The water in the sub-floor drainage channels was four degrees above freezing, heavy with stone salts, and black as squid ink.
Yan Zhiqiu swam without a torch.
In the flooded tunnels beneath the northern foundations of Entry hall 380, any artificial light would have turned the clear hadal water into a bright light for the Scholar’s underwater sensor nets. She navigated entirely by the tactile feedback of her fingertips and the faint, internal deep ring of the pre-flood Broken Slate.
She held the ancient relic before her with both hands, its flat slate plane angled slightly downward to serve as a water-flow diving plane.
Whenever her shoulders brushed against the slimy, algae-crusted cut stone blocks of the channel walls, the slate shivered in her palms, emitting a micro-sound pulse that bounced off the granite stonework. In her mind’s eye, the soundings painted a three-space-folding map of the drowned hall: twelve arm-lengths wide, eight arm-lengths high, half-round in cross-section, with an outward drainage slope of one inch per fathom.
The stonework here belonged to the First Deluge, carved by master builders who had expected the sinking of the world. Every stone block was five arm-lengths long, dressed with fine tooth-chisels and fitted dry without mortar, secured only by hidden bronze dovetail clamps. Along the spring-line of the vaulted tunnel, bas-relief carvings of ancient river-dragons and cartographic depth-scales slid past her numb fingertips, slick with hadal silt.
