The second cycle began before the steam from the first had even settled against the vaulted white jade ceiling.
Lin Tao kept his fingers firmly on the shaft of the tuned brass needle. In his test left eye, the tracking data stream was no longer an uneven flurry of error messages. It was a rhythmic, predictable cascade of state shifts. It unfolded in accordance with the flawed Precursor firmware logic.
An orphaned resource, Lin Tao analyzed with razor-sharp clarity. Because the rollback subroutine failed to verify the physical drainage valve was fully closed, the one hundred liters of fluid drawn during the aborted cycle remained trapped in the intake pipe hub. The controller, running on the assumption that its memory buffer was clean, issued a fresh share-out command to replenish the missing volume.
In meatspace, this meant something that violated every deepest dogma taught in the grand lecture halls of the inner sect:
The mountain was pulling another one hundred liters of liquid spiritual essence from the deep-rock mantle, without deallocating or draining the one hundred liters that had already arrived.
The sight-glass casing, forged from six-inch cast bell-bronze, grew freezing cold to the touch as thousands of gallons of deep-mantle fluid rushed through its internal channels. Frost formed in delicate, feathery fronds across the brass bolts, glistening with a pale azure bioluminescence that bathed the drafting bench in an eerie, sky twilight. The sheer aromatic purity of the vapor was overwhelming. It smelled of mountain snowfields, crushed juniper needles…
