The emerald moss beneath them did not wither under the heat of mortal bodies; it breathed.
When Qiao Ming shifted his weight to sit upright, the stringy tendrils under his thighs released a faint, musical hiss, like dry grass bending before a summer squall. A cloud of fine viridian dust rose around his knees, glowing with a soft, steady soft glow that lit up the damp fabric of his trousers and the green rust buckles of his chest harness.
He didn’t stand right away. A seasoned land-mapper learned early that after surviving an uncharted drop, the first duty was not motion, but inventory. One counted one’s tools, tested one’s bones, and sounded the balance of the foundation before committing weight to a stride.
Beside him, Yan Zhiqiu was already on her knees, carefully brushing green spores from the intaglio grooves of the Broken Slate. Her fingers, though smudged with soot and grease from their battle on the Grand Round hall, moved with the respectful care of a temple scroll-keeper. The slate was entirely undamaged. Its dense, pre-flood hardened shale had resisted both Zhu Heling’s acid-burning spells and the friction of the mile-long descent.
“The slate is warm,” she noted, her voice hushed by the massive scale of the green vault around them. “In the upper entry halls, it was always cold as river ice. But here, the stone itself seems to have absorbed the heat of a buried fire.”
