Chapter 78 — The Rune Trigger and Amber's Slacking-Off Time

Rebecca was clearly rather pleased with Gao Song's praise—so pleased she all but wagged a tail and asked for another round of compliments. Gao Yang, meanwhile, after finishing his praise, began seriously studying the structure of this new furnace. He had already noticed that many things on it had not been part of his original design, and that some of these additional structures were likely Hammer's modifications based on his blacksmithing experience, while the rest were certainly Rebecca's handiwork.

Hammer, after all, had no idea how to make changes to runes and magic arrays.

"What's this structure for?" Gao Yang pointed at the linked pedals, rods, and iron plate beneath the furnace. The assembly looked quite ingenious—probably forged piece by piece with Hammer's hammer. Part of it was flush against the flagstones on the ground, while the other part seemed connected to the furnace's array structure, which stirred some vague associations in Gao Yang's mind.

"Oh, oh! Didn't you say, Ancestor, that an ordinary blacksmith ought to be able to control the array's activation and shutdown? So I designed this structure," Rebecca said smugly. "The new furnace can run continuously, but it still needs an off switch, so look—this pedal controls the movement of this iron plate. There's a rune on the plate, and another on the obsidian slab of the furnace body. Separated, this pair of runes does nothing, but combined, they become part of the whole array..."

As she spoke, Rebecca demonstrated for Gao Yang. She stomped hard on the pedal, and the connected iron plate flipped over and fitted into a groove beneath the furnace. Only then did Gao Yang see that its reverse side was carved with basic elemental runes—precisely the part missing from the furnace body's magic array.

This was a switch—an extremely simple yet highly creative structure.

Before this thing existed, mages had essentially controlled array operation directly with their own mana.

But blacksmiths had no idea how to control mana, so they obviously needed this.

Once the iron plate flipped up, the entire furnace's magical circuit was connected. Gao Yang felt a faint current of air stir around him, and then shimmering, faintly glowing patterns surfaced on the flagstones underfoot. The magic arrays on the furnace's sides began to activate as well, their runes lighting up one by one. Firewood had long since been placed in the furnace chamber, and now, as the arrays activated, the wood directly caught fire, sending up a roaring blaze—far more vigorous and searing than ordinary burning firewood!

Rebecca had already lifted her foot, but the iron plate was held in the furnace's groove by the mechanism's catch teeth. Though the precision of this whole structure could not remotely compare with industrial products, since all it took to activate was pushing that rough rune up, it was clearly working perfectly.

"Step on it again and it goes back!" Rebecca pointed proudly at the catch teeth between the rods. "I named the whole thing 'Rune Trigger'—a lever-operated mechanism that uses runes as its conduit! And let me tell you, don't go thinking that just splitting a few runes apart and recombining them is simple. I tested for ages before I confirmed this pair of runes was the most stable and most universal combination..."

Girl, you gave this thing an incredibly cool name!

Seeing Gao Yang's slightly dazed expression, Rebecca finally stopped the nonstop babbling brought on by excessive excitement, and said with a touch of hope and nervousness, "Um... Ancestor, what do you think of this thing? Oh, right—apart from this Rune Trigger, all the other parts of the furnace were modified by Hammer."

"Very good, very good. You two did well," Gao Yang said from the bottom of his heart. Then, noticing that the old blacksmith was not present, he asked curiously, "Where's Hammer?"

Rebecca scratched her hair. "Building the new furnace needed more black stone and red clay, so he took a few apprentices and went into the mountains with the exploration team to look for materials. The exploration team mentioned yesterday when they got back that they'd seen black stone in the mountains."

Gao Yang grunted in acknowledgment, and only then did it suddenly occur to him that he had come to Rebecca for a real reason. He smacked his head. "Ah, right—I came to see you about something. Take a look at this first. Does it look familiar?"

As he spoke, he took out a grayish-black, unremarkable clump of caked matter—the last piece of "waste slag" he had left on hand, after the sample he had given to Hetty.

Rebecca recognized it the instant she saw it. "Ah, isn't this the waste slag from those batches I burned wrong before?"

"Look closely inside," Gao Yang said, seeing that Rebecca herself had never noticed that the "waste slag" she had produced was actually mixed with something else. "See these granular crystals? Do you remember how you made this stuff?"

Only then did Rebecca notice the fine particles. Honestly, since the waste slag from different batches all looked about the same, she could not tell by eye which batch this was from. Fortunately, however, she had strictly followed the "operating rules" Gao Yang had laid down, carefully recording the material ratios, times, temperatures, and furnace numbers for every batch of samples she fired. As long as this was confirmed to be from the first few batches, restoring all the records from that day would easily reveal how these things had come about.

Hearing that Rebecca had kept careful records and could easily reconstruct the operating details from them, Gao Yang breathed a genuine sigh of relief. In this era, the notion of "detailed record-keeping" scarcely existed in the minds of ordinary people; only mages absorbed in magical research had even a crude concept of it. But Rebecca was not a mage capable of doing research—her fireballs had always come in only a few grades: big, extra-big, extra-extra-big, and who-knows-how-big—so the girl had never developed any of the habits proper to experimentation...

But fortunately she was obedient. Whatever Gao Yang instructed, she never slacked off on.

And while Gao Yang was working out how to introduce "the art of explosion" into this era as quickly as possible, a certain half-elf thief, with nothing to do after eating and drinking her fill, was wandering through the dense forests of the Dark Mountains.

Of course, the more high-sounding way to put it was patrolling the territory's borders, searching the Dark Mountains for latent dangers and treasures... same thing, more or less. Anyone who knew her at all knew it was just slacking off.

Carrying her two beloved little daggers and humming a tuneless song, Amber leaped among rocks and branches as if walking on flat ground. With the aid of the shadows that lurked everywhere in the mountain forest, her figure would vanish into the air from time to time and then abruptly appear dozens or even hundreds of meters away. Sometimes, with a flicker of her form, a wild fruit plucked from who-knows-where would appear on one of her little daggers, only to be bitten twice and casually tossed aside.

This dim mountain woodland was a heaven tailor-made for Amber, who was both an elf and a shadow master.

"Hah... what a great place..."

Standing on a branch of a large tree, Amber stretched luxuriously and sighed with lazy contentment.

Though she had been frightened by the Dark Mountains' fearsome reputation when she first arrived—she had even toyed with the idea of finding a chance to flee—after spending some time here, she found it was really not nearly as terrifying as that seven-hundred-year-old dried-up corpse had said.

Well, of course. The magic tide had passed several hundred years ago, and those monsters were doubly sealed off on the Gondorian wasteland by the Great Wall and the Dark Mountains. The northern side of the range was protected layer upon layer—how could there possibly be any danger?