Chapter 81 — Monster, Monster

By the time Gao Yang reached the southeastern corner of the camp, a group of soldiers had already gathered there; the Byron knights who had been patrolling nearby heard the commotion and came at once to keep order, dispersing the bolder commoners.

But to be honest, even without the soldiers driving them off, few commoners had gathered: they feared not only the authority of the nobility but the power of magic itself. Hedy's magic laboratory was, in the eyes of those who could not wield supernatural power, an eerie and terrifying place, and the explosion that had rung out from within it was enough to make the heart quail. Curiosity may be human nature, but there are some spectacles that even the boldest dare not go to see.

Gao Yang saw that one wall of the magic laboratory had burst open into a great hole, and thick smoke was pouring out of it, mingled with a pungent stench of scorching, and here and there in the smoke the glint of magic not yet dissipated. Hedy and Rebecca had already rushed out of the building, both smeared with soot and grime. Hedy was at that moment summoning water in a most bedraggled fashion to wash the ash from her hair and face, while Rebecca, catching sight of Gao Yang, came running up in high excitement: "Ancestor! The power of art really is formidable!"

Gao Yang held back Rebecca, who was plainly giddy with excitement, and looked with concern at these two—the chief culprits and victims of the laboratory accident, who seemed to have just been rescued from a coal pit: "Are you two all right? How did the wall get blown apart like this..."

The blast had been more powerful than he had expected. He had thought that with the protective magic in place, and with only some unsealed crystal grains being detonated, there would not be much harm done.

But he had overlooked one thing: this was no gunpowder weapon from Earth but a magical effect, and for explosive magic, whether or not it was sealed inside a hard, airtight container made only a limited difference to its power...

"The effect of detonating a large number of crystal grains at once exceeded expectations somewhat," Hedy said, coming forward to answer Gao Yang's question now that she had finally managed to wash herself back into some semblance of a human being with the water she had summoned, and at the same time she flung a ball of water none too gently into Rebecca's face. "And more importantly, she put the two test samples too close together! Twice the amount of crystal grains detonated at the same time!"

Gao Yang gave Rebecca a silent look, and concluded that the silly doe really would not escape a beating today...

Having confirmed that both of them were unharmed, Gao Yang was more or less relieved, and only then did he turn his mind to property: "Was the damage great?"

Hedy's face twisted in pain: "The magic array I was using for the experiment is destroyed, but fortunately, at the instant of the explosion I diverted most of the force toward the empty wall, so that dreadfully expensive crystal resonator was spared—in exchange, half a wall needs repairing."

Gao Yang gave Rebecca another silent look. Since the most valuable crystal resonator was intact, the silly doe probably would not be beaten to death...

Rebecca noticed nothing at all—though it was also possible she had been stunned by the blast and had not yet come to her senses—and observing that the Xuanmai Sect kept glancing her way, she asked blankly: "Ancestor, why do you keep looking at me?"

Gao Yang thought for a moment: "Can you take a beating?"

Rebecca scratched her hair: "I suppose so... when I was little I was always fighting with wolves."

"Then it's fine," Gao Yang waved a hand. "How many samples did this use up? And how did the rune trigger perform?"

"Just... two little piles," Rebecca said, gesturing with her hands to show roughly how much had been used, and when she mentioned the rune trigger, pride came over her face. "And let me tell you, Ancestor, the rune trigger really works! Connected to the explosive array as its ignition energy, it's more than sufficient—once the array has this initial energy, the subsequent explosion can be sustained entirely by those crystals. Next time I plan to try whether that bit of magic from the rune trigger can activate other kinds of rune sets... ah, if only magic had a more precise numerical value, so we could know how much magic the rune trigger produces when it closes, and calculate how much magic it takes to run an initial rune set..."

As Rebecca spoke, her thoughts drifted further and further, and midway through she gave a start and yanked her wandering mind back, then began to tattle to Gao Yang: "Ancestor, let me tell you, Aunt Hedy didn't believe me at first—didn't believe that the rune trigger would produce a surge of magic when it closed. She said that thing had no energy-gathering structure..."

Speaking of the rune trigger, Hedy did in fact have praise for Rebecca: "That thing really is a rather good invention. Mages have tried before to cut a complete magic array apart and control the magical mechanism by reassembling the pieces, but no one ever thought of turning that cutting and reassembling into a fixed pattern. Rebecca's rune trigger uses a fixed pair of runes as the 'connecting key,' and this structure fits rather well with the 'universality' and 'standardization' you're always telling us about..."

That was because Rebecca had from the very beginning defined the rune trigger as a product "that ordinary people could use too." She had even considered the degree to which, if the rune trigger were damaged, the smiths and apprentices in an ironworks could repair it with their own hands—which was why she had simplified the structure to the utmost, so far as to reduce it to a single set of runes.

Which of this world's mainstream mages would ever have thought of that?

And as for the "standard numerical value for magic" that Rebecca had just mentioned as though in passing, Gao Yang kept it in mind as well.

The technical level of modern humanity was utterly incapable of precisely measuring and standardizing magic, but in the Gondor era seven hundred years ago, the first shoots of such an idea had in fact appeared. Some archmages, faced with the nearly inexhaustible magic supplied by the Deep Blue Well, had once pondered how to put that immense energy to more accurate and more standardized use. Unfortunately, before they could think it through, the Deep Blue Well blew up.

But since he intended to build upon this world's "magic," standardization and normalization were only a matter of time.

"First, repair the magic laboratory, and then the explosion experiments on those crystals should continue," Gao Yang said, coming back from his brief reverie and looking at Hedy and Rebecca. "But the experimental method needs adjusting... those crystals are more powerful than expected, and it's too dangerous to keep testing indoors. I'm assigning you the gentle slope by the river on the east side of the camp as a test site—the terrain is open there and suited to testing this sort of thing. Also, think about how to make a suitable container to serve as the shell for 'Rebecca crystals,' so as to turn them into a genuinely usable weapon."

Rebecca and Hedy nodded repeatedly, committing these instructions to memory, and then Gao Yang, after a moment's thought, suddenly recalled something rather crucial: "Wait—have you thought about how to delay the array's detonation time?"

"Delay the detonation time?" Hedy did not react at once, but then realized: not everyone could press the rune trigger from far away with a mage hand as she could.

With the current operating mechanism of the rune trigger and the explosive array, it was a thing that went off the moment it was pressed—which meant the damned thing was practically a self-destruct artifact. After pressing the button, whether the enemy died or not was unknown, but you yourself certainly would.