Chapter 79: Reba’s Sess and Doubts About Magical Power
<strong>Trantor: </strong>As Studios <i></i><strong>Editor: </strong>As Studios
“So these are the ‘Reba Crystals’ that you sessfully produced… Mm, that’s right. They look like the same thing.” Seated in his own tent and looking at the big basket of things that Reba had excitedly brought over, Gawain nodded lightly.
It was a basket of dark-grayish, grotesquely strange substance. Some were loose like sand, while some were packed together, but regardless of their form, they were all almost evenly filled with countless tiny particles. Andpared to the ‘waste residue’ that Reba had <em>unintentionally </em>produced, the products in this basket evidently contained more crystals. The average diameter of these crystals also seemed to have increased significantly.
This meant that Reba had not only found the form, but she’d even figured out the way to improve the method of production.
Upon hearing Gawain’s words, even the iron-headed, straightforward Reba with low EQ instantly became embarrassed. The viscountess scratched her face, now ck from the smoke and heat. When she smiled, she looked like a doofus who’d just turned seventeen and had set off explosives in a kiln. “Hehe… Lord Ancestor, do you really think this thing can be named as such? Isn’t it only really great people who get things named after them…”
“You invented these crystals. Isn’t that impressive enough?” Gawain looked at this nth+1 great-granddaughter whocked confidence. “Mm, although there’s still a lot of room for improvement, this is indeed a ‘product’ that can be repeatedly produced. The name ‘Reba Crystals’ is well deserved.”
Reba entered a state of silly happiness. “Hehe, heheheh…”
“Stop your silly giggles for now. Tell me how exactly this was produced.” Gawain was at a loss of whether tough or to cry as he nced at this iron-headed girl. “Although luck has a part to y in the emergence of any new material, I still want to know how such amazing luck befell us.”
“Oh, oh, as a matter of fact, it’s totally a coincidence.” Reba scratched her face. “They had actually been baked ording to the primitive form that you gave me. But I failed several times when I attempted to recreate the baking process. None of the mixture ratios worked. Subsequently, I suspected a problem with the furnaces, so I ordered people to check on their condition. In the end, it was found that a big piece had fallen off from the inner walls of one of the furnaces…”
“A big piece fell off?” Gawain frowned. He realized that the key to producing these ‘Reba Crystals’ was probably in those fallen pieces of the furnace wall. “So the materials used to build the furnace were also involved in the reaction?”
“That is one of the reasons. Because those furnaces were also heated using runes, there was quartz sand mixed in when they were being built. And other than quartz sand, another important factor is the rocks from the Dark Range.”
“Rocks from the Dark Range?” Gawain repeated.
“Yes, Ipared quite a few records and found that there were two obvious differences between the products from that furnace and the other furnaces. One, quartz sand from the building of the furnace was mixed into the raw materials; two, the limestone in the raw materials was dug up from the Dark Range. The limestone from the other furnaces was from the banks of the White River; also, it was transported from the logging shed at the western side. When those are used as raw materials, even adding quartz sand is useless…”
Two conditions, quartz sand and limestone from the Dark Range is it…
Gawain pondered for a while. These two conditions were the urate conclusion that Reba came to after multipleparisons; there was no need to suspect their validity. Then exactly what role did these two materials y in this process?
The effect of quartz sand was usible as it was a weak magic-conducting material. Though extremely cheap, it was still a genuine magic material. Besides, it was one of the raw materials to produce man-made crystals in itself. But what was with the limestone from the Dark Range?
Why couldn’t limestone extracted from other ces work?
He threw these questions to the floor, leaving Reba stupefied.
The young viscountess had never considered these details. She scratched the back of her head as she mumbled, “I was too wrapped up in feeling happy. I’ve yet to think…”
“The Dark Range had once been enveloped by the Dark Wave,” Gawain said as he rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Till today, the mark of being corroded by the elemental tide still remains in many areas in the mountains. Perhaps it is this process that altered the properties of some minerals… that provided them with the attribute of being responsive to magic?”
In the situation where there was ack of more experimental data and theoretical guidance, Gawain could only make such a bold guess. But regardless of the reason, Gawain was now sure of one thing — ‘Reba Crystals’ were absolutely unique in this world; at least in the Anzu Kingdom, it was.
In usual times, who would be so idle as to go dig up the Dark Range and bake rocks…
“After confirming that the key was with quartz sand and limestone from the Dark Range, I tried out several methods to increase the proportion of crystals and their quality.” Reba went on, “I found that increasing the proportion of quartz sand can increase the yield of crystals, but many crystals would shatter out of the furnace. Upping the proportion of limestone would enhance the product’s capacity to store magical power, but past a certain amount, there would instead be no crystals formed. And I also realized that the effects of temperature and baking duration are especially notable… There were too many variations that could be tested. I couldn’t finish them at the same time, so I baked one batch using the best method we have now. Na, they are the ones before you.”
Gawain asked bluntly, “Couldymenplete this process?”
“Yes, but the majority would not understand what the ‘cross-referencing’ and ‘observation group’ that you taught me means, so they can only produce ording to the method taught to them,” Reba answered. “Moreover, they’re really careless. Even if they’ve been told how to do it, they would often get thepounding ratio wrong or remember the incorrect baking duration. The time control that is needed for producing crystals is much stricter than that for baking bricks!”
Improving the average quality of thebor force was imperative.
Yet he couldn’t even find a few cultural teachers that were up to standard… Everyone literate in words and numbers was already overworking; where would he find people to create an education system?
Hire them from Tanzan Town? There weren’t many who were literate in Tanzan Town either! People who could read and write were either merchants or had already joined aristocrat residences to take on ‘respectable roles’ like butlers and clerks. How could those people be willing toe to the middle of nowhere and join them in developing the wilderness? They weren’t impoverished serfs or peasants…
Gawain touched his head again. Each time a new problem emerged, he would subconsciously do this action, as if he was checking on his own hairline…
“Lord Ancestor?” Reba spoke up cautiously.
“No, its fine, all these are issues that need to be settled in the long term.” Gawain waved his hand. “Continue with production ording to this ‘optimal case’ for now. Then try toe up with even better ratios of materials when you have the time. In short, the more crystal bits there are, the better. It’s even as important as the output of steel. Oh yes, we also need toe up with a way to extract these crystals mixed in them. This ck waste residue is quite useless. You can try crushing them and then use water to sift through it. Crystals are much harder than the waste residue and also heavier. It should be easy to separate them after crushing and rinsing with water.”
Reba nodded as she listened. When Gawain finished, she then leaned over with a gleeful smile and asked like a cat that ate the canary, “Um… Lord Ancestor, I heard from Aunt Heidi, you’re nning to make such crystals into magic articles that can explode?”
“Something like that.” Gawain looked at this girl who always had funny ideas. “What opinions do you have?”
“You’re nning to use the explosive magic circles in the Gondor manufactured crystals on these crystals, aren’t you?” Reba’s eyes were bright. “But have you thought of how to do the detonation?”
Gawain frowned; this was precisely the question he was deliberating over.
The explosive magic circles in those ancient Gondor crystals were the same asmonly seen small-scale arrays; they belonged under ‘magic circles that could not recharge themselves’. In other words, they need an external magical power source to be the ‘starting source of energy’ to continue proceeding with the subsequent detonation. In those Gondor crystals, this portion of energy was provided by the crystal itself; in the ‘Art 1’ that he conceptualized, there did not exist this portion of energy.
Other than being an explosive substance and being directly blown up, the magical power stored in Reba Crystals could not be extracted to be used in other magical reactions at all. As such, the explosive magical circles attached to the Reba Crystals would require another magical power to be the ‘starting catalyst power’, then where would this portion of magical powere from?
Use another piece of storage crystal to be the ‘explosive battery’? Then it would have lost the significance of being ‘inexpensive’.
Use mages’ magical power to stimte the magic circles? Then it would lose the design objective of ‘having the average person be able to use it’.
“Speak your mind. Just looking at that gaze of yours, I know you have an idea.” Gawain scanned Reba. This youngdy before him really wasn’t someone who could hide things; even if he didn’t ask, she would probably still spill her thoughts.
“It’s like this…” Reba, as expected, didn’t keep him guessing. “I studied that explosive magic circle for a bit and found that the magical power required to activate it… is actually pretty little.”
Gawain nodded. “That’s of course. It’s a magic circle used for spontaneous explosion when the crystal ceases to be effective, after all. Its activation-energy demand would definitely have been optimized countless times.”
“Then I realized one thing,” Reba went on. “The ‘rune trigger’ that I invented, it produces an extra ‘spark’ of magical power. Very weak, but it really exists…”
“Wait a minute!” Gawain interrupted Reba instantly. He realized that he had caught a key problem which had been neglected for a long time. “You said that the rune-trigger construct produces magical power at the moment it closes? Are you sure that it isn’t magical power dissipated from the magic web buried underground?”
“I checked several times because I’ve been able to sense magical power very well from a young age. I can <em>see </em>it very clearly.” Reba nodded hard in emphasis. “There is an extra portion of magical power when the rune trigger shuts, and I even found that it’s not restricted to the rune trigger. As long as a pair of originally intact runes is taken apart and put back together, an ‘instantaneous spark of magical power’ would be produced. This bit of magical poweres and goes in a sh, just in the blink of an eye. But if one wants to ignite something, just this blink of an eye would be enough.”
Gawain immediately sank into deep thought, onlying back to his senses when he saw he’d left Reba utterly nervous. “Ah… Very good, very good. Then, you can test out your rune trigger together with the explosive magic circle ording to your ideas. You can get Heidi to help. Just tell her the orderes from me.”
Reba presently beamed with a smile. However, before she left, she suddenly remembered something. “Ah yes, Lord Ancestor, have you thought of what to name such explosive articles in the future?”
Gawain thought for a moment and replied solemnly, “Art.”
“Eh? Does this have any rtion to art?”
Gawain’s expression was serious. “We’re naming it Art!”
Reba’s eyes rolled up as she gave it some thought, thinking that Ancestor might have some significance in that, so she nodded along happily. “Mm! Art!”
Reba left joyfully, but Gawain couldn’t find peace for a long time as he sat in his tent.
He fiddled with a pen, spinning it around subconsciously. When he recovered from his daze, he realized he had scribbled a line of words on the rough paper: “Magical power. What exactly is magical power?”