Chapter 139 — The Right Path

"The approach is to calculate it through Runic Logic!" Jenny was already lost in listening. She had studied the laws of runes for many years, but she had only used them to design arrays and complete the tasks her mentor assigned. This was the first time she had realized, on a higher level, the true value of these mathematical tools. "Traditional mages believe it's the increase in runes within an array that causes interference and collapse, but in fact we can calculate from the formulas that more runes do not cause interference—on the contrary, more runes give the array greater resistance to interference. What truly causes interference is the 'interference knot' produced when runes are arranged in certain patterns. It's only because the interference produced by interference knots rises exponentially, far exceeding the anti-interference capacity gained by adding rune knots, that people have always believed that as soon as an array has more runes, it becomes unstable..."

Gao Yang laughed, immensely pleased. "Exactly. With Runic Logic, we no longer have to grope in the dark like those traditional mages, no longer have to design arrays by luck and unreliable experience. Take the rotary magic-energy engine I designed earlier—we can reduce interference knots by finely adjusting the rune arrangement of every repulsion array, or even by redesigning the repulsion arrays entirely. By the same method, we can draw or etch onto cheap red copper plates those arrays that originally required expensive mana-conductive materials, making them cheap enough for anyone to use!"

"Anyone can use them..." Jenny was clearly startled by the notion. "Is that possible?"

Gao Yang countered: "Why not? Right now even the brickmakers and miners on the estate are using magic-energy engines—and isn't a magic-energy engine essentially just a magical artifact?"

Jenny was instantly at a loss for words.

"So you want us to go calculate these things next?" Rebecca looked at the drawings Gao Yang had produced, and an eager expression suddenly came over her face. "Ah, I see you've even annotated the price ranges for substrate material and rune material next to each array... You want to make the arrays run on such a cheap basis? That looks seriously challenging!"

"Have confidence?" Gao Yang asked.

Rebecca puffed out her chest. "Absolutely!"

Jenny, meanwhile, smiled with a touch of shyness and restraint. "I'll do my best. I won't let you down."

The two girls left with an armful of new drawings and materials. Gao Yang relaxed, leaning his upper body back against the chair and letting his thoughts drift.

He thought that he had finally found the right path—the path that would let ordinary people enter the realm of the mysterious.

He had also grasped the path that would let this world's "magic" deliver the greatest possible efficiency of advancement.

The "as you think, so it becomes" nature of magic was the greatest aid in rapidly turning his wild ideas into reality!

In a world without magic, turning a concept into reality might take years, decades, or generations of effort, with the difficult process of tool-making and improvement consuming most of the time. But in a world where magic existed, that process was drastically shortened—nearly all the time cost was paid between the mind and pen and paper. As long as a mage calculated fast enough and accurately enough, then the instant he completed a spell model, his spell would become a "thing" that could produce effects in reality. Even if their magic still belonged only to themselves for the moment, the "real-world significance" that magic could produce had already been realized.

And all Gao Yang had to do was convert these spells, one by one, into magic-energy engines, thermal ray guns, crystal bombs, honeycomb magic nets...