Chapter 267 — The Lights of Civilization
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
The perfection of the Molten-Cut Sword marked another step in the refinement of Cecil's combat troops, in both fighting power and fighting style. In a world where every manner of magic and counter-magic existed, no single ranged or melee weapon could cope with the complexities of the battlefield, and the Molten-Cut Sword filled precisely the gap in the Cecil soldiers' current capabilities. Its other great significance lay in what it represented: a leap forward in the thinking of the domain's native craftsmen and technicians.
Unlike the novelties that had appeared in the Cecil domain before, the "Molten-Cut Sword" was conceived and brought to final production entirely by locals working on their own. Apart from a few suggestions Gao Yang had offered when the technical route was first chosen, none of the technical or creative stages in the whole process had involved him—the "cheat." The craftsmen, technicians, knights, and soldiers of the domain had pooled their ideas and completed the design and finalization of the new weapon. To Gao Yang, the meaning contained in that surpassed the Molten-Cut Sword itself as a technological achievement.
In the course of manufacturing the Molten-Cut Sword, he saw the capacity of this world's native technicians to take existing techniques and materials and turn them into something new. The blade was made from a peculiar magical material called "purple steel," whose properties were extraordinary: it tolerated extreme heat and could hardly be smelted in any sort of high-temperature forge. Only within an arcane energy field of a specific intensity did purple steel become workable. For insulation, meanwhile, the sword used a mixture of quartz sand and crystal dust—a byproduct of processing various magical substances at the "mana crystal smelting works." The mixture was highly heat-resistant and a poor conductor of heat, and once bound with an acidic adhesive it formed an extremely solid filler between the metal components...
The so-called "insulation" runes on the blade were among the most basic runes mages used in their laboratories. They constrained heat and channeled it in a directed manner into the gaps between rune clusters. In the lab, mages commonly used them as the outer shielding of alchemical benches, to keep the benches from being destroyed by magics of extreme temperature (after all, many magical experiments required extreme conditions, and no alchemical bench material could withstand every possible extreme magical effect). The rune artificers who routinely helped mages set up their alchemical apparatus had cleverly applied this rune to the Molten-Cut Sword, letting it confine all the heat near the blade in something like a "focusing" fashion...
These were substances and techniques unique to this world. Their peculiar properties would probably strike any technician from Earth as nothing short of bewildering—and yet this seemingly backward "medieval world" had its own technical routes for processing and handling them. That, indeed, left Gao Yang with much to think about.
On the second day after the Molten-Cut Sword was finalized for production, a brand-new magical device was being erected in the lord's plaza at the center of the city.
A large group of mage-technicians—the "magical industrial technicians" unique to the Cecil domain—bustled about under Karmel's direction. They hauled a tarp-covered "big fellow" to the center of the plaza, then began unbolting the metal cover plates set into the ground there and exposing the mana-net connection terminals beneath. Using rune substrates pre-engraved with various magic circles, the technicians took readings on the mana net; once they confirmed the terminals were operating properly, Karmel used Mage Hand and a weight-reduction spell to move the two-meter-tall "big fellow" directly above the connection terminals.