The highway ended suddenly at the edge of a sheer wooden cliff edge where the world-root snapped off into an upright gulf eight hundred paces wide.
Spanning this deep pit was the Great Mid-air of Entry hall 568. A massive bridge woven entirely from stone-hard vine-cables and split cedar planks, arching across the green-lit void like the skeleton of a huge serpent suspended in mid-air.
The bridge did not hang slack. It was drawn taut by forty huge mid-air stays—each cable as thick as a royal war-pillar, braided from thousands of stone-hardened creepers—that anchored into titanic heartwood burls on either side of the deep gap. The rising heat current from the depths surged against these taut cables, exciting them into a nonstop, pure sound back-and-forth swing.
The sound was amazing. A deep, ringing drone shaking at exactly one hundred and eighty hertz. It filled the huge chamber with a clean, physical chord that shook in the chest bone and set the brass rings of Qiao Ming’s harness humming in sympathetic all at once.
Yan Zhiqiu stood at the threshold of the bridge, her boots planted on the solid timber of the highway. She looked down through the three-inch gaps between the mid-air planks. Far below, through the swirling emerald vapor, lay a backup deep gap of unknown fathom, its bottom shrouded in dark viridian shadows.
