In the quiet hours of the low tide, Qiao Ming completed his check of the Scholar’s dropped records.
He sat upon his soapstone hearth in Entry hall 101, unrolling the final document from the tortoise-shell case: a massive technical blueprint drawn in gold ink upon stiff, purple silk—the blueprint of the Golden Sovereign, the flagship of the Nine Great Sects’ Exodus Fleet.
Qiao Ming held his wooden ruler against the drawing, his calloused fingers tracing the dimensions of the vessel.
The ship was monstrous. Three leagues long, one league wide, designed as a flying mountain of white jade and spirit-iron, powered by twelve massive void-drain tubes and thirty-six core-furnaces. Its inside was divided into sixty tiers of palatial pavilions, pleasure gardens, pill-refining laboratories, and private quiet focus chambers for the Grand Elders of the Cloud Peak Scroll hall.
Yet as Qiao Ming analyzed the ship’s logistics, the horrifying mathematics of the enterprise became clear.
The vessel had a working capacity of two thousand passengers.
The entire fleet of sixty dreadnoughts could carry, at total maximum, one hundred and twenty thousand individuals—barely the population of a minor country town.
And the mortal continents governed by the Nine Sects held over four hundred billion living beings.
