They left the frozen foundry behind. They entered a high-vaulted pillared hall whose walls were fully paneled in heavy sheets of polished gunmetal. This was Entry hall 675, known in the royal records as the Chamber of the Great Schema. Here, the intellectual elite of the Ashen Epoch had engraved the foundational philosophy of their mechanized great realm upon the living metal.
Qiao Ming walked slowly down the central aisle, his bare horn-hard feet pressing against the cold, smooth gunmetal floor plates. On either side, twelve massive steles of star-fallen iron, each ten arm-lengths high and four arm-lengths wide, stood bolted to the granite foundation. Engraved upon these steles in sharp, sharp-angled cuneiform was the complete doctrinal treatise of the Mechanized Dao.
Yan Zhiqiu walked from stele to stele, her lantern held high, her lips moving as she translated the ancient characters. “The First Theorem of the Iron Mind,” she read aloud, her voice trembling slightly with the weight of the ancient words. “‘The flesh is porous, unstable, and corruptible by emotional humors. The spirit that resides in blood must inevitably perish with the blood. So the Dao can’t be attained through body breath, but only through unchanging clockwork shape.’”
