Chapter 61 — The Pride of the Cecil Family
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Rebecca had no idea why Gao Yang would take an interest in such a question, but at least the Ancestral Ink seemed not to be criticizing her, so she breathed a sigh of relief. "I just drew while I calculated... If you treat the whole courtyard as a sheet of paper, it gets much easier."
The answer was far too vague. Gao Yang frowned slightly. "Specifically?"
"This edge of the courtyard is one line, and the edge next to it is another line," Rebecca said, waving her arms wildly to demonstrate. "Then, using these two lines as a reference and treating the whole courtyard as a sheet of paper, every line on the magic circle gets broken down into a lot of key points. The distance from each key point to the courtyard's two edges can be calculated easily—you just scale up the numbers on the manuscript. Calculation is a mage's strong suit!"
Calculation was indeed a mage's strong suit, but ordinary mages did not calculate this way!
Gao Yang stared dumbfounded at the girl's muddled way of speaking—Hetty probably hadn't understood a word of it—yet Gao Yang understood perfectly: she had established a coordinate system within the courtyard, and on that basis had scaled up the manuscript's magic circle proportionally.
That way there was no need to stand somewhere high at all. One simply calculated where each key point ought to be, then connected the key points according to the manuscript's requirements.
But coming up with the idea alone was not enough. Rebecca also needed tremendous geometric imagination and mental arithmetic, because this world had no complete system of mathematics or geometry. She had either to brute-force everything with addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, or to invent all sorts of formulas herself!
Of course, Rebecca's method was not the best. Gao Yang knew plenty of drafting techniques from Earth that could be applied to this situation—but so what?
In this world, in this era, for Rebecca to have achieved this much was already a miracle!
"You came up with this method yourself?" Gao Yang's eyes shone as he looked at Rebecca, as though he had discovered a rare treasure.
Rebecca scratched her hair. "Not all of it. Part I saw in a hedge mage's notes, and the rest I figured out myself..."
So that was it.
Understanding dawned on Gao Yang. He had read the hedge mage's notes from cover to cover as well; they did contain a great deal of rudimentary geometry and mathematics. Though never organized into a system, it was almost a kind of "foundation." If Rebecca was already extraordinarily gifted in this area, then under that inspiration, doing what she had done today was hardly surprising.
And even inspired by the hedge mage's notes, her achievement was still incredible.
"Very good, a very good method," Gao Yang said, nodding in satisfaction. "Now tell me, why did you choose to bury the magic circle underground?"
"Oh, that's because you said, Ancestral Ink, that this magic circle is for a smithy," Rebecca said with a nod. "I thought about how blacksmiths and their apprentices are different from mages, and the work they do is different too. Between these furnaces, hauling materials around and forging iron, it'd be easy for them to accidentally damage the circle's structure. And burying it underground doesn't affect its charging, nor does it affect any future construction on the surface. As long as everything stays on the circle's radiant points, adding new furnaces or tearing out and rebuilding the current ones will be very convenient—how should I put it... it's just convenient."
Functional zoning, separation of the energy section from the consumption section, encapsulation of key systems, scalability... a flood of terms applicable to Rebecca's thinking swept through Gao Yang's mind, but the thought that surfaced last was an even more important matter: