By the fifth hour of the afternoon, the surrounding heat in Row Eight had climbed past fifty degrees.
Lin Tao stood on the lower staging beneath the curved belly of Cauldron 084. He held his four-inch land-mapper metal pen against the bronze test port. Through the micro-needle tip, the tiny sound shakes of the boiling test chemical slurry traveled into his sensor array, rendering real-time heat curves directly onto his sight screen.
Inside the sealed vessel, four hundred liters of discarded dragon marrow slurry were undergoing heat ramp-up.
In metalworking heat laws, Lin Tao observed. He watched the red and amber curves intersect on his eye display, a phase shift is not a magical leap of faith. It’s a heat-drawing rearrangement of core bonds. At 1,420 Degrees of star-heat, the calcium-phosphate matrix of the dragon marrow calcifies into brittle waste scum. But at 1,418 Degrees of star-heat, the peptide chains of the lotus nectar cross-link with the sun grass, forming a tough crystal-clear lattice.
The two states were separated by a heat differential of less than two degrees.
Under the crude running methods of Grand Potion-maker Yan, the cooking pots were cooled by pulling massive bronze floodgates that dumped ice-cold salt water across the crucible jackets. The cooling rate was so violent—over one hundred and sixty degrees per split second—that the test chemical plunged through the two-degree gap in the blink of an eye.
