Before proceeding to the Lithic Carillons, Qiao Ming performed his final duty of the border patrol: he tracked the Scholar’s retreat to the edge of the world.
He waded through the flooded transverse hall of Entry hall 099. There, the water reached mid-calf. The floor here was composed of rough dark rock flags crusted with small, clicking mussels that closed their shells with tiny, wet snaps as his bare feet approached.
In the silt of the fairway, the Scholar’s trail was clear.
A narrow trench of disturbed mud, smeared with yellow sulfur-powder and droplets of dark, clotted blood, marked the path where Ji Mingchuan had dragged his ruined leg toward the outer drainage chimney pipes. Every three paces, the Scholar had fallen, his trembling hands leaving deep, desperate claw-marks in the slime as he pulled his shivering body across the stone.
At the western boundary of the entry hall, seventy arm-lengths above the flooded floor, rose the Peripheral Crevice. A jagged, hairline fracture in the outer hull of the Ark where an ancient ground-shaking shock had snapped the giant stone dark rock plates apart.
Through the crack, a pale, sickly violet soft glow was filtering down into the hall.
It was the light of the dying cosmos—the cold, entropic glare of the outer void, with a freezing draft that turned the spray of the water into falling needles of ice.
