The threshold of Entry hall 679 was marked by a giant stone arch of dark jade-veined dark rock, carved with segmental baffles designed to absorb sound. Qiao Ming and Yan Zhiqiu stepped across the doorstep. Then, the eight-hertz shaking that had pulsed through the quicksilver channels intensified into a physical wave of pressure that shook in their ribcages, their teeth, and the soles of their bare feet.
Dominating the center of this circular, dome-roofed vault was a massive machine of staggering proportions: the Great Inertial Flywheel of the Ashen Epoch. Suspended vertically between two huge granite piers sixty arm-lengths high was a huge disc of forged star-fallen iron, eighty arm-lengths in width and six arm-lengths thick at its rim. Its mass was estimated at thirty-two thousand metric tons.
The huge wheel was moving.
It wasn’t spinning with the furious, blurred speed of a heavy-duty turbine. It was turning with an infinite, terrifying slowness. A stately, barely noticeable rotation so smooth that only by watching the passage of its polished rim against a fixed graduation mark on the granite pier could the human eye detect its movement. It needed twelve days and four hours to complete a single revolution.
Qiao Ming stood at the edge of the safety barrier, his bare calloused feet planted firmly upon the granite flags. He was transfixed by the sheer, unearthly perfection of the machine. The giant wheel made no clockwork scraping sound, no grinding clatter of metal against metal. The only sound was the deep…
