Episode 014| Seven Notches
Twelve hundred meters beneath the surface, a priest crouches at an ancient altar disc carved with inverted runes. It turns one notch, then seven — a motion his deepest texts barely describe — and he sends word up the chain that the Writer is in position.
Kaiyuan Year 1010 · Jan 1 · 10:59 · the Frozen Northern Reach, 1,200 meters directly beneath signal marker S-17-R · the Altar Chamber
The priest heard the snow moving overhead.
Not truly "heard" — he was 1,200 meters underground, and it was physically impossible for him to hear snow shifting on the surface. It was something else. Deep in the frozen earth, between the ice and the rock, ran an extremely thin mineral seam — a seam he'd known since the year he was born — and whenever something on the surface displaced on a large scale, that seam gave off a sound his whole kind could hear, something close to a page being turned.
That seam had been turning pages since 08:00 this morning.
The page just now had taken the longest.
He crouched at the outer rim of the altar disc.
The altar was a disc, six meters across, its edge slightly concave. The disc itself belonged to an earlier age — older than his kind had existed on this planet, older than the planet's present physical laws. Runes were carved across its surface, and the carving was inverted: each stroke begun at its tail end and worked back toward its start. Which meant these runes were not made to be "read" — they were made to let the system read in reverse.
He didn't dare step onto it. The first rule his kind trained into him was this: not until the moment of "already in position" may you set foot inside the disc.
After that one turning of the page, the disc moved.
The outer ring of runes rotated one notch counterclockwise.
In that second, every scale on the priest's body stood on end.
Each scale carried a thin layer of sensory fiber — the thing his kind had bought across several thousand years by letting certain functions of smell and hearing atrophy. Each time the runes moved a notch, the scales read out the corresponding energy value for him. The energy intensity of that one notch was the highest of all the single-notch motions he had witnessed this disc make in his lifetime.
Not only the highest. It far exceeded the benchmark in any record his kind had ever kept.
He slid his right hand into the hollow at the left of his chest — the chest-scales of his kind naturally split open an inner pouch — and drew out a thin, translucent sliver of mineral. The sliver gave off a faint green glow in his palm. The points of light pulsed irregularly, keeping time with the turning of the disc outside.
This mineral sliver was a transceiver.
At half his normal speaking speed he brought it to his lips.
"The Writer is in position."
As he spoke the line, he drew out every syllable to twice its usual length — his kind held some strings to brutally strict rules of pronunciation, and this one above all. Mispronounce a single sound, rush a single beat, and the whole Altar Chamber would turn and devour him.
He finished. Nothing happened.
The green glow of the sliver went from pulsing to a steady, constant brightness, then — slower than a heartbeat — began to flash a rhythm of three short and one long.
The signal had gone out.
Now the altar disc moved again.
This time it was not one notch.
It was seven notches.
The priest fell back half a step — he didn't dare retreat far; the moment the field around the disc shifted, even his line of retreat would be counted into the disc's "read target."
What seven notches meant, he himself had seen only in the deepest texts of his kind.
The original line in the text was: "The Writer himself, by his own will, seals his perception into a vessel the Writer once wrote with his own hand."
Put simply —
The one up above had just spliced himself into something he had left behind himself.
The priest closed his eyes and pressed the mineral sliver against his left eye.
Light passed through the sliver and projected the live coordinates of that bare patch — 1,200 meters above — into his optic nerve.
He couldn't look at that ground with an ordinary eye — an ordinary eye would be devoured by it in turn. But through this sliver he could look at it aslant.
He looked aslant for about three seconds.
Then, on his kind's low-whisper channel, he sent a second confirmation:
"The conditions of the Seventh-Layer Protocol have been satisfied automatically at the surface."
Twelve hundred meters above the frozen surface, Lika's brain-chip interface jumped to:
[Backup of Observer fragment: complete · 0.13%]0.07 to 0.13 — in the instant of seven notches, the progress had nearly doubled.
Lika didn't see it.
Or — he had only just begun to see.
【Ch. 014 End · deep beneath the frozen earth】
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