When Yan Zhiqiu opened her throat for the second movement of the Harvest Song, she was no longer singing alone.
From the northernmost archway of Entry hall 001 to the granite cutwater of the High Meridian Prow in Entry hall 098, ten thousand stone giant statues joined their voices to her mortal melody.
It wasn’t a chaotic roar, nor was it a simple all at once chorus. It was a huge, exactly precise ten-part polyphonic choral stonework. The ancient Chant of the Ten Sovereign Epochs, designed during the founding of the Ark to bind the collective soul of humanity to the stones of the earth.
The ten choirs sounded according to their dynastic stations across the three-mile expanse:
The two thousand foundation warriors along the lower keel provided the sub-bass drone. A massive, underground foundation at sixty-four hertz that shook the fiery dust from the bedrock.
Above them, the fifteen hundred canal engineers and water gate-masters added the deep registers at one hundred and twenty-eight hertz, singing complex, waving counterpoints that mimicked the flow of mountain rivers through stone water gates.
The twelve hundred grain-masters and court guards of the central plazas held the bass-deep at one hundred and eight hertz. They anchored the agricultural memory of the soil into the stone floor.
