Chapter 55 — Laying the Foundation

Amber's mouth was, as ever, locked in its random state of being punch-worthy and extremely punch-worthy. Ordinarily, Gao Yang would already have been hefting the Pioneer's Sword and preparing to slap the creature against the wall, but this time he did not bicker with Amber.

Because he was genuinely in a good mood.

He even felt like discussing some rather serious matters with Amber: "Do you have any idea how valuable that magic circle is?"

"How valuable?" Amber blinked. To be fair, this half-elf lady was quite confident in her own magical attainments—she was utterly certain of the depth of her ignorance in such matters, and so she admitted it without the slightest embarrassment. "I couldn't even tell how many kinds of magic runes are on it. How would I know how valuable it is..."

Gao Yang had not expected such candor. He nearly choked to death on the spot, but having lived through the internet age in his past life, he had seen even the most shameless of people, so he quickly recovered his composure: "Then let me ask you another way. If magic became something everyone could use—or something everyone could 'borrow'—how valuable would you say that kind of technology is?"

Amber froze. It was a full half minute before she said, incredulous: "You're saying... that magic circle could turn everyone into a mage? You haven't been staring at the sun too long these past couple of days and gotten heatstroke, have you?"

Gao Yang ignored the punch-worthy part of her remark and shook his head, still in fine spirits: "Of course it can't turn everyone into a mage. But it might let everyone touch the realm of the extraordinary. I suspect even Hetty hasn't truly grasped the significance of that array. It's not merely 'a clumsy spellcaster assembled a large magic circle out of basic runes'—its greatest significance is that it is a breakthrough. A breakthrough in being universal, general-purpose, and easy to use. To let his daughter—who had no magical talent whatsoever—receive mana, that wild mage made the self-charging array capable of providing a constant, adjustable mana output to any mana-consuming unit. And before this... not a single archmage in the world had any notion of such a thing, because those archmages had always done the job with their own hands."

Amber seemed not to follow Gao Yang's reasoning: "Being able to control mana freely with one's own power—isn't that far more impressive than that wild mage needing a giant array to achieve something similar?"

Gao Yang looked into Amber's eyes: "A mountain gorilla can crush a brown bear's skull with a single slap, but a human needs a warhammer to do the same. Which do you think is more impressive?"

Amber: "...Huh?"

Gao Yang paid no mind to Amber, sunk as she was in astonishment and rumination, and rose to his feet, walking to the tent's entrance.

The treasure left behind by that nameless wild mage was not only a magic circle, but also a vast body of research notes in his notebooks. As a "weakling" extremely limited in spellcasting ability, he had been forced to compensate for his shortcomings with calculation and advanced ideas, and the shadow of this was everywhere in his research notes. The first time Gao Yang saw those things, he was deeply astonished; he could scarcely believe they could have been left by someone living in an benighted, oppressive medieval age.

Self-operating. Compatible transmission interfaces. "Foolproof" external control. Geometric rules for rune arrangement. Simplified rune formulas...

Without the broad perspective of another world, most people in this world would likely have swept these "struggles of the clumsy" straight into the rubbish heap, for any spellcaster of middling rank or above could simply rely on various metamagic techniques to skip the very steps recorded in the wild mage's notes. They had never even conceived of such a fantastical notion as "letting the inferior folk who cannot use magic or have little magical talent control mana."

Those archmages who wielded flame and thunder with their own strength might be worthy of fear, but in Gao Yang's eyes, it was not until a clumsy wild mage stripped magic as a tool away from "personal talent" and freed his own hands that this mysterious and mighty craft was truly elevated—it went from a fist to a club.

Just as when humans first bound a stone to a wooden stick and used that crude warhammer to slay beasts many times their strength—that was a leap.

Yet sadly, after hundreds and thousands of years, the humans of this world were still making warhammers.

Gao Yang felt it was time to fit this warhammer with a rocket booster...

Setting aside Rebecca, who had clutched the original diagram of the magic circle like a priceless treasure and gone off to study how to build it, on the third day—when the bulk of the manpower had finally arrived—the land-clearing work of the Cecil frontier officially began.

Food, clothing, shelter, and transport—food is the root of survival. No matter how many grand plans built on Dolye-steamed steel and rocket-boosted power hammers filled Gao Yang's mind, he first had to make sure the people of his domain were fed.

A sufficient quantity of food had already been purchased back in Tansen Town, and the king had promised grain and cloth for the domain's first year, but all of that was merely transitional. For long-term survival, self-sufficiency was essential. Though it was not impossible to trade the resources from the mines for grain with nearby lords, as a pioneer transmigrated from the Celestial Empire, Gao Yang had the obsessive-compulsive disorder shared by the vast majority of his countrymen:

The no-grain panic disorder.

Clear the land! Plant crops! After arriving somewhere, who would dare sleep without first breaking ten acres of field? Who would have the gall to claim a firm foothold without two vegetable plots behind the base? Since ancient times, the one and only standard for opening up territory and securing lasting peace has been this—carve out a stretch of farmland!

Of course, having such a notion was perfectly normal, but in a world where supernatural forces existed, Gao Yang was well aware that he had a great deal yet to learn.

A very simple principle: after learning that the humans of this world could smelt iron using straw as fuel by virtue of rune power, who would dare guarantee that piling up a heap of manure could beat the local primitive techniques?

Moreover, without knowing this world's fundamental rules, Gao Yang could not be sure how much of the Earth knowledge in his memory would still work here. What if the microbial activity of this world did not follow the basic laws...

But regardless of such details, the basic idea—settle down, plant first—was always a good one.

Gao Yang arrived at the land being cleared. Everything here was still at a very rudimentary stage. Rebecca had found time to come by the day before and spent a full half-day casting great fireballs over the weed- and shrub-choked wasteland, completing a perfect controlled burn; today the serfs had begun deep-plowing the soil, turning the fertile ash into the earth and clearing out the stones mixed in with the dirt along the way.

Gao Yang was pleased to see that the system he had ordered in advance was also being carried out here. Across the broad wasteland, a wooden stake was planted every hundred paces, dividing the whole clearing area into many even plots, and the laborers worked within these plots, while several other groups moved between them, making preparations for digging irrigation ditches. At the edge of the clearing, a wooden shed had been thrown up temporarily; Hetty and a few others were there, responsible for recording work progress and registering each group's withdrawal and return of tools.

The shed also had a large cauldron stove; the clearers' lunch was taken care of near the shed as well.