At twenty-four thousand deep-water lengths below the surface of the world, the upright descent reached its deep-rock conclusion.
Qiao Ming’s bare coral-jade soles sank into a deep, silent stratum of deep-sea silt that covered the floor of the Genesis Well like grey snow. The settled mud was cold, powdery, and infinitely fine, offering no pushback as his heels settled four inches into its compacted dust until they met the hard, unbending flat stone slabs of the ancient basin.
This was no ordinary marine mud. It was the Silt of Discarded Timelines. The crushed stone ash of nine failed cosmological epochs that had been discarded by the First Master builder before the foundation of the current heaven.
In his fifty years of lead-sounding across the sunken continents, Qiao Ming had surveyed every variety of subaquatic settled mud known to mortal charts: the coarse granite gravel of the Northern Shallows, the black fiery tephra of the Burning Trench, and the jelly-like sea-glass speck ooze of the Southern Gyre. Yet this silt was fully empty of organic decay or oceanic life. When he knelt and scooped a handful of the grey flour with his calloused jade palm, the dust sifted between his fingers like dry powdered bone. That left behind tiny flecks of hardened red stone, powdered amethyst, and stone-hard parchment.
