Chapter 53 — The Magic Web
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 4
Gao Yang stroked his chin, looking at the blacksmith's furnace before him.
Then he posed two questions:
"Does the charging part have to be inscribed on the furnace itself?"
"Does every function have to be crammed into a single magic circle?"
Rebecca blinked, at a loss: "What else would you do?"
Gao Yang had the vague sense that he had seized the crux of the problem: the people of this world seemed to focus solely on turning magic into the rawest, crudest force, or merely on how an individual wielded power—and had never considered how this "transcendent power" might be spread more widely and on a lower foundation.
"Draw a large self-charging circle, let it draw the free magic out of the air, and then leave 'output terminals' on this large circle to feed magic to the small circles on the furnaces. That solves the charging problem. As for switching... make the connection between the furnaces and the self-charging circle controllable. Cut it, and the small circles naturally stop. And the large self-charging circle has an overflow-and-dissipate nature of its own, so there's no worry about overloading it..."
Rebecca quickly grasped Gao Yang's idea in her own way: "Take a magic circle apart and use it piece by piece? That's even possible?"
"It's a train of thought, at least," Gao Yang nodded. "I think we should discuss it with Hetty—she should be more of an expert."
Rebecca agreed wholeheartedly. Although Aunt Hetty's spellcasting accuracy only reached the level of tracing a person's outline in the air, when it came to theoretical knowledge, even those mid-rank mages probably couldn't match her!
So Gao Yang led his people bustling out of the place once more, leaving old blacksmith Hammer and his apprentices and hired hands staring at one another.
"Master, are we... still firing the furnace?" one apprentice asked cautiously. He hadn't dared breathe while the duke and the viscount stood before him; only now did he finally dare to speak.
The old blacksmith glared at the apprentice: "Fool! Of course we're firing the furnace! Don't go thinking about slacking off—whether we get meat tonight depends on how this batch turns out!"
Meanwhile, Gao Yang had already sent Amber to summon Hetty to his tent, but after he finished explaining his idea, the elegant lady shook her head.
"The idea of using one magic circle to charge another is all very well, but it's far too difficult to put into practice... The output of magic is a very precise matter. The moment the 'interface' goes wrong, both circles are ruined. And the efficiency of a self-charging circle is a serious problem as well. Even if you drew a circle as large as the smithy's courtyard, the magic it produced probably couldn't drive more than a few magic furnaces..."
Gao Yang looked at Hetty. He had of course known she would raise these difficulties—but he had in fact long since worked out a solution.
So he smiled faintly. As his thinking on the problem deepened, he felt he had finally found the path he truly ought to take. He pushed the pile of blueprints on the desk to one side and spread out on the table a sheet of paper especially large, covered in symbols and lines.
What was on that sheet he had finished drawing days ago, but only today had he realized what use it could be put to.
"Take a look at this," Gao Yang said.
Hetty stared in astonishment at the great sheet of rune arrays on the table. Her first reaction was that her own honored ancestor could be learned to such a degree: "Ancestor... you actually know how to draw magic circles?!"
"I only know a little, and this circle isn't my creation," Gao Yang said, deliberately keeping her in suspense. "Take a look at it first. What do you make of it?"