Chapter 451 — The Crystallization of Wisdom
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
To be honest, Gao Yang sometimes reflected on whether something had gone wrong with the way he recruited people and built up his territory — enough that everyone gathered around him (spheres, fish, light bulbs, and the like) ended up so distinctly characterized. These distinctive fellows were, of course, beyond any doubt in terms of ability, but their vivid traits would now and then turn a perfectly good affair into an awkward one — and Mr. Nikoxi Egg was unquestionably a master of that particular art.
The sphere could even turn itself square. Where was the logic in that?
Once this newfangled printing press came out, even writing up a record of merits would be a headache — for other project leaders you could say they toiled with devotion and exhausted themselves for the cause, going on about accumulated wear and illness, coughing blood from overwork, refusing to leave the front line over a minor wound; but when it came to the Mechanical Research Institute, you would have to write that the director grew twelve edges from sheer exhaustion — and without seven or eight illustrations and two pages of explanatory text attached, any reader would suspect the author's brain had been caught in a door...
"You... have worked hard..." Gao Yang said, the corner of his eye twitching as he looked at this iron-star man. "Once this project is finished, take a couple of days off..."
"Ah, don't worry, it's a minor ailment, I'll recover soon enough," Nikoxi Egg said, as though utterly unaware of how many people his current shape had frightened. "Let's first see how this equipment works — you're sure to be satisfied."
Gao Yang struggled to pull his attention away from those twelve newly grown edges of Nikoxi Egg and began to focus on what truly mattered here.
That "arcane printing press," different from any press he knew in working principle, structure, and appearance alike, was now fully prepared.
"Let's begin," Gao Yang nodded. "Starting from the initial editing. Rebecca, you operate it yourself."
Rebecca, who had come along with Gao Yang to inspect the results, had been waiting for this moment all along. She answered cheerfully at once, then walked with light steps to the small cabinet beside the arcane printing press.
She pulled a lever on the side of the little cabinet, and a very faint humming rose from within the device. A glimmer of light surfaced on the projection crystal set into the cabinet's top, and then a pale blue halo appeared above the entire apparatus.
It closely resembled the holographic display of a magic-net communicator with no signal connected, sitting in standby — except that the edges of this image were bounded by a ring of bright square lines, which must be the restricted area of the page layout.
And as the little "cabinet" started up, at the junction between the cabinet and the main body of the press, a crystal set into a metal platform also lit up — only then did Gao Yang realize that this structure connecting the two devices was in fact the arcane printing press's "scanning unit."
An assistant standing by stepped forward and placed a sheet of white paper, already covered in writing, onto the metal platform.
In the holographic projection above the "little cabinet," the image of that white paper appeared at once — up to this point, every step was a scene and phenomenon utterly familiar to the mages of this world; this was nothing more than the most common technique in illusion magic and crystal craft.
But as Rebecca pressed the first key on the "keyboard" atop the little cabinet, Gao Yang saw something that never appeared in conventional illusion magic:
In the holographic projection above the cabinet, beneath the image of the white paper, the characters Rebecca had entered appeared.
A string of characters was soon typed out by Rebecca, forming a sentence: "The part above is the physical scanning function; this sentence is the text editing function."