The Broken Slate locked into the western relief slot of Entry hall 860. Then, the deep gap responded not with an explosion, but with a sudden, sickening drop in crushing pressure that tore the breath from Zhu Heling’s sound chest muscle.
The Siphon Gate of the Eighth Patriarch was not a simple wooden water gate or iron drop-gate. It was an inverted high-pressure venturi tube, ninety arm-lengths in length and cast from four thousand tons of massive stone dark rock. For seven thousand years, it had remained primed with a nonstop column of hadal salt water, balanced on the knife-edge of sky balance by the weight of two opposing water chambers.
When Yan Zhiqiu’s old family key turned the inner tearing-pin, the balance shattered.
A column of seventy thousand tons of water, suspended in the upright drainage chimney pipe behind the gate, was suddenly released into the bottomless water tanks of the Axis Mundi. The falling water acted as a huge high-pressure piston, pulling a total empty pocket behind it.
The torrent in the funnel deep gap did not merely speed up. It reversed its surface slope, transforming into a violent, churning whirlpool whose suction dragged everything on the floor toward the central intake throat with the speed of an avalanche.
