The crisis of the thirteenth day was not born of violence, but of abundance.
In the vast agricultural galleries of Entry halls 032 through 038, the underground crops were flourishing with astonishing speed. Fed by the stone-rich ice-slow waters from the Patriarch’s Lip and warmed by the gentle earth-heat breath of the sub-floor chimney pipes, forty acres of porous fiery tufa had sprouted dense, emerald carpets of giant bladder-kelp, edible sea-cress, and dense thickets of oyster-mushrooms. In the settling basins, freshwater reed beds had grown twelve feet tall, providing endless fiber for mats, baskets, and clothing.
Yet the ten million mortals were unable to harvest the harvest. Having surrendered every iron sickle, scythe, and wood-axe at the outer edge gates to preserve the Ark’s bedrock, the farmers were reduced to tearing the tough, stringy kelp stems with their bare fingernails or pounding them with blunt river stones.
Harvesting tools were desperately needed: twelve thousand sickles, scythes, and paring knives. But to forge twelve thousand iron blades would instantly wake the sound tremors of the keel and doom the safe hall.
At the morning bell, Qiao Ming led Yan Zhiqiu and seventy master carvers from the wood and horn guilds to the western terminus of Entry hall 065: the Leviathan Ossuary.
