The sky iron point of the awl in Qiao Ming’s left hand struck the giant beast thick parchment with the decisive, razor-keen bite of a surgeon’s razor knife. Moving with smooth, steady driving force, he drew the three-sided needle edge across the hide from left to right, scoring the twelve lengthwise datum lines that formed the load-bearing grid of the Twelfth Journal. The iron parted the dense, stone-hardened connective tissue fibers with a crisp, musical hiss—chhh-tck, chhh-tck—cutting twelve perfectly parallel channels, each exactly one tiny fraction of an inch deep, across the creamy white surface.
Right away behind the awl, their joined right hands brought the badger-hair brush into play. The tip, soaked with the glossy, purplish-black heme-carbon enamel, followed the freshly cut grooves with breathtaking accuracy. The thick, sticky mid-air of pine soot and Yan Zhiqiu’s bright red blood flowed into the channels, drawn by powerful tiny blood vessel suction deep into the porous osteocytes of the hide.
The deep-water data they inscribed was not composed of theoretical abstractions. It contained the hands-on measurements recorded across four hundred years of deep-sea soundings. In Cycle 2, the Ark had dropped through seventy leagues of underwater dark rock before encountering the heat updrafts of the central trench. In Cycle 5, the salinity slope had shifted by four percent, indicating the presence of an extinct underground ocean basin beneath the northern shelf. In Cycle 10, the deep water pressure had reached forty-two tons of pressure at the doorstep of Entry hall 460…
