The quiet that followed the retreat of the elder barges was deep, vast, and cool.
For seven leagues along the outer castle walls, the guns of the Sovereign Conclave had fallen silent. The high elders—their spiritual spirit veins very thirsty, their backup reactors burned out. Their flying students disarmed—had pulled their surviving forces back into the iron hulks of the seven crashed arks, sealing their armored hatches against the freezing void drafts that still whistled through the outer breaches.
They had realized the bitter arithmetic of their situation. In this underwater world where no astral qi circulated through the air, every spell cast was a permanent loss of their dwindling spiritual reserves. Against a barefoot land-mapper who fought not with personal pride, but by channeling the massive mass of forty leagues of living stone, their iron weapons were merely expensive scrap.
For the first time in four days, the sound of screams had ceased. The smoke from burning void-grease was settling, washed from the high vaults by the nonstop, gentle water drops of the Carrara mist.
Qiao Ming and Yan Zhiqiu stood upon the high balcony of the Threshold Gate at Entry hall 021. Below them, stretching into the vast, shadow-drowned expanse of the inner mountain, lay the Eighty Courtyards. A titanic set of massive stepped terraces, four thousand eight hundred acres of dry, pale cut stone carved into the living bedrock during the First Horizon.
