In the vast underground pillared hall of Entry hall 040—an ancient hall measuring four hundred arm-lengths across, whose vaulted ceiling was upheld by eighty fluted granite pillars—ten thousand mortals stood arrayed in solemn ranks.
They weren’t soldiers of a royal legion, nor students of an immortal sect. They were the common workers of the sunken continents. Quarrymen from the gray hills of the north, carpenters who had built grain barges, weavers whose fingers were stained with indigo, and barefoot longshoremen who had hauled cargo across wet docks for twenty seasons. They wore coarse linen shirts and trousers of undyed wool, tied at the waist with braided hemp.
Yet as they stood beneath the warm, amber glow of the stone-oil lamps, there was neither panic nor confusion among them. They stood in twenty disciplined cohorts of five hundred, organized into four specialized divisions. The Bone Pikemen who held the front lines, the Shield-Bearers who locked the ashwood mantlets, the Sump-Engineers who operated the flood-water gates. The Sound-Runners who carried silent messages through the air-flow ducts.
Yan Zhiqiu stood upon the raised muster dais, her master slate resting upon a waist-high walnut lectern. Beside her stood Qiao Ming, his oilskin coat tied with split rush, holding his sixty-fathom horsehair sounding line. Behind them, eighty guild elders from the Common Board watched with steady, unblinking eyes.
