Chapter 449 — Rebecca's Cleverness, Truly
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
This thing called the "arcane transfer cylinder" was nothing like the printing press rollers Gao Yang had imagined.
In fact, apart from a vague similarity in outline, its entire operating principle and method of use had never once featured in his imagination.
This was yet another product born solely from the "magical technology route" that was rooted in this world.
He watched quietly as blue veins surfaced across the silver-white alloy drum, realizing that these patterns must be a built-in "standard plate" designed specifically to test whether the device was functioning properly; and when he brought his hand close to those blue lines, he felt a distinct heat.
This heating phenomenon was probably the key to its ability to print.
"Tell me how it works," Gao Yang said, looking at Rebecca. Although Nikoxi Egg had brought the device, it was Rebecca who had placed the order, and she was certainly the one who knew all its technical secrets. "How does it run?"
A small pride showed on Rebecca's face: "Ancestor, do you remember those detection posts I set up in the Magic Web early on?"
"Detection posts?" Gao Yang blanked for a moment, but quickly recovered. "Oh, I remember now. It exploited the property that mithril temporarily heats up and turns black after being infused with arcane energy, right..."
"That's it!" Rebecca nodded, delighted. "There's one person I have to mention specifically here — an arcanist named Cohen, one of the mages Santis brought back from the royal capital. He's the one who found the breakthrough. He thought of mithril's special property under arcane energy, and only then did we finally find the right approach."
As she spoke, Rebecca pointed at the silver-white surface of the transfer device: "The casing has two layers. The inner layer is a very fine copper mesh, used to conduct magical power and serve as the skeleton of the whole device. The outer layer is actually a coating. We made an alloy of mithril and other metals, added other auxiliary materials to make a paint, then spread it evenly over the copper shell — and that's how you get this silver-white layer you see."
"You should know that the original detection posts were coated with pure mithril, but pure mithril has many problems. First, its magical conductivity is too high — basically, if even one point is affected by arcane energy, the entire sheet of mithril changes, so there's no way to make a plate at all; the whole thing just turns black."
"Second, mithril's response to arcane energy lags. That's because it's a very special magical conducting material — its ability to retain and to dissipate magical power happens to be exactly balanced. While magical power is being continuously injected, its storage and dissipation rates reach equilibrium, so its appearance shows no change at all; only when the energy stops does the balance break, and only then does it heat up and change color. If that lag were used for plate-making, the editing process would become slow and cumbersome, so we also had to find a way to make mithril's response to arcane energy more sensitive and more immediate."
"Beyond that, pure mithril has another problem: when its properties change, it turns black, which makes it very easy to confuse with the printing press's ink. Then even if something goes wrong, it's hard to spot at a glance. So we considered using mithril as the main material, with other magical conducting materials to adjust mithril's properties and add new characteristics."
"We added inert white copper to the alloy to reduce mithril's magical conductivity, so that it only changes where it is directly struck by arcane energy. We also used blue crystal steel to affect mithril's rate of magical dissipation, so that it changes the instant it's struck by arcane energy. And we added crystal dust to the final coating material, so that after the coating is struck by arcane energy it glows blue instead of turning black... Mr. Egg did all that work."