Chapter 203 — What the Magic Tide Brought
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Gao Yang and Hedy's simultaneous interrogation made Rebecca's neck shrink by two-thirds at a speed visible to the naked eye. Gao Yang even wondered whether, if he sharpened his tone a little more, the girl might put on a live demonstration of the rare art of retracting her head into her torso.
But no matter how far her neck retracted, an explanation still had to be given. Rebecca glanced timidly at the two elders who were fully entitled to string her up and thrash her, and answered honestly, "It's not my fault! I was over at the Rune Institute testing the new detonation substrate when my aunt suddenly called me over to help with an experiment. I just stuffed the detonation substrate into my pocket, and when I got here I set it down on the bench without thinking."
"Don't you have safety regulations or something for conducting magic experiments?" Gao Yang said, his eye twitching as he looked at Hedy. "Dangerous things like that can just be set down on the bench?"
In his view, Rebecca's maneuver ranked roughly alongside welding a blasting cap while sawing through a lightbulb.
"Of course we have safety codes," Hedy said at once, defending the honor of mages—but then she turned her head aside with a trace of embarrassment. "It's just that I've never let Rebecca near the laboratory much since she was small, so she's lacking in common sense in this area. That's a failing in my upbringing of her."
"Institutionalization really does need to reach into every corner of everything, and magic laboratories especially. No one should be allowed to take part in experiments without full safety-code instruction," Gao Yang said, shaking his head with a sigh. "Thank goodness it was only a detonation rune, and not even a very powerful one."
"But by rights there shouldn't have been any danger at all," Rebecca said, a little aggrieved. "It's a detonation rune substrate, sure, but before it comes into contact with a magic source it's just a static rune array—no different from an iron plate with patterns carved on it. How could it explode?"
Gao Yang frowned at that. He knew Rebecca was right.
Detonation runes were not like the blasting caps of Earth; the latter carried a certain inherent risk of exploding, but a detonation rune would not detonate on its own.
It contained no energy-storage structure. For such a thing to explode, it had to be paired with a carrier holding stored magic—which was exactly why, in Gao Yang's eyes, it was far safer than Earth explosives like blasting caps.
So if it had exploded, there was only one explanation: at that moment, magic of sufficient purity to trigger it had appeared nearby.
"It must still have something to do with that new ore," Gao Yang said, looking toward the sample ores stacked in another corner of the bench, as yet untested. They had all been cut into fist-sized chunks, each one faintly floating with the luster of magical material. "Hedy, have you tested whether they can store magic?"
"They can't—their magic conductivity is excellent, but they're completely incapable of storing magic. In that respect the leakage rate is about the same as purple steel or red copper," Hedy said, shaking her head. "Could it be that strange magic field?"
This new ore had many bizarre properties. For instance, when magic was rapidly infused into it, it would "volatilize" that magic into the air at nearly the same rate; and if two pieces of the ore performed this "volatilization" at the same time while close together, the magic would not dissipate at once but would form a peculiar "field." This field of gathered, undispersed magic seemed to both Gao Yang and Hedy to possess some unknown function.
Perhaps the magic field had activated that detonation rune.
"Very likely," Gao Yang nodded. "Hedy, try to excite that magic field again. Rebecca, do you have any spare detonation runes?"