Evening settled over the Eighty Barren Courtyards not as a setting of the sun, for no sunlight had touched the drowned world in thirty seasons, but as a deliberate dimming of the communal lamps.
Across the vast expanse of Entry halls 021 through 080, ten million two hundred and forty thousand mortals had found their measure of peace. Where once had been dark, echoing ruins abandoned to the deep drift, there now stretched leagues of clean cut stone terraces, warm floors, and orderly living bays.
In one thousand four hundred and twenty communal hearths, bricks of dried peat and cakes of tightly packed kelp burned with steady, sootless warmth over the fiery dark rock hearth-stones. The air in the high ribbed vaults was clear and sweet, circulating through the ancient chimney pipes with the rhythmic, gentle draft of a sleeping giant.
Qiao Ming and Yan Zhiqiu walked the high narrow high walkways that connected the high window row galleries from Entry hall 021 all the way to Entry hall 080. They looked down through the open arcade arches. They witnessed the miraculous rebirth of human society within the womb of the mountain.
In Entry hall 023, the central kitchens were running in seamless harmony. Fifty huge bronze cooking pots, each holding two hundred gallons of dried kelp and salt-cod broth, simmered over dark rock heat-wells. Teams of sixty apprentice cooks worked with massive boxwood ladles, filling clay pot bowls for the long, quiet lines of evening diners. Not a single…
