Chapter 414 — A Groundbreaking Advance
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 3
As he spoke, Camille floated before the device and activated its base with a small spark of energy.
With an extremely faint humming sound, the beautiful device came to life. The runes on its base lit up one after another, and the crystal set at its center filled with a faint white glow. A moment later, the air above the crystal began to twist and tremble, and within that trembling, a blurry image surfaced before Gaoyang.
Gaoyang's breathing quickened involuntarily—even Hetty beside him could not help drawing a soft breath.
The image finally steadied. Gaoyang saw his ever-energetic little granddaughter bobbing her head back and forth within the frame, apparently operating or observing something around a device on the other side. She fiddled with it for a few seconds, and only then did she seem to suddenly catch sight of Gaoyang. At once she waved vigorously toward this side in excitement, and a clear, cheerful voice came from the base of the device: "Progenitor! Progenitor!! Look what we've made!!"
"I see it, I see it!" Gaoyang said loudly, beside himself with excitement—ordinarily, to maintain his dignity as Progenitor, he rarely showed such obvious and agitated changes of emotion, but at this moment he truly could not control himself, because he knew all too well what this thing Camille and Rebecca had built meant. "You've finally succeeded! Rebecca, where are you now? How far is the communication distance?"
"I'm in the North Shore Development Zone!" Rebecca said merrily, then stepped aside, and in that projection Gaoyang saw the broad open scenery outside the window—the newly leveled foundation of the North Shore Development Zone. "It's still very clear over here! Can you see me clearly? Can you see me? I can see you clearly! Ah! I can see Aunt Hetty too! Auntie, your dark circles are drawn so realistically today!"
"Calm down. This child is always like this," Gaoyang said, placing a hand on Hetty's shoulder. "So those dark circles really are drawn on again?"
"Of course not!" Hetty was a little frantic. She would never understand how Rebecca could steer any topic off in some whimsical direction no matter the circumstances—even if that silly deer was a girl she had raised herself, she still could not understand it. "I really... but you actually built this thing!"
Though her head was full of thoughts about giving Rebecca a beating, the momentous device before her ultimately drew Hetty's gaze. She circled it several times, trying to judge its magical principles and the difficulty of manufacturing it, but in truth she already knew the answer: if this device had been built on a traditional communication spell model, Camille would have had no reason to present it to Gaoyang as a great achievement!
In a world where supernatural power existed, long-distance communication was nothing unheard of; it was merely a matter of higher spell tiers and exceptionally high costs. Precisely because of these two limitations, its applications had always been confined to a very narrow range—such as the one or two emergency communication channels held by the monarchs of various nations, or the short-range communication needs of certain mid- to high-tier professionals. At present, the only long-distance communication channel on the continent that could be called practically valuable and was also applied on a large scale was the magnificent wall built by the elves—but that wall had been built seven hundred years ago by the combined strength of nearly half a continent's intelligent races, at a cost so enormous that even today, seven hundred years later, the various nations still had not mustered enough strength to build another one. And the communication range of the magnificent wall extended only in a ring around the wall itself...