The fracture that took Zhu Heling was not a clean break; it was a sound shriek.
Along the southern side of the Grand Round hall. There, the floor flags met the outer edge wall-seats, a band of dense greenstone known as the Threshold of the Nine Drains gave way under eight thousand tons of asymmetric thrust. The stone parted with a high-hum, glass-shattering scream that tore through the air at three thousand cycles per second. It shook so wildly that the liquid silver column in Qiao Ming’s star compass shattered into fine, silvery droplets.
The entire southern side of the floor—sixty paces wide and eight feet thick, carrying the smoking wreckage of the Grand Borer and the crumpled iron carriages of the acid cannons—tilted thirty degrees into the deep gap.
Zhu Heling lost his footing instantly.
His broken wrists could find no purchase on the slick, powdered hard speckled rock flags. He slid backward across the tilted floor on his back. His heavy boots skidded over the edge of a three-arm-length rift, his body tumbling into the lateral rock fracture that opened between the floor and the outer foundation wall.
“Land-mapper!” the Scholar shrieked, his voice rising into a jagged, animalistic howling that echoed up through the darkness.
