By the second watch of the night, the lower cooking pot galleries were an inferno of flying cinders and scalding steam.
Lin Tao stood atop the upkeep staging of Cauldron 084, clad in a thick hide tunic that had been soaked in salt water to prevent spontaneous burning. In his hands, he held a six-foot scraper made of cold-drawn star-iron, chipping away at the dense, glass-fused crust that lined the inside throat of the crucible.
Every strike sent showers of sparkling green sparks into the gloom.
Beneath the crust, the dark glowing bronze of the cooking pot was smooth, worn down by hundreds of years of gritty stone scouring. Inside the hollow belly of the vessel, the air was hot enough to bake bread. He smelled intensely of dried dragon root, hardened ginseng, and the metal tang of liquid red stone.
Lin Tao paused, resting the scraper against the rim, and extended his left hand.
With a practiced motion, he unclipped his four-inch land-mapper metal pen from his inner sleeve. He touched the pure-crystal star-white-gold tip to the polished inside wall of the reaction chamber, initiating a high-hum sound test sweep.
In heat reactor building, Lin Tao recorded in his mental memory bank, uniform wall thickness is critical for predictable heat flux. This crucible was cast with a 1.tiny taper toward the base. When the heating chimney pipes are active, the bottom third of the vessel reaches phase shift four seconds before the upper vortex.
