Chapter 118 — Divine Arts and Magic

Pi Yun invited Gao Yang into his wooden hut. The little old man, who looked ancient enough to be someone's great-grandfather, had a pair of eyes shrewder and nimbler than any young profiteer's. Bustling about to pour tea and fetch water, he kept stealing glances at Gao Yang all the while: "The Duke himself has come to visit my humble, shabby little hut. Has some knotty problem arisen that requires my druidic arts? Or have you finally taken an interest in my fortune-turning rituals and divinations?"

Gao Yang glanced around the room's furnishings and found it remarkably tidy. The workbench for alchemical experiments and the various vessels for compounding potions were all arranged neatly in the northwest corner's work area, and the living quarters were plain and simple—utterly unlike the filthy, cluttered impression Pi Yun had given off when he first arrived in these parts.

Hearing the old man speak, he simply ignored the second half of the sentence, that fresh sales pitch, and said directly: "I'm very interested in the process by which you compound alchemical potions and bless them."

Pi Yun was astonished: "Brewing potions and blessing arts? For a trifle like that, Your Grace came in person?"

"I just happened to be passing by, so I thought I'd satisfy my curiosity along the way," Gao Yang waved a hand. "And I recall telling you before to increase the output of the agricultural catalyst potions. I'd like to know how that's coming along."

Pi Yun's face fell: "How could it be that easy? Your Grace's timing is simply too..."

Gao Yang waved again: "It doesn't matter if there are no results yet. Just let me see your progress."

Only then did Pi Yun breathe a sigh of relief, his face creasing into smiles: "Well, that's no problem at all. I was just about to start work."

As he spoke, he walked over to the work area used for compounding potions and began making preparations: brewing these potions was his daily work anyway, so he might as well humor this eccentric Duke's personal hobby.

Gao Yang followed behind the little old man, watching him bustle among the potions and alchemical tools, while his mind turned over far more complex thoughts.

The magic engine had succeeded.

This was genuinely a matter for rejoicing. Even the mature and steady Hetty had been immersed in the joy of success, and Gao Yang was certainly no exception.

Yet what filled Gao Yang's heart was not joy alone. Rising alongside it was a doubt that had surfaced before and been temporarily suppressed: what exactly is magic? What exactly is the nature of this world's laws?

The operation of the magic engine undoubtedly proved the existence of logic and law; it proved that the phenomena of this world are not independent of one another but interrelated, capable of being combined into systems. The repulsion array drives the piston; the piston drives the crankshaft and connecting rod; the spinning flywheel generates inertia; inertia links every stage of the engine's working cycle together. And extending further outward: the engine's energy comes from the magic net, and the magic net's energy comes from the environment...

Everything seemed orderly and complete, a closed loop.

But where did the original magic come from? The magic net draws from the natural environment—then what of the magic in the natural environment? Is it truly inexhaustible and omnipresent? Can it truly be replenished into the magic net without end, never running dry through all the ages?

Does this world not even obey conservation of energy?

Or is it that magic has its own source, its own finite reserves, hidden throughout all things in a manner humans cannot observe or calculate? Humans make use of it in their ignorance, believing it infinite—but perhaps one day it will simply run out?

Faced with this most worrisome of questions, Gao Yang could not even spare a thought for what the "repulsion" produced by magic arrays actually was.

To be honest, at the moment he saw the magic engine spin to life, what rose in Gao Yang's mind alongside the joy was worry.

Mechanical motion was a more intuitive discharge of energy, and it made Gao Yang more keenly aware of the process of "consuming energy" than the static magic arrays on the rune furnace ever had. Yet he was not accustomed to the fact that he could see no energy-storage substance at all—he could not see "magic fuel," could not see a battery, could not see an actually existing wire or a gauge registering energy consumption. It gave him a hollow feeling, as if he feared the magic engine might simply stop dead at any moment as it spun...

Even if wireless power transmission had been achieved on Earth, Gao Yang at least knew that fuel was burning in the power plant. But here... there was only a magic net endlessly filling itself out of nothing. The people of this world might be accustomed to the phenomenon, but he suddenly found it jarring.

Gao Yang wanted to understand the essential secret of magic; wanted to understand why this world operated as it did; wanted to understand why water found it so hard to do work when it turned to steam, yet still maintained its three states; wanted to understand why electromagnetic induction failed in this world, and yet independent magnetic and electric fields still existed here, and "light"—theoretically a special electromagnetic wave—still existed as well (if that was truly "light")...

These contradictions gave him a profound sense of dislocation. Many phenomena that ought to be closely interconnected, and the principles behind them, seemed fragmented in this world—as though matter no longer existed in an ordered fashion but had been forcibly set in place by so-called gods. Each thing displayed its own bizarre physical and chemical properties, not because the microscopic world sustained them, but because they "ought to be so"...

These contradictions and this sense of dislocation had once been suppressed by his busy affairs, temporarily forgotten in the back of Gao Yang's mind. But at the moment the magic engine truly began running according to his designs, these thoughts surged up again, impossible to restrain.

Yet he knew one could not become fat on a single bite. To directly explain this world's microscopic domain and fundamental principles at this stage was impossible. He had to proceed step by step: to understand the deepest truths, he must first begin by observing the most superficial phenomena, beginning with the empirical and the practical.

For instance, first observing this world's various magics, and the mechanisms by which they took effect.

Hetty and Rebecca were both proper mages (though their talents were somewhat skewed), yet Gao Yang did not go to them. He went to Pi Yun instead, because he knew one thing: druidic spells were the most peculiar in this world, and their origins and transformations seemed capable of revealing certain secrets about magic.

Druidic magic had evolved from divine arts.

Pi Yun had already prepared the potion ingredients to be compounded today, along with the implements for conducting druidic rituals. As he worked, he explained: "Compounding alchemical potions really isn't that hard. The materials for the most basic catalyst potions are all very cheap—herbs can be found everywhere. Most of the time is spent on post-processing: smoking, drying, grinding to powder, and so on. That part can actually be solved by hiring more hands."

As he spoke, he put powdered fish-tail grass seeds and perilla chrysanthemum petals into the heating vessel, poured in pure water and some pre-prepared grass juice.

"I heard Amber explain those labor systems you invented—division of processes, responsibility systems, assembly-line work. Honestly, they're remarkable ideas. This way the complex preparation process for alchemical potions can be broken down and handed to laymen. But the most critical part simply can't be..."