The seventy-second hour of nonstop running stripped away the distinction between mortal flesh and the ancient stone beneath Qiao Ming’s bare feet.
He was no longer consciously commanding his legs to lift, his ankles to flex, or his toes to grip the cold, salt-worn stone floor of Entry hall 378. The physical body had passed beyond tiredness, beyond pain, entering a strange, freezing state of rhythmic trance where every movement was dictated by the sound deep ring of the House itself. His heart beat forty-four times a minute—a slow, deep, massive pulse that mirrored the twelve-second heave of the deep-sea tide. In the water-mapping treatises of the Drowned Dao, this state was known as the Depth-chart Sleep. The condition wherein a land-mapper’s spirit sinks to the total floor of mind, leaving the physical form to function as a pure clockwork instrument of depth and line.
The air in the long hall was freezing. It drifted down from the high air-flow shafts at two degrees below zero, but Qiao Ming felt neither the cold nor the sharp gravel that cut into his raw heels. His body was sustained by an internal potion-made fire, stoked by sixty hours of boiling amber fumes and the living current of the deep.
