The heavy oilskin coat fell to the white marble floor with a dense, greasy thud, its hem weights clinking softly against the stone. For the first time since Yan Zhiqiu had joined his survey in the drowned lower gates, Qiao Ming stood stripped to his waist under the amber beam of the horn lantern. The cold, dry cold air of the writing hall right away puckered his skin with gooseflesh, raising the coarse gray hair along his forearms and chest.
Yan Zhiqiu held the lantern high, her eyes widening in horror and respectful awe as the light washed across his torso. His body was not the ordinary body of a sixty-year-old water mapper. It was a living palimpsest—an ancient, scarred parchment that had been erased and inscribed eleven times over ten thousand years.
Across his broad shoulders and ribs ran a fine, detailed, chaotic archipelago of white, raised scar tissue, interwoven with dark, pigmented patches where deep chemical burns had healed without melanin. There was scarcely a hand’s breadth of smooth skin on his back. Every major muscle group was crossed by the silver lines of old stitch tracks, bronze staple marks, and the deep, puckered craters of piercing trauma.
