The dust that fell from the vaulted ceiling was not grey ash. It was white stone powder, crushed by sound deep ring.
Every three seconds, a dull, rhythmic hammer-stroke punched through eighty feet of solid mountain granite:
THUD. THUD. THUD.
It was the clear sound signed name of Earth-Piercing Awls. It was heavy, enchanted iron stakes driven by steam hammers, used by royal prospectors and mercenary cartels to conduct deep-strata sound mapping.
Zhao Wuji was scanning the Seventh Ward’s bedrock under the legal pretense of “Emergency Geological Cavity Inspections.”
Down inside Sub-Vault Zero, the sound waves were not scattering into empty air.
The ancient staging array’s brittle silver channels, already clogged with three hundred years of hardened stone melted rock waste and holding seventy-six sea-weights of un-vented spiritual back-pressure, began to sway like over-tuned piano wires.
A hairline fracture spider-webbed across the white jade dais.
