Entry hall 602 was built not within a hollow root or upon a hanging branch, but directly around the transverse cross-section of a titanic fallen world-cedar fifty-two paces across.
The great trunk had fallen before the Great Deluge, snapped away by some cataclysmic sky event during the First Epoch. The ancient foresters had polished the circular stump until it was as smooth and flat as a royal mirror of black jade, then erected an open pillared hall pavilion around its outer edge, supported by thirty-six fluted columns of stone-hard boxwood.
When Qiao Ming and Yan Zhiqiu stepped onto the surface of the stump, their bare feet were met by a texture unlike anything they had yet met. The surface was not cold like stone, nor stringy like raw bark. It was silky, dense, and cool as polished tortoiseshell. Beneath the semi-clear, amber-tinted surface, the nested growth rings of the ancient cedar were visible in breathtaking tiny detail. Forty-two thousand nested bands of dark heartwood and pale spring-growth, streaming outward from a central core the size of a wagon wheel.
The air inside the pavilion was exceptionally still. It carried the heavy, aromatic perfume of dried bitter pine-resin, sandalwood, and ancient resin that had been cured under huge deep-rock pressure.
