Chapter 145 — The Ancient Proving Ground

Looking at these neatly arrayed devices, Gao Yang could almost picture the vessels once filled with biological solvent, each steeping a test subject, while around them imperial mages hurried to and fro, recording every parameter of the samples within, stimulating those samples with spells from time to time, handling the "test subjects" of their own race inside the vessels with an almost inhuman coldness.

Human experimentation had been no rarity in the Gondor Empire of those days—and is no rarity in the Ans Kingdom of today.

"Simply unbelievable..." Hetty gazed at those mysterious ancient magic devices with an almost intoxicated expression; the neatly arrayed runes and finely wrought metal structures filled her with wonder. "Such complex rune combinations... such seamless assembly... such uniform, standardized components... How did they manage it?!"

"These runes were piled up through brute force—borrowing the endless energy of the Deep Blue Well and burning through it without regard for cost, accumulating experimental data until the patterns emerged. And these components..." Gao Yang looked at those magic devices already bearing a certain resemblance to industrial products and sighed softly. "They required thousands of skilled artisans, more than twenty kinds of basic workshops, an entire complex production process with a thousand standard parameters, and a technical system sustained by the whole empire."

Hetty was lost in thought for a moment: "...We actually lost such advanced technology? Could it truly not be preserved back then?"

Gao Yang sighed: "The first generation of Ans's pioneers strove to recreate these things within their lifetimes, but the materials we salvaged weren't enough to reconstruct even half of them. The industrial chain was broken. A band of half-literates who'd fled from the borderlands could study the blueprints for ten years and still not fill in a single missing link—and the conditions then didn't permit anyone to step away from production to do research. The first generation had to pour ninety percent of its energy into production just to keep the number of people starving to death from exceeding the number of newborns..."

At this he shook his head: "But more important than all that is that we lost the Deep Blue Well. The vast, pure energy it provided greatly lowered the operating requirements of many magic devices, and the same devices placed in any other magical environment might not run at all. The most basic, simplest things were manageable enough, but the more complex and advanced they were, the more utterly they failed once severed from the Deep Blue Well."

Hearing Gao Yang's words, Amber was suddenly struck by something: "So that's why you value versatility and adaptability so much?"

"A magic-driven industrialization propped up by the Deep Blue Well doesn't count as true industrialization," Gao Yang said—words the others present likely could not yet understand—then smiled and looked around. "But rather than that, let's first see how many surprises this ancient proving ground has left us."

His gaze swept across the culture vessels, control consoles, arcane pedestals, and sensors that already bore a thousand years of history, and finally came to rest on a nearby section of wall. His eyes could not help but fix there.

There, inscribed in the common tongue of the ancient humans, stood a single line of enormous characters:

Humanity shall endure forever, even in defiance of the gods.