Chapter 414 — A Groundbreaking Advance

To be honest, although seeing Camille appear outside the window ledge was quite a surprise, once Gaoyang saw the brilliant blue arcane glow enveloping the other man, he guessed that this ancient archmage must have achieved something extraordinary—otherwise he would never have lost his composure like this. Camille was always a steady man, but where his research projects were concerned he turned into a different person. Gaoyang had personally heard the technicians of the Rune Institute and the Magical Technology Research Institute discuss Camille's working state: sometimes, when struck by inspiring results, the ancient mage would even flicker through colors like a neon sign...

Of course, the technicians at the institute had no idea what a neon sign was. The first time they saw Camille putting on a light show in the laboratory, they thought the master was about to self-destruct...

"What have you come up with?" Gaoyang wasted no pleasantries and spoke to him right there at the window ledge. "Have you finally worked out the laws governing changes in the magical field?"

"Ah... not that, no," Camille said. The brilliant blue arcane light around him flickered slightly, then brightened again. "But it is still an exciting result—please come with me. The equipment is still in the institute for the time being."

Gaoyang could tell Camille was deliberately being coy, but he happily played along, and even turned his head to call Hetty over. "You come too. Let's see what Camille has made."

The three of them left the lord's mansion and arrived at a laboratory in the Magical Technology Research Institute.

Camille had originally been a member of the Rune Institute, but this erudite ancient archmage who had taken part in the Defiance Plan was not merely strong in theoretical knowledge—he also possessed remarkable talent in all sorts of practical technical fields. After encountering and quickly familiarizing himself with the various technologies of the magical industry, he established a laboratory of his own within the Magical Technology Research Institute, which specialized in practical technology, and moved a portion of his projects there.

In this clean, bright laboratory, Gaoyang saw a great many things in semi-finished or disassembled states—including magical obelisks, orbital acceleration devices, a new generation of magical capacitors, and so on—all sorted into their respective experimental zones. But none of these were obviously the exciting result Camille had spoken of. That result sat on a platform at the very center of the laboratory, and its appearance... was like nothing ever seen before.

Gaoyang saw a triangular base—a shape commonly adopted in many magical devices of the ancient Gondor Empire, and one Camille was also in the habit of applying to his own creations. The triangular base was made of common copper matrix, perhaps with a trace of crystal dust or crystal-blue steel mixed in, giving it a beautiful and mysterious blue-violet hue. At the middle of the base the device's main body rose upward, set with a piece of clear, translucent artificial crystal. The crystal's texture was very pure, but its color was nearly transparent, which showed that it was not some overly expensive magical material but simply an ordinary medium for releasing magical power—the device's true secret was most likely still hidden inside that triangular base.

The whole device was not large; its longest side was only about half a meter. The ancient Gondor design gave it a perfectly symmetrical appearance, and together with the raised metal mount at the center and that piece of crystal, it looked on the lab bench more like a decorative work of art.

"Now can you reveal the secret?" Gaoyang looked with keen interest at the thing on the bench, secretly guessing at what it might do. "What is this?"

"Please wait a moment, I'll activate it right away—if the other device is also operating normally, you should be able to see it very soon..."

As he spoke, Camille floated before the device and activated its base with a small spark of energy.

With an extremely faint humming sound, the beautiful device came to life. The runes on its base lit up one after another, and the crystal set at its center filled with a faint white glow. A moment later, the air above the crystal began to twist and tremble, and within that trembling, a blurry image surfaced before Gaoyang.

Gaoyang's breathing quickened involuntarily—even Hetty beside him could not help drawing a soft breath.

The image finally steadied. Gaoyang saw his ever-energetic little granddaughter bobbing her head back and forth within the frame, apparently operating or observing something around a device on the other side. She fiddled with it for a few seconds, and only then did she seem to suddenly catch sight of Gaoyang. At once she waved vigorously toward this side in excitement, and a clear, cheerful voice came from the base of the device: "Progenitor! Progenitor!! Look what we've made!!"

"I see it, I see it!" Gaoyang said loudly, beside himself with excitement—ordinarily, to maintain his dignity as Progenitor, he rarely showed such obvious and agitated changes of emotion, but at this moment he truly could not control himself, because he knew all too well what this thing Camille and Rebecca had built meant. "You've finally succeeded! Rebecca, where are you now? How far is the communication distance?"

"I'm in the North Shore Development Zone!" Rebecca said merrily, then stepped aside, and in that projection Gaoyang saw the broad open scenery outside the window—the newly leveled foundation of the North Shore Development Zone. "It's still very clear over here! Can you see me clearly? Can you see me? I can see you clearly! Ah! I can see Aunt Hetty too! Auntie, your dark circles are drawn so realistically today!"

"Calm down. This child is always like this," Gaoyang said, placing a hand on Hetty's shoulder. "So those dark circles really are drawn on again?"

"Of course not!" Hetty was a little frantic. She would never understand how Rebecca could steer any topic off in some whimsical direction no matter the circumstances—even if that silly deer was a girl she had raised herself, she still could not understand it. "I really... but you actually built this thing!"

Though her head was full of thoughts about giving Rebecca a beating, the momentous device before her ultimately drew Hetty's gaze. She circled it several times, trying to judge its magical principles and the difficulty of manufacturing it, but in truth she already knew the answer: if this device had been built on a traditional communication spell model, Camille would have had no reason to present it to Gaoyang as a great achievement!

In a world where supernatural power existed, long-distance communication was nothing unheard of; it was merely a matter of higher spell tiers and exceptionally high costs. Precisely because of these two limitations, its applications had always been confined to a very narrow range—such as the one or two emergency communication channels held by the monarchs of various nations, or the short-range communication needs of certain mid- to high-tier professionals. At present, the only long-distance communication channel on the continent that could be called practically valuable and was also applied on a large scale was the magnificent wall built by the elves—but that wall had been built seven hundred years ago by the combined strength of nearly half a continent's intelligent races, at a cost so enormous that even today, seven hundred years later, the various nations still had not mustered enough strength to build another one. And the communication range of the magnificent wall extended only in a ring around the wall itself...