Cooking pot 084 sat at the nexus of three massive high-pressure channels at the western boundary of Row Eight.
Unlike the ornate, gold-trimmed cooking pots of the upper tiers where the Grand Alchemists performed their public rituals, Vessel 084 was a purely heavy-duty machine. Cast from eight tons of dark glowing bronze, its hemispherical belly was banded with forged star-iron hoops to resist internal vapor pressure. Four heavy steam relief valves stuck out of its domed lid like brass organ pipes, venting steady plumes of bitter stone steam toward the vaulted ceiling chimney pipes.
Lin Tao knelt beneath the support cradle. He ran his calloused fingertips along the main cooling salt water pipe hub.
The pipe was four inches in width, made from extruded red copper and heavily crusted with green rust and white salt crystals. Beneath his fingers, he felt the violent, churning pulsing of fluid. Thousands of gallons of chilled underground salt water pumped from the mountain roots to cool the cooking pots during the critical crystal-forming phase.
In distributed high-pressure systems, Lin Tao analyzed, tracing the pipe layout with his test eye, when many nodes share a single common exhaust pipe hub, you introduce total resource contention. The master builders built one thousand and twenty-four reaction chambers. But they only installed two return pipes.
