The opening of the twenty-arm-length bronze iris released a breath out that had been trapped beneath the floor of the world for thirty hundred years.
It was no mere blast of surface wind. It was a slow, heavy subsidence of displaced mass that smelled of stone-hard marrow, warm animal fat, and ancient stone oil. As the massive bronze shutters folded outward into their circular wall-recesses with a rhythmic series of heavy, metal clanks, Qiao Ming stepped to the threshold of the shaft. His bare, calloused feet gripped the curved lip of the bronze portal, his toes curling over the cold metal rim. Below him yawned the central engine vault of the Primordial Ark. An underground cave so vast that the amber radiance of Yan Zhiqiu’s Broken Slate could not light up its lateral inner walls.
Here lay the body foundation of the great vessel.
The walls of this giant stone chamber were not built from dressed stone or riveted bronze plates. They were carved directly from the stone-hard spinal spine bones of the World-Serpent, the ancient cosmic beast whose carcass had been salvaged from the deep-sea silt of the Hadal Trench during the First Epoch to form the living keel of humanity’s safe hall. Each vertebra stood forty arm-lengths tall, white as seasoned ivory, its porous spongy-bone filled with solidified veins of dark star-fallen copper that hummed with faint, automatic deep ring. For three thousand years, those stone-hard bones had absorbed the crushing deep water pressure of the drowned heavens…
