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

"You're planning to use the detonation array from the Gondorian standard crystals on this crystal, right," Rebecca said, eyes sparkling. "But have you figured out how to set it off?"

Gao Yang frowned. This was exactly the problem he was pondering.

The detonation arrays in those ancient Gondorian crystals, like common small arrays, were magic circles incapable of self-charging—in other words, they needed an external mana source as "starting energy" before they could proceed to detonate. In Gondorian crystals, that energy was supplied by the crystal itself, but in the "Art No. 1" he envisioned, there was no such energy.

The mana stored in a Rebecca Crystal, apart from being used as an explosive to simply blow things up, could not be extracted at all to take part in other magical reactions. Therefore the detonation array attached to a Rebecca Crystal had to use some other mana as its "starting动力"—so where would that mana come from?

Use another storage crystal as the "detonation battery"? Then it would lose all meaning of being "cheap."

Use a mage's mana to activate the array? Then it would lose the design goal of "letting ordinary people use it too."

"Just say it straight. One look at your eyes and I know you have an idea," Gao Yang said, glancing at Rebecca. The girl before him was really not someone who could keep things to herself—even if he didn't ask, she probably couldn't hold back from voicing her thoughts.

"It's like this," Rebecca said, indeed no longer keeping him in suspense. "I studied that detonation array and found that the starting mana it needs is actually very, very small…"

Gao Yan nodded: "Naturally. After all, it's an array meant to self-detonate when the crystal is about to fail—its starting energy requirement must have been optimized who knows how many times."

"And then I discovered something," Rebecca went on. "That 'rune trigger' I invented—at the instant it closes, it produces an extra surge of mana. Very faint, but it's definitely there…"

"Wait!" Gao Yang cut Rebecca off in an instant. He vaguely sensed he had caught hold of a key question long overlooked. "You're saying that rune-trigger structure produces mana at the instant it closes? Are you sure it isn't mana seeping from the magic net buried underground?"

"I checked several times. Since I've had a strong sense for mana since childhood, I 'saw' it very clearly," Rebecca said, nodding hard for emphasis. "The rune trigger does produce an extra bit of mana when it closes. And I also found it isn't just the rune trigger—as long as you take a originally complete rune set apart and then close it back up again, a 'momentary mana' is produced. This momentary mana comes fast and goes fast, just the blink of an eye, but if you're trying to detonate something, that blink is enough."

Gao Shao was sunk in thought, and when he finally snapped back to himself—having nearly frightened Rebecca to death in the meantime—he said: "Ah... good, good. Then go ahead and follow your own line of thinking: try combining your rune trigger with that detonation array. You can ask Hetty for help—tell her it was my order."

Rebecca's face lit up at once, but just as she was about to leave, something suddenly occurred to her: "Oh, right—Ancestral Inkmaster, have you decided what this explosive gadget of yours ought to be called in the future?"

Gao Yang thought it over, then answered with the solemn dignity of a Buddha statue: "Art."

Rebecca: "Huh? Is there any connection between this and art?"

Gao Cen's face was dead serious: "It's called Art."

Rebecca rolled her eyes up and thought about it, decided that the Xuanmai Sect must have some deeper meaning in mind, and nodded happily: "Mm! Art!"

Rebecca departed beaming with delight, but Gao Yang sat in the tent for a long time afterward, unable to calm himself.

He toyed with a pen in his hand, twirling it unconsciously this way and that, and only when he came back to himself did he realize that he had idly written a line of text on the scratch paper:

Mana—what exactly is mana?

(Ah, I actually updated another chapter?)