Chapter 249 — Heresy and Faith
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
Camille twisted his body with some discomfort, and the floating rune-armor plates clinked faintly with his movements. Yet that strange sensation came and went quickly; before he could work out what had happened, everything seemed to have returned to normal.
Truthfully, Camille had not felt anything like this in a great many years. Ever since he lost his human form, he had lost the vast majority of human perception, replaced by the ability to sense his surroundings through magical power. He was not even certain whether what he had just felt was "itching"—that sensation was so distant, so remote that he retained only the vaguest impression of it. When it had suddenly appeared just now, he had actually been startled, thinking something had gone wrong with his body.
Jenny, standing before him, looked quite worried. "Master Camille, are you really... all right?"
"It's nothing. I'm probably just a little unaccustomed to a new magical environment. I'll adjust my energy flow later," Camille buzzed, manipulating his magic to set the papers covered in formulas and calculations floating around him. His voice carried admiration and astonishment. "I still can't believe it... that you could actually summarize all this..."
"It wasn't just me. There was also Mr. Ravencrest and Mr. Wildmage—they laid the foundation. I only summarized it," Jenny corrected him earnestly. She boldly looked straight at the two leaping arcane sparks that served as Camille's eyes. "The lord once said something: the truths of the world should tend toward simplicity and clarity. To seek truth is every person's heaven-granted right. A person's magical talent should not become the shackles that bind their thinking..."
"Shackles on thinking, is it..." Camille murmured, lost in thought. "'All have the right to think'—that was a phrase the mages of the Gondor era often had on their lips, but few ever truly extended it to every person. We grew accustomed to the fact that only mages were qualified to seek truth, so much so that we nearly forgot... that ordinary people can think too."
He looked around at the manuscripts floating about him, and in his mind surfaced the magical mechanisms he had seen earlier at the mechanical workshop—and the "mortals" who operated them and even designed them. As an ancient mage who had studied the ways of magic for many years and witnessed the Gondor magical civilization, he of course understood what these things meant.
Even ordinary people without the slightest magical talent, so long as they possessed sufficient knowledge, could control the power of magic—not merely use it, but even research and invent with it, even advance the development of technology.
Camille was a researcher, but that did not mean he was wholly ignorant of things like social development. He could imagine what impact these technologies would have on human civilization, and what left him at a loss was that he did not know whether such an impact would be for good or for ill.
"Noble magic, in the end, is nothing but a tool..." he could not help murmuring to himself.
"Magic isn't noble. It's just a kind of power," Jenny immediately retorted—but no sooner had she said it than she shrank back a little. "That's what the lord says too..."
Yet the anticipated scene of "ancient archmage flies into a rage" did not occur. Camille merely let out a string of hoarse laughter. "You seem to worship your lord quite a lot?"
"The lord is a great man," Jenny said quietly. "He thinks further than all of us, and sees more clearly..."
"If he firmly believes this is beneficial to humanity, then I will support him. After all, I have already sworn my allegiance," Camille said with a light laugh, stacking the manuscripts neatly on the table and turning to look at Jenny. "May I take a copy of the manuscript back to study? I am... very interested in these things."