From the boiling mud around the Giant beast’s flank, thousands of charred, metal ribbons began to uncoil like black iron ribbons from a ruined printing press.
These were Zhu Heling’s spectral scrolls. The careful archive of seventy-four thousand extinct great realms that had risen, flourished, and perished across the nine failed epochs of the pre-flood universe. As the metal ribbons drifted through the dense fluid aether, they projected light-projected vignettes of cosmic collapse that swirled around Qiao Ming and Yan Zhiqiu like a blizzard of soot.
“Read them, map maker!” Zhu Heling’s voice snarled from the iron mud, fighting to reassemble his melting features. “Here is the Empire of the Nine Cauldrons—they built seven thousand leagues of marble aqueducts, and within three ages their rivers dried into salt-pans! Here is the Dynasty of the Sunken Mirrors—they mapped twenty thousand stars with star wheels of solid white-gold, and their astronomers starved in their towers when the winter sky froze into black ice! Here are the Great canal-cities of the Southern Shore—their granaries were full, their poetry was praised in seven languages, and in a single night a sea-quake drowned eighty million souls in their beds!”
The ribbons whipped around Qiao Ming’s face, showing images of shattered palaces, bone-strewn mudflats, and crumbling lighthouses whose lamps had been smashed by tidal bores. Among the drifting fragments, Qiao Ming recognized the record of the City of the Iron Bells. An entire great realm that had wrapped itself in brass domes to shut out the…
