The water at the margin of the nine hundred and ninety-ninth portal did not roar. It had ceased its foaming long before the eleventh hour of the low watch, settling into a shallow, glass-clear sheet that barely reached the ankle-bones.
Qiao Ming halted upon the final slab of green veined stone. The stone beneath his bare soles was worn smooth by the passage of vanished ages, its stone veins fractured by hairline seams of white spar-stone that felt cool and reassuring against his hardened skin. His toes, calloused by twenty seasons of gripping algae-greased banded limestone and salt-bitten stone railings, spread naturally across the lip of the flat stone slab. For nine hundred and ninety-nine entry halls, the weight of the Drowned Dao had pressed against the crown of his skull like five deep-water lengths of lead-shot salt water. Here, at the gateway of the thousandth hall, that crushing downward drag had dissolved into a wide, breathless calm.
Beside him, Yan Zhiqiu lowered the heavy iron ring of her lantern. The flame within was small, fed by purified sheep fat, casting an amber disc across the damp hem of her coarse linen trousers. In her right hand she held the Broken Slate, its fractured dark rock edge catching the faint glow of the water. The slate remained still, its carved characters resting in quiet dormancy, no longer shaking with the uneven ground-shaking chimes that had haunted their ascent through the lower vaults.
