The third chronicle was the one that had broken through the silence of Qiao Ming’s forgotten life. When he unrolled the bleached whale-thick parchment across Desk Three, his hand did not waver, but his fingers moved with a solemn, respectful tenderness, as if touching the shroud of an ancient grave. The thick parchment here was slightly discolored along its northern margin, stained with a pale, brownish scorch-mark that smelled of ozone and spark-charged air.
Yan Zhiqiu stepped to his side, bringing the horn lantern close. She didn’t need to search for the passages. The layout of the text was burned into her memory from their earlier check. Her fingers hovered above the second column of the main text:
THE THIRD CHRONICLE OF THE DROWNED DAO: THE SOLAR FLARE Flooding.
“In the twelfth year of the Great Gathering,” the text began, the strokes heavy, decisive, and carried out under the light of an angry, swollen sun, “the Great Star of the Central Heaven entered end-post pulsation. Every forty-eight hours, an expanding sun-fire flare erupts from its equator, sweeping across the world-size orbits in a wave of high-energy solar star-fire. The magnetic shields of the world have collapsed. The night sky is filled with green and violet auroral curtains so bright that one can read the smallest seal-script by their light at midnight.”
