The avalanche of ice-slow salt water did not fall like ordinary water. It dropped as a solid, crystal-clear wall of blue ice and sub-zero slurry forty arm-lengths wide.
In Entry hall 864, the impact shook the foundations of the land-wide shelf. Seventy-two thousand tons of hadal salt water, cooled to minus two degrees under seven thousand years of underground frozen stillness, struck the floor of the transverse portal with the striking force of a collapsing mountain peak. The sound was a massive, earth-shattering boom that traveled through ninety leagues of solid granite, rattling the rib-bones of every stone-hard sovereign sleeping in the lower crypts. The air was wildly displaced, creating a gale of freezing spray that roared through the gallery at seventy knots, tearing loose iron sheeting and tumbling spent shell-casings across the dense green rock flat stone slabs like dry leaves.
Qiao Ming and Yan Zhiqiu stood upon the raised check narrow high walkway behind the portal support posts, their bare soles gripping the ribbed bronze decking.
The freezing spray engulfed them instantly. Qiao Ming did not retreat. He lowered his chin, tucking his beard into the stiffened collar of his oilskin coat, his calloused hands gripping the bronze stone railing. The spray was bitter, stinging the skin of his face and arms with crystal-clear frost that turned to grey slush against his warm blood. His bare feet, hardened by decades of navigating wave-lashed stepped stone bases and freezing sump-troughs, clamped onto the bronze treads without a shudder. The…
