Chapter 443 — A Trade in Technology

Watching that rare look of eagerness on Tyr's face, Gao Yang knew he had finally landed this fish—though he was not entirely sure how he had managed it, for his original plan had been to drag Tyr around a while longer, using this and that from the human world to slowly kindle the creature's interest. He had never expected the Rainbow Light Cannon to hook her outright.

No matter. The fish was on the line.

"You are interested in the Rainbow Light Cannon?" Gao Yang looked at Tyr. "Is it impressive even by the standards of you sirens?"

"Impressive? Its destructive power is certainly decent, but we are hardly short of weapons..." Tyr shook her head. "What I am curious about is how you bind such a vast and pure arcane energy... and how you extract that energy from an ordinary magical environment!"

Tyr had no interest in the Rainbow Light Cannon itself—for the once vastly advanced siren civilization, the manufacturing and engineering behind this new weapon were nothing remarkable. What stirred her curiosity was the principle behind it, the Cecilians' approach to controlling magic.

Gao Yang understood this quickly enough. Looking into Tyr's eyes, finally free of their usual drowsiness, he did not answer her request at once. Instead he asked, "May I be more specific—why does this part of the technology interest you? You sirens have long observed the races of the land. Has our system of magical technology never drawn your interest before?"

"The magical technology of the land, as it was before?" Tyr slapped the deck of the Aurora hard with her tail. "Ha, you mean the 'skill' system you land-dwellers invented? Or your first-, second-, third-rank magic arrays? Those are nothing alike! Your 'skill' system is utterly useless to us. Have you never noticed it yourself? This thing you call the Rainbow Light Cannon... it is a far more fundamental technology of energy utilization. It draws power from the magic net, then modulates it, binds it, focuses it, and finally discharges it. In all of this, what rank of spell is it? What skill is it? There are no such superfluous concepts at all!"

The siren lady was rarely so agitated, her tail thumping the deck without pause. Her words were bound to sound obscure to an outsider, even muddled and out of order, yet Gao Yang vaguely grasped what it was that this siren truly cared about—

The magic net's property as a "universal energy source."

Humanity had spent tens of thousands of years building a "skill tree," converting magic into skills of various ranks and spells of various categories, using countless intricate and disparate incantations and spell models to turn magic into specific phenomena. Yet this "skill" that only humans could understand and master was meaningless to the sirens. Their very form of life seemed to determine that they could never comprehend human spells—unable to learn them, and with no use for them.

What they needed was a "universal energy source."

Yet perhaps precisely because of that form of life, they had never found a way to convert magic into universal energy.

The Rainbow Light Cannon showed Tyr an entirely new technological path. In that devastating beam she sensed a power sufficient to break through a certain bottleneck of the sirens—and that power was no rigid skill, but pure energy drawn from the magic net, frequency-tuned through rune arrays, and focused by the rainbow light crystal. This energy could be launched as a weapon, but change a few control runes and it could be put to other uses as well.

Gao Yang said the sirens had an ancient lost city, and that the energy reactor at its heart had been cold for many years. They needed a powerful new source of energy to reignite it. The divine flesh and blood they had dredged from the seafloor held tremendous energy, but perhaps because it could not be fully converted, they had only ever been able to keep the reactor at a faint "residual heat"—never enough to wake the whole city.

After a brief pause for thought, Gao Yang broke the silence. "The Rainbow Light Cannon could 'ignite' your reactor?"

"Perhaps not yet. It is not powerful enough. Compared with our core fusion tower, it is still only a tiny spark..." Tyr turned her head and gazed absently at the cannon on the deck. "But you have made that spark appear..."

Most technologies capable of changing the world are crude in their first prototypes—so crude that the ignorant may well exclaim, "What is the point of this gaudy thing?" In the eyes of a higher civilization, that crudeness is all the more glaring.

Only very few can recognize, at such a stage, the value behind these "small sparks"—and how far they might grow.

Gao Yang had not expected Tyr, forever half-asleep, to possess such vision. But he was glad she did.

A fish with good eyesight tends to take the hook firmly.

"I will get you one," Gao Yang said, nodding to Tyr. "Of course, you will have to give something in return."

"Just name it," Tyr said with great confidence, slapping the deck with her tail, plap-plap. "I am a war priest, after all. I would be of great use to you here. Or do you want wealth and treasures? I can manage that too. Down in the deep..."

"I have no interest in your personal fighting strength or your personal savings," Gao Yang cut her off. "Technology must be traded for technology."

"Traded for technology?" Tyr blinked. "What do you mean?"

"How much do you know about... shipbuilding?"

The moment Gao Yang asked, Byron wore the look of a man thinking, "So we have come to this part at last." Clearly the knight had long known what his lord intended in bringing this siren along. Rebecca, however, had just finished inspecting the Rainbow Light Cannon's condition and was strolling over; hearing Gao Yang's words, she froze, blinked, and stared at him. "Lord Gao Yang, are you planning to have Miss Tyr help us build ships?"

After Gao Yang confirmed it, Rebecca could not help scratching her hair, her gaze toward Tyr full of doubt. "But is she up to it?"

Tyr had not yet answered Gao Yang when she caught Rebecca's skepticism. She looked puzzled. "Why do you assume I cannot?"

Rebecca was probably still lost in the cannon's rune arrays and mechanical structure, her head too muddled to catch up, for she blurted, "Do you sirens even need ships? It is not as if you cannot swim..."

Tyr could not help sizing Rebecca up and down. "You humans can walk, can you not? Why do you build carts?"

Rebecca's expression went blank. It was a long moment before she managed to squeeze out, "Oh. Right..."

Setting aside this girl whose mind was always on some other channel, Tyr turned back to Gao Yang. "You want me to help you build ships, then—fine, I have no problem with that. But first, let me make a few things clear.

"First, what I understand by building a 'ship' is absolutely not the same as your human shipbuilding techniques. For the most part we have no need of a waterborne conveyance that must forever float on the surface and remain sealed and dry. That much is no great problem, though—with our techniques for building waterborne craft, even in a field where we are not proficient, surpassing you would not be difficult. That is not an insult; it is a fact.

"Second, I can teach your craftsmen a great deal—fluid dynamics, materials science, specialized coating techniques, even propulsion technology. But it is quite possible these techniques will prove too far ahead of their time to realize, because they require a whole mountain of prerequisite science and industrial foundation, and I do not know how to build that up step by step either. So it may well be that I serve as your consultant for several years, draw up a great pile of excellent blueprints, and your craftsmen still produce nothing. Do not blame anyone for that.