Chapter 78 — The Rune Trigger and Amber's Slacking-Off Time
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 3
Rebecca scratched her hair. "Building the new furnace needed more black stone and red clay, so he took a few apprentices and went into the mountains with the exploration team to look for materials. The exploration team mentioned yesterday when they got back that they'd seen black stone in the mountains."
Gao Yang grunted in acknowledgment, and only then did it suddenly occur to him that he had come to Rebecca for a real reason. He smacked his head. "Ah, right—I came to see you about something. Take a look at this first. Does it look familiar?"
As he spoke, he took out a grayish-black, unremarkable clump of caked matter—the last piece of "waste slag" he had left on hand, after the sample he had given to Hetty.
Rebecca recognized it the instant she saw it. "Ah, isn't this the waste slag from those batches I burned wrong before?"
"Look closely inside," Gao Yang said, seeing that Rebecca herself had never noticed that the "waste slag" she had produced was actually mixed with something else. "See these granular crystals? Do you remember how you made this stuff?"
Only then did Rebecca notice the fine particles. Honestly, since the waste slag from different batches all looked about the same, she could not tell by eye which batch this was from. Fortunately, however, she had strictly followed the "operating rules" Gao Yang had laid down, carefully recording the material ratios, times, temperatures, and furnace numbers for every batch of samples she fired. As long as this was confirmed to be from the first few batches, restoring all the records from that day would easily reveal how these things had come about.
Hearing that Rebecca had kept careful records and could easily reconstruct the operating details from them, Gao Yang breathed a genuine sigh of relief. In this era, the notion of "detailed record-keeping" scarcely existed in the minds of ordinary people; only mages absorbed in magical research had even a crude concept of it. But Rebecca was not a mage capable of doing research—her fireballs had always come in only a few grades: big, extra-big, extra-extra-big, and who-knows-how-big—so the girl had never developed any of the habits proper to experimentation...
But fortunately she was obedient. Whatever Gao Yang instructed, she never slacked off on.
And while Gao Yang was working out how to introduce "the art of explosion" into this era as quickly as possible, a certain half-elf thief, with nothing to do after eating and drinking her fill, was wandering through the dense forests of the Dark Mountains.
Of course, the more high-sounding way to put it was patrolling the territory's borders, searching the Dark Mountains for latent dangers and treasures... same thing, more or less. Anyone who knew her at all knew it was just slacking off.
Carrying her two beloved little daggers and humming a tuneless song, Amber leaped among rocks and branches as if walking on flat ground. With the aid of the shadows that lurked everywhere in the mountain forest, her figure would vanish into the air from time to time and then abruptly appear dozens or even hundreds of meters away. Sometimes, with a flicker of her form, a wild fruit plucked from who-knows-where would appear on one of her little daggers, only to be bitten twice and casually tossed aside.
This dim mountain woodland was a heaven tailor-made for Amber, who was both an elf and a shadow master.
"Hah... what a great place..."
Standing on a branch of a large tree, Amber stretched luxuriously and sighed with lazy contentment.
Though she had been frightened by the Dark Mountains' fearsome reputation when she first arrived—she had even toyed with the idea of finding a chance to flee—after spending some time here, she found it was really not nearly as terrifying as that seven-hundred-year-old dried-up corpse had said.