The forty-eight star-threads had been woven. Then, the seventy-two diamond cross-braces locked. The ten thousand old family statues awakened in their high galleries, one final underground danger remained buried beneath the floor of the Genesis Well.
At the exact nadir of the basin, directly beneath the central hard speckled rock keystone, lay the mouth of the Basal Silt Well.
This was an upright drainage shaft, thirty spans wide and fifty deep-water lengths deep, hewn directly into the ancient dark rock by the First Sovereign to serve as the ultimate settling sump of the Ark’s high-pressure system. In the First Epoch, heavy stone dust that could not be held in mid-air was meant to settle into this deep shaft, where periodic flushing cycles would discharge it harmlessly into the earth-shaking crust-sink zones of the mantle.
For three full epochs, however, Zhu Heling had inverted the function of the sump.
He had turned the Silt Well into the ultimate careful septic-tank of the cosmos. Into this dark fifty-fathom shaft, his void-court courts had dumped the packed, insoluble residues of seventy-four thousand extinct great realms. The stone-hard grease of burned libraries, the curdled sludge of poisoned watercourses, and the bitter thick tar of ruined dynasties that had perished in despair.
