Chapter 80 — The Nature of Magic and the Ringing of Art
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
To the vast majority of people in this world, "what is magic?" was not a question at all. They believed the answer was glaringly obvious and unworthy of deeper inquiry: magic was simply magic—one of the energies pervading the world, the most precious gift the gods had bestowed upon humankind, and the very standard by which people were sorted into higher and lower orders.
Some priests would tell you that magic was the authority the gods scattered across the world after their fall, the residual wake of the War of the Gods recorded upon the "Eternal Tablets." Those gods who lost were torn asunder in the war and plunged toward the earth; their bodies burned in midair, and the flame and smoke were the first magic, while the charred remnants were the first monsters. Scholarly mages, meanwhile, would say that magic was the bridge between the elemental world and the real world, a kind of "hyper-matter"—perceptible and usable, yet invisible. It came from the turbulence of the Aether Sea and rose and fell irregularly as the relative distance between the real world and the elemental realm shifted; this was the phenomenon of magic upwelling...
Yet Gao Yang could accept neither of these explanations. He came from a modern world that revered science and reason, that championed the clear explication of every mystery, and he believed magic ought to have some explanation that was clearer, more comprehensible—one that could even be quantified with data and formalized with models.
Perhaps such an approach was off-limits where the gods were concerned, but since mages could wield magic through specific methods—could even use formulas to streamline the casting process—then magic surely could be analyzed this way.
According to the intelligence gathered so far, magic truly was "everywhere"; every corner of the world was saturated with this invisible force. And the people of this world employed magic chiefly in two ways. One was direct casting: mages used mental power to construct spell models, then let those models draw upon the magic already present in the atmosphere to produce spell effects. The other was to first extract magic using facilities like charging arrays or magic wells, and then employ that magic in ritual workings.
Either way, magic was "drawn" from nature—never created by humans out of nothing.
So Gao Cen had reasoned that magic might indeed be a special kind of "matter," or something that took matter as its vessel. But the instantaneous magic generated the moment Rebecca's "rune trigger" was connected had given him a somewhat different notion.
This is very much like a phenomenon that would arise within a certain kind of energy field, he hypothesized boldly.
What if magic were an "energy field," and the various effects of magic could be regarded as a special kind of wave? The rune trigger was like an incomplete circuit within an energy field; the instant it connected, the circuit became complete, and so a portion of that energy field would flow into the circuit. In that process, the flow of energy produced the observable "magic fluctuations." But because the rune trigger's circuit was closed, the process could not continue—and so the magic was instantaneous...
In this way, although the ultimate source of magic remained nature, the instantaneous magic within the rune trigger was "created" by artificial means, with no process of "drawing" involved. That was also why the rune trigger, despite having no gathering or charging structure, produced a trace amount of magic.
Gao Qi frowned, casually taking up a black stone from beside him that served as a paperweight, and pressed his fingers firmly across its surface. The strength of a professional easily carved swirling, vortex-like lines into it; then he pressed a dot hard into the center of the lines to form the elemental symbol of wind: Breeze.