Chapter 443 — A Trade in Technology
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Watching that rare look of eagerness on Tyr's face, Gao Yang knew he had finally landed this fish—though he was not entirely sure how he had managed it, for his original plan had been to drag Tyr around a while longer, using this and that from the human world to slowly kindle the creature's interest. He had never expected the Rainbow Light Cannon to hook her outright.
No matter. The fish was on the line.
"You are interested in the Rainbow Light Cannon?" Gao Yang looked at Tyr. "Is it impressive even by the standards of you sirens?"
"Impressive? Its destructive power is certainly decent, but we are hardly short of weapons..." Tyr shook her head. "What I am curious about is how you bind such a vast and pure arcane energy... and how you extract that energy from an ordinary magical environment!"
Tyr had no interest in the Rainbow Light Cannon itself—for the once vastly advanced siren civilization, the manufacturing and engineering behind this new weapon were nothing remarkable. What stirred her curiosity was the principle behind it, the Cecilians' approach to controlling magic.
Gao Yang understood this quickly enough. Looking into Tyr's eyes, finally free of their usual drowsiness, he did not answer her request at once. Instead he asked, "May I be more specific—why does this part of the technology interest you? You sirens have long observed the races of the land. Has our system of magical technology never drawn your interest before?"
"The magical technology of the land, as it was before?" Tyr slapped the deck of the Aurora hard with her tail. "Ha, you mean the 'skill' system you land-dwellers invented? Or your first-, second-, third-rank magic arrays? Those are nothing alike! Your 'skill' system is utterly useless to us. Have you never noticed it yourself? This thing you call the Rainbow Light Cannon... it is a far more fundamental technology of energy utilization. It draws power from the magic net, then modulates it, binds it, focuses it, and finally discharges it. In all of this, what rank of spell is it? What skill is it? There are no such superfluous concepts at all!"
The siren lady was rarely so agitated, her tail thumping the deck without pause. Her words were bound to sound obscure to an outsider, even muddled and out of order, yet Gao Yang vaguely grasped what it was that this siren truly cared about—
The magic net's property as a "universal energy source."
Humanity had spent tens of thousands of years building a "skill tree," converting magic into skills of various ranks and spells of various categories, using countless intricate and disparate incantations and spell models to turn magic into specific phenomena. Yet this "skill" that only humans could understand and master was meaningless to the sirens. Their very form of life seemed to determine that they could never comprehend human spells—unable to learn them, and with no use for them.
What they needed was a "universal energy source."
Yet perhaps precisely because of that form of life, they had never found a way to convert magic into universal energy.
The Rainbow Light Cannon showed Tyr an entirely new technological path. In that devastating beam she sensed a power sufficient to break through a certain bottleneck of the sirens—and that power was no rigid skill, but pure energy drawn from the magic net, frequency-tuned through rune arrays, and focused by the rainbow light crystal. This energy could be launched as a weapon, but change a few control runes and it could be put to other uses as well.
Gao Yang said the sirens had an ancient lost city, and that the energy reactor at its heart had been cold for many years. They needed a powerful new source of energy to reignite it. The divine flesh and blood they had dredged from the seafloor held tremendous energy, but perhaps because it could not be fully converted, they had only ever been able to keep the reactor at a faint "residual heat"—never enough to wake the whole city.