The heat inside Cauldron 084 crossed fourteen hundred Degrees of star-heat.
Through the quartz sight glass, the swirling dragon marrow slurry had changed from deep amber to a brilliant, blazing bright golden-violet. The surface of the liquid was no longer boiling wildly. Instead, it had entered a state of white-hot smooth-flowing flow, moving in smooth, nested rings that pulsed with a faint, rainbow-bright soft glow. The thickness of the fluid was dropping sharply as the organic compounds achieved eutectic balance.
Lin Tao pressed his left hand against the cold star-iron rail. His test eye tracked the phase curves with nanosecond care.
In distributed state machine stonework, Lin Tao analyzed. He watched the glowing fluid churn within the vessel, the system is entering its final uncommitted state. At 1,418 Degrees of star-heat, the chemical matrix attempts to commit its crystal-clear structure. If the cooling wave arrives during normal execution, the system takes the default branch. Ninety percent melted rock waste, ten percent low-grade pill.
The default branch existed because the ancient Precursor engineers had designed a failsafe against vessel explosion. When the heat dropped too quickly, the system locked the active reagents into hardened stone to prevent runaway nuclear or spiritual reactions. Modern alchemists considered this turning to stone to be divine will, entirely unaware that it was simply a self-running error handling routine.
