The ascent up the eastern stone support prop root was a trial of balance, heat, and moving timing. Two hundred arm-lengths of upright stone-hard lignite rose like a cliff of polished jet, swept by gales of rotten-egg steam and splashing rivulets of boiling amber sap.
Every three paces, the fourteen-hertz foundry pulse struck the trunk like an invisible sledgehammer. The entire two-hundred-pace mass of the Sovereign shuddered, dislodging plates of stone-hard bark that fell past the climbers into the dark deep pit with sickening whistles of speed.
Qiao Ming moved with the fluid, calculated care of an experienced coastal land-mapper working a storm-swept sea stack. His bare calloused feet found purchase in the ancient chisel-marks of the First Dynasty, his broad toes flaring and curling over the narrow stone ledges with prehensile strength.
The heat rising from the bark pores was searing, but the thick, horn-like calluses on his soles—hardened by decades of scaling granite sea-cliffs and walking frozen ballast decks—padded his nerves against the burning wood. He climbed without pause, his core locked in perfect clockwork balance with the upright face.
Behind him, connected by ten deep-water lengths of braided horsehair line, Yan Zhiqiu climbed steadily. Her courier boots had been discarded at the base. Her bare soles, hardened by months of underground travel, matched Qiao Ming’s foot placements step for step. Her breathing, filtered through the living moss mantle, was rhythmic and deep, untroubled by the boiling sulfur mists swirling around her knees.
