The sensation beneath Qiao Ming’s bare soles was that of stepping upon thick, sun-cured river-ice that had formed over swift-moving water.
There was no stone under his feet. There was no bronze plate or oak decking. The tri-colored ribbon of light—woven from Sovereign Cang Hai’s deep turquoise tide-will, Sovereign Tai Xuan’s golden sky shape. Sovereign Shen Tu’s emerald reef-stonework—had solidified into a smooth, semi-clear highway four arm-lengths wide, suspended in the empty air three hundred arm-lengths above the glowing seed-waters of the Genesis Well.
The moment both of Qiao Ming’s feet cleared the dark rock coaming of Entry hall 999, the sense stonework of mortal existence ceased to function according to terrestrial habit.
His eyes, accustomed through fifty years of survey to the square joinery of stonework and the plumb-true verticals of sounding shafts, struggled to organize the space before him. The pathway appeared to go down at an angle of thirty degrees toward the south. Yet as he took his third step, his knees felt the heavy crushing load of climbing an almost upright cliff. When he turned his head to look back at the volcano bowl rim, the massive circular opening of the archway had shrunk to the size of a copper coin. Meanwhile, the stone railing appeared sixty arm-lengths tall, towering over them like a mountain range of black dark rock.
