The night before the final descent was spent not in a closed burrow, but in the Root Cradle of Entry hall 644. A suspended platform of woven wild-reed webbing slung sixty arm-lengths above the deep gap floor between two huge stone props of the southern world-tree.
Here, hanging in the open space of the deep pit, Qiao Ming and Yan Zhiqiu lay upon mats of dried ginkgo leaves, sheltered by an overhanging canopy of stone-hard ferns. The air was cool and refreshing, carrying the vast, clean drafts of the upright canyon.
The cradle platform was anchored by eight thick cables of braided gutta-percha vines, each as thick as a man’s thigh, tensioned with heavy bronze turnbuckles that groaned softly. The heat winds surged up from the depths. The natural latex of the vines had been cured with fiery sulfur, rendering the cordage fully impervious to water-rot, fungal decay, and clockwork abrasion. As the wind whipped through the stays, the cables hummed with deep, musical notes like the bass strings of a huge zither.
Looking out from the edge of the woven platform, the view was breathtaking. Across the miles of upright space, millions of living-glow clover clusters and glowing bracket fungi crusted the huge root columns, glowing with soft emerald, sapphire, and amber points of light. Tiny spore-moths, their wings coated in sparkling silver dust, drifted through the darkness like falling star-patterns. It was an underground galaxy—a silent, sacred universe of life thriving ten thousand deep-water lengths beneath the drowned…
