When the twenty-pound bronze sinker struck the swirling core of the Void Giant beast, Qiao Ming felt the impact not in his arms, but in the marrow of his bones.
The braided horsehair line snapped bar-taut, shaking with such extreme speed that the friction boiled away the droplets of bitter violet slime clinging to the cord.
The Void Giant beast was not a creature of solid matter. It was a sound strange flaw of negative flow pushback, an anti-deep ring generated by the entropic collapse of eleven dead universes. It survived by drinking sound, consuming striking force, and pulling physical reality into its silent, frozen grave.
Against such an entity, mortal steel would have shattered like glass, and royal sorcery would have been swallowed without a ripple.
But Qiao Ming did not strike to wound.
He sounded to measure.
In the water-mapping grammar of the Drowned Dao, to sound the true depth of a body of water was to define its limits, to strip away its terrifying mystery, and to force its chaotic, lawless depths to conform to the unbending shape of the map maker’s chart.
The horsehair line sent the four-hundred-and-forty hertz standing wave into the bed-rock of the Genesis Well. Then, the lead sinker did not merely measure physical distance. The lead sinker was engraved with the seventy-two water-mapping seals of the Jade Board. Ancient map point markers that mapped the oceanic contours of the First Continent before the deluge. As each knot of the braided horsehair line…
