The description of the Fire-Arrays came not from rumor, but from the official audit ledgers that Yan Zhiqiu had stolen from the Imperial Archive before its destruction.
She sat by the glowing salt-kiln, her hands resting flat upon the Broken Slate, reciting figures and technical specifications with the terrifying, photographic memory of a royal scribe. In her voice, there was no tears, no fake drama, and no rhetoric. There was only the devastating weight of office accuracy.
“The arrays were called The Nine-Fold Heaven-Melting Cauldrons,” she said, her grey eyes reflecting the vermilion coals. “They weren’t cooking pots of iron that rested upon the ground. They were inverted moving arrays suspended from twelve void-cruisers anchored in high orbit. Each cruiser deployed a linked network of spirit-refraction mirrors made of polished star-fallen copper, angled to focus the surrounding solar heat wave and the world-size magnetic lines into a single, needle-fine focal plane at ground level.”
Qiao Ming listened with his chin resting upon his chest, his hands gripping his leather harness straps, feeling the rough texture of the horsehair line against his knuckles.
“When the array was engaged,” she continued, “it didn’t produce a sudden explosion. An explosion was inefficient. It scattered the organic materials and boiled away the delicate soul-filaments before they could be condensed. Instead, the array generated a sustained, low-hum microwave field that heated the targeted province to exactly three thousand four hundred degrees.”
