The shadow cast by the Primordial Loom extended fifty paces across the white marble floor, clean and sharp as the gnomon-line of a great mid-belt sundial.
Qiao Ming stood at the base of the machine, his bare feet planted firmly upon the dry flags. His oilskin coat, stiffened by years of salt spray, brushed against his shins as he tilted his head back to take in the sheer verticality of the bronze uprights. The two lateral support posts rose fifty arm-lengths into the darkness of the dome, cast from a dense, sea-hardened sky bronze that bore no green rust, no rust-scabs, and no salt-rime. The metal was polished to the dark, gleaming hue of smoked chestnuts, reflecting the golden radiance of the Genesis Well like twin mirrors set to flank the universe.
Between the uprights stretched the warp-threads.
They weren’t spun from flax, nettle, or silkworm cocoon. Each thread was a taut, hair-thin filament of aligned light that dropped from an invisible beam in the ceiling vault to anchor into a massive level roller of stone-hard boxwood at the base. Millions of these filaments stood in parallel posture, spaced so exactly that a single hair from his beard could not pass between them without brushing both sides.
