Chapter 66 — The Sphere

They had come in tense and nervous, and now they were heading back pushing a ball. Truth be told, the sight of the group trundling a ball along greatly eased the soldiers' tension—but it also filled Gao Yang with a deep sense of incongruity. He couldn't shake the feeling that his hard-won first foray into an otherworld ruin had been ruined by this ball—as if you'd donned a legendary suit of armor, taken up the finest sword in the village, been granted the title of Hero by the king, assembled four sages as your companions, and set off full of ambition on a quest to slay the Demon King—only to find the Demon King was Patrick Star...

The Gondorians back then must have had far too much time on their hands. Studying a ball for no reason—what was the point?

With Hetty's magical markers and the map in Gao Yang's head guiding them like something out of a cheat, the group's return was incomparably faster than the journey in. Even pushing a ball, the impossibly light thing was hardly any burden; when they came to an uphill stretch or a flight of steps, Hetty simply summoned an evocation hand and lifted it up.

The group retraced their route, and soon the faint light of the exit appeared ahead.

Outside, the soldiers had been waiting a long time by now, and had even begun to grow uneasy. The sound of footsteps and shouted orders coming from deep within the central gate finally let them breathe easy—but the noise that came along with the footsteps left them exchanging puzzled looks: it sounded like something rolling across the ground...

The sight of two soldiers pushing a ball appeared before them—truthfully, one person could have pushed it; the second was mainly for balance.

"Fall in, let's head back," Gao Yang said, back in the entrance hall at last, letting out a long breath. One hand resting on the stone ball, he added, "This is the result."

The soldiers looked at one another.

The next day, everyone moving about the camp's edge saw this bizarre sphere.

It had been set down on an open patch outside the camp, with several fully armed warriors standing guard beside it. A ring of wooden stakes had been driven into the ground a dozen or so meters around the sphere, connected by ropes to form a barrier.

It looked absurd to the point of being hilarious—those guards must have lost at cards, people whispered to one another.

Ruibeiyu woke up and heard the news, and hurried over to see the spectacle. Seeing that her own Xuanyuan Sect and Aunt Hetty were both on the scene, she squeezed her way through and joined the curious onlookers gazing at the ball: "Ancestor... is this the thing you brought out of the ruins last night?"

"We brought out some metal samples and such as well—there's still plenty of good stuff to dig out of those ruins," Gao Yan said with a nod. "But it's this thing here—we can't make sense of it."

Rebecca circled the great sphere twice out of curiosity, then came back and asked the Xuânmạch Sect for permission: "Can I touch it?"

Gao Yang waved a hand: "Don't throw a big fireball at it, anything else is fine."

Strange as it was that this "stone sphere" felt so light, it was in fact extremely sturdy. He had already tested it: without drawing on any transcendent power, ordinary blades and swords could barely leave a scratch on its surface, so a couple of knocks ought to be perfectly safe.

But a big fireball was another matter entirely—especially with Rebecca's reckless streak; she might well conjure up a fireball the size of a bathtub and hurl it down without a second thought...

Rebecca pressed her ear curiously against the surface of the sphere, tapped it twice with the iron staff in her other hand, and turned to shout at Gao Yang: "It's not hollow!"

"Right, it's solid, yet impossibly light," Gao Yang shrugged. "Your aunt scraped off a bit of debris and found it's a composite with a very high metal content. If the whole sphere were made of the same material, it would weigh enough to crush a man."

"Maybe only the outer layer is a shell, and inside it's actually some very light material?" Rebecca's scholarly interest flared up. "Should we cut it open and see?"

Gao Yang frowned. "That's what I was thinking too, but not now. First let's study it using every method that doesn't cause damage. If we truly can't get any results, then we'll consider cutting it open. After all, the Gondorians of that era used so many tools to study it, and in the end never damaged its shell—there must be a reason."

Rebecca looked a little disappointed: "Oh..."

Gao Yang glanced at her. "Rather than studying this sphere, there's something I'd like you to do—if you have the time."

Rebecca's eyes lit up at once: "Huh? I have time, I have time! I don't need to do the work at Magic Web No. 1 myself for the moment—the craftsmen and apprentices are digging trenches and smelting quartz sand, so I'm free right now! What do you want me to do?"

"Burn rocks."