Chapter 354 — The Satellite Spirit's New Function

He did not immediately shift his "gaze" away, but instead lingered over the Gondor Wasteland with something like obsession. He strove to concentrate, attempting to make up for the image's shortcomings through such high-end techniques as blink-frame interpolation and mental mosaic removal. In the process, he painstakingly distinguished bits of terrain within the Gondor Wasteland through those flickering interference patterns and misaligned images, and compared them against what he remembered.

He thought he had found the mana scorch marks, and he saw the great plain of the wasteland; and near the mana scorch marks he also glimpsed some shapes that seemed, faintly, to be writhing... What was that? Could it be a migrating swarm of aberrants?

Gao Yang frowned, trying to track those writhing shapes, but very quickly their image blurred beyond recognition.

And as Gao Yang was trying to locate other aberrant swarms, a very faint flash of light suddenly appeared in the central region of the Gondor Wasteland and caught his attention.

He at once concentrated his entire effort (including the power of blink-frame interpolation and mental mosaic removal) on that area, and after waiting patiently for several dozen seconds, he did indeed observe another flash in that same spot.

Was that lightning within the clouds? It did not seem so... Although much of the Gondor Wasteland was covered by thick radiation clouds, at present most of the wasteland's center and north were cloudless—there was only a mana environment of abnormally high concentration...

Gao Yang speculated on the possible answer. He knew what that place was.

That was the imperial capital of the Gondor Empire. The Deep Blue Mana Well had once been there as well...

So that was very likely light given off by the wreckage of the Deep Blue Mana Well!

Gao Yang was startled by his own conjecture. After all these years, could part of the Deep Blue Mana Well still be running?! Had it not been utterly destroyed by the mana tide?!

But that faint bluish flicker was unmistakably the glow produced only when a Deep Blue Mana Well was running normally! It was the electric arc that appeared only when the reaction tower discharged energy!

Gao Yang was spurred on by fierce curiosity, yet it was utterly impossible to make out anything more from the surveillance feed. The interference was simply too severe; no amount of blink-quick frame interpolation or imaginative mosaic-scrubbing could surpass its limits.

Feeling his spiritual power draining rapidly, Gao Yang had no choice but to abandon the notion of observing more from the Gondor Wasteland. He tried instead to pull his field of vision as far as it would go, hoping to see whether he could observe anything beyond this continent.

After a strenuous attempt, the result was exactly as he had expected: he could not.

He realized that this limitation was probably dictated by the satellite's position and the mechanical structure of its sensors. The satellite's range of observation truly extended only over this continent. Unless he one day gained the authority to maneuver the satellite into a different orbit—assuming the satellite even had such a function—there was likely no way to see beyond the continent.

There was, of course, another line of thought: connecting to satellites over other regions... But Gao Yang felt the odds of that were even worse than making the satellite change orbit... Surely he could not just drop dead on the spot and transmigrate back into the sky, could he?

Next, Gao Yang became like a child who had been given a new toy, and began enthusiastically fiddling with the viewpoint authority he had just unlocked. Though the images he saw after zooming in were far less clear than they had once been, this still delighted him beyond measure. One moment he stole a glance at Saint Sunil, the next at Aldernan, and occasionally he looked toward the Elven Empire, straining all the while to guess at the reality beneath the blurry mosaic.

He kept at it for a long time, until he was on the verge of throwing up.

Gao Yang braced himself on the desk and sank back into his chair, thinking that he could not keep playing like this—a little longer and he really would vomit... If Amber happened to come back just then, he would lose every shred of dignity.

He had barely sat down when footsteps came from outside the study door.

Gao Yang told himself that it was certainly not Amber; after all, Amber rarely came in through the door, and even more rarely announced herself with footsteps.

Judging by the heavy, forceful tread outside, he suspected it was Byron in full armor, or perhaps some burly guard coming to report something.

A moment later came a knock. He answered, and the study door opened. Priest Wright stood in the doorway, staring at him eye to eye.

Gao Yang: "..."

No wonder the footsteps had been so heavy and forceful!