Chapter 1006 — The Chessboard
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Hearing the news Hedy brought, Gao Yang showed no trace of surprise: "A rejection I expected... and fair enough. After all, this touches on Typhon's very foundations."
"So it seems the Wolf General will not cooperate," Hedy stood before Gao Yang's desk, a stack of documents tucked under her arm, her face serious. "And... I think she is quite right: this is not a decision a commander can make. Only Luoyan Augustus has the right to trade interests on that scale."
"Naturally, open and honorable technical exchange would be better," Gao Yang smiled. "Only, exchange on that level is hard enough to arrange in peacetime, let alone in the present tension... Never mind. I was only testing the waters to begin with; Anluo's refusal was the expected outcome."
As he said it, a faint sigh stirred in his heart: choosing Bard as the intermediary to approach Anluo had clearly been the right decision. Send anyone else to broach a matter that sensitive, and the Wolf General's blood pressure would surely have hit the ceiling; one wrong word and it might even have come to blows. Handing the task to Bard was precisely to guard against that — in theory, even at maximum blood pressure, the Wolf General would hardly come to blows with the father she had been separated from for so many years...
Some far-fetched associations drifted through his mind. Hedy had no idea what the master of the Xuan Vein Sect was scribbling away at, but she could tell Gao Yang had wandered off. She gave a light cough, and only once she had his attention did she go on: "At present the 'mass-produced transcendent' proposal is on hold. The work now underway falls mainly into two tracks: one is continued technical optimization of the psionic singers' equipment and training methods, to find some way of reducing the neural load on the users; the other is to begin selecting suitable candidates from among the mages, converting a portion of the former battle-mages into psionic singers...
"And beyond that, Beiyila has put forward a third proposal."
"A third proposal?" Gao Yang's brow lifted. "The details?"
"These are the documents sent over from Solin Keep. Beiyila has already drafted it," Hedy said as she laid the papers on the desk, her expression somewhat peculiar. "I skimmed through it... how should I put this? As befits a former dark druid — what she has conceived is... quite a challenge to one's tolerance."
Growing more curious by the moment, Gao Yang took the document and opened its cover. On the first page a large title met his eyes: "Prospects and Technical Points for the Application of Giant Wetware Nodes in Assisted Spellcasting." Beneath it, in smaller letters: To avoid moral and ethical risk, all wetware in this proposal is gestated and produced by the Solin Great Tree itself.
Gao Yang's gaze rested on those words for several seconds before, with a faint sense of oddity, he turned to the pages that followed — a technical proposal, rigorously worded, rich in data, complete in detail, lucid and easy to grasp, one that even looked ready to move straight into practical application, unfolded before him.
Before examining its contents in earnest, he could not help but first marvel at Beiyila's professionalism as a technician — the All-Ending Society, one had to admit, deserved its reputation as the masters of the most advanced biotech in human history. Even though they were the Cinderdark Cult, no one could deny that the cult's upper echelons were technical talents in the truest sense.
Technical documents of this caliber — few in the several senior teams at the Arcane Research Institute could have produced them.
And after that sigh of admiration, Gao Yang was quickly drawn in by the ideas set out in the document. He read carefully, page by page, until a vivid concept illustration appeared before his eyes —