Chapter 579 — The Edge of the Wasteland

"...The Black Forest really is a strange place," Amber said, scratching her hair. "No wonder you insisted on blasting everything flat to open the road. In an eerie environment like this, an ordinary team of superhumans would probably be gone in minutes after going in deep."

Gao Rong smiled and did not answer.

Blasting everything flat — that was the one sure rule for dealing with the Black Forest. Yet to accomplish it, the precondition was sufficient military might.

To meet the threat of the wasteland, to stand against the enemies that might come, he had never relaxed in the slightest where "military might" was concerned. Though the weapons and equipment of the Cecil combat legions were in fact already at the pinnacle of human armies in this age, against those uncanny, unpredictable aberrations, no amount of firepower was ever too much.

Cecil's weapons design department had never halted its research. Even as "grand projects" like the magic chariots, the magic-net communicators, and the magic trains kept making progress, the equipment in the soldiers' hands was in fact being perfected just as swiftly.

For the early days of the magic-industrial age, the birth and development of many things came down to "whether the idea existed." Without the idea, a new thing — even an entire field — would remain a blank; but once the idea existed, everything in that field would surge forth like a geyser.

After the success of the thermal ray gun, the technicians discovered a "key idea" — namely, that "low-level magic in the traditional sense, if properly utilized and properly combined and then industrially mass-produced, would deliver astonishing results."

Gao Yang called this idea the "minimalist pragmatism approach" — that is, under the premise of controlling cost and system complexity, arranging and combining stable, reliable basic spells as much as possible to achieve the highest practical effect attainable.

Low cost, high stability, mass-producible.

On the basis of this idea and the thermal ray gun, a whole series of weapons — using the universal magic terminal as their carrier and low-level offensive spell substrates as their core — was soon designed. By swapping out the modules within the magic terminal, the soldiers' offensive options need not be limited to searing rays: acid arrows, lightning arrows, ice bolts, even weak healing and support spells — so long as the energy level met the requirements and they were compatible with the magic terminal's basic structure, all of them could be realized.

And the heavy burners in the White Knights' hands were the gadgets Rebecca had tinkered together not long ago — an extension of this same "minimalist pragmatism approach."

Inside those new weapons, Rebecca and the technicians under her had installed rune substrates for Grease and Burning Hands, and used "Wind Element Blessing" to extend the spray range of the Grease; and facts had proven this design worked astonishingly well.

Three basic spells, combined into a war weapon of tremendous power.

Gao Yang did not mind that the essence of these weapons was merely "an arrangement of inferior spells." To him, so long as they were useful, that was enough.

On the 40th day of the Harvest Moon, the pathbreaker unit burned the last stretch of woodland at the southern edge of the Black Forest to ash.

The tangled poisonous vines and ancient trees were reduced to cinders; the monsters corrupted by chaotic magic energy gradually became smoke drifting in the air. On the ground the White Knights had trodden, the magical flames generated by the heavy burners swiftly died out in the chaotic mana environment, and as the smoke and dust slowly dispersed, the scene at the forest's end suddenly opened up.

The boundless Blighted Plain stretched on ahead, and in the distance the vast luminous veil of the Great Wall joined sky to earth.

To the whirring of machinery, one after another specially modified mana-powered vehicles — built to handle the treacherous terrain of the wasteland — rolled out of the forest region and onto this scorched earth polluted by the tide of magic.

Gao Yang stepped down from the vehicle and set foot on the desolate land, where he saw that several elves, Suo You among them, had already left the convoy before him and were waiting for him up ahead.

The elves were the "technical advisers" of the barrier restoration project, so naturally they had to come along.

Only once Gao Yang drew near did Suo You speak, with no small feeling: "We've finally made it out of that Black Forest — to walk through such a profane, twisted jungle is truly torment for an elf."

A high-ranking ranger could not help saying: "Indeed — though thank goodness for those vehicles. At least there's a layer of crystal and steel between us and that fallen forest."

"Yes, the mana devices..." Suo You glanced at Gao Yang. "I have to admit, these things you humans have cobbled together under your leadership are really quite good. But I do think you'd better be careful with that thing called a heavy burner — especially in a forest. The Black Forest is one thing, but if you were to use them to burn a healthy forest... well, speaking personally, I'd find that hard to stomach."

"Burn down a mountain and you'll sit in a cell till the day you die — that line's written into the Cecil Civilization Accord," Gao Yang said, spreading his hands with a laugh somewhere between amusement and exasperation. He had known that Suo You, being an elf, would sooner or later bring this up after seeing the thing. "Don't worry, we're not madmen who know nothing but destruction."

As he spoke, he felt a certain ruefulness: Suo You and the other elves still muttered instinctively at the sight of the burner, yet Suo Jilin — every bit as much a true elf — had shown no such reaction at all upon first encountering one. In fact, he had been rather excited...

That fellow had surely wandered the human world so long that he'd forgotten he was a child of the forest...