Entry hall 601 was silent with the deep, terrifying silence of an archive that holds the death certificates of seven great realms.
Here, across one hundred and fifty underground galleries that stretched for four leagues beneath the middle decks, was the Great Library of the First Universe. The walls were not bare stone. They were lined from floor to ceiling with millions of recessed niches carved from dark grey soapstone, each holding a stone-hard scroll of thin, flexible soapstone, sheets of hammered lead leaf, or cylinders of white green jade engraved with tiny seal characters. Every scroll was cataloged according to the decimal registers of the ancient ministries: hydrodynamics, sky mechanics, metalworking, agrarian law, medicine, and philosophy.
These soapstone leaves had been split along natural metamorphic foliation planes twelve thousand years ago, each leaf shaved to the thickness of three sheets of paper, then soaked in boiling tung oil and pine resin to repel moisture before being etched with diamond needles. For twelve thousand years, these galleries had remained underwater beneath forty deep-water lengths of cold, stale salt water. The water had seeped into every niche, depositing a fine, silken settled mud that obscured the letters. Meanwhile, the crushing deep water pressure had threatened to fuse the delicate soapstone leaves into solid blocks of stone. Without the sound pulse of the Great Bell, another century of full-body VR would have converted the entire library into an unreadable mass of stone-hard shale.
