The air inside the forty-arm-length archway of the thirty-first gate began to shiver three minutes before the black wave appeared.
It was a sound blast wave traveling through the seventy leagues of living bedrock, far heavier than any tremor carried through the air. The ninety-arm-length curtain of silver light, rising from the four-inch line of cured hadal silt, hummed with a rising, crystal-clear pitch that climbed from one hundred and fourteen cycles toward two hundred. Across the entire outer edge, the sealed stone was transferring its collected water-pressure tension inward, focusing the load-bearing pushback of forty entry halls upon this single, unsealed water gate-portal. For ten thousand years, the White Jade Barrier had stood as the master control valve of the deep. Now, every ton of its ancient mass was leaning into the threshold.
Here, at the central threshold of the Barrier of White Jade, the ancient master builders had left an opening forty arm-lengths wide and thirty arm-lengths high to allow the drainage outflow from forty districts to pass into the lower deep-sea reservoirs.
Outside that opening lay ruin: eighty leagues of chewed dark rock, fallen stone beams, and the iron dreadnoughts of Zhu Heling’s armada.
Inside that opening lay the living: three thousand refugees huddled behind the second bronze gates, the sacred memory of ten thousand sleeping sovereigns, and the clean, flawless jade of the inner safe halls.
