Seventy arm-lengths above the floor of the Genesis Well, protruding from the vaulted dark rock ceiling like the inverted pillars of a drowned temple, hung the Seven Tidal Veins of Sovereign Cang Hai.
These were not ordinary water-pipes. They were the main blood channels of the Primordial Ark. Giant funnels cast from pure royal bell-bronze, each twenty arm-lengths in width at the lip and fluted with internal spiral vanes designed to inhale and exhale the huge hydro-cosmic tides of the universe.
In the original design of the First Sovereign, these seven veins functioned as the breathing lungs of the Ark. When the vessel sailed the cosmic void, the tidal veins circulated ancient liquid aether through the core engine rooms, cooling the spiritual boilers, driving the great paddle-wheels of the upper decks, and providing living water to the eighty-four thousand civil chambers where humanity was meant to sleep.
For three epochs, however, the mouths of these seven bronze channels had been plugged with thick, stone-hard bungs of void-iron and rotten-egg ash, hammered into the openings by Zhu Heling’s judges to starve the ship of its living pulse.
Now, as the warm seed-waters of the Nine Golden Pipes continued to flood the basin below, the pressure within the Genesis Well was rising at an exponential rate. If the Seven Tidal Veins were not right away uncapped and rigged to the foundation caisson, the piled up fluid pressure would blow out the vaulted ceiling of the wellhead, collapsing the entire lower bottom spine-beam…
