Chapter 451 — The Crystallization of Wisdom

To be honest, Gao Yang sometimes reflected on whether something had gone wrong with the way he recruited people and built up his territory — enough that everyone gathered around him (spheres, fish, light bulbs, and the like) ended up so distinctly characterized. These distinctive fellows were, of course, beyond any doubt in terms of ability, but their vivid traits would now and then turn a perfectly good affair into an awkward one — and Mr. Nikoxi Egg was unquestionably a master of that particular art.

The sphere could even turn itself square. Where was the logic in that?

Once this newfangled printing press came out, even writing up a record of merits would be a headache — for other project leaders you could say they toiled with devotion and exhausted themselves for the cause, going on about accumulated wear and illness, coughing blood from overwork, refusing to leave the front line over a minor wound; but when it came to the Mechanical Research Institute, you would have to write that the director grew twelve edges from sheer exhaustion — and without seven or eight illustrations and two pages of explanatory text attached, any reader would suspect the author's brain had been caught in a door...

"You... have worked hard..." Gao Yang said, the corner of his eye twitching as he looked at this iron-star man. "Once this project is finished, take a couple of days off..."

"Ah, don't worry, it's a minor ailment, I'll recover soon enough," Nikoxi Egg said, as though utterly unaware of how many people his current shape had frightened. "Let's first see how this equipment works — you're sure to be satisfied."

Gao Yang struggled to pull his attention away from those twelve newly grown edges of Nikoxi Egg and began to focus on what truly mattered here.

That "arcane printing press," different from any press he knew in working principle, structure, and appearance alike, was now fully prepared.

"Let's begin," Gao Yang nodded. "Starting from the initial editing. Rebecca, you operate it yourself."

Rebecca, who had come along with Gao Yang to inspect the results, had been waiting for this moment all along. She answered cheerfully at once, then walked with light steps to the small cabinet beside the arcane printing press.

She pulled a lever on the side of the little cabinet, and a very faint humming rose from within the device. A glimmer of light surfaced on the projection crystal set into the cabinet's top, and then a pale blue halo appeared above the entire apparatus.

It closely resembled the holographic display of a magic-net communicator with no signal connected, sitting in standby — except that the edges of this image were bounded by a ring of bright square lines, which must be the restricted area of the page layout.

And as the little "cabinet" started up, at the junction between the cabinet and the main body of the press, a crystal set into a metal platform also lit up — only then did Gao Yang realize that this structure connecting the two devices was in fact the arcane printing press's "scanning unit."

An assistant standing by stepped forward and placed a sheet of white paper, already covered in writing, onto the metal platform.

In the holographic projection above the "little cabinet," the image of that white paper appeared at once — up to this point, every step was a scene and phenomenon utterly familiar to the mages of this world; this was nothing more than the most common technique in illusion magic and crystal craft.

But as Rebecca pressed the first key on the "keyboard" atop the little cabinet, Gao Yang saw something that never appeared in conventional illusion magic:

In the holographic projection above the cabinet, beneath the image of the white paper, the characters Rebecca had entered appeared.

A string of characters was soon typed out by Rebecca, forming a sentence: "The part above is the physical scanning function; this sentence is the text editing function."

Then Rebecca pulled a handle beside the keyboard, and a faint sound of mechanical operation came from the little cabinet. She continued to enter characters, and the new characters surfaced below the previous sentence.

"Speaking of which, how do you input text into an illusion projection?" Gao Yang asked the question he had overlooked before, one that puzzled him deeply: given the current progress of Cecil's rune logic, computer technology was still far beyond reach — the technicians could not yet build a magic array capable of data processing, and Jenny had no clue about it either. So how had Rebecca achieved text processing on a device like this?

Was it a purely mechanical process? And if so, how was a purely mechanical process converted into symbols on a holographic projection?

"Oh, this? The principle isn't complicated at all, it's just the structure that's complex. There are only twenty-eight letters in all, and with the common punctuation marks that's just over thirty — so we built thirty-seven small white crystals, each pre-engraved with a character, right into this cabinet. These thirty-seven white crystals are tiny, arranged by connecting rods into a fan-shaped disc, with a very small window at the front edge of the fan disc. On the other side of the window is a thin sheet of cardboard that moves, and behind the cardboard is another scanning crystal that moves along with it. When you press a rune trigger on this 'keyboard,' the corresponding white crystal is flicked to the window at the front of the fan disc and activated, burning a black character onto the cardboard — then the crystal behind the cardboard projects the pattern down. Also, by adjusting the distance between the white crystals and the cardboard, the size of the characters can be regulated..."

As she spoke, Rebecca opened the side panel of the little cabinet, and Gao Yang saw the intricate, astonishing mechanical structure inside — a structure that vaguely resembled the mechanical typewriters he remembered.

Rebecca went on: "But its drawbacks are fairly obvious too. First, it consumes a sheet of cardboard every time — though that consumption isn't large, so it's acceptable. Second, you have to be careful when typing: a mistake leaves a mark on the cardboard. If there are only a few errors, you can roll the cardboard back and cover them with the black-block key, but too many errors and it ruins readability — the whole sheet is wasted..."

"Incredible..." Gao Yang gazed at that complex mechanical structure in near astonishment. Those ingeniously designed connecting rods, springs, gears, and slide rails seemed to carry a strange charm; they were the crystallization of human wisdom from an age before digital technology existed, the pinnacle of mechanical craft. He stared wide-eyed at Rebecca. "You came up with this?"

"I worked it out together with my assistants," Rebecca said, scratching her hair. "Strictly speaking, I only proposed the idea — the design was entirely the assistants' doing. Two of the newly arrived arcanotechnical engineers are clockmakers from the royal capital, and they're extremely good at designing this kind of delicate mechanical contraption — though back in the capital they never had the chance to design anything this bizarre."

Nikoxi Egg promptly let out a muffled voice from the side: "I'd originally planned to bring those two clockmakers over to the Mechanical Research Institute — but it turned out they were more interested in arcanotechnology."

Clockmakers...

Looking at the intricate mechanical structure inside the little cabinet, Gao Yang gave a slight nod of admiration. "Very good, very good — those two are talents, talents like Cohen. They should be given special training. Now, continue."

"Right," Rebecca nodded happily. "Next, all that's left is to send this edited material to the arcane transfer cylinder and print it out!"