The spool that Qiao Ming drew from his oilskin pouch was no larger than a royal teacup, turned from dense, fragrant bitter pine-resin-wood and bound with silver hoops.
Yet wound upon this modest wooden spindle were eight hundred and forty thousand arm-lengths of astral silk. A nonstop, unbroken cord spun from the distilled, incorruptible spiritual marrow of the ten thousand sleeping statues housed within the upper entry halls of the Primordial Ark.
In the hundreds of years before the Great Flooding, when the disaster was still a distant whisper upon the southern horizon, ten thousand fighters, master-craftsmen, high-pressure engineers, and scholars of the First Heaven had voluntarily surrendered their mortal physical forms. They had entered the Hall of Ten Thousand Statues. They allowed their living bodies to petrify into sacred granite and white jade, preserving their uncorrupted dao-memories within the stone so that a living seed of human civil order might survive the end of the world.
From the heart of each stone-hard statue, the ancient priest-navigators had drawn a single filament of pure, uncreated astral light. A thread finer than a spider’s web, yet possessing a pulling strength greater than forged star-fallen iron. These ten thousand filaments had been gathered, twisted, and braided together upon this single bitter pine-resin spool. He waited for the hour when the bottom spine-beam of the Ark must be lashed to the spine of the cosmos.
