The liquid silver entered the bronze pipe hub not as a drop, but as a silver sliver of liquid ice.
Hanging by her knees from the overhead narrow high walkway rail, Yan Zhiqiu leaned her torso upside down above the boiling copper retorts. Her hands, steady despite the blistering heat streaming from the steam pipes, unscrewed the threaded cap of the brass metal tube. With a smooth, flicking motion of her wrist, she poured three drops of pure hadal liquid silver directly into the check petcock of the main reflux valve.
The reaction was instant, violent, and silent.
The liquid silver did not mix with the flowing potion-made broth. It acted as a sound crystal-forming trigger. In the spirit chemistry of the Drowned Dao, hadal liquid silver carried the memory of eighty thousand deep-water lengths of water-pressure squeezing. When it met the hot, volatile solution of human marrow, sulfur, and raw void-fire-oil, the liquid metal drew the moving heat from the surrounding organic molecules in a fraction of a split second.
The glowing crimson broth inside the pipe hub flashed dark purple.
Then it froze.
It didn’t freeze into soft ice. It crystal-hardened into solid, rock-hard aggregate of red stone and barium sulfate. Within two seconds, forty arm-lengths of high-pressure bronze piping choked fully, transforming a free-flowing channel into a solid plug of dense stone.
