Descent into the Lower Cauldron Tier was like entering the high-pressure boiler room of a sunken battleship.
The stone stairway plunged seventy feet beneath the Conclave courtyard. It spiraled through solid granite walls dripping with water drops. With every step, the surrounding air grew denser, hotter, and heavier with the stench of hardened herbs and boiling stone salt. By the time Lin Tao and Tie Shan reached the bottom landing, the heat had climbed past forty-five degrees. The roar of the Thousand-Cauldron Array was shaking directly through their boot soles.
The underground hall was huge.
A vaulted chamber three hundred paces wide stretched into the misty distance, supported by massive square columns of heat-resistant dark rock. Along both sides of the central stone walkway ran double rows of huge bronze cooking pots. Each the size of a hay barn, mounted atop brick burning chambers fed by roaring chimney pipes of high-pressure earth-heat gas.
Thick iron pipes lagged with stringy asbestos snaked across the ceiling. It hissed with high-pressure steam and bitter cooling salt water.
In heavy-duty work-yard operations, Lin Tao observed. He wiped stinging sweat from his brow, running a thousand high-pressure heat reaction vessels without digital pressure transducers is pure madness. The entire work-yard relies on human sense senses to prevent load-bearing blast.
