The Thousand-Cauldron Array was not built by mortal hands.
Its foundation had been laid forty thousand years ago, during the Second Epoch of the Celestial Empire. Just then, the Precursor dynasty hollowed out the fiery roots beneath the mountain and anchored one thousand and twenty-four hemispherical reaction chambers into the living mantle rock. Each cooking pot was thirty arm-lengths across, cast from dense glowing bronze and linked to its neighbors through an underground network of stone chimney pipes and extruded copper channels.
From his vantage point on the raised narrow high walkway of Row Eight, Lin Tao looked down across the cavernous foundry floor.
Heat shone across the vast expanse like see-through liquid silk. Beneath the iron walkway, two thousand stokers and apprentice refiners labored in the choking sulfur haze, moving between glowing hearths, high-pressure valve nests, and coal hoppers. Yet where the grand alchemists saw a sacred temple of spiritual transformation, Lin Tao saw the physical stonework of a massive, multi-threaded distributed processing cluster.
In distributed system stonework, Lin Tao analyzed, his left eye tracing the massive heat bus ducts snaking beneath the stone floor, when you scale a cluster to over a thousand execution nodes without central orchestration, you inevitably meet resource starvation. The master builders designed these vessels to process parallel batch jobs. But the modern fighters operate them like isolated cooking pots.
