The silence that settled over Entry hall 120 in the wake of the black flood was vast, cold, and profoundly humiliating.
Across the four-hundred-pace expanse of the sunken basin, forty thousand tons of ancient settled mud lay twelve arm-lengths deep, glistening in the pale light of the high window row shafts like a lake of dark grease. The roaring wave that had swept through the outer edge grates had already spent its speed, settling into a dense, jelly-like slurry whose surface barely rippled as the cold air of the hall moved across it.
In that lake sat four thousand two hundred elite warriors of the Sovereign Conclave.
They weren’t dead. Not a single skull had been fractured, not a single rib crushed beneath stone. The monstrous thickness of the black silt had acted as a huge high-pressure brake, converting forty miles per hour of rushing fluid into a gentle, choking slowdown. But their trouble was total. Buried to their waists, their chests, or their armpits, the soldiers found that every try to channel their martial qi into their limbs resulted only in a dull, numbing ache.
Qiao Ming stood at the edge of the northern terrace, his bare calloused feet planted firmly upon the dry pale limestone coping. He held a measuring rod of seasoned boxwood, dipping its notched end into the margin of the mud to test the setting rate. Beside him, two refugee youths held large clay pot tubs filled with clean, sweet rainwater drawn from the water…
