Chapter 315 — One Step Forward

Pi Yun carefully examined the large base plate on the central experiment bench. On the plate, runic blocks of various kinds, suited for combination, together with lines of magical power, sketched out a magic circle steeped in mystery, while threads made of non-conductive material were pinned to the circle's surface by fixing needles, dividing the circle into regions with different functions.

These divisions had been improvised by Jennie and Camille. They weren't precise enough—they could only serve as a research aid.

"These are indeed transformed divine runes," Pi Yun said, stroking his beard and nodding as he studied the symbols marked out in special pigment. "Hmm... this confirms one of my guesses."

"A guess?" Jennie looked at the old druid curiously.

"Whether it was the nature sect the druids once believed in or the dream sect the Ever-Sleepers worship, in the process of converting their divine spells into magic, the pioneers all carried out very careful operations of 'avoidance' and 'concealment,'" Pi Yun said with a smile, a sly glint in his eyes. "These transformed runes reveal only one thing..."

Camille's distinctive voice, carrying an arcane echo, came from the side: "Fear."

"Exactly. Fear," Pi Yun chuckled. "God's authority has fallen into human hands, yet humans still tremble, as if forever in dread that God will return, in dread that God will punish the blasphemers who stole His authority. Even though the pioneers found the laws and techniques for converting divine spells into magic, they still worked to conceal their own actions in the process—as if, deceiving themselves, they were dodging a god who may no longer exist."

"It was the same in the early days of the Defiance Project," Camille buzzed. "Not until we confirmed the existence of the 'Great Stag Amon,' confirmed that He was the fallen god of nature, did our fear abate somewhat."

Jennie had never imagined that one day she would come into contact with matters like this, but she had grown used to it by now, and she asked instinctively, "Has the God of Dreams... also fallen, like the Great Stag Amon?"

"Hard to say. The strangeness of gods exceeds human imagination. The Great Stag Amon's divine corpse does lie in the Shadow Realm, but heaven knows what state the gods worshiped by the other fallen sects are in," Pi Yun chuckled, shaking his head as he leaned toward the magic circle. "Rather than puzzling over what state those gods are in now, we ought to figure out as quickly as possible how this magic circle works."

"On that point, we've already made some preliminary progress," Camille said, while summoning an evocation hand to bring over a half-meter-tall metal-and-crystal device from beside the test bench.

It was a small magic-energy obelisk, prepared specially for the laboratory environment.

"At first, we tried to drive this array with ordinary magic power, but it failed. This array has a special interface—it responds only to the Ever-Sleepers' dream spells. Both activation and control require a special dream magic to supplement it. Clearly this magic circle is incomplete; it can't operate on its own. There must be a spellcaster performing a corresponding ritual to complete its magical pathways," Camille said, adjusting the magic-energy obelisk as he spoke. "This isn't uncommon. Many traditional arrays have this kind of 'incompleteness' due to insufficient optimization or flawed architecture, but it's brought us a great deal of trouble..."

The magic-energy obelisk activated, and a stable field of magic power began to shroud the whole Runic Research Institute.

"But later we discovered that we don't actually need the whole array to run. One part of it is crucial—so long as that part can be activated, then by means of the field's diffusiveness, it can produce an incredible effect."

Camille raised his arm, brimming with arcane energy, and a tiny spark struck the magic circle on the test bench. A portion of the runes in the circle immediately lit up, and began to flicker bright and dim as the magic power Camille fed in changed.

Almost at once, Pi Yun felt something and looked toward the wall on the other side of the laboratory.

On that wall hung another large base plate. It bore no complete "Ever-Sleeper array," only the most basic set of rune arrays—and yet it was that basic rune array which was now flickering and shifting in time with Camille's movements.

"For now we can still only transmit variations this simple, and the transmission is highly susceptible to interference, with distance posing a considerable problem as well—but at least in the course of this process we have proven one thing:

"The 'black box' of message-transmission magic is not unbreakable. Its underlying principle may well be simpler than any of us ever imagined."