When the twin streams of boiling burning acid were twenty arm-lengths from the green jade dais in Entry hall 888, the mountain awakened its ancient water-pressure defense.
It wasn’t a barrier of raw magical force or spiritual light. It was a physical manifestation of deep water pressure, generated by the sixty-four thousand internal channels of the Axis Mundi. From the outer edge gutters of the green jade platform, sixteen star-black glass nozzles opened in perfect all at once. Driven by the seventy-two-fathom head of water held in the basal water tanks, a towering hemispherical curtain of distilled hadal water rose into the air, forty-eight arm-lengths in width, swirling at three hundred turns a minute like a huge dome of spinning glass.
The water was ice-cold, drawn directly from the basal reservoirs seventy-two deep-water lengths below, soaked with the ancient memory of the First Dynasty’s master masons. The smooth-flowing flow was so dense, so smooth, and so tightly bound by sound water’s skin that it seemed carved from a single hollow diamond. Through its spinning walls, the diamond star-patterns of the vault were refracted into ten thousand dancing rainbows of turquoise and violet light.
The twin streams of burning sulfuric acid struck the spinning water shield.
