Chapter 138 — The Power of Calculation
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
"An infinitely expandable structure for the magic net?" Hearing this string of terms come tumbling out of Rebecca's mouth, even Gao Yang was momentarily dazed. "Did you ever mention this to me before?"
"It wasn't me who brought it up—it was you! Have you forgotten?" Rebecca waved her arms about (and truth be told, Gao Yang was genuinely worried that one careless swing would bring that iron staff crashing down on her own head). "Didn't you tell me before that you wanted the magic net to become something more open, more expandable, easier to lay down and to add or remove units from? So I've been thinking about it ever since, but I thought for ages without getting anywhere—until a while back."
As she spoke, she raised a hand toward Jenny, who stood nearby gulping for breath. "A while back Jenny showed up, didn't she, and she brought those early research materials of the wild mages. That's when I finally filled out the whole system. You know about the Ancestral Inkmasters? The wild mages' notebooks can only count as part of the results—the magic net in them is just the conclusion from the latter half, with no derivation or construction principles from the first half. Without those, all we could do was 'simulate' the magic net in a very clumsy way. But the materials in Jenny's hands contain the complete logic of how the wild mages originally built those foundational runes..."
For all that Rebecca usually seemed scatterbrained and vacant, the moment she started talking about matters in her field she would rattle on without pause, and Gao Yang could tell this girl was set to talk straight through to the next mealtime, so he cut her off quickly: "Stop, stop—I get your meaning. You've finally assembled the full theory, so you've finally grasped the laws of the magic net on the level of principle rather than just copying the form. I understand all that. Show me this infinitely expandable structure you're talking about."
"Let's go inside to look—there are loads of sheets!" Rebecca grabbed Gao Yang's arm and headed toward the tent, calling back over her shoulder at the top of her voice to Jenny, "You come too, you come too! Most of the calculations were yours, after all!"
Inside Gao Yang's tent, Rebecca, her face alight with excitement, unrolled the paper scrolls Jenny had brought one after another, spreading them across the entire table in order, and only at the very end unrolled the large blueprint she held in her own hands and laid it at the exact center of all the rest.
These were sheets covered in calculation formulas, geometric figures, and the processes of logical induction. With rigorous and almost inconceivable logic they optimized and recombined the foundational runes over and over; every sheet was crowded with dense lines and diagrams. Even Gao Yang, who knew a fair amount about magic, felt dizzy at first glance—but on the sheet Rebecca unrolled last, all the intricate calculations and connections had been reduced to simplicity.
Upon it was a single, utterly fundamental unit diagram: a symmetrical hexagonal structure formed from a combination of eight rune-knots—six composing the border, two within. Its simplicity and elegance reached an almost inconceivable degree. At a single glance, Gao Yang's gaze was drawn deeply in.
"This is..."
"The most basic unit of the magic net," Rebecca said, her eyes shining. "After completing every possible optimization and simplification, I found that the magic net needs only these eight rune-knots to perform its most basic charging and output operations, and within it there is only one interference knot—so every such 'unit' is far below the interference threshold, and the more of these units are connected, the lower the interference becomes. Look, it's symmetrical, opposite sides complementary, so..."
Gao Yang could no longer hear what Rebecca said next. Before his eyes was rising a stunning vision belonging to the future.