Chapter 103 — What Kind of Nonsense Is That?
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 4
But no matter what, the concept was exceptionally tempting, and Gao Heng could not possibly abandon it.
So he took a blank sheet of paper from beside him and, under Amber's, Rebecca's, and Hedy's curious gazes, rapidly sketched out a rough draft with a scratch-scratch-scratch.
A ring-shaped outer casing, an inner rotor fitted with many slanted blades (the repulsion targets), and on the casing many symmetrically distributed repulsion arrays...
Its structure was just that simple.
"This is..." Hedy's eyebrows arched as she spoke, curiosity and hesitation mingled in her voice.
Gao Yang put down his pen and said, with a trace of excitement: "The second-generation machine."
The three people present besides him were instantly dumbstruck, three faces utterly bewildered. After a long while, Amber finally looked at Gao Yang as though beholding a monster: "Just how is that brain of yours wired?"
"You are not to insult my ancestor!" Rebecca flared up at these words, snatching up her staff and pressing its head against Amber's forehead—but right on the heels of that she too turned her head and asked, "Ancestor-Inscriber, how is your brain wired?"
Gao Yang: "..."
It was two full seconds before Rebecca got a grip on herself, hurriedly lowering her staff and apologizing meekly: "I'm sorry, Ancestor-Inscriber, I spoke without thinking again..."
"No, that's not the point," the half-elf miss, having survived the iron-staff-to-the-skull crisis, was not chastened in the least; eyes wide, she kept exclaiming, "We haven't even finished discussing your first-generation sketch over here, and you've already casually produced a second generation? And whether you look at the principle or the structure, they clearly aren't even children of the same mother... Your head must already be stuffed with a whole pile of sketches just waiting to come out!"
Gao Yang nearly choked on his own spit: had this one actually guessed right by sheer accident?
"It's only an immature idea," he said, swiftly wiping the about-to-collapse expression from his face as he turned to the more meticulous Hedy. "Its principle is very simple. What do you think of its feasibility?"
"It certainly is much simpler, and its theoretical feasibility is high... but it will probably be difficult to actually build," Hedy said. It took her only one glance to spot the problem, and her reply matched Gao Yang's own estimate exactly. "Putting a large number of repulsion arrays together in a symmetric, tightly packed arrangement like this is practically tailor-made for magical resonance. They will interfere with each other, one hundred percent. Whether it will even move once activated is a question."
"What if we increase the diameter so that the distance between each 'repulsion point' also grows?"
"...Feasibility would still be low. I understand what you mean: these repulsion points have to relay continuously, one after another, to drive the rotating part in the middle at maximum efficiency, so however far apart they are, there is a limit. Rather than increasing the distance, it would be better to find a way to add anti-magic structures between the arrays to shield against interference—but that way... the cost would be appalling."
Gao Shao's mouth twisted with a twinge like a toothache: anti-magic materials, eh—even the cheapest of them were precious metals among magical conductor materials. If they were really to be used in mass-produced machines, then even if he died on the spot and had someone bury him, with Rebecca and Hedy collecting admission at the graveside and letting the whole nation come to view him, the proceeds still would not cover it... And what kind of monstrous metaphor was that, anyway?