The Colonnade of the Drowned Dao was not a single avenue. It was a vast, sharp-angled forest of three thousand massive stone pillars that stretched across three leagues of clean star-black glass.
Each pillar was seventy arm-lengths tall, carved from a single six-sided crystal of dark hypersthene. They stood in sixty parallel rows, spaced forty paces apart with clean, steady care. They formed long, soaring halls of black stone that came together upon the circular lake of quicksilver silt surrounding the Sovereign’s dais. High above. There, the capitals met the diamond-studded vault, the columns did not end in arches. They flared into lotus-shaped brackets that captured the soft starlight, directing the light down the fluted facets in six upright ribbons of pale, silver soft glow.
Qiao Ming walked down the central aisle, his bare feet making rhythmic, muffled taps against the glass floor. The air was entirely motionless, yet the room hummed with a deep sound shaking. A nonstop, pure drone at four hundred and thirty-two hertz that rang in the hollow cavities of his skull and the arch of his ribs. His wide, calloused toes splayed over the black glass floor, feeling the minute micro-textures of the stone.
It was the ringing chime of three thousand intact laws of nature, standing undisturbed in the dark.
