The Great Parchment Roll lay spread across three granite chests, lit up by the clean, yellow flame of a rapeseed-oil lamp.
Beside the parchment, Yan Zhiqiu laid the Broken Slate.
The two maps—one drawn on oiled shark-skin in Qiao Ming’s careful silt-ink, the other carved into hardened shale twelve thousand years ago by the master builder of the First Epoch—lined up with an eerie, exact care that made the small hairs on Yan Zhiqiu’s arms stand on end.
“Look at the hall between Entry hall 518 and 522,” Qiao Ming said, his green rust bone-awl hovering over the parchment. His right palm was bound in a clean strip of salt-linen, but his grip on the tool was steady and firm. “The hall is known as the Throat of the Whale. It is two hundred paces long, but barely four paces wide, vaulted with double ribs of solid olivine dark rock.”
Yan Zhiqiu leaned over the slate, her thumb tracing the corresponding intaglio channel.
“On the slate, this passage is marked with three inverted chevrons,” she said, her brow furrowing as she deciphered the ancient building glyphs. “That indicates a dynamic pressure channel. It wasn’t designed as a walkway. It was designed as an overflow bypass for Sluice-Gate Fourteen.”
