The column of focused solar bright purple heat wave dropping from the twelve bronze mirrors was thirty feet wide at the cloud base, narrowing into a needle-sharp beam of three-hundred-thousand-degree white star-fire as it touched down. The air inside the tiered arena spark-charged into crackling ozone, and pebbles on the marble floor began to liquefy before the beam even made physical contact.
“Perish!” High Scribe Checker Mo Sha screamed from the edge of the terrace, his black sharkskin robes billowing in the white-hot heat updraft. “Witness the Solar Cleansing of the Ancestral Sanctum!”
Six thousand scholars covered their faces, shielding their eyes as the searing light threatened their sight.
Frank stood calmly beside his upturned wooden crate, hands tucked into the front pockets of his denim overalls. “Curved collector without a focal heat sensor,” Frank observed. He shook his head behind his dark safety goggles. “They’re dumping eighty thousand lumens into an uncollimated waveguide. The beam is wandering by three point two degrees because of heat swelling in the bronze mounting brackets.”
He glanced at Xiao Yu, who was standing three paces forward on the gravel. “Xiao Yu. Set up the copper plate. Let’s show these scribes what happens when you don’t calculate your angles of incidence and glow.”
