Chapter 248 — Heddy's Experiment

Gao Yang went with Amber to inspect those hundred-odd future "intelligence elites," and on the way, Amber began fishing for information about a rumor she had heard in the domain: "So, I just heard someone say a new 'ancient archmage' has arrived in the domain?"

Gao Yang nodded. "His name is Camille. You'll be meeting him soon enough."

Amber's eyes rolled about in their sockets, and whatever thoughts were turning in her head, she suddenly blurted out: "So you dug him out of that ruin in the mountains?"

"...I wouldn't exactly call it digging him out," Gao Yang said, feeling that this half-elf's choice of words was subtly problematic. "He was trapped in a pocket dimension..."

"That means you dug him out," Amber said matter-of-factly, and then began looking Gao Yang up and down, until the latter was covered in goosebumps. "What's that look supposed to mean?"

"The domain's got another one risen from the coffin!" The half-elf lady clapped her hands together. "Did you feel like you were the only ancient one around here and had a generation gap with everybody, so you decided to dig up someone even older than yourself? But aren't the two of you still separated by a generation gap?"

Gao Yang immediately felt that he had knocked this one about a little too lightly just now...

Still, Amber's winding, nine-bend thought processes and her blunt, slap-worthy mouth were nothing new. Gao Yang had long since built up a decent immunity—so long as he paid this one no mind, she would soon quiet down on her own.

But this time, Amber's babble seemed worse than usual. Even when Gao Yang did respond to her, she kept opening up new topics on her own at his side. After being prattled at by this half-elf for most of the journey, Gao Yang finally couldn't help but shoot her a glance. "Why are you so talkative this time?"

"Am I?" Amber blinked, then shook her head vigorously. "I didn't notice!"

"You're a little nervous, aren't you," Gao Yang said, looking at her with resignation. "When you get nervous, you talk a lot of nonsense, and you don't even notice you're doing it."

Reminded by Gao Yang, Amber only then realized she had inadvertently let her feelings show. Marveling at why a knight had to be quite so perceptive, she finally nodded rather awkwardly. "To be honest... a little. But it's not me I'm nervous about."

Gao Yang had in fact already vaguely guessed at Amber's thoughts. "It's about those people you brought along?"

"Something like that..." Amber gave a dry laugh. "I just wanted to say... those fellows are all bastards who grew up in the gutter. Crooks, swindlers, thieves—that's the main part they played in the past. I know they all swore up and down before coming that they'd follow the rules, but I know what they're really made of... I hope you can brace yourself a bit, and not fly into a rage just because they're coarse and rude. Those... are actually a pretty decent bunch."

Gao Yang stopped in his tracks and looked at Amber with something between a smile and not, until the other party awkwardly turned her head away. Then he said with a laugh: "It's rare to see you speak so cautiously, and making excuses for others in advance, no less."

"We're all bound by life-and-death ties, even if it was years ago," Amber said with a curl of her lip. "I want to take this chance to give them a hand up, but their true measure really sets my mind at ease—no, the opposite of at ease."

Gao Yang shook his head, then suddenly brought up what seemed an unrelated topic: "You know about the royal shadow guards who serve the Ansuth royal family?"

Amber blinked, then suddenly nodded. "Yes, yes! Last time we went to the capital, I even ran into one—the one I kicked out of the Shadow Realm and who nearly passed out like a sap, that was a royal shadow guard, wasn't he?"

Gao Yang: "...Don't get cocky about that one lucky fluke. If you'd faced that shadow guard head-on at the time, ten of you wouldn't have been enough for him to clean up. The royal shadow guards are the most powerful stealth operatives and intelligence agents trained by the Ansuth royal family. From the very founding of Ansuth, they were charged with secretly safeguarding the kingdom and gathering all manner of intelligence for the king. And I was one of the first trainers of the royal shadow guards."

"I think I remember you mentioning that," Amber said, frowning as she tried to recall. "Oh, you taught them two-handed swordsmanship and physical conditioning..."

Gao Yang was choked off once again. That feeling of trying to show off one's caliber and being cut off time after time was not pleasant, but he steeled himself and continued: "...I did teach them those two things, but beyond that, I also took part in drawing up the entire training regimen for the royal shadow guards."

Amber finally understood what Gao Yang meant, but her face showed utter astonishment. "Don't tell me... you're going to train that bunch of no-hopers to the standard of the royal shadow guards?"

Before Gao Yang could answer, she was already waving her hands strenuously. "Don't kid around. Don't I know how much those fellows are worth? What can they do besides swindling and a few con-artist tricks? Getting them trained up to ordinary soldier standard would be a stretch, let alone elite operatives."

"They don't need overwhelming fighting strength, and I don't expect to train them fully to the royal shadow guard standard," Gao Yang said with a shake of his head. "The royal shadow guards and the intelligence personnel I have in mind are ultimately different. I don't need a pack of elite combatants... Intelligence gathering, covert communications, identity disguise, the use of spycraft tools—as ordinary people, there's no shortage of things they can learn. You should have a little faith in them."

"I don't know what you're thinking," Amber said, scratching at her hair as she looked at the utterly confident Gao Yang, "but you always have a whole pile of tricks up your sleeve. I'll trust you this time."

Meanwhile, in the magic laboratory in the southern part of the domain, Heddy and Rebecca—whom she had dragged in as an assistant—were bent over testing a strange-looking "stone."

They had cleared a rather large open space in the center of the magic laboratory, laying across the floor a "portable honeycomb magic net" assembled from runic base plates, easy to dismantle and move. Between the honeycomb cells of the net, three red copper base plates had been set for conducting magical power. These three plates were arranged in a tripod formation, and in their center rested a "stone block" several dozen centimeters tall, roughly obelisk-shaped.

The surface of that "stone block" carried a deep purple luster, its texture somewhere between crystal and metal. It was none other than purified and recast raw Horne ore.

Purifying this peculiar magical-conductive material had cost Heddy and Hammer of the metal smelting works no small amount of effort. Unlike ordinary metal ore, raw Horne ore could not be smelted and cast through simple high-temperature calcination—as the temperature climbed, these raw stones would only split apart, eventually turning into useless sand-like powder. And though Nikkhsi's egg had successfully overcome its "allergic cold" symptoms toward raw Horne ore, his metal-manipulation ability had no effect on these ores at all. In the end, the problem of purification was solved by what seemed an inadvertent misstep.