The sound of falling liquid became a steady, melodic roar long before the vaulted archway of Entry hall 562 came into view.
It wasn’t the harsh, bone-shaking crashing of ocean breakers against granite sea-walls, nor the sharp hiss of mountain torrents tumbling over gravel. It was a rich, heavy, thick, sticky murmur, like warm syrup poured into a wooden vat, shaking at a deep sound hum that hummed through the bones of their legs.
When Qiao Ming and Yan Zhiqiu passed through the root-woven portal of the entry hall, the scene that opened before them took their breath away.
Entry hall 562 was a huge high-pressure chamber, five hundred paces across, hollowed from the intersection of four titanic world-roots that came together like the groined vaults of a royal cathedral. Suspended thirty arm-lengths above the floor was a fine, detailed network of fluted aqueducts, carved entirely from jade-hardened cedar timber. Through these channels flowed rivers of semi-clear, golden-amber liquid that caught the surrounding emerald light of the canopy. Then it turned it into ribbons of pure, glowing honey.
The amber liquid cascaded from tier to tier through stepped water chutes and scalloped settling basins, designed to aerate the fluid and filter out heavy settled mud before it was distributed into thousands of upright drainage channels that plunged deeper into the roots below.
