The white marble flags under Qiao Ming’s bare feet were so cold that the moisture from his skin froze into tiny, glassy beads along the edges of his calluses before evaporating into the dry cold air. The room did not echo. He took three measured steps toward the central dais. Then, the whisper of his skin across the polished stone died instantly within two paces, absorbed by the tiny air holes of the sound foam-stone that lined the fifty-arm-length ceiling dome overhead.
Yan Zhiqiu walked beside him, her lantern held low so the yellow beam washed across the nested rings of the floor. The marble was pure white, quarried from the deepest seams of the drowned southern continents, free of veins or stone flaws. Every seam between the six-sided flags was filled with a thread of beaten lead, hammered flat and scraped level with black glass blades, preventing any friction between next-door stones during earth-shaking settling.
“This room does not belong to the mountain,” Yan Zhiqiu whispered, her voice sounding strangely flat and intimate in the dead sound space. “It is a suspended swinging weight. Look at the outer edge gutters. The entire floor is floating on ball-shaped bronze ball-bearings resting in curved granite troughs. If an earthquake snapped the bedrock by twenty arm-lengths, this eight-sided dais would remain level to within half a minute of arc.”
