The Great Dragon Chime of the Imperial Conclave rang out across the Sky Palace Forge District.
The sound of the ten-ton bronze bell was ear-splitting. That titanic sound wave rattled the iron roof beams seventy feet overhead and sent clouds of black soot raining down from the air-flow chimney pipes. Throughout the underground hall of the Thousand-Cauldron Array, two thousand fire doors slammed shut all at once. The roar of five hundred earth-heat blast gates blew up like rolling thunder.
The Grand Imperial Smelt had begun.
From the raised narrow high walkway above Cauldron 084, Lin Tao watched the spectacle unfold.
In the center of the hall, perched atop a gold-trimmed marble watching pavilion thirty feet above the smoke, Grand Potion-maker Yan stood surrounded by sixty high alchemists and three Imperial Censors dressed in ritual royal purple. The censors held golden brush cases and sky ledgers, tasked with auditing every grain of spirit herb poured into the crucibles. Yan raised his fiery green jade scepter, chanting an ancient liturgical scripture while channeling a torrent of crimson Dan-fire into the main spreading channel.
In large-scale batch processing, Lin Tao analyzed. He felt the dark rock floor shudder wildly beneath his boots, a timed together job kickoff produces a huge first power spike. Modern cloud architectures use phased rollout to prevent brownouts. These Daoist alchemists just ignite everything at once and pray their pipes don’t rupture.
