Chapter 574 — Breaking New Ground

After Camille had gone, Gao Yang sat quietly behind his desk and sank into a long meditation.

He pondered the nature of mana, wondered at its origin, and considered how the interference of natural mana upon his observational experiments might be shielded. Amid this reverie, Amber, standing beside him, spoke up: "You seem to have been studying something about the nature of mana all this while... is that question really so important?"

"Aren't you curious?" Gao Yang glanced back at Amber and saw that the half-elf's face was full of puzzlement. "Have you never wondered just what mana in the natural world actually is, or where it comes from?"

"...Mana is just mana, as natural a thing as the air; it's simply part of the world," Amber said, scratching her hair. "Casting spells needs it, brewing potions needs it, even the survival of some plants and beasts needs it... I figure it's like stone — it's been there since the world was born."

"But stone doesn't suddenly turn into a chaotic mana tide; mana can. And it needn't exist forever, unless we can prove it truly is inexhaustible," Gao Yang said with a slight shake of his head. "What if mana is only a brief miracle? Of course, 'brief' only by the measure of the world's whole span of years — but perhaps mana is merely a small episode in this world's long cycle of ages, like a moment of calm amid a thunderous ocean. We mortals are tiny insects born within that moment of calm, and our lives are briefer still; we are born in the calm and so imagine the world's true nature to be a placid sheet of water, never knowing that the next second may bring a violent storm. Or perhaps mana is something of limited reserve, consumed at every instant, yet before it runs dry mortals have no way at all to perceive or measure it..."

The more Amber listened, the more astonished she grew, until at last she stared wide-eyed: "Where do you get these appalling ideas?"

Then, with a strange expression, she looked Gao Yang up and down: "No wonder you so often seem so mysterious... so your head is crammed with this sort of bizarre nonsense every day... Say, you weren't seeing things during those seven hundred years your soul was out of your body, were you?"

"...That has nothing to do with it," Gao Yang said, shaking his head with a laugh, caught between amusement and exasperation. "Never mind. One day you'll..."

He had meant to say "One day you'll understand this question," but then he thought of Amber's laziness in matters of knowledge and her disinclination to think things through, and his tone shifted: "Don't trouble your head about it."

Amber thought for a moment, then glared: "I think you're insulting my intelligence..."

Gao Yang paid no heed to the half-elf's little protest. He merely rose, left the study, and made his way to the magical laboratory nearby.

The laboratory belonged to Hedy, but since Gao Yang also had some knowledge of the magical field, a few things of his were kept here as well. He went to a corner of the lab, took a set of apparatus that had lain idle for some time from a cabinet, carried it to a nearby bench, and assembled it.

Its structure was simple: a light shield pierced with a small hole, a baffle bearing a narrow double slit, and a flat screen — and thanks to the precision-crafting skills of the Nikshi egg, the accuracy of this apparatus was unmatched in this age.

The baffle of this apparatus was not mana-suppressing crystal but an ordinary opaque metal plate; it was therefore not meant for observing the double-slit interference of mana, but was an ordinary device for observing the double-slit interference of light. It had sat here for several months already, and the relevant observations had long since been recorded — but today, Gao Yang wanted to look once more.

He set the monochromatic light source before the apparatus, extinguished the lamps in the laboratory, and then began carefully adjusting the relative positions of the baffle and the screen.

No matter how he adjusted it, what appeared on the screen was always nothing but a chaotic, spreading halo of light.

The halo drifted and shifted as Gao Yang made his adjustments, like a devil's malicious grin, mocking the helpless experimenter.

There were no interference fringes.

Gao Yang seemed to return once more to those months ago, and to feel again the shock and bewilderment that had come over him when he first observed that halo through this apparatus.

The light of this world did not seem to be light — and yet the simple optical instruments he had designed, telescopes and the like, all worked perfectly well.

No interference fringes appeared on the screen. It might be that the apparatus's precision or range of adjustment was still insufficient, or it might be that the "light" of this world truly had no wave nature. But after his conversation with Camille today, and after learning that the elves had encountered the same problem when verifying the wave nature of mana, a new conjecture came to him: perhaps this apparatus, too, was subject to the interference of natural mana.

Was the "light" of this world also a kind of mana? A mana visible to the naked eye, one that could be blocked by ordinary opaque matter? Or could the mana of this world influence the wave nature of light at the microscopic scale, so that every double-slit interference experiment, once exposed to a mana environment, was bound to fail?

Gazing at that hazy, chaotic halo upon the screen, Gao Yang sank into long thought.

...

Autumn had come.

As the most conspicuous constellation in the summer night sky, the Fireflow had gradually drawn away from the zenith and become a settled fixture of the western sky, while the Frostsky — harbinger of the receding heat — was slowly rising and beginning its climb toward the center of the heavens.

Each year, the first month was the Month of Chill, the second the Month of Revival, the third the Month of Fire, and the fourth the Month of Harvest — the ascent of the Frostsky meant that the hottest season of the year was nearing its end, that the autumn of harvest had come upon the land, and that it would keep rising through the coming Frostmonth and Fogmonth, drawing nearer the zenith with every day. To mark the turning of the seasons, the Ansus had given a name to this season, just as the Frostsky began its ascent: "Fourthmonth Frostwelcoming."

The name had briefly puzzled Gao Yang. Though he knew from memory that "Frostwelcoming" in this phrase did not mean welcoming frost and snow but welcoming the "Frostsky," the habits of an Earthling's mind had still made it a long while before he could link this "cool" name to days that still retained a trace of summer heat.

In the end, he had adapted to this world after all.

In the government hall, the weekly routine report meeting was under way. Gao Yang sat at the head of the long table, listening calmly to the report of Norris, Minister of Agriculture.

The minister, a man of poor farmer stock who now increasingly showed the marks of age, held the documents in his hands and, though he tried hard to stand straight, his upper body remained somewhat stooped: "...The crops in the newly reclaimed lands of Horsman, Kant, Carroll, Grane, and Tamsen are growing well, and a good harvest may be expected. In Peppo, Constantine, the western wilderness, and the northwestern regions, the new lands were opened later, land consolidation and exchange are not yet complete, and with the matter of resettling the inhabitants besides, I fear the grain production plan cannot be fulfilled..."

"The promotion of the new farm machinery in Horsman and Kant has produced good results; some of the early-maturing crops have already been harvested ahead of schedule...

"Testing of the 'Harvest-II' druidic agent in the North Shore experimental fields has achieved preliminary success; as planned, the next step will be to assess the agent's subsequent effects upon the soil... cough, cough..."