To remember the drafting of the Ark was to remember the weight of an unmade universe pressing upon a single sheet of thick parchment.
Qiao Ming remained kneeling upon the hard speckled rock flags of Entry hall 950, his bare right hand still resting upon the warm dark rock foot of the ninety-arm-length giant statue. The golden light that filled the Hadal water column was no longer merely lighting up the safe hall. It was acting as a sound guide-rod, projecting the technical memory of the First Era directly into the fluid of his inner ear. Every load-bearing formula, every pulling math, and every grain of coarse grey rock ballast recorded in the original stone-built manifests unrolled across his mind like a scroll seventy leagues long.
He remembered the drawing tables of the First Dynasty.
They had been built from slabs of polished gray slate three deep-water lengths wide, mounted upon high-pressure jacks in the high pavilion above the Grand Shipyards of Taiyuan. In those days, before the sky had unraveled, the air had been dry, crisp, and smelling of sun-baked cedar shavings, boiling pine pitch, and crushed limestone. A thousand apprentices had stood at attention along the gallery, grinding black graphite ink and sharpening bone styluses, waiting for the Lead-Sounder of the Sunken Heavens to strike the first baseline.
