Chapter 1492 — "Erroneous Copy"
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Gao Yang could tell that Amber was visibly more astonished than he was when she set eyes on that Staff of Shadow—but that did nothing to stop him from teasing the Shadow Assault Goose on the spot: "Don't you think it's about time you reflected on this habit of yours, nicking whatever you come across? You lifted the Lady of Night's Staff of Shadow itself—the only reason the Lady of Night still has a chair to sit on is that the damn thing was built into the altar and you couldn't pry it loose, isn't that right?"
"Wha—I did not lift this one!" Amber's eyes went wide, and she looked profoundly wronged. "Didn't I just tell you? I'd barely touched the staff when some error-report voice 'kicked' me down—I climbed that throne for nothing! How was I supposed to know how this thing followed me out... And look at its form—this clearly isn't the original Staff of Shadow either!"
"True enough," Gao Yang of course knew Amber could not possibly have made off with the Staff of Shadow, but the short rod she had "summoned" still bore an obvious connection to it. He thought of the voice Amber had heard in her mind before being "kicked" off the throne, and of the information recorded in the anchor generator at the Sky Dome Station, and a hypothesis gradually took shape in his mind. "Perhaps... this is an 'erroneous copy' of the Staff of Shadow..."
"An erroneous copy of the Staff of Shadow?" Amber was taken aback. Her first thought was that the next issue of The Holy Word Record was about to gain a new entry, and she immediately asked, "You mean I only touched the genuine staff once, and it automatically manufactured a counterfeit for me, and thoughtfully delivered it into the real world? And why emphasize that it's an 'erroneous' copy?"
"Obviously—if it weren't erroneous, this thing would be at least as thick as a roof beam!" Gao Yang shot her a glare. "And think about it carefully—this is probably not the first 'erroneous copy' you've come by. Remember those 'Shadow Dust' particles and that 'Shadow Rift' you somehow got your hands on?"
Amber caught on at once. With one hand she gripped the black-and-white short rod she had just summoned; with the other she gave a casual wave through the air. The next second, gray-white dust, like smoke and mist, materialized out of nothing and slowly rose and swirled around her; a gray-white gleam like a slit in space-time appeared amid the dust, then docilely settled into her empty hand.
Gao Yang looked at Amber, who had just summoned her "three divine artifacts"—the Shadow Dust wreathing her whole body, the black-and-white staff of archaic and mysterious design, the light-and-shadow rift that seemed to tear space itself. Frankly, any one of these, taken alone, sounded like a world-shaking premise—the sort of thing that, dropped into a slightly more normal setting, would set seven or eight world-class civilian paramilitary syndicates to wiping out one another's entire bloodlines. But gathered together on Amber, somehow the whole aesthetic just went... wrong...
On reflection, he decided the "counterfeit" label was to blame. Why else call it an erroneous copy? Compared with the Lady of Night's genuine articles, Amber's lifted wardrobe was roughly the equivalent of copper-plated iron—except that it wouldn't float in a pond, there was nothing cheaper about it. Especially since she used the Shadow Dust to fling in people's eyes mid-fight, and the Shadow Rift as a slingshot to break windows... If the Lady of Night ever found out, her blood pressure would surely spike.
Gao Yang's thoughts began drifting uncontrollably, but Amber had no idea what the old dumpling was pondering. She merely gazed thoughtfully at the pile of knockoff artifacts (miracles) she had summoned, mulled them over for a long while, and then suddenly blurted out: "Say, is this short rod about the same size as the power cudgel I usually carry?"