Valve Station Delta was the beating heart of the Azure Cloud mountain range.
He stood beneath the thirty-pace brass pipe hub. Lin Tao felt tiny, insignificant, and awed by the sheer physical boldness of the Precursor builders. The air was a swirling vortex of cool, spark-charged mist and scalding stone steam. Above them, thousands of tiny brass indicator gauges—each no larger than an apricot, with delicate silver needles dancing behind crystal bezels—monitored the deep water pressure of twelve separate underground river systems.
In the center of this heavy-duty cathedral, the seized high-pressure piston was stuck like a barbed arrow in the throat of a dragon.
The piston rod, cast from a solid metal tube of cold-drawn star-iron twelve inches thick, was jammed inside its bronze guide metal tube. A thick cake of crystal-hardened spirit salts and hardened stone scale had fused the metal surfaces together. That kept the piston from completing its return stroke.
With every bone-shaking beat of the system, forty thousand gallons of water backed up against the jammed gate, building a huge water-pressure wave that shuddered through the entire cave.
Lin Tao walked around the base of the brass pipe hub, his boots clicking crisply on the dry floor tiles. Unlike the flooded sump, the floor here was dry. It was built from linked six-sided slabs of non-porous white jade that had repelled moisture for eight hundred years.
