Chapter 207 — Dinner Time at Gao Yang's House

A while later, Hedy—busy handling personnel transfers—and Rebecca—hopelessly lost in runes—finally returned home as well, and by the time they walked into the dining room Amber had already stuffed herself to seven-tenths full on all sorts of appetizers and cheese...

Gao Yang reckoned that if dinner were delayed a little longer, Amber would clear the mustard off the table mixed with butter... Had this half-elf choked to death on rich food in a past life, or what?

As the family members took their seats, Gao Yang brought up what he and Amber had discovered in the Shadow Realm.

"You're saying you found some kind of 'vast hollow' in the Shadow Realm?" Hearing Gao Yang's description, Hedy showed great astonishment. "And that hollow doesn't match the terrain of the Dark Mountains in the present world?"

"That's right. That hollow is big enough to swallow our entire town, I'd guess, and it's very tall—the top even breaks through the summit of the Dark Mountains, so that part of the sky is visible. The light inside the hollow is abnormally dim, dark enough to make one uneasy," Gao Yang described the interior in detail. "There's some unnatural phenomenon inside the hollow. I saw enormous boulders floating in the darkness, as if they had lost gravity."

"I've heard you and Amber describe it—the Shadow Realm is a mapped counterpart of the present world, and apart from being drained of color and laid waste, there's no significant difference in physical laws..." Hedy frowned. "Does that vast hollow mean some 'law of the Shadow Realm' we don't yet know about?"

"What worries me more is that it was caused by some external force—that some power beyond human imagination has been at work in the Shadow Realm, having 'dug out' a great mass of Shadow Realm matter and altered the physical laws within that range," Gao Yang said with deep concern. "What's more troubling is this... the Gondorian mages of a thousand years ago clearly knew of this vast hollow's existence. They installed something like a magic gate on the lowest level of the mountain ruin, and the other side of that gate should link to the vast hollow, or to some place connected with it. A pity that gate can no longer be activated."

Hedy bowed her head in thought, while Rebecca, wrestling with the butter that would not spread evenly on her slice of bread, asked: "So is that plan you mentioned before still going ahead—moving some of the domain's facilities into the mountain?"

Gao Yang watched Rebecca's butter-knife-wielding with some alarm; her manner was as if the slice of bread had murdered her whole family. "Take it easy. Is there any need for such flourish just to spread butter?"

Only then did he answer the Iron-Headed Girl's question: "The relocation goes on. At the very least, the workshops that make grenades and all sorts of explosives have to be moved out of the domain, and then there are the munitions factory production lines—these things can't keep sitting right next to the residential district. Speaking of which, how's the training of the craftsmen team for laying the magic net coming along?"

"They're all learning well. The moment I said magic-net technicians get double the pay of ordinary construction workers, they perked right up. And since those craftsmen are decent at reading and arithmetic, the best of them have even learned to work out on their own how to connect the hive units according to the laying environment and the blueprint tutorials—their connection success rate is on par with first- and second-rank rune masters. Now they can complete the tasks independently without my guidance."

Gao Yang nodded in satisfaction: "Very good. Send the best team into the mountain ruin and start laying the hive magic net from the entrance hall as the starting point, rebuilding the facility's mana supply to prepare for the machinery that will come in later."

Hedy, overhearing, sighed with heartfelt admiration: "Honestly, who would have thought that ordinary people with no casting ability—not even the ability to sense mana—could control mana in this way... The magic net, the mana engines, the thermal ray guns, the Rebecca Crystal—all of these have now reached the point where production can be handled by ordinary craftsmen entirely without mages, or with only minimal guidance from a mage..."

"Right now they're still at the stage of following the blueprints and making sure nothing goes wrong—that's only 'imitation,'" Gao Yang smiled. "But once the Rune Research Institute under Jenny achieves its first-stage results and the first batch of rune majors graduates from the academy, you'll see ordinary people's 'creation' in the field of magic..."

Hedy could not imagine what that would look like. In truth, even Rebecca could not.

But Gao Yang could dimly make out that new age—an age in which, even without casters, even without any gift for magic, ordinary people could rely on their minds and their calculations, on rigorous scientific analysis and mathematical tools, to master magic, and even to develop and create all manner of magical technologies.

At that moment Amber, who had been bent over her food, suddenly looked up and chimed in: "But speaking of which... where's that siren?"