The smoke that filled Entry hall 512 was not the gray, fragrant smoke of burning pine chips or sandalwood sticks.
It was greasy, purple-black, and so dense that it clung to the ceiling vaults like wet wool. It carried the choking stench of boiled sulfur, calcined bone-oil, and roasted amber. The horrific aroma produced when stone-hard spiritual laws are forced into an unnatural potion-made melt.
Four portable smelting furnaces, forged from thick sheets of boiler-iron and lined with heat-proof fireclay, had been assembled upon the eight-sided terrace of the Grand Navel. Beneath each fire, coal-fires roared under the forced draft of hand-pumped leather bellows. The coals glowed with a blazing bright, lemon-yellow heat, their draft-nozzles whistling like angry adders.
Zhu Heling stood before the central crucible, his singed sleeves rolled back to his elbows, revealing arms mottled with potion-made acid-scars and heat-blisters. Over his face he wore a curved mask of see-through mica, held tight by oiled leather straps that bit into his hollow cheeks.
“Raise the heat to fifteen hundred degrees!” Zhu Heling shouted, his voice muffled by the mica shield. “Do not let the melted rock waste skin over! Add four ounces of powdered red stone and half a dram of sky lead!”
