Chapter 70 — When the Playbook Stops Working...

The plan to have the thick-headed fireball kid produce primitive cement had failed, but Gao Yang was not about to give up so easily. Copying Earth's experience over wholesale might not work, but an idea from Earth was not necessarily wrong. Perhaps the formula for certain things was different, but that did not mean such things were worthless. At the very least, a building material that was cheap, plentiful, sturdy, and easy to work should have a place wherever one went.

Even if in this world it had to be renamed magic.

He sent Rebecca off to keep trying new production methods and told her the general idea along with his expected goals—and this was no aimless flailing. His own production method had failed, but Gao Yang knew that this world had once possessed "cement."

Deep within the mountain ruins, he and the men he led had already seen this material. The engineers of the ancient Gondor Empire had used an artificial substance rather than stone to build that fortress in the mountains, and had made the fortress sturdier and more durable than an ordinary stone stronghold. A thousand years had passed, and there was not the slightest sign of collapse.

In Gao Yang Cecil's memory, this material had been developed as early as the "Steel Age" before the "Starlight Age," and had been in use for ten centuries. Through repeated improvements and refinements, by the late Gondor period it had become one of the most widely used building materials in the empire.

And this was precisely what Gao Yang most regretted: after the collapse of the Gondor Empire, a great many technologies were lost and no longer passed down—some because the technology itself depended on the Deep Blue Mana Well, some because the groups who mastered the relevant techniques had been wiped out entirely and left no records behind, and some because the raw materials (or environment) required by the technology had been swallowed by the contaminated zones. Gondor's "otherworld version of cement" was one of these many lost technologies.

Given the chaos of that era, Gao Yang could not be sure which of the three had caused this technology to be lost, but he doubted it was the Mana Well: producing the otherworld version of cement, like Earth cement, did not require overly complex equipment or especially advanced energy, so it was most likely the extinction of talent, the loss of records, or a problem with the raw materials. Either way, this technology—which should have been the most basic of basics, one of the cornerstones of civilization—was simply gone.

Seven hundred years later, the people of Anseth were building houses out of stone and wood, while nobles with the means would extravagantly use mages' various shaping spells and alchemical potions to make their palaces and castles more refined and sturdy. But the latter clearly did not meet Gao Yang's requirements of being "universal, cheap, and mass-produced."

Yet though the technology had been severed, all was not lost. After all, it had been one of the most common foundational technologies of the old Gondor Empire; even if Gao Yang Cecil had never worked with it himself, he had seen it. Even now, fragments of the relevant knowledge lingered in his mind. He would hand these fragments to Rebecca, and as for how far the technology could be restored... that would depend on the fireball kid's ability.

At moments like this, Gao Yang could not help but lament: if only Gao Yang Cecil seven hundred years ago had been a keyboard warrior... just shift a little of that combat prowess over to miscellaneous knowledge, and the current situation would be much better. Never mind anything else—at least jot down the cement formula!

In the spirit of "who's afraid of a satellite that's been cultivating for hundreds of thousands of years coming down to earth," Gao Yang grumbled freely about the original owner of this body, then began drawing up a list of the various experiments he would have to conduct next.

Over the following days, Amber watched as Gao Yang had people haul a pile of things into the tent: strange mineral powders, metal containers joined together, crystal lenses large and small, and the lodestones and metal wires commonly used by mages and diviners. These odds and ends were heaped on a table, nearly half of them urgently purchased from Tamsen Town, the rest processed under Gao Yang's guidance by Hetty and the craftsmen.

Looking at that table full of stuff, the half-elf lady was utterly baffled: "What on earth are you up to?"

Gao Yang kept fiddling with the lens assembly in front of him without even looking up: "Experiments."

"Nobles are so hard to understand," Amber blinked, then her eyes lit up as if she had finally caught Gao Yang by the tail. "Oh ho! I've finally caught you! So you really couldn't keep up the act and you've started indulging in idle pursuits! I knew it—how could any normal-minded noble endure hardship for this long? You've finally started wasting money and manpower... Ouch, ow, ow!!"

Gao Yang twisted Amber's ear around twice before letting go, then looked with great curiosity at this chronic pain in the neck: "I really don't get it—are you incapable of learning a lesson, or what? Can't you just make your personality a little cuter?"

"Like you have room to talk! I'm a great master thief, and you've got me tied down here as a bodyguard. Normally it's either watching over your pile of chicken scratch or running all over the hills patrolling, keeping watch, and gathering intelligence for you. And on the rare half-day off, you make me learn to study your chicken scratch with you—do you have any respect for my profession at all?"

The half-elf lady spoke with great conviction, and the gist of it, once boiled down, was three words: I'm bored.

"You could stand to be more driven than Betty," Gao Yang said, pressing a hand to his forehead in exasperation. "She comes to learn reading and writing from me even after finishing her work every day. Is it really so hard for you to learn addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division?"

"Oh? So that little maid really is learning to write?" Amber blinked, her interest thoroughly piqued. "No wonder people have been saying these past couple of days that they've seen her muttering to herself when she's alone, and that whenever she has a spare moment she's scratching away on the ground with a stick..."

"Fine, fine, I give up on you. If you're really that bored, go out and play by yourself," Gao Yang waved a hand at Amber. "Just three things you're not allowed to do: no stealing, no causing trouble where people are working, and no fighting with people—though fighting with geese is fine."

Having gotten Gao Yang's permission, Amber immediately rolled happily back into the shadows, and as her body faded she kept muttering: "You really are a weird one—why do you always have to bring up geese in front of me..."

Only after Amber left did Gao Yang finally have the chance to focus his attention on that great pile of things.

He had already tested some of them; the rest were still being verified.

Before sitting back down in his chair, he first glanced at the large basket beside him, then sighed softly.

In that basket were the indescribable conglomerates Rebecca had produced earlier when firing her cement. She had originally planned to dump them, but Gao Yang had kept them, and deliberately placed them by his side where he could see them at any time.

He treated them as a kind of warning, a kind of marker, a sign to constantly remind himself that "this world" was "this world."

Pulling his gaze back from those things, he glanced at a certain container on the table, lowered his head, and wrote a new record on the paper in Chinese: