The base of the central round hall looked like the scene of a fiery explosion frozen in solid glass.
Surrounding the fifty-pace star-iron metal tube was a moat ten paces wide and four paces deep, designed to house the Primary Intake Pipe system of the land-wide cooling circuit. But the moat was no longer a waterway. It was fully filled with a huge, stone-hard dam of black stone-glass melted rock waste, glass-fused sulfur, and crystal-hardened lead carbonate.
The mass rose three feet above the floor grates. It wrapped the intake valves in a jagged, rock-hard shell that radiated waves of choking, chemical heat.
Lin Tao stood at the lip of the moat. His protective copper goggles reflected the dull red glow pulsing from beneath the crust. The air here was so hot that the fringes of his linen cloak curled and browned under the radiant flux. Every breath was a rasp of dry fire air that threatened to sear the lung lining.
“Here is the bottleneck,” Lin Tao said. He pointed with his steel land-mapper metal pen toward the center of the melted rock waste mound. “The intake pipe hub sits directly beneath that central dome of black glass. The surface chimney pipes burst three thousand years ago. Then, the emergency bypass tried to dump boiling liquid into this basin. But without active drainage, the stone salts separated and baked into solid rock.”
