With measured, unrushed care, Qiao Ming knelt upon the edge of the great parchment, his bare knees resting against the pale reeds.
The scroll extended thirty arm-lengths from north to south, spanning the full width of the central star-pattern mosaic. To prepare such a document had needed three years of labor in the flooded scroll halls of the lower tiers. The paper itself had been made from the inner pith of ancient papyrus reeds harvested from the sunken banks of the Genesis River, beaten with wooden mallets until the fibers twisted together into a seamless, waterproof sheet six spans wide and fifty arm-lengths in total length.
Across that vast expanse, drafted with lines no thicker than a horsehair, lay the complete nervous system of the Drowned Dao.
Ten thousand statues were depicted upon the surface, each rendered with its exact map points, its height above the bedrock, its internal water chute dimensions, and the sound ringing hum of its hollow chest. From the base of each statue ran fine tiny blood vessel runnels that joined backup collection channels, which in turn came together upon the twelve master floodgates of the Central Siphon.
To the uneducated eyes of Zhu Heling’s iron-masters, the drafting appeared as an impossibly dense maze of sacred mandalas and astrological wheels. But to an initiate of the water-mapping lineages, the document was a working blueprint of a huge machine—a high-pressure network capable of routing millions of tons of high-pressure salt water through the heart of the mountain…
