The horizon of the Axis Mundi did not drop into a basin. It curved subtly upward, rising toward the central dais of the world in a barely noticeable, non-Euclidean curved grade.
Qiao Ming walked along the center line of the avenue, his bare soles making rhythmic, whispering contact with the star-black glass floor. The fiery glass was dark as pitch, yet beneath its polished surface lay frozen currents of rainbow-bright violet mica that caught the starlight from the diamond-studded ceiling. That created the illusion that he was treading upon the outer envelope of a sleeping nebula. His feet, calloused and wide, felt a strange, floating lightness with every step. It wasn’t weightlessness, but an inverse gravity pull—a gentle, aimed attraction that pulled the center of his mass toward the distant dark shape of the Obsidian Throne.
He unhitched the Knotted Horsehair Sounding Line from his harness, letting three deep-water lengths of the black cord trail behind his heel. The braid, spun from black stallion-hair and boiled sea-silk, slithered across the dark glass without a sound.
The eight-sided lead line-weight did not hang straight-across to the floor. It dragged at an angle of eighteen degrees toward the south, its cone-shaped nose pointing steadily toward the seated titan two leagues away. The soft lead seemed drawn by an invisible current of pure, condensed mass, defying the ordinary straight-line of the upper world. Qiao Ming lifted the weight into his palm. Then, he felt a level vector tugging against his tendons—a silent, persistent…
