The forty thousand gallons of boiling sulfuric acid struck the northern weir with a dull, underground roar that shook the granite pillars of Entry hall 881.
From the three heavy drilling platforms of the Sovereign Conclave, flexible wire-braided hoses pulsed like bloated black pythons, vomiting thick, steaming streams of yellow-green burning acid directly into the bored injection sockets. The acid was heated to three hundred degrees by high-pressure steam jackets, designed by Zhu Heling to melt through the stone-glass matrix of the rock and turn the ancient dark rock into porous slurry. The chemical composition had been refined in the high furnaces of the capital. Packed oil of burning acid fortified with distilled spirit-salts, capable of dissolving hardened bronze and eating through granite blocks in minutes. Where the burning acid made contact with the stone, violent chemical fumes erupted into the air, filling the northern half of the chamber with dense, choking clouds of rotten-egg vapor that hissed against the cold rock.
The alchemists of the Conclave, clad in heavy lead-lined aprons and sealed glass respirators, cheered through their brass speaking tubes, believing that the foundation of the Axis Mundi was already dissolving beneath their assault. Their steam pumps hammered in rhythmic fury, iron pistons driving forward with eighty-pound strokes to force the acid-burning fluid deeper into the mountain’s pores. They shouted through the clatter of the boilers. They waved their oilcloth gloves at the boiling cascades of green foam pouring into the fissures, convinced that their science had finally…
