At the foot of the Obsidian Throne, the physical universe functioned as a single, living lung gearwork rather than a collection of separate continents and seas.
Qiao Ming knelt upon the green jade platform of Entry hall 874, his bare soles anchored against the stone curb. His hands lay flat upon the pale jade pavers, his calloused palms absorbing the deep ground-shaking ringing that pulsed upward from the ancient roots of the world. With every passing heartbeat, he felt the staggering clockwork truth of the Axis Mundi through his skin. Ninety leagues of solid mountain stone, the four land-wide plates of the Northern Lands, thirty-six underwater mountain chains, and eighty thousand cubic leagues of ocean above were not resting upon static foundations. They were breathing in step with the stone-hard lungs of the First Sovereign.
Every four hundred and eighteen seconds, as the First Sovereign’s huge chest swelled beneath his stone mantle, the entire land-wide shelf rose three point one seven five tiny fractions of an inch—exactly one-eighth of an inch.
It was a barely noticeable shifted weight to the mortals and sect fighters who lived upon the surface leagues above, tilling their terraced fields and sailing their merchant junks without suspecting the gearwork beneath their feet. Yet that eighth of an inch was the salvation of the world. By lifting the land-wide plates by a fraction of a barleycorn at regular intervals, the Sovereign relieved the huge, pooling sideways tearing force along the basal fault lines. The clockwork clearance…
