Chapter 118 — Divine Arts and Magic
Blade of Dawn · Page 3 of 3
Bubbles began to rise in the heating vessel, and a pungent, sharp odor emerged. Pi Yun hurriedly added a new potion to balance the mixture's potency.
"The potion produced by the preliminary steps is merely mundane—it possesses no transcendent power, and even if it has some effect, it is very weak. To make it exert the wondrous power of magic, magic must be infused into it, and that step must be completed through a druidic ritual..."
Pi Yun had already sealed the lid of the heating vessel. Through a bent copper conduit, the vapor rising from the vessel was led into an adjacent condensation tube and condensed into drop after drop of pale green liquid. The little old man carefully collected this pale green liquid until he had produced a small cup's worth, and placed it on a small altar nearby.
Gao Yang watched the old man's operations without blinking. He saw Pi Yun arrange around the altar elemental runes representing wind, fire, water, and earth, all carved into oak slips, and then place two crystals on the inner layer—ordinary white crystals, the cheapest kind of natural crystal.
Then he began to chant the obscure, difficult-to-fathom incantations of the druids, and Gao Yang activated his magic perception.
He saw the radiance of magic gradually fill the space around Pi Yun. Guided by the runes, this energy arranged itself into special geometric figures, vibrating and exerting influence around the half-finished potion, and the potion's color shifted accordingly from pale green toward dark green.
Just as the transformation was nearing completion, the druid halted his chanting, withdrew the two white crystals, and began reciting a prayer to the nature gods with the utmost solemnity: "O great gods of nature, guardians of life, great spirits of nature... ah, no—Heart of the Forest, guide of life, your devout believer prays here, beseeching a response from the gods of nature. May you, from your oak... palm... or rather, oak—let's say oak—may you bestow your blessing from your oak throne, filling this potion with the energy of life, and let it... oh, is it already done?"
Pi Yun looked down, confirmed the potion had completed its transformation, and promptly cut off the prayer he had been on the verge of improvising further. Beaming, he took the potion from the altar and handed it to Gao Yang: "Have a look—freshly made plant growth catalyst potion, still warm."
Holding the potion, Gao Yang felt his entire face twitching—the kind of twitching that not even a square-jawed face and a full beard could save.
What in the world was that final prayer of the old rascal's?!
Yet it was precisely that final stretch of near-absurd prayer—one that, on any normal believer, would have earned seven or eighty smitings from their own God—that fully confirmed the notion in Gao Yang's heart.
The divine arts of the old druids... had indeed vanished completely.
What remained in the world now was only druidic magic.
He set down the small cup of potion, still steaming, and looked into Pi Yun's eyes. "If I remember rightly, the prayer you just recited was in fact a passage from the *Words of the Wildwood*—the scripture of the Forest Heart faction of the Senming sect."
Pi Yun was a little startled. "You know even that?!"
"I have read the book," Gao Yang said, waving a hand to show that this was beside the point. "What I want to ask is—are druidic spells really born out of divine magic?"
(A book recommendation: *I, the God, the Redeemer*, written by Shiyu—yes, the very same author who wrote the little Bubbling God cult back then. This book is still about the Guya God cult, in the cultural-invasion, proselytizing vein.)