The water of Entry hall 950 did not grow warmer as the deeper memories surfaced. It grew denser, taking on the heavy, thick, sticky pushback of cold stone oil.
Qiao Ming remained kneeling before the ninety-arm-length giant statue, his bare right hand still pressed into the dark rock matrix of the titan’s foot. The golden radiance that had wrapped around the platform now began to swirl with dark, marble-like striations. Bands of gray and white lime-chalk suspended in the Hadal salt water, tracing the slow, hardening drift of the middle epochs. Through his sound chest muscle, he could hear the sound of the vessel’s ancient joints groaning under the weight of three hundred thousand seasons of pooling settled mud.
“The third cycle...” Qiao Ming whispered, his salt-cracked lips moving against the inner bronze mesh of his helmet. “It was the era of the white plaster.”
Beside him, Yan Zhiqiu kept her grip upon his shoulder, her lead-weighted boots planted firmly upon the hard speckled rock flags. The green light of the Broken Slate upon the altar pulsed in slow, mournful syncopation with the golden bands in the water, lighting up the fine wrinkles around his eyes through the quartz viewport.
