Entry hall 118 was a field of daggers.
As the skin-burning salt water from the collapsed Zodiac Round hall drained through the transverse halls, the rapid drop in heat had triggered a total crystal-forming event across the entire floor of the nave. For a distance of two hundred paces, between the fluted piers of black dark rock, the stone floor was fully covered by a dense forest of needle-sharp halite crystals.
The needles grew upward from the flat stone slabs like white grass, six inches tall, tapering to points so fine that they could pierce a leather boot like an iron needle-point arrow. Under the dim, green soft glow of the ceiling veins, the floor glistened like a plain of crushed glass, throwing off thousands of tiny, prismatic reflections that hurt the eyes to look upon.
Qiao Ming stood at the threshold of the chamber, his bare feet resting upon the safe, uncalcified doorstep of Entry hall 117.
He looked down at his feet.
His soles were wide, flat, and yellowed by thirty seasons of walking barefoot on stone. Covered in a layer of calloused horn nearly three lines thick, impervious to barnacles, jagged oyster shells, and the coarse bite of river-sand. But against this forest of chemical needles, bare skin had no defense. A single misstep would drive five dozen needles through the flesh of his instep, carrying skin-burning sodium hydroxide directly into the bone marrow.
