Chapter 223 — Beneath a Sky Full of Stars

Despite her wretched magical talent, her dismal noble breeding, and a personality and manner that gave everyone a headache, Rebecca had remained the most doted-upon child in the family from childhood to adulthood—after all, the Cecil family had declined completely by her generation, and the elders of the house could find no other heir to cultivate and cherish.

So Rebecca had received a great many gifts over the years, so many that she could scarcely count them all.

Yet few of those gifts had ever left a deep impression on her.

Be they pretty clothes or new books on magic and history, none struck Rebecca as novel. Unlike ordinary noble young ladies, she had no fondness for flowers and new gowns, nor any interest in studying history and etiquette. But ever since that ancestor of hers had risen from his coffin, she had finally found someone who could understand her and who always brought her a sense of freshness—an ancestor from seven hundred years ago. Rebecca had originally assumed that Gao Yang would be the most hidebound, most solemn elder she had ever met, yet never had she imagined that this ancestor of hers would prove so entertaining, his head full of whimsies not one whit inferior to her own.

Even the gift he gave her was thoroughly delightful.

Still, cradling this object called a "telescope," Rebecca remained a little conflicted (or rather, sulking at herself): "I don't like looking at stars at all! I never have, from childhood to now—what's the point?"

Gao Yang merely smiled, and dragged the silly girl up to the terrace atop the lord's manor. Under Heddy's astonished gaze, he helped Rebecca secure the telescope's stand and adjust the focus of the lens, then pressed the hard-headed girl's head down and made her put her eye to the eyepiece.

Half a minute later.

"Looking at stars is really fun!!" Rebecca's voice came out utterly spineless.

"Ancestor, is this... the gift you said you had for Rebecca?" Heddy too was drawn by the commotion and could not resist setting down the astrolabe in her hands and coming over. "There's no magical fluctuation at all... what is this?"

"You can try it," Gao Yang said. "Hmm... though it has no matching star-chart dial, so in your hands it may not be as professional as an astrolabe, but if it's only for observing distant objects, it should be somewhat easier to use than your magical implements."

Heddy spent quite some effort shoving Rebecca's head aside, then bent to the eyepiece and took a look, whereupon an expression of astonishment appeared on her face at once.

In this world, the Hawk Eye spell and the "astrolabe" technique developed from it had respectively become the primary means by which people observed distant objects and the stars. Though they remained confined to the circle of spellcasters, these two techniques had nonetheless stifled any exploration along the path of optical research. The fundamental physical laws governing light in this world differed in no way from what Gao Yang knew—yet on the premise that a single spell could grant observation of distant objects, who would ever think of combining several convex and concave lenses to build a telescope?

After all, the two technical paths lay simply too far apart.

Rebecca stared blankly at this wondrous metal device. She circled it several times and could not find so much as a single rune or a scrap of magical material upon it, and could not help scratching at her hair in bewilderment: "But why is it like this?"

Heddy likewise raised her head curiously: "Yes, why?"

Hearing their questions, the corners of Gao Yang's mouth could not help curling upward.

They had finally learned to ask "why" of their own accord—to dig into underlying principles rather than being satisfied with mere usability. This was the mindset he had been striving to instill in the domain's technical personnel, and now his efforts over this period had finally borne fruit in these two descendants.

"That brings us to the propagation of light," Gao Yang thought for a moment, and decided to give a simple explanation first. "You at least know what a magnifying glass is..."

He explained the effects of convex and concave lenses and the principle of the telescope, yet he did not explain it all too deeply or too definitively. He merely described, as best he could, how the telescope worked, in the manner of offering a conjecture—and this was out of necessary caution.

This bizarre world was so strange in its physical laws—who could be certain that if the telescope worked, the optical principles here must necessarily conform to Earth's standards? Perhaps in the macroscopic world, the propagation and refraction of light behaved in the manner he was familiar with, but what if one day, when research reached the microscopic level, it was discovered that this world's "light" was in essence something entirely different?

He knew how great his influence over Heddy and Rebecca would be. Even if they now possessed the skepticism of qualified researchers, the words he spoke would still leave too deep an impression in their minds. Therefore he had always avoided using too affirmative a tone when describing his conjectures on magical principles before the two of them—unless such knowledge had already been fully verified in practice. This was to avoid one day warping their own lines of research.

Rebecca listened, dazed and wide-eyed. She knew the theories of magic, and she knew mathematics, mechanics, and some theoretical knowledge of alchemy, but never had she imagined that the workings of this world could be explained from such an angle. It brought her an immense sense of novelty: "So the light that's everywhere... actually has such interesting aspects to it?"

As she spoke, she pressed her eye to the telescope and gazed at the stars in the sky with keen interest. She imagined those distant starlights embarking on a long journey, passing through an atmosphere brimming with magical power, and finally falling between a set of lenses, where they became clearer, more magnified images. She saw more and brighter stars than she had ever seen as a child, and she saw those faint, blurry celestial structures that had originally lain hidden among the stars.

Owing to the limited craftsmanship of the first telescope, its magnification was not very high, and it was impossible for her to see too many of the stars' secrets through the lens. Yet even so, that starry sky—more brilliant than she had imagined—was enough to make her cry out again and again in wonder.

"I always used to want to hurl great fireballs into the sky and blow those stars down," Rebecca raised her head and blinked. "But they're so far away..."

"Do you know, actually most of the stars in the sky are essentially just burning fireballs themselves," Gao Yang said with a smile, then hastily added the latter half of his sentence, "Of course, that's only my conjecture."

"Stars are burning fireballs too?" Rebecca looked at Gao Yang in astonishment. "Then what do they use for fuel? How can they burn for so many years?"

Back home it was hydrogen—but heaven knew what the stars here burned...

Yet Gao Yang could not answer so directly, and could only give an awkward laugh: "I don't know either."

"Ancestor, you're not pulling my leg, are you?" Rebecca eyed Gao Yang suspiciously. "How could the stars in the sky possibly be great fireballs?"

"You mustn't speak to the Ancestor that way!" Heddy at once shot Rebecca a stern look—but Gao Yang had only been moved for half a moment before she finished the latter half of her sentence: "The Ancestor once hung in the sky himself, so he must have seen with his own eyes how those stars burn, right, Ancestor?"

Gao Yang: "...Er... yes, yes..."

"Whoa, amazing!" Rebecca let out an exaggerated gasp, then immediately stroked her chin and sank into thought. "Then tell me—if I make a fireball really, really big, and then fling it somewhere really, really far away, could it turn into a star too?"