On the fifteenth evening after the closing of the gates, the Great Census of the Eighty Courtyards was brought to its triumphant conclusion.
In the grand writing hall of Entry hall 070, eighty master scribes sat at long tables of planished pine, their oil lamps casting steady golden pools upon stacks of blue slate tablets. Each tablet recorded the demographic ledger of a single entry hall. The names of every household, their old family province on the sunken continents, the craft they practiced, and the health status of their members.
A grand ritual procession of four hundred apprentice scroll-keepers had carried the tablets from the four cardinal scroll halls, bearing the heavy stones on biers of woven cedar boughs. Arranged in nine nested circles around the central green jade dais, the tablets formed a physical monument of human remembrance. A stone library preserving the name of every child, fisherman, weaver, and elder who had reached the safe hall.
The spreading of the population across the mountain’s underground chambers reflected the careful design of the ancient master builders. Entry halls 016 through 035, chosen the Northern Family Quarters, housed three million four hundred thousand mortals in multi-tiered residential cells carved directly into dry granite. Entry halls 036 through 055, the Central Artisan Arcades, contained two million eight hundred thousand craftsmen, weavers, carpenters, and bone-carvers. Their workshops arranged around was wide air-flow shafts that circulated warm, clean air. Entry halls 056 through 075, the Agricultural Galleries and Basalt Sumps, sustained two million…
