Chapter 1156 — The World Accelerates

When the ancient arcanist's words fell, Gao Yang did not speak for a moment. His face was as calm as still water; all the answers and clues converged in his heart into a ceaselessly spinning vortex, and a certain "truth" of this universe presented itself to him all the more clearly:

Mana accelerates everything—both the birth of civilizations and their destruction. It is a force that "pushes things along," and every sapient people born in this universe is swept up in it, multiplying and developing at extreme speed, and perishing at extreme speed, round after round. Once, Gao Yang's impression of the universe had been cold and slow; that impression came from his homeland, where before the astronomical scale the changes of all things were reckoned in tens of thousands, even hundreds of millions of years, and the lamps of civilization that chanced to be born in the cold universe appeared so slowly and crept forward so sluggishly that even unto extinction they might be the only faint, tiny spark in the vastness of the stars.

But now he realized that the world he lived in was utterly different from that—this world was a cauldron of fierce heat, where all things were accelerated under the roasting of mana. Here, it was easy for a sapient people to develop; once a technological breakthrough appeared, mortals could go from groping forward in ignorance on the ground to commanding machines and touching the sky in a single stride. But at the same time... the end of a civilization was far easier too.

And herein lies the sorrow of many sapient races: they cannot keep up with this fast-moving train, nor can they avoid the countless traps in this accelerated race. They sprint down a road whose end they cannot see, and a single misstep or a moment's pause means utter ruin.

Thus the starry sky is strewn with the flickering glimmers of civilizations, yet scarcely one can become a bright lamp. Among those dense, swiftly changing glimmers, there lie in fact tombstones beyond number, marking civilizations that have already perished.

"What are you thinking about?" Kamael, seeing that Gao Yang had not spoken for a long while, finally broke the silence.

Gao Yang gave a slight shake of his head and said in a low, slow voice, "I was only thinking whether we too are being swept along by mana, racing forward..."

"...Gramos, the philosopher of the Starfire era, once said that all beings in the world are bound to be swept along by the environment in which they were born. It is not we who chose this world; it is this world that gave us birth," Kamael said suddenly after a moment of silence. He raised one arm, and bright arcane sparks leaped across the surface of his runic armor plates. "Mana... you should know that it is everywhere, and we cannot develop apart from it."

A fish lives in water and dies when taken from it. Perhaps one day it will evolve to breathe with lungs, but that is clearly not something the mortals of today can consider.

"You have a point," Gao Yang nodded slightly, but his gaze came to rest on the energy conduits and the elemental pool behind Kamael. "So now I am especially curious... what exactly is the essence of mana?"

Kamael turned around. The pure flame-streams in the energy conduits rose, giving off a radiance bright yet cold. "Master Vilania and I both believe it is a wave—a fluctuation that pervades the entire universe, piercing through stars and spanning time and space. All the indirect phenomena we have observed so far support this conjecture, including our communication technology and the 'mana field' of the mana obelisk. But to this day, we have not found that crucial piece of evidence...

"I have been continually testing ever-purer sources of arcane energy, to reduce as much as possible the probability of its interacting with the clutter in space. The scholars of the Silver Empire, meanwhile, are trying to create a kind of 'darkroom' effect, using anti-magic materials and energy fields with blocking properties to screen out the mana noise in the environment. Our efforts cannot be called fruitless, but we are still far from seeing results."

"Is the mana noise in the environment still an insoluble problem?" Gao Yang frowned. He had known of this difficulty years ago, and he also knew that in fact, nearly half a century earlier, the silver elves had already been trying to break through this barrier. "Is there no 'natural environment' in this world that is free of mana noise?"

"Unfortunately, we have found no clue in that direction to this day," Kamael's voice carried undisguised disappointment. "Mana is everywhere, and so is the noise. We once imagined that if we left this planet, there might be a 'pure' mana vacuum in space—but now we know that even out in the universe, mana fills the space between the stars... I think it is likely the very 'base color' of our world, or the macroscopic projection of some most fundamental structure of our world—so long as we live in this world, we cannot get around it."

The macroscopic projection of the world's most fundamental structure?

This seemed a conjecture of considerable depth. Gao Yang frowned and pondered for a while, but gained nothing. He shook his head. "Do you think the dragons might have an answer? The technology they once commanded was far more advanced than ours, and they have accumulated a million years of knowledge—much of which has now been 'unsealed.'"

"In fact I have already asked. When the dragons' envoys last visited Xuanyao City, I paid a visit to one of their members," Kamael said, shaking his head. "What is surprising is that their progress in this area is actually about the same as ours... They believe the essence of mana is indeed a wave, and they have confirmed this conjecture from various indirect evidence. The evidence they command is indeed far more than ours, but as for the final conclusion... they are always one link short."

To ordinary people, the question of "whether mana is really a wave" is probably not so important. They might even feel that since the dragons command so much indirect evidence and many of their technological achievements more or less support this conjecture, then the question is "more or less settled," and there is no need to pursue it so rigorously, or to verify it over and over with such fastidiousness. But Kamael knew that he and Master Vilania could not do that.

Scholarship is rigorous—all the more so when it may touch upon the deepest secrets of this world.

"Even the dragons have not found a way to complete this experiment?" Gao Yang was utterly astonished by Kamael's words. "This... it seems the problem of mana noise is far more troublesome than we imagined..."

...

At the same time, in the sky north of Xuanyao City, a small dragon flight was beating its vast wings, passing in formation through the depths of the clouds.

At the very front of the flight were the white dragon Noretta and the blue dragon Metzen.

"This is the first time I have left Tarrond since that battle," Noretta could not help saying as they passed through a gap between the clouds. Her gaze swept over the land far below, and broad, straight roads and the mana-transmission facilities distributed along them entered her view. "There have been great changes again... The changes in the human world truly never cease for a moment."

"Tarrond is the same nowadays," Metzen said, stirring the mana in the air so that his voice passed directly into Noretta's ears. "And in the future, we too will certainly never again fall into the kind of stagnation we once knew."

"That is a fine blessing," Noretta bent her neck, lightly touching her chin to an egg-shaped vessel secured firmly to her chest by clasps, the dragon egg within bathed in a magical field, its surface shimmering faintly. "I too believe that once this child is born, the future awaiting it will surely be a better world."

(End of this chapter)