Five hundred feet above the meadow, inside the lower hold of the Heavenly Mandate, the floating building deck was a chamber of screaming metal.
Sixteen massive circular furnaces—each forged from five tons of cast bronze and lined with heat-resistant dark rock brick—sat in twin rows along the ship’s central keel. Inside each fire, stacks of fist-sized high-grade spirit stones were crumbling into blinding, violet-white star-fire, generating millions of lumens of raw spiritual flux. Thick copper channel pipes, as wide as a man’s torso, ran from the fire heads into the main anti-gravity keels below the deck plates.
Under normal cruising conditions, the flux flowed through the channels like water through an open water gate. It maintained the ship’s floating balance with the earth’s gravity pull.
Now, the channels were cold.
At the base of each fire, a heavy bronze rotary valve—controlled by a self-running jade office actuator—sat wedged at a forty-five-degree angle. It shook with a high-pitched, high-pressure chatter that shook the rivets out of the floor plates. Every time the fire tried to push a pulse of floating flux into the keels, the actuator queried the central tax ledger for fuel clearance.
The ledger returned an audit lock.
The valve slammed shut, cutting off the flow. A split second later, the ship’s gravity sensors detected a loss of height, commanding the valve to reopen. The valve swung open. The actuator queried the ledger. The ledger returned the lock. The valve slammed shut.
