The black slate ledger resting on Qiao Ming’s knees was no longer a flat surface of square grids. It had become a star-ring projection of curved reality.
They had climbed to the High Spirit vein of Entry hall 598. There, a broad, cantilevered gallery of stone-hard hardwood jutted eighty arm-lengths outward from the world-pillar into the green-lit void. Suspended between the sheer upright bark behind them and the boundless emerald twilight before them, Qiao Ming worked with deliberate, unrushed care. His bare calloused feet were locked over the fluted margin of the gallery, his prehensile toes curled into the ancient bronze sockets that had once held safety lifelines for royal sounders.
Beside him, Yan Zhiqiu held a fresh animal fat candle sheltered within an oiled horn lantern, casting a warm, steady circle of amber light across the black stone tablet. Her bare feet were tucked beneath her knees, their pale skin bearing the first healthy pink flush of adaptation to the living timber. In her lap lay the Broken Slate, its intaglio lines glowing with a steady, sympathetic green soft glow that mirrored the map point circles Qiao Ming was incising into his ledger.
With his green rust bone-awl, Qiao Ming cut the main ball-shaped shell into the slate. The tool’s copper tip gave off a dry, high-pitched skrrr as it scored the dense shale, producing a neat furrow of grey stone powder that Yan Zhiqiu swept away with a soft badger-hair brush.
