Chapter 104 — A Stranger Meets a Strange Sphere
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
The sphere seemed to freeze for a moment at Gao Song's words—though there was really no way to tell, since it was just a bare, smooth metal ball with no face, no expressions, not even any bodily movement; when it hovered motionless in midair, you could not even tell whether it was listening. But it did wait a full two seconds of silence before answering: "Isn't that obvious? I was hauled here from somewhere else, so of course I'm not from your planet!"
"You know that's not what I mean," Gao Yang said, utterly unmoved. "You must have come from somewhere much farther away—so far, in fact, that mere distance hardly does justice to a thinking, talking metal sphere that can emit strange energy fluctuations and control both magic and metal. I've never heard of any such bizarre race existing in this world."
"That's because you haven't seen enough of the world," the sphere said, its tone seemingly mocking. "These past two days I've learned about you people from that human who calls himself a druid. It seems you've been through a great decline and are now incredibly backward. So how much can you possibly see in a single lifetime? With only those human eyes and word-of-mouth as your means of passing on information, there's so little you could ever witness in a whole lifetime..."
Hearing this, Gao Yang felt three parts more certain in his heart.
The sphere was right. In this era, in this world, the vast majority of people were indeed "blindfolded." The scarcity and chaos of information channels, combined with a fragmented feudal order, made it hard for anyone to encounter or gather new information. Only a handful of high nobles, great mages, and great knights took any interest in the world outside. Everyone else—including landed nobles like Viscount Andrew of Tamsan Township—kept themselves sealed off and closed in. As for a peasant who toiled facing the earth and turning his back to the sky, the sum total of new things he might encounter in his entire life amounted to no more than the information in a few newspapers. So if Gao Yang had been one of those "blindfolded" men, then judging a sphere to be a visitor from beyond the heavens solely on the basis of "I've never seen anything like it" would indeed have looked ridiculous.
But the real Gao Heng was not blindfolded—he had, in fact, watched this world evolve with his eyes wide open for countless years. He had been watching since before the monkeys on this continent could even walk upright. He could not see the other continents, true, but no matter how isolated or bizarre the lifeforms of those other continents might be, they would not evolve an alloy sphere out of a pile of carbon-based creatures!
Unless there really was some cheat-like race outside Gao Yang's field of vision that had rapidly teched up to some kind of superluminal-tier technology, built an alloy-shelled, anti-gravity-hovering, strong-AI contraption, and then that contraption had somehow drifted into the Loren Continent a thousand years ago and been captured by those Gondorian mages... Rather than believe such a thing, Gao Yang would sooner believe that Amber would return the pocket watch she'd stolen from the neighboring Viscount Andrew's steward.
So he smiled, walked up to the sphere, and pressed his hand against its surface.
The sphere immediately shrieked: "Hey, hey, what are you doing!? Don't go flying into a rage and taking it out on me! Otherwise I'll—"
The sphere got stuck halfway through its sentence, because Gao Yang had used magical resonance to send a sentence directly into its mind (did a sphere really have such a thing?): "Don't you think you're a little too different in style from every living thing in this world?"
The sphere fell silent for a few seconds, then answered in the same magical-resonance way: "...If you want to talk, just talk. Why the mystery?"
"Because I know there are some things you might not want others to know," Gao Yi said with a smile. "So you can tell just me."