Chapter 76 — The First Step of Art

The crystal in the ruby vessel crumbled into a heap just like that. Gao Yang and Hedy stood beside it, staring at each other in bewilderment.

After a long daze, Gao Yang finally managed to squeeze out, his mouth twitching: "So the star-upgrade failed, is that it?"

Hedy: "Eh?"

"Ahem, I mean, what exactly happened here?" Gao Yang hastily coughed twice to cover up the words that had slipped out on reflex. "Did the magic array pull too hard when it was drawing out the energy and just yank it into powder?"

A faint arcane glow shimmered in Hedy's eyes. After carefully examining the traces of magic left in the ruby vessel, the excitement that had lit her face slowly dimmed. "No... I'm afraid it's an inherent flaw in this kind of crystal..."

"Flaw?" Gao Yang's brow furrowed at once, and a vague premonition crept over him—the feeling of a gacha pull flashing gold only to land on the pity guarantee. "Don't tell me it's one-use only? That once it's charged and discharged, it's bound to be destroyed?"

If that were truly the case, the value of this "man-made crystal" would drop considerably. But Gao Yang felt he could still live with it. In this world, crystals capable of storing mana were materials of enormous worth. Mages graded such crystals into two tiers. The high-grade ones were pure and stable, able to be inscribed with magic arrays and to run them steadily, and were therefore used as the cores of all manner of magical artifacts—set into staves, for instance. The lower grade, lacking stability, could not hold magic arrays, but could serve as mana-storage vessels, and were likewise regarded by spellcasters as a vital strategic resource.

Yet storage crystals had always been obtainable only from the natural world; man-made ones could never replace them. The reason was that artificial crystals suffered from a severe problem of "natural leakage"—the mana stored within would dissipate at an alarming rate, vanishing entirely within a few days, wholly unfit for use. Thus artificial crystals had always served merely as auxiliary materials for magical artifacts, or even as ornaments in noble castles...

If the only flaw in these crystals Rebecca had fumbled into existence was that they were "one-use," then in Gao Yang's view the problem was no problem at all. Hedy had already confirmed that the crystals were stable, so at worst they could be made into single-use magical items. To a man accustomed to the industrial age, "one-use" by no means implied low practical value—on the contrary, it was a byword for cheap, fast, and mass-producible.

But Hedy shook her head. "It's not that they're one-use. It's that the mana stored inside can't be extracted for use at all."

This time Gao Yang was utterly dumbfounded. "How can that be?"

"The mana has lost its 'attunement.' It likely happens the instant extraction begins—the ordered mana becomes disordered 'waste energy' during the process, and dissipates the moment it is drawn out. And even if you collected it before it vanished, it would be useless. After all... it's 'waste energy.'"

Waste energy—a term of art among mages, also called disordered mana. It was a form of mana that could take part in no magical reaction and could cast no spell, worthless as a musical note stripped of its tuning. Disordered mana was a byproduct of many spells, the "dregs" left behind after mages finished casting. And the most memorable incident involving disordered mana that Gao Yang knew of was the great explosion at the Deep Blue Well in the year before the fall of the Gondorian Empire, when vast quantities of disordered mana appeared inside "Deep Blue," directly causing the Well to run at full power yet output no energy at all, until the core melted down and exploded.

What went into the crystal was mana; what came out was dregs. It was exactly like those shady games from his previous life—put in equipment and gems, get back slag ore and a server-wide mockery megaphone...

The facts were clear enough. What Rebecca had refined was a little white crystal shard guaranteed to send the enhancement-obsessed into a fit of rage (confirmed).

Casting a disappointed glance at the powdery crystal dust, Gao Yang shook his head. "Maybe someday Rebecca will manage to refine a usable storage crystal... Let's just look forward to that for now. Enough of this—I saw you tinkering with those antique crystals earlier. What have you come up with?"

Hedy perked up, though her tone was rather apologetic. "Forgive me, Ancestor. Many of the magic arrays and rune patterns in that crystal have been lost to time, and they are combined in a manner I cannot comprehend. The precision of present-day crystal resonators is limited, so I have only managed to distinguish a small portion of them and reconstruct them as magic arrays... Please, come this way."

Gao Yang followed her, watching as Hedy took from her desk some array diagrams she had already organized. Besides the various symbols and lines, the sheets bore notes written in elegant script—annotations she had left.

As Gao Yang studied the diagrams, Hedy voiced her thoughts beside him. "The magical system of the ancient Gondorian Empire was vastly different from today's. Their magic arrays were 'layered,' with key nodes connecting each layer, and those nodes, combined among themselves, turned out to be arrays as well—nested layer within layer. With present-day techniques it would be utterly impossible to construct arrays of such a structure. I simply cannot imagine how the Gondorian mages of old stuffed that entire complex of runes into a tiny crystal..."

Gao Yang looked up and smiled. "First they prepared a room with practically no dust or suspended particles. Then, in that room, they built a massive model of the array out of mana-conducting materials. Next they evacuated the air from the room. Finally, they irradiated that array model with the powerful mana of the Deep Blue Well—and at the 'focal point' of that irradiation, they placed a blank crystal awaiting processing. Through a special polarization technique, the mana imprinted the layered array onto the interior of the crystal, layer by layer. Just like that, one pass of mana, one array burned into the crystal. Twenty-seven per minute."

With a clatter, the dip pen in Hedy's hand fell to the floor and snapped in two.

Good heavens—so the ancients were really this formidable?!

"And that's precisely where I differ most from the people of this era. You think of many things as precious and scarce, and take it for granted that masters craft them with painstaking care and hand them down through the generations. But in my view, cheap mass production is the norm for such things. What a pity—with the Deep Blue Well gone and the first generation all dead, it's only natural that you've developed the way you have."

Hedy's expression turned peculiar; she felt keenly that this unworthy descendant had once again disappointed the Xuanmai Sect...

Just then, Gao Song's gaze was suddenly drawn to the magic array on one of the diagrams. "Hm?"

Hedy hurried over, and seeing where Gao Song was looking, explained: "That is the array that controls the crystal's self-detonation. As you know, the final function of these standard crystals when they are on the verge of collapse is to self-destruct. That layer of the array was therefore imprinted at a position independent of the other rune groups, and it is exceptionally simple, which makes it relatively easy to reconstruct. But the friend-or-foe identification portion tied to this detonation array cannot be reconstructed. I still haven't found which runes accomplish that incredible function—I truly lack talent in this area..."