On the green jade dais of Entry hall 889, the black star-black glass of the First Sovereign ceased to behave as inert fiery glass and began to function as living, blood-vessel stone.
Qiao Ming stood at the edge of the footstool, his bare feet resting on the joint between the pale green jade pavers and the huge black heel. His calloused toes, hardened by thirty years of cold salt water and wet weir sills, detected a sudden, deep heat shift. The bitter, hadal chill that had permeated the star-black glass for ten thousand years was retreating inward, replaced by a deep, steady warmth that rose through the stone with the force of an underground geyser.
The heat of the black glass footstool climbed from the four-degree baseline of deep hadal water to thirty-seven point two degrees—the exact body warmth of human blood.
He knelt upon the jade floor, placing both of his scarred palms flat against the flank of the titan’s left heel. Beneath the smooth, glassy surface of the star-stone, he felt the surging rush of the blood-vessel channels. Sixty-four thousand tiny channels of green rust copper and quartz, which had carried only stale salt water during the long sleep of the deep, were now circulating fresh ice-slow meltwater at six point four deep-water lengths per second. The stone did not merely hold heat. It radiated a calm, living warmth that smelled of sun-baked river gravel and drying summer grasses.
