Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

In the province of Zhejiang in eastern China, near a village called Shiyan Beicun, the local people long believed that a cluster of small ponds were bottomless. For as long as anyone could remember, the dark still water had simply been there, and no one knew how deep it went. In 1992, a few curious villagers decided to find out. They bought pumps and began to drain one of the ponds, expecting perhaps to find fish, or mud, or nothing at all. Instead, as the water level dropped, the walls of an enormous chamber rose out of the darkness around them. The pond was not a pond. It was the flooded mouth of a colossal artificial cavern, hewn by human hands out of solid rock — and it was only the first of many. A City Carved Into the Dark When the villagers and, later, the archaeologists had drained the surrounding ponds, they found themselves standing inside something extraordinary. There were at least two dozen separate caverns, each one a great hall cut down into the sandstone, some of the...