Moving forward from the artillery gallery, Qiao Ming and Yan Zhiqiu climbed a narrow spiral stairs carved through solid dolerite. He walked into Entry hall 740: The Forward Observation Deck. This was a crescent-shaped gallery perched thirty arm-lengths above the floor of the Submerged Bastion, set directly beneath the outer seawall cap where the bedrock met the open seabed.
The air in this high gallery was filled with a terrifying, physical shaking. The ceilings, built of linked megalithic blocks of black dark rock, were groaning under huge clockwork stress. Fine cascades of white stone dust trickled continuously from the mortarless seams, pattering like dry hail against the stone floor flags.
High above, the noise of the Azure Firmament Sect’s mining operations had grown from a distant clockwork murmur into an unrelenting, ear-splitting roar. Heavy-duty diamond cone drills, rotating at three thousand turns a minute under high-pressure high-pressure feed, were grinding into the outer dark rock cap with savage fury. Every two seconds, the percussive hammer of an air-powered mud-driver struck the rock, sending blast waves through the soles of Qiao Ming’s bare feet.
Qiao Ming walked to the center of the watching gallery. There, the ancient builders had installed a solid bronze tone check pillar, four arm-lengths high and two arm-lengths thick, bolted directly into the bedrock floor. He unclipped his Folded brass star-compass and withdrew the True-Sight Verdigris Needle from its harness sheath.
