Chapter 304 — The Sprite Monitoring Station
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
The "technical black box" of the arcane field was the problem that vexed Jenny and Camille most.
Jenny's runic logic was a formidable tool when it came to optimizing and restructuring traditional spell arrays. Grounded in mathematical law, it could simplify a magic array from a purely computational standpoint—eliminating superfluous interference nodes, boosting the array's effective output, or lowering its operational requirements—all without demanding that the operator possess any talent for sensing magical power. But runic logic had its limits too: to restructure an array, one first had to "segment" it—or rather, one first had to determine what functions each distinct runic zone within the array performed, which runes belonged to a single interference region, and which runes had to be preserved and run independently.
Only after an effective segmentation of the array could any subsequent optimization and restructuring proceed.
Given that premise, the "technical black box" was inevitably a roadblock in the way.
The birth of the technical black box was bound up with the origin of magic itself. When the first mortal pioneer cast the first spell by imitating the primal magic patterns on the hides of ancient dire beasts and the surfaces of natural minerals, the black box came into being. For a thousand years, countless casters had studied those intricate, ancient symbols and tracings. Many magics had been parsed in the process, becoming "fully analyzed spells," yet nearly half still remained in the black-box state.
Almost all black-box magics were blurry and tangled, retaining their most primitive spell structure; whether in spell model or runic array, they remained in an unparsed state. You simply could not tell how many functional zones its runic combination contained, who could be partitioned from whom, and who maintained independence from whom. Under such circumstances, plugging the formulas in directly might sort the runes out one by one on the mathematical level—but in the process, the array's own structure was thoroughly torn apart.
Simple low-tier arrays did not have to worry about this, since their functional zones were often few, sometimes even a single complete zone (such as the "unit" of the hive magic net). But from mid-tier upward, an array's functional zones—or, to use the term Jenny had coined, its "runic domains"—grew ever more complex, and the black-box phenomenon grew ever more common.
Camille and Jenny were setting themselves to this problem. They were attempting to distill, by organizing the basic elemental language, basic spell models, and basic runic units, a set of effective rules by which most arrays could be "split apart." The work had been attempted before, but had failed for lack of a correct research approach and mathematical tools. Camille and Jenny, however, were full of confidence—and already they had made some preliminary progress.
Gao Yang trusted their abilities, and he trusted that now, with the relatively mature technical samples from the Eternals in hand, they would surely find the breakthrough to crack the technical black box of the communications spell—a boon of immense value, whether to research in the arcane field or to the practical development of the territory...
...
Within the Typhon Empire, in a valley on the northwestern frontier.
This valley was a special place to the Typhonians—and in fact, to the four great human nations, each country held within its borders one or two similar "special locations." These places lay within the territories of the human kingdoms, yet administratively they were the land of the distant Silver Empire. The largest of them occupied a stretch of mountains and valleys; the smallest was a mere town. And they all shared one trait: their inhabitants were almost all silver sprites.
They were the sites of the "monitoring stations" established by the Silver Empire.