Chapter 71 — The Anomaly of the Sphere
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
Those experiment logs were the bloody proof of Gao Song's clashes with the rules of "this world" as he tried to reconcile them with his "Earth experience." He had bound them into volumes, encrypted them in Chinese, and treated them as a secret he would never reveal to another soul.
Of all the experimental records, nearly eight in ten were failures.
This meant that although this world looked habitable, its natural environment even superficially resembling Earth's in some respects, at a deeper level its rules were utterly different from Earth's. What sustained its operation was an order entirely alien to Gao Yang—an order in which supernatural forces, magic included, occupied a considerable and vital share.
No—perhaps they should no longer be called supernatural forces at all. In this world, conjuring great fireballs by hand and calling on gods with incantations was what counted as natural.
But Gao Yang did not actually choose to wash up and go to sleep. On the contrary, this inconceivable world only filled him with fighting spirit.
He believed that every law had a way of being deciphered, that all things ought to have deep underlying principles. Man should revere nature, but he must not halt at nature out of that reverence. Since these extraordinary powers truly existed in this world, then he would study them as things that truly existed—just as the wind and rain, the thunder and lightning, and universal gravitation belonged to his homeland. The so-called magic here was merely another part of nature's cycle. His "Earth experience" might be useless now, but could the way of thinking he had forged in an age of information explosion really be inferior to that of those conservative nobles and pedantic scholars shackled by medieval life?
And besides, not all experience was useless.
Gao Yang picked up two transparent lenses resting in the corner of the desk. They were cheap artificial crystal—cheap only relative to natural magic crystals. The most skilled craftsman in Tanzan Town had spent two days grinding them until, per Gao Song's specifications, one was a convex lens and the other concave. Gao Yang held the two lenses one before the other in front of his eyes, adjusting their positions until a clear image appeared before him.
Though the speed of light could not yet be measured, at the very least light still followed the laws he was familiar with as it propagated.
That meant, at minimum, a telescope could be built—a cheap "Hawkeye" spell that could be spread among the common folk.
All it would take was further lowering the cost of artificial crystal and solving the inefficiency of manual grinding.
And beyond optical phenomena, the fact that waterwheels could operate proved something else as well: in this world, though the fundamental laws of the microscopic realm might differ greatly from Earth's, some intuitive, macroscopic physical laws should be little different from Earth's.
So many things were still worth pursuing.
After writing an entry about the telescope in his memorandum, Gao Yang gave a long yawn, and only then noticed that everything outside had gone completely quiet: night had long since fallen, and it was time to sleep.
Gao Yang had sharp ears. He could hear faint snoring and sleep-talk drifting from nearby—Betty and Amber, sleeping in the next tent. Listening to Amber muttering about getting rich even in her dreams, he could not help shaking his head with a smile.
Now it really was time to wash up and sleep.
As the night deepened, the last light in the tent was extinguished, and a quiet darkness settled over everything, like the veil of the Lady of the Night in legend, sheltering those who drifted into dreams. Gao Yang strove to empty his mind and slowly sank into sleep.