For nineteen seasons, across more than nine hundred deep-water lengths of physical and spirit descent, Qiao Ming had worn the same yellow oilskin coat.
It wasn’t a royal robe woven from sky silkworm threads. It was a common working garment of the Southern Guild, fashioned from heavy duck canvas that had been boiled in linseed oil, beeswax, and pine-tar until it was as stiff and weatherproof as cured ox-leather. Its hem was frayed from brushing against the gritty edges of granite wharves. Its cuffs were blackened with greasy residue from winches and lead-weights. And its back was scored with pale salt-lines that marked every storm he had ever weathered from the Yellow Reach to the Hadal trenches.
It had served him as an umbrella in pouring mountain cloudbursts. It had served him as a blanket when sleeping upon the wet ballast-stones of open skiffs. And in the freezing depths of the outer entry halls, it had served as the thin, mortal barrier preserving the last spark of human warmth within his chest against the starving chill of the void.
Now, at twenty-seven thousand deep-water lengths below the surface of the universe, under a water-pressure load that exceeded eleven mountain-crushing pressure, the oilskin coat had completed its appointed destiny.
