The vault of Entry hall 983 was lower than the grand galleries above, built not from dressed dark rock, but from thick slabs of hardened sea-oak that had been stone-hard under forty hundred years of oceanic salt water.
The air here had grown intensely cold. Every breath Qiao Ming drew into his chest left a thin, burning residue of rime on his upper lip, tasting of bitter potash and dead starlight. His bare feet moved across the underwater floor with extreme caution. The flat stone slabs were coated in a layer of clear, slippery frost that had formed beneath the surface of the dark liquid—an impossible phenomenon born of the outer void’s negative breakdown.
The water itself had ceased to flow. It sat in the long gallery like a pool of black oil, so still and dense that it reflected the amber light of Yan Zhiqiu’s lantern without a single shiver.
In the center of the hall yawned the mouth of Drainage Sump Nine.
The sump was an ancient upright check well, eight arm-lengths across, lined with massive rings of cast gunmetal bronze. In the First Epoch, water-scribes had stood upon the bronze grating spanning its mouth to measure the settling rate of cosmic silt before the water passed into the keel’s main ballast tanks. The bronze grating had been torn away. Its massive mounting bolts, thick as a wrestler’s wrists, were bent backward like twisted straws, their snapped ends glistening with crystal-hardened lilac frost.
