Chapter 573 — Interference
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Summer was drawing to its close.
The Fireflow constellation of the night sky had begun to drift toward the west, the heat was receding from the whole kingdom, the winds of morning and evening had turned cool and pleasant, and after several generous rains the feel of autumn drew nearer with each passing day.
Arcane and intricate magical runes floated in midair like a field of stars; the crystal apparatus used to display their structure was fixed upon a base of wrought alloy, its surface glimmering with magical radiance; a low humming echoed through the laboratory. Camille floated quietly amid those illusory runes, the arcane light in the place where his eyes should be as bright as ever.
This was the largest analysis chamber of the Rune Research Institute, and today's task was to decode the technical materials the elves had brought.
Several senior runesmiths of the Institute stood to one side, transcribing the rune structures of a few key nodes, while a tall, lean male elf with brilliant golden hair stood beside Camille. Now and then the elf's gaze would fall upon Camille — clearly, an arcane being of such power greatly concerned this elven mage-tutor.
Camille, however, paid no mind to the elven mage-tutor's gaze; nearly all his attention was fixed upon the runes that had just been transcribed and decoded. After studying their core structure closely, he could not help saying, "Master Banna — is the core mechanism of this purification array some kind of... resonance and harmonic regulation?"
"You are quite right, Master Camille," said the elf mage-tutor called Banna with a nod. "Through long study of chaotic magical energy, we found that in essence it is still a form of mana, and not the 'highly contaminating waste energy' we once believed it to be. And if it is mana, then it may be brought to order through re-tuning and resonance — that is the idea behind 'purification.'"
Camille's gaze rested among the phantom runes, and a note of excitement gradually entered his voice: "In other words, you treat mana as a kind of 'wave' — and you succeeded?!"
"'Wave'..." The elven mage-tutor suddenly checked himself, staring at Camille in surprise. "You have introduced that concept as well?!"
"...We only introduced it a short while ago, and we still cannot confirm it — it remains a conjecture," Camille hummed. "We applied the wave properties of mana in decoding and reconstructing the message-transmission spell, and its wave nature was confirmed both mathematically and in practice — but we still lack the crucial evidence: observable evidence."
"We introduced the concept forty years ago. The Grand Astromancer Vilania proposed the hypothesis that mana is a wave, and through the spell models of several arcane magics she derived the theoretical wavelength range of pure arcane mana. Her theory is the foundation of the purification array — but regrettably, we too have failed to obtain observable evidence..."
Camille suddenly turned, fixing the elven mage-tutor before him with a blazing gaze: "The interference you ran into was the same?"
"You ran into it too?!" There was no small astonishment in the tone of the elven mage-tutor named Banna, and by now his attention was entirely off Camille's arcane body. This elf from the Silver Empire had never imagined that at the far end of the continent, in a nation of another race, in a human society in full decline, human mages would be studying the fundamental nature of mana as well — still less that human research would have gone so deep, and even run into the very bottleneck the elves had hit!