A violent, underground blast wave ripped through the floor of the writing hall, knocking the horn lantern onto its side. The amber flame flickered wildly inside its horn housing, casting uneven, leaping shadows across the whale-bone desks before steadying. Above their heads, the massive dark rock rafters groaned with a dry, stony shriek, showering the white marble flags with a fine, chalky rain of crushed white chalk-stone mortar.
From the north-eastern side of the ceiling chimney pipes came a sound that Qiao Ming knew in the deepest, most scared recesses of his soul. The sound scream of high-pressure salt water tearing through a fractured stonework gate.
Entry hall 492 had been breached.
It was the exact sector described in the Eleventh Journal—the final outer barrier where the Eleventh Keeper had spent his last day driving lead wedges into the archway before the flood overwhelmed the lower locks. Now, ten thousand years later, the same stone was breaking again, shattered not by the slow decay of hundreds of years, but by the packed fury of Zhu Heling’s potion-made void-charges.
High above the dais, the forty-eight inverted white spar-stone stalactites suspended from the singing chimney pipes began to cry. Heavy drops of black, freezing salt water fell sixty arm-lengths through the dark, striking the whale-bone desks with wet, ringing splatters. The water brought with it an unbearable stench. The sulfur of spent explosive magic charms, the oily rot of crushed ancient kelp, and the sharp, stone tang of deep-sea saline that had…
