Yan Zhiqiu sat cross-legged upon the white marble floor flags between Desk Six and Desk Seven, her salt-stiffened cloak spread out beneath her like a dark gray carpet. The horn lantern rested upon an overturned sample crate to her right, its flame trimmed low to conserve animal fat. In the dim, steady circle of amber light, she had laid out three separate documents: the Broken Slate of Yan-Luo, the royal lineage roll of her dynasty, and the open folio of Journal Seven.
For three hours, neither of them had spoken above a whisper. The silence in the writing hall was not the silence of an abandoned crypt. It was the intense, packed stillness of a royal reading bureau during the compilation of the great dynastic annals. The only sounds were the dry whisper of parchment leaves turning across whale-bone desks, the rhythmic scrape of Yan Zhiqiu’s bone metal pen upon her wax tablet. The faint, cyclic ticking of Qiao Ming’s star compass as he checked sky-high map points.
Yan Zhiqiu leaned forward, her eyes scanning the tiny seal-script of Journal Seven. The text described the dissolving of a universe under a deluge of gray chemical acid. A sky disaster that began when the high sky spheres reacted with acidic cosmic dust. That turned the clouds into acid-burning liquid that dissolved granite mountains into sludge in forty days.
