While the shattered jaw of the Void-Giant beast cried rivers of rotten-egg machine-oil into the grey silt, Qiao Ming knelt upon the basal flat stone slabs. Then he opened the oiled horn case slung beneath his left arm.
From within the waterproof horn tube, he withdrew his personal survey journal—a battered, accordion-folded ledger built from ninety leaves of sun-cured sharkskin, bound between thin plates of seasoned bitter pine-resin-wood.
The sharkskin had been harvested from deep-sea deep-sea hound-sharks of the Outer Banks, tanned with oak gall and smoked for forty days over smoldering river-kelp according to the secret arts of the Southern Guild. Such parchment was impervious to the rotting salt of the sea. Water could not soften its grain, nor could the skin-burning acids of the Hadal trenches dissolve the thick, black squid-ink pressed into its pores.
The journal was yellowed with fifty seasons of full-body VR, its margins stained with dried salt, lamp-black. The greasy brown fingerprints of a man who wrote his observations while bailing bilges in the teeth of winter squalls. Every page was ruled with fine, hand-drawn red ink-lines, crowded with thousands of tiny entries written in the laconic, disciplined script of the Southern Guild. Sounding depths, bottom substrates, drift angles, tidal offsets, and the names of drowned reefs that had claimed the hulls of careless captains.
