Chapter 201 — A Cold

After Rebecca and Jenny had left, Gao Yang rose from behind his desk and walked around to the large floor-to-ceiling window, gazing thoughtfully at the new buildings rising across the square.

That was the headquarters of the "Public Security Bureau." Some of the former militia, once trained and ideologically educated, would become the first professional "patrol officers" or "security guards" on the territory, replacing the current arrangement in which soldiers of the Combat Corps served as patrolmen.

What occupied Gao Yang's mind was not how this new system would be implemented—he was watching the construction process of those buildings.

Wherever new facilities were built, the Hive Magic Web followed, so before work on the Public Security Bureau building had even begun, hive units and output terminals of the magic web had already been buried in the foundations around it. These magical energies would also serve as vital aids on the construction site: before breaking ground, the craftsmen would inscribe simple weight-reduction arrays, heating runes, elemental enhancement runes, and the like around the magic web's output terminals according to the blueprints issued to them. The building materials delivered from the cement plant and the brick and tile works would then be processed in these array-inscribed areas—some heated and cured, some given elemental enhancement to extend their service life, and most of all lightened in weight to make them easier to transport and install.

Even a crude weight-reduction array inscribed with cheap materials could provide roughly an hour of weight reduction, during which heavy building materials would be conveyed to the proper positions—beams, rooftops. And the craftsmen, full of laboring wisdom, had already distilled experience from this process; they knew how to install these lightened materials so that when their weight suddenly returned, they would not batter the building's structure but instead lock all the more firmly together with the other materials. The production and construction activities spanning the entire territory had greatly accelerated the fusion of new applied magic with traditional craft. The craftsmen of the building trade could well be counted among the first to accept and grow accustomed to using magical power in their work.

And the participation of these simple spells had raised construction efficiency on the Cecil territory to an unbelievable degree—even beyond what Gao Yang and Heidi had initially expected. Both were astonished, though the latter was astonished that spreading magic among the common folk could produce such changes, while the former was reexamining whether his judgments about this world were accurate...

This "medieval" Kingdom of Ansu—or rather, this whole world—was it really "backward"?

Gao Yang furrowed his brow, recalling the task he had assigned to Rebecca and Jenny, and all that he had seen and heard over the past months.

The communication rings of the Mithril Vault, Heidi's levitation and weight-reduction spells, the brain arrays of the Long Night cultists, the biological modifications of the Fellowship of the World's End...

If judged purely by "whether a given objective can be achieved," or by "whether a certain technological means exists," then this world was not backward at all—it was unbelievably advanced.

Here there existed long-distance, low-latency remote communication technology (magical messaging spells, or the Mithril Vault's communication artifacts); at the level of state-to-state affairs there were advanced facilities like the magic information towers; in the realm of the silver elves there was even a flying city called the "Sunlit Vault," and that city could blanket the entire Silver Empire with remote communication signals—it was, by Gao Yang's reckoning, the most powerful information base station he had ever heard of;

Scorching rays manifested in a form akin to some kind of high-energy laser, or a plasma jet of extremely high temperature and confinement;

The technology of the Eternal Sleepers had created a neural thought network—the human-brain array computer was, in Gao Yang's eyes, nothing short of black technology. And what else had this technology achieved? Fully immersive virtual reality—one that could even affect the real world;

The biological technology of the Fellowship of the World's End had, many years ago, achieved organ transplantation and even fusion between different species (assuming the creatures of this world also used [something] as the carrier of genetic material);

The holy water of the Church of the Shining Dawn could achieve a sterilization and disinfection rate of nearly one hundred percent, and their divine healing arts could even regenerate a person's limbs in an instant;

Mages could conjure energy shields, focused energy rays, damaging sound waves, and even small-scale artificial weather...

In Gao Yang's field of view, a beam lightened by more than half its weight was being hoisted to the rooftop by workers with slings and fitted into place with ease. What was that, at bottom? Anti-gravity technology!

The Sunlit Vault relied on some powerful anti-gravity device to float above the Silver Empire for thousands—even tens of thousands—of years. If put to proper use, how many spaceborne motherships would it be worth?

So then—a world possessing remote instantaneous communication, energy weapons, energy shields, anti-gravity technology, flight technology, and high-end biological technology—was it really backward?

By rights it should not be backward; it had even advanced to the point where the only word for it was "science fiction."

Yet in Gao Yang's eyes it remained backward. The vast majority of people still scratched a living from the soil, still relied on crude wooden tools and brute labor to survive, still lived lives in which food and warmth were hard to come by and a minor illness or mishap could mean death. The cause of all this was not any failure of technological level—the technological level had long since been reached; it had simply never been popularized.

Herein lay this world's peculiarity: the various advanced technologies based on magic could be mastered and realized by individuals even without being popularized!

Even if their development was constrained by the factor of "not being popularized," magic's "high starting point" had already determined that even its most primitive applications were enough to let those who wielded power live quite comfortable lives.

Those at the top held transcendent power; they could already use this transcendent power to live lives of extreme comfort and convenience, and they had masses of "lower orders" at their disposal. Naturally, they would never think of popularizing the power that sustained their own rule. And in the lower strata, even if a rare few heaven-favored lucky ones mastered these powers, they would immediately be absorbed by this world's social structure, transformed into a new noble class, and become members of the very system that maintained this state of affairs. More importantly, before the Hive Magic Web and rune logic appeared—before Gao Yang, this "third-party observer," appeared—no one would even have thought of how to popularize all this, or what the consequences of popularizing it would be.

So the world remained backward. Despite its remote communication, despite its energy weapons, despite its biological technology and virtual reality and anti-gravity technology, it had remained backward for centuries upon centuries, as unchanging as a single day.