The entrance to the Hall of Ten Thousand Sages was not a doorway. It was an underground vault designed to survive a sky-high bombardment.
Cast from seventy thousand tons of starry-sea bronze and cold-cooled dragon-iron, the huge double-doors stood sixty feet tall, their surface etched with the names of every sovereign scholar who had climbed to immortality since the dawn of the Jiuzhou Plane.
Frank approached the threshold. Then, munching calmly on a cold pork loin and pickled radish sandwich, he stopped three paces away, looked at the massive bronze pivot hinges. Then he wrinkled his nose.
“Zero grease zerks,” Frank announced, chewing thoughtfully. “No fittings anywhere on the hinge barrels. How do you expect to pump fresh grease into a sixty-ton door without a lubrication port? Moisture in the air in here is sitting at eighty-eight percent, there’s no cross-draft. I can smell damp lime and stale sulfur. Who designs an archival document vault without intake angled slats or an active dehumidifier?”
Behind him, Class 404 marched in tight worksite formation. Shen Shitou carried the twenty-four-foot light metal ladder across his star-forged shoulders. He held half a sandwich in his free hand. Princess Jiang Ling’er carried her brass tea kettle, its exhaust valve whistling gently as she vented a clean stream of dry, warm vapor into the chilly air to cut through the stale dampness. Niu Mang rested his shovel against his hip. Meanwhile, Xiao Yu and Murong Seven scanned the massive bronze portal with their testing instruments.
