Midnight in the lower quarry barracks brought a silence so heavy it felt high-pressure, like the silence at the bottom of an ocean trench.
Eighty debt-bound laborers slept packed together on damp pallets of rotted rye straw inside the drift cave. The air was a choking soup of unwashed bodies, gangrenous ulcers, and the sour vinegar stench of coal dust sweat. A single oil lamp flickered near the timber doorway. It cast long, wavering shadows across the rows of sleeping men whose breath came in ragged, wheezing gasps.
Lin Tao lay awake on the hard stone floor, his back pressed against the cold granite wall.
His body was deteriorating rapidly under the brutal physical demands of the quarry. His broken left collarbone throbbed with an angry, inflammatory heat that sent sharp stabs of pain through his neck every time he drew a breath. His inner body heat remained dangerously raised at thirty-eight point six degrees. The ungrounded moving recoil from the afternoon’s cave-in had left his right shoulder bruised and stiff, with micro-blood-vessel ruptures darkening the skin of his chest into mottled purple bruises.
I need a sterile cache, he thought, staring up into the pitch-black void of the cave roof. If Hu searches the straw pallets during tomorrow’s morning muster, he will find the iron metal pen and the copper wire. In a penal labor camp, carrying cold iron without an overseer’s brand is an immediate summary execution.
He pushed himself up from the floor, moving with slow, calculated care to avoid triggering the friction agony in his shoulder.
Beside him, Tie Shan breathed with the deep, steady beat of a hibernating bear. The young giant lay on his side, his scarred back exposed to the damp draft, one massive fist curled tightly around an unworked block of iron ore even in his sleep. Tie Shan didn’t stir as Lin Tao stepped over the sleeping bodies, his bare feet making no sound on the damp stone floor.
Lin Tao slipped through the unlatched timber door, moving past the snoring night guard who sat slumped against an empty kerosene barrel. Then he stepped out into the abandoned eastern haulage drift.
The eastern drift had been unsafe twenty years ago after a pocket of odorless black-damp gas suffocated an entire thirty-man shift in their sleep. The entrance was barricaded by a row of rotted pine logs, plastered with yellow paper ward-magic charms whose red stone ink had long since faded to dry brown dust. The miners believed the drift was haunted by the vengeful spirits of the suffocated shift. Not even Overseer Hu’s cruelest guards set foot beyond the timber barrier.
Lin Tao stepped over the rotted pine logs without pause.
Through his left eye, the complete darkness of the mine was entirely meaningless. The damp walls and flooded floor were rendered in crisp, pale-green wireframe lines, lit up by the tracking data overlay of the Sovereign Engine:
He walked sixty paces into the damp, silent tunnel. His boots splashed through shallow pools of stone-heavy runoff that smelled of old copper and rotting shale. The air grew colder with every step, shedding the human stink of the barracks and taking on the sterile, metal scent of ancient, undisturbed stone.
At the terminus of the drift, two huge granite blocks formed a corner where the Precursor digging had suddenly halted thousand years ago.
To an ordinary fighter carrying a torch, the two granite blocks appeared to meet at a seamless right angle—a solid, impassable wall marking the boundary of the mountain. But to Lin Tao’s left eye, the two polygons didn’t touch.
There was an unrendered shape gap. A spatial crevice three feet wide and six feet deep that had never been assigned solid crash properties by the Sovereign Engine.
A null-space crevice. A dead memory address in reality’s map point table.
Lin Tao reached forward with his four-inch land-mapper’s metal pen.
The iron tip passed into the solid gray stone without encountering a single ounce of pushback, sinking into total nothingness as if the mountain were made of smoke.
Lin Tao took a slow breath. He closed his eyes for a heartbeat, and stepped directly through the solid stone face.
The moment his body cleared the boundary, the damp smell of mine water, sulfur, and rot vanished entirely.
The air inside the null-space crevice was bone-dry, utterly motionless, and fully empty of surrounding heat. It felt like stepping inside an airless empty pocket chamber. There was no wind. There was no sound. There was not even the low, deep thrum of the mountain’s bedrock shaking beneath his boots.
He lowered his gaze to the floor.
His boots touched something dry, brittle, and smooth.
Lin Tao adjusted his tracking data filter, increasing the contrast of the wireframe overlay.
Resting against the unrendered back wall of the crevice sat a human skeleton. The bones were chalk-white, hardened by hundreds of years of dry solitude, clad in the rotted, moth-eaten tatters of what had once been indigo silk robes.
This had not been an indentured quarry slave. Indigo silk was the exclusive dress of an inner sect student from the Azure Cloud Sect’s founding era. The student had crawled into this shape error hundreds of years ago to escape an enemy, or perhaps to meditate in secret, and had died in total, sterile solitude when his lifespan ran dry.
On the skeleton’s right index finger rested a ring of dull, dark green jade.
Lin Tao knelt beside the dry bones, his eyes narrowing with test focus.
Lin Tao stared at the green jade band in the darkness. He felt the rapid, rhythmic thump of his pulse against his ribs.
A spatial storage ring with an uninitialized memory buffer.
Here, hidden inside an unrendered memory leak of the universe, lay the exact tool he needed to survive the morning tally.