Chapter 1248 — Seas Turn to Mulberry Fields
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
The captured "loophole."
Amorn was no expert in the field of magic, nor did his authority include the interpretation of such occult phenomena; yet that did not mean he lacked the capacity to learn and understand. In the days since he had come into contact with the neural network and spent time in Milmina's company, he had absorbed a great deal of cutting-edge knowledge, and so now, with only a moment's thought, he grasped the meaning in the Goddess of Magic's words.
"You mean... these motes of dust could never have existed stably in the real world? That some 'essence' of theirs conflicts with the laws of the real world?" He stared fixedly at the dust-phantoms bound within the spell array, flickering madly like a broken signal, and questioned the Goddess of Magic beside him, his tone hesitant and uncertain.
"More than that," Milmina nodded slightly, her tone grave. "These motes vanish the instant the observer vanishes—which shows they are hard-linked to 'cognition.' And when the observer returns, they reappear—which shows that a higher order of 'cognition' is anchoring them. When observer and dust vanish together, it is this higher cognition that ensures the motes still exist in some dimension beyond observation, and ensures that they can return..."
"...This is getting close to the blind spot of my knowledge," Amorn shook his head slightly, his light-forged eyes full of bewilderment. "But one thing I do understand: without your experimental procedure, an ordinary person would never have guessed that these motes were like this..."
"Only when every observer is incapable of perceiving these motes do they vanish; and when an observer returns, they immediately revert to their normal state... In a conventional experimental procedure, technicians would indeed find it very hard to notice that these phenomena had ever occurred," Milmina said softly, but then shook her head slightly. "Still, that is not absolute. Mortals are very clever—once they have a line of thinking, sooner or later they will design experiments to verify the special properties of these shadow-dust motes. This is merely an observer test."
"The hard part is precisely that 'line of thinking,'" Amorn sighed. "If Lady Enya had not pointed it out, who would ever have thought to run an observer test on this dust? Though I am a little curious—how did Lady Enya see it?"
"She was once the dragon race's 'Pantheon'; she knows the authority of every god, including those domains that touch upon dreams and illusion," Milmina said offhandedly. "With such breadth of experience, it would not be difficult for her to detect the anomaly in this shadow-dust."
Amorn fell into thought, and after a few seconds asked suddenly: "This dust was produced by Amber—what about the samples sent from Talrond? Do those 'true' shadow-dust motes also possess this contradiction?"
Milmina slowly shook her head: "Lady Enya has examined them; those motes do not possess this 'contradiction'... Of course, if we are unsure, we could bring those samples here for testing as well. But there are far fewer of those samples—every grain is precious—so I would have to redesign the spell array here."
"You are the expert in this; you decide," Amorn nodded, then could not help turning his curious gaze back to the imprisoned dust. "But then again... what do you think causes these motes to exhibit such a bizarre state?"
"...I am not certain," Milmina mused, her tone slow and hesitant. "In my memory and understanding, there seems to be only one circumstance that would barely fit this phenomenon..."
"One circumstance?" Amorn turned back, looking at Milmina's eyes, hidden within their veil of illusory mist. "What circumstance?"
"Dream-spawn... That should be the domain of Naretir and Duvalt, but I suspect even they have never seen such a phenomenon occurring directly in the real world—one that can even linger in the real world and deceive observers."
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