Beneath the right heel of the kneeling giant statue, an iron trapdoor counterbalanced with lead weights gave access to a sloping stairway of dressed andesite. Dropping seventy arm-lengths through the rock, Qiao Ming and Yan Zhiqiu emerged into a hall that was unlike any space they had yet met in the Ashen Epoch: Entry hall 678, the Gallery of the Liquid Spirit vein.
The floor of this vast, box-shaped chamber was not paved with iron plates or rough granite flags. It was crisscrossed by a fine, detailed network of deep, curved channels carved from single blocks of black, glassy andesite, polished to such a high degree of luster that they reflected the lantern flame like black glass mirrors. These channels, three arm-lengths wide and two arm-lengths deep, curved across the hall in graceful, linked spirals, converging toward a central eight-sided weir.
Qiao Ming walked along the edge of the central channel, his bare horn-hard feet gripping the smooth stone lip with confident, prehensile ease. The channels were dry now, but the bottom of the andesite troughs was coated in a fine, silvery-grey dust. The rusted amalgam residue of fifty thousand tons of liquid quicksilver that had once flowed through these channels as a zero-drag high-pressure medium.
