Chapter 79 — Rebecca's Success, and the Question of Magic

"So this is the 'Rebecca Crystal' you managed to produce… Mm, yes, it looks like the same thing."

Sitting in his own great tent, looking at the large basket of goods Rebecca had brought over in high excitement, Gao Yang nodded slightly.

It was a basket of grayish-black, unremarkable, eerie substance—some of it loose as sand, some of it caked together in hard slabs, but whatever the form, countless fine granules were embedded almost uniformly throughout. And compared with the "waste slag" Rebecca had first produced in her muddled way, the crystal content in this basket of finished product was clearly higher, and the average diameter of the grains seemed considerably larger as well.

This showed that Rebecca had not only found the formula, but had also vaguely grasped the way toward improving production.

Hearing Gao Song's words, even the thick-headed, blunt, low-EQ Rebecca suddenly grew embarrassed. The viscount's daughter scratched her face, blackened by smoke and fire, and grinned like a silly roe deer just turned seventeen who had somehow blown up explosives in a cement kiln: "Heh… Ancestor, do you really think this stuff can be called by that name? Isn't it only really amazing people who get to name other things after themselves…"

"You invented these crystals—aren't you amazing enough?" Gao Yang glanced at this lacking-in-confidence great-great-granddaughter of his, one layer up. "Mm, there's still plenty of room for improvement, of course, but this really is a 'product' that can already be reproduced. The name Rebecca Crystal is well deserved."

Rebecca entered a state of foolish bliss: "Heh, heheheh…"

"Stop your foolish heh-hehing for now. Tell me how this thing is actually made," Gao Yang said, caught between laughter and tears as he looked at the iron-headed girl. "Any new material's appearance involves some element of luck, but I still want to know how that good luck happened to fall on our heads."

"Oh, oh, now that you mention it, it really was—a complete coincidence," Rebecca said, scratching her face. "It was actually fired according to the original formula you gave me, but yesterday when I tried to reproduce the firing process I failed several times—none of the ratios worked. Only later did I start to suspect the furnace, so I ordered an inspection of several kilns, and it turned out that a big chunk of the inner wall had fallen off one of them…"

"A big chunk fell off?" Gao Yang furrowed his brow, realizing that the key to forming these "Rebecca Crystals" probably lay in those fallen fragments of kiln wall. "So the material the kiln was built from also took part in the reaction?"

"That's one reason. Those kilns also use runic heating, so quartz sand was mixed in when they were built. And besides the quartz sand, another important reason is the stone from the Dark Mountains."

"Stone from the Dark Mountains?" Gao Yang repeated.

"Yes. I compared several sets of records and found two big differences between that batch and the others. First, quartz sand from the kiln construction got mixed into the raw material. Second, the limestone used in the raw material was dug from the Dark Mountains. The limestone for the other batches came from beside the Whitewater River, and some was hauled over from the lumber camp to the west—with those as raw material, even mixing in quartz sand doesn't work…"

Two conditions: quartz sand, and limestone from the Dark Mountains…

Gao Yang ruminated slightly. Both conditions were accurate conclusions Rebecca had drawn after repeated comparisons—no need to doubt their truth. So what exactly did these two things do in the process?

The quartz sand was imaginable, since it was itself a weak mana-conducting material—extremely cheap, but genuinely a magical material, and one of the raw materials for making artificial crystal. But what was the matter with limestone from the Dark Mountains?

Why was limestone quarried elsewhere no good?

He tossed these questions out, leaving Rebecca blinking in confusion.

The viscount's daughter had never thought about such details at all. She scratched the back of her head: "I was too busy being happy. I hadn't thought about it…"

"The Dark Mountains were once shrouded by a magic tide, and to this day many places in them still bear traces of erosion by elemental tides," Gao Yang said thoughtfully, stroking his chin. "Maybe this process changed the properties of some of the minerals in them… gave them the property of taking part in magical reactions?"

Lacking more experimental data and theoretical guidance, Gao Yang could only make such a bold guess. But whatever the real cause, he was now certain of one thing: the "Rebecca Crystal" was absolutely unique in this world—at least unique in the Kingdom of Ansu.

After all, who in normal times would have nothing better to do than run to the Dark Mountains to dig up rock and burn it…

"After confirming the key was quartz sand and Dark Mountains limestone, I tried several methods to raise the crystal ratio and quality," Rebecca continued. "I found that increasing the quartz sand ratio raises the crystal yield, but a lot of the crystals shatter when they come out of the furnace. Increasing the limestone ratio improves the finished product's ability to store mana, but past a certain ratio no crystals form at all. And I also found that temperature and firing time have a huge effect… There are too many variables to test, and I couldn't finish them all at once, so I fired one batch according to the best method I have now. Here—these are what you see in front of you."

Gao Yang asked bluntly: "Can an ordinary person carry out this process?"

"Yes, but most people don't understand what you taught me—'cross-comparison' and 'observation groups'—so they can only do it the way they're taught," Rebecca answered. "And they're careless. Even when you tell them how, they often get the ratios wrong or misremember the firing time. The time control needed for firing crystal is much stricter than for firing bricks."

Raising the average quality of the labor force is imperative.

Yet in the territory he couldn't even find a few qualified literacy teachers… Everyone who could read and count was already working beyond capacity. Where was he supposed to find people to form another set of teaching staff?

Hire from Tamsan Town? There were hardly any literate people in Tamsan either! Those who could read and write were either merchants' sons or "respectable folk" already employed in noble households as stewards and clerks. How could such people be willing to come to a godforsaken place like this and join a frontier settlement? They weren't serfs and poor folk who had nothing to begin with…

Gao Yang rubbed his head—whenever a new problem arose, he always made this motion unconsciously, as if checking his own hairline…

"Ancestor?" Rebecca ventured cautiously.

"No, it's nothing. These are all long-term problems to be solved," Gao Yang said, waving his hand. "For now, keep producing according to this 'optimal plan,' and when you have spare time, try for a better ratio. In short, the more of these crystal grains the better—they're even as important as steel output. Oh, and we also need to figure out how to extract the crystals mixed in with this stuff. Those blackish residue bits on the side are useless. You can try crushing them and washing with water to sort them—crystal is much harder than the residue and heavier too, so after crushing, water washing should separate them easily."

Rebecca nodded along as she listened, and only after Gao Yang finished did she sidle over with a grin, and in a whisper like a cat that had stolen a fish, asked: "Um… Ancestor, I heard from Aunt Hetty—you're planning to make this kind of crystal into a magic item that explodes?"

"More or less," Gao Yang said, glancing at this girl who was always full of whimsical ideas. "You have some thoughts?"