The water inside the shallow bronze basin at the foot of the thirty-first gate was so cold that thin needles of clear ice were beginning to crystallize along the rim.
It was consecrated hadal salt water, drawn from a depth of four thousand deep-water lengths by the First Mapmaker and preserved in sealed clay pot jars beneath the floor of the White Jade Barrier. It carried no settled mud, no river silt, and no organic decay. It was pure, heavy sea-water under ninety sea-weights of ancient pressure, so dense that a copper coin dropped into the basin sank with the slow, graceful drift of a falling feather.
Qiao Ming sat upon the lowest step of the jade dais, his coarse linen trousers rolled above his knees. His bare feet, blackened by soot from the crawler battles and crusted with the white dust of three hundred ruined weavers, rested over the edge of the bronze basin.
With slow, deliberate movements, he lowered his feet into the freezing salt water.
The cold hit his skin like an electric shock, racing up the tendons of his calves and locking the muscles of his shins in an iron grip. He didn’t pull back. He closed his eyes, inhaling the sharp, stone scent of the hadal water, feeling the salt bite into the tiny cuts and abrasions along his soles.
