Chapter 70 — When the Playbook Stops Working...
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 4
Over the following days, Amber watched as Gao Yang had people haul a pile of things into the tent: strange mineral powders, metal containers joined together, crystal lenses large and small, and the lodestones and metal wires commonly used by mages and diviners. These odds and ends were heaped on a table, nearly half of them urgently purchased from Tamsen Town, the rest processed under Gao Yang's guidance by Hetty and the craftsmen.
Looking at that table full of stuff, the half-elf lady was utterly baffled: "What on earth are you up to?"
Gao Yang kept fiddling with the lens assembly in front of him without even looking up: "Experiments."
"Nobles are so hard to understand," Amber blinked, then her eyes lit up as if she had finally caught Gao Yang by the tail. "Oh ho! I've finally caught you! So you really couldn't keep up the act and you've started indulging in idle pursuits! I knew it—how could any normal-minded noble endure hardship for this long? You've finally started wasting money and manpower... Ouch, ow, ow!!"
Gao Yang twisted Amber's ear around twice before letting go, then looked with great curiosity at this chronic pain in the neck: "I really don't get it—are you incapable of learning a lesson, or what? Can't you just make your personality a little cuter?"
"Like you have room to talk! I'm a great master thief, and you've got me tied down here as a bodyguard. Normally it's either watching over your pile of chicken scratch or running all over the hills patrolling, keeping watch, and gathering intelligence for you. And on the rare half-day off, you make me learn to study your chicken scratch with you—do you have any respect for my profession at all?"
The half-elf lady spoke with great conviction, and the gist of it, once boiled down, was three words: I'm bored.
"You could stand to be more driven than Betty," Gao Yang said, pressing a hand to his forehead in exasperation. "She comes to learn reading and writing from me even after finishing her work every day. Is it really so hard for you to learn addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division?"
"Oh? So that little maid really is learning to write?" Amber blinked, her interest thoroughly piqued. "No wonder people have been saying these past couple of days that they've seen her muttering to herself when she's alone, and that whenever she has a spare moment she's scratching away on the ground with a stick..."
"Fine, fine, I give up on you. If you're really that bored, go out and play by yourself," Gao Yang waved a hand at Amber. "Just three things you're not allowed to do: no stealing, no causing trouble where people are working, and no fighting with people—though fighting with geese is fine."
Having gotten Gao Yang's permission, Amber immediately rolled happily back into the shadows, and as her body faded she kept muttering: "You really are a weird one—why do you always have to bring up geese in front of me..."
Only after Amber left did Gao Yang finally have the chance to focus his attention on that great pile of things.
He had already tested some of them; the rest were still being verified.
Before sitting back down in his chair, he first glanced at the large basket beside him, then sighed softly.
In that basket were the indescribable conglomerates Rebecca had produced earlier when firing her cement. She had originally planned to dump them, but Gao Yang had kept them, and deliberately placed them by his side where he could see them at any time.
He treated them as a kind of warning, a kind of marker, a sign to constantly remind himself that "this world" was "this world."
Pulling his gaze back from those things, he glanced at a certain container on the table, lowered his head, and wrote a new record on the paper in Chinese: