Chapter 139 — The Right Path
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
After they had finished discussing the honeycomb magic net model and he had promised his "reward," Gao Yang did not let Rebecca and Jenny leave. Instead, he brought out a set of drawings he had been working on over the past days, along with the notes, summaries, and calculations he had compiled from his own understanding of "Runic Logic."
Rebecca's attention was drawn to Gao Yang's drawings, while Jenny's eyes went straight to his calculation sheets. Her eyes went wide with astonishment. "You did all of these?"
"When I had nothing to do, I studied the materials you gave me and tried assembling the rune sequences myself," Gao Yang said with a nod. "I do have some grounding in magical theory."
"This... this isn't a matter of grounding," Jenny said, staring at Gao Yang's work in disbelief. "These methods of calculation, and... your writing habits. Have you had contact with this sort of thing before?"
"The Gondor Empire period produced quite a few achievements in mathematics and the sciences, certainly—though Runic Logic never did develop." Gao Yang brushed it off. Only he knew the truth: he had never actually encountered Runic Logic before, but the mathematical thinking he had accumulated in his previous life remained. The formulas might no longer be universally applicable, but that logic and approach to calculation would never fail. The Runic Logic formulas Jenny had organized so far were still at a fairly simple stage, and understanding the calculations extended from those empirical formulas was not difficult for Gao Yang.
Seeing that Jenny was about to keep questioning him, Gao Yang quickly steered the conversation to the next stage. "Let's look at these things first."
"This is the 'second-generation magic-energy engine' you mentioned last time, the one called a rotary engine or something..." Rebecca flipped through the drawings before her. "I've never seen this... This array model looks like fire element?"
"It's a Scorching Ray array, a tier-two spell. It can release a focused beam of heat from the array's focal point," Gao Yang explained. "Besides, isn't this just a low-tier spell? One tier below even the big fireball... You've never seen it?"
"Never," Rebecca said, shaking her head vigorously. "Aunt Hedy taught me the spell model for Scorching Ray back then. She thought it shared an origin with Fireball and that I might be able to learn it. In the end, studying that spell made my skull ache. After that I had a psychological scar about it, and when it came time to learn how to convert the spell model into an array, I slept through several classes..."
Watching this great-great-granddaughter of his who so candidly confessed her dark history, Gao Yang was utterly dumbfounded.
The so-called Scorching Ray was no profound spell. Although in Gao Yang's eyes this magic of firing a biu of thermal energy was spectacular in its light-and-shadow effects, it was in fact only a tier-two spell, just one level above the tier-one small fireball—and Rebecca was a "tier-three mage" who could, relying on her formidable mental power, force out a big fireball. By rights, Scorching Ray should have been no trouble at all for her. But there was no help for it: in this world's transcendent realms, so-called casting talent was determined by heaven. For mages who cast spells through personal ability, if one was born with a casting defect, no amount of effort could fix it.
Overexert yourself, and your skull would ache besides.