With the underground sump cleansed to its bedrock floor, the ancient, glass-fused crust of outer void-rot that had crusted the outer edge walls of the Genesis Well could no longer sustain its unnatural grip upon the planet.
For three full epochs, the sixty-league dark rock walls of the volcano bowl had been smothered beneath the Void-Shell. A ugly, stone-hard armor of cold void-iron, fiery melted rock waste, and stone-hard thick tar that Zhu Heling had poured over the stone to prevent the living earth from breathing.
This black back shell was three arm-lengths thick, pitted with deep acid-burning blisters and scored with the blasphemous office tallies of the judges. It acted like an iron-hard iron corset clamped around the throat of the wellhead, stifling the natural deep-rock deep ring between the world-size mantle and the Primordial Ark.
Now, starved of its entropic fuel by the purification of the sump. Then he subjected to the intense ringing shakes of the ten thousand old family cordons, the black back shell was riddled with millions of tiny stress-fractures.
The iron was dying.
Qiao Ming and Yan Zhiqiu stood upon the northern rim of the dark rock doorstep at twenty-nine thousand two hundred deep-water lengths.
