Chapter 203 — What the Magic Tide Brought

Gao Yang and Hedy's simultaneous interrogation made Rebecca's neck shrink by two-thirds at a speed visible to the naked eye. Gao Yang even wondered whether, if he sharpened his tone a little more, the girl might put on a live demonstration of the rare art of retracting her head into her torso.

But no matter how far her neck retracted, an explanation still had to be given. Rebecca glanced timidly at the two elders who were fully entitled to string her up and thrash her, and answered honestly, "It's not my fault! I was over at the Rune Institute testing the new detonation substrate when my aunt suddenly called me over to help with an experiment. I just stuffed the detonation substrate into my pocket, and when I got here I set it down on the bench without thinking."

"Don't you have safety regulations or something for conducting magic experiments?" Gao Yang said, his eye twitching as he looked at Hedy. "Dangerous things like that can just be set down on the bench?"

In his view, Rebecca's maneuver ranked roughly alongside welding a blasting cap while sawing through a lightbulb.

"Of course we have safety codes," Hedy said at once, defending the honor of mages—but then she turned her head aside with a trace of embarrassment. "It's just that I've never let Rebecca near the laboratory much since she was small, so she's lacking in common sense in this area. That's a failing in my upbringing of her."

"Institutionalization really does need to reach into every corner of everything, and magic laboratories especially. No one should be allowed to take part in experiments without full safety-code instruction," Gao Yang said, shaking his head with a sigh. "Thank goodness it was only a detonation rune, and not even a very powerful one."

"But by rights there shouldn't have been any danger at all," Rebecca said, a little aggrieved. "It's a detonation rune substrate, sure, but before it comes into contact with a magic source it's just a static rune array—no different from an iron plate with patterns carved on it. How could it explode?"

Gao Yang frowned at that. He knew Rebecca was right.

Detonation runes were not like the blasting caps of Earth; the latter carried a certain inherent risk of exploding, but a detonation rune would not detonate on its own.

It contained no energy-storage structure. For such a thing to explode, it had to be paired with a carrier holding stored magic—which was exactly why, in Gao Yang's eyes, it was far safer than Earth explosives like blasting caps.

So if it had exploded, there was only one explanation: at that moment, magic of sufficient purity to trigger it had appeared nearby.

"It must still have something to do with that new ore," Gao Yang said, looking toward the sample ores stacked in another corner of the bench, as yet untested. They had all been cut into fist-sized chunks, each one faintly floating with the luster of magical material. "Hedy, have you tested whether they can store magic?"

"They can't—their magic conductivity is excellent, but they're completely incapable of storing magic. In that respect the leakage rate is about the same as purple steel or red copper," Hedy said, shaking her head. "Could it be that strange magic field?"

This new ore had many bizarre properties. For instance, when magic was rapidly infused into it, it would "volatilize" that magic into the air at nearly the same rate; and if two pieces of the ore performed this "volatilization" at the same time while close together, the magic would not dissipate at once but would form a peculiar "field." This field of gathered, undispersed magic seemed to both Gao Yang and Hedy to possess some unknown function.

Perhaps the magic field had activated that detonation rune.

"Very likely," Gao Yang nodded. "Hedy, try to excite that magic field again. Rebecca, do you have any spare detonation runes?"

"Yes, yes!" Rebecca nodded happily, then reached into her mage's robe and pulled out a long cloth bag. She upended it over the table, and a whole heap of rune substrates tumbled out with a clatter. She rummaged through the pile. "Let me see... scorching ray, here; small fireball, here; detonation, detonation, detonation—these ones are all detonation!"

Gao Yang watched open-mouthed as this silly doe casually produced a whole pile of explosives, and broke into a cold sweat on the spot. "You carry these things on you all the time?"

"Not all the time. These past couple of days I've been working with Jenny on summarizing, organizing, and simplifying magic arrays, so I've been carrying some substrates around."

"From now on, search her before Rebecca enters the lab," Gao Yang said, his eye twitching as he looked at Hedy with uncommon severity. "Has this child really gone her whole life without ever blowing herself up?"

Hedy's expression turned a little peculiar too. "Now that you mention it, it really is strange. She's always the one blowing other people up, and she spends all day around big fireballs, yet she's never once set herself off by accident—at most she's gotten her face sooted black. That's truly rare among mages, who usually injure themselves constantly during their apprentice years."

Wiping cold sweat, Gao Yang signaled that the experiment could continue—but before they began, he ordered Rebecca to throw all the spare detonation rune substrates far enough away from the bench.

A bare detonation substrate exploding in that magic field seemed to have very little force, at most some fireworks-like effect—but who knew whether this silly doe carried some explosion-catalyzing aura of her own? If she actually blew the laboratory sky-high, wouldn't they all end up strung up on a flagpole and beaten?

Once everything was ready, Hedy placed the detonation rune substrate atop a protective magic array, then set two pieces of the new ore at some distance from the substrate. She laid her hands on the two ores and began infusing them with magic.

The two ores glowed faintly, and Gao Yang could sense that a magic field was indeed forming in the process.

In his magic vision, centered on the two ores, an "environment" whose intensity clearly exceeded the background magic radiation swiftly took shape, filling the entire laboratory and possibly extending well beyond it. Within that region the radiance of magic shimmered, now bright, now dim, drifting and uncertain—plainly, as Hedy had said, it was highly unstable.

Shutting off his magic vision, Gao Yang looked at the detonation rune substrate resting on the protective array.

It showed no change at all.

"Seems like no reaction," Rebecca said, scratching her hair. "Maybe this plate is broken?"

Hedy ended the magic release, and the three heads huddled together to study why the "blasting cap" had failed to go off.

Gao Yang recalled a detail from Rebecca's earlier account. "Didn't you say just now that before the detonation substrate exploded, you also had a piece of ore in your hand ready to infuse with magic?"

"Right, and it even lit up for a moment."

"That's probably where the problem lies," Gao Yang nodded. "That extra piece of ore likely played a special role. Find a piece of ore and put it together with the detonation substrate—close together."

When everything was arranged, Hedy once again activated that peculiar magic field.

Almost the instant the magic field appeared, the detonation substrate inside the protective array burst into a bright ball of fire, together with the ore beside it.

"That's it, that's it!" Rebecca sprang up in delight. "It's resonance—this must be resonance!"

"When two pieces of this ore are infused with magic at the same time, a magic field is produced, and a third piece of ore within the field resonates in sync?" Hedy frowned slightly, analyzing the properties these stones displayed, and then looked at the remaining samples piled in the corner. "But those things are inside the magic field too. Why haven't they changed?"