Chapter 92 — Nicole·Egg
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 4
Gao Yang eyed this silvery-white "giant egg" with considerable skepticism, deeply doubting whether this fellow could really stay quiet and not cause trouble. But considering that it had just been through a thrilling and utterly failed "escape attempt," it probably wouldn't try a second time anytime soon—so he decided to trust it, for the time being.
Even if he didn't trust it, there was no help for it. There was still far too much to deal with in the camp—he couldn't spend all his time arguing in circles with a ball.
The group left the tent, and Hedie couldn't resist glancing back at the tent flap that had been tied shut again: "Are we just going to leave that ball sitting there like that?"
Though her words sounded like worry that the ball might cause trouble, what flickered in her eyes was pure, full-blown curiosity and the spark of an explorer's spirit. As a mage and a researcher, Hedie possessed an endless interest in the "unknown," and a floating, talking metal sphere was absolutely more "unknown" than any "unknown" she had encountered in her entire life. Frankly, if not for the responsibilities weighing on her shoulders and the strong likelihood that the ball would refuse to cooperate, she truly wished she could haul that big ball into her laboratory right now—she could happily study it for half a month straight.
Never mind slicing it open—at the very least she had to drill a hole and see what filling was inside...
By now Gao Yang understood Hedie well enough to know exactly what his eldest granddaughter was thinking from her expression, but he didn't call her out on it. He only shook his head: "It's no longer a stone that stays put and doesn't move. It can move, it can think, and it seems to have decent mobility. On top of that, it has a talent for manipulating metal and magic. Forcing control over it brings no benefit—and we might not even be able to control it anyway. So better to let it cooperate willingly."
As he spoke, he glanced at the soldiers standing guard not far away.
These soldiers were still, per their earlier orders, guarding the security line ten meters out from around the tent. Though it couldn't be certain this distance was beyond the metal-controlling range of that Nicole Egg, it at least put the soldiers a bit more at ease.
"Of course, we still need to tighten the watch," Gao Dai said. "Replace the militia with family soldiers, but keep it to distant monitoring. Tell those soldiers in advance that the sphere in the tent is a magical device storing an ancient soul, and that they're not to have excessive contact or conversation with the sphere. If the ball really does run wild, have them report it up the chain immediately—no confronting it. That ball may be cowardly, but when it leaps up and slams into someone, even aberrations go down in one hit. Ordinary soldiers couldn't stop it at all."
"What do you think that ball actually is?" Hedie asked with a frown. "Could it... really be a magical creation of the ancient Gondor Empire?"
After the "dragon egg hypothesis" had been ruled out, Hedie had involuntarily turned her thoughts in this direction. In this world, Gondor's legacy and dragon legends shared a good many similarities—for instance, both were perfectly suited to explaining things that couldn't be explained, functioning much like metaphysics back on Earth...
"The Gondor Empire wasn't omnipotent either," Gao Yang shook his head. "Even the arcanists and golem-masters of the Spark Era couldn't create magical constructs with this level of intelligence."
But there was another half of the sentence he didn't say aloud: never mind the magical artificial intelligence experts of the Gondor Empire—not a single kingdom, not a single generation of civilization, not a single race that had ever been active on this continent before Gondor had ever produced an intelligent creation of this grade.