“Look at that burner pressure! Look at that blue flame!”
Alchemist Boom-Pot Sun—a round, barrel-chested man wearing a heavy leather apron covered in scorch marks and dried herb stains—knelt on the insulated catwalk of the Solar Jacket and pressed his brass goggles right against a fifty-yard burner grate.
Directly beneath the heavy Star-Iron grate, pure golden-white solar fire—filtered by Ao Ming’s steady dragon breath down in the core—roared upward at a constant, roaring three thousand degrees.
“Back when I was an apprentice in the Central Continent’s Pill-King Pavilion,” Boom-Pot Sun said, wiping a tear from his soot-blackened cheek with the back of a giant iron wrench, “the Grand Elder beat me with a bamboo stick because my third-grade pill furnace blew the roof off the sect master’s bedroom. He told me, ‘Sun Baolu, your fire control is too violent! No stove in this world can survive your recipes!’ Well, look at me now, old man! My stove is fifty million miles wide!”
Beside him on the catwalk, Old Guo chuckled, resting his massive iron soup ladle on his shoulder as he tested the heat coming off the grate with his thick, calloused palm.
“The heat is steady enough, Master Sun,” Old Guo nodded approvingly, “but if we put ordinary iron pots on top of solar flares, the bottoms will burn black before the mutton bones even soften. If you burn my soup stock, I don’t care if you’re a Rank 7 Peak Grandmaster Alchemist—you’re peeling onions for a month.”
