an enraged cosmic entity back to sleep with a whispered nursery rhyme. In the Upper Heavens, such a feat would have needed a grand ritual of sixteen foundation elders and three thousand spirit stones.
Ji Mingchuan stepped forward, his boots splashing heavily, and snatched his dripping silver drain tube from the pool. He shoved it into his satchel with violent, trembling hands.
“You think you have saved her,” the Scholar hissed, his voice trembling with a venom that made the water around his slippers quiver. “You think you have preserved your little safe hall. You have only delayed the certain by an hour.”
Qiao Ming picked up his wooden ruler and secured his mallet to his harness. His slate-gray eyes met the Scholar’s rotating double pupils without a trace of fear or anger.
“The wound is clean, honored guest,” Qiao Ming said gently. “And the water will wash away the black tears before nightfall. The House forgives you, traveler. But you should not strike her again.”