Chapter 79 - Rebecca’s Success and Doubts About Magical Power (2/2)
Hire them from Tanzan Town? There weren’t many who were literate in Tanzan Town either! People who could read and write were either merchants or had already joined aristocrat residences to take on ‘respectable roles’ like butlers and clerks. How could those people be willing to come to the middle of nowhere and join them in developing the wilderness? They weren’t impoverished serfs or peasants…
Gawain touched his head again. Each time a new problem emerged, he would subconsciously do this action, as if he was checking on his own hairline…
“Lord Ancestor?” Rebecca spoke up cautiously.
“No, its fine, all these are issues that need to be settled in the long term.” Gawain waved his hand. “Continue with production according to this ‘optimal case’ for now. Then try to come up with even better ratios of materials when you have the time. In short, the more crystal bits there are, the better. It’s even as important as the output of steel. Oh yes, we also need to come up with a way to extract these crystals mixed in them. This black waste residue is quite useless. You can try crushing them and then use water to sift through it. Crystals are much harder than the waste residue and also heavier. It should be easy to separate them after crushing and rinsing with water.”
Rebecca nodded as she listened. When Gawain finished, she then leaned over with a gleeful smile and asked like a cat that ate the canary, “Um… Lord Ancestor, I heard from Aunt Heidi, you’re planning to make such crystals into magic articles that can explode?”
“Something like that.” Gawain looked at this girl who always had funny ideas. “What opinions do you have?”
“You’re planning to use the explosive magic circles in the Gondor manufactured crystals on these crystals, aren’t you?” Rebecca’s eyes were bright. “But have you thought of how to do the detonation?”
Gawain frowned; this was precisely the question he was deliberating over.
The explosive magic circles in those ancient Gondor crystals were the same as commonly seen small-scale arrays; they belonged under ‘magic circles that could not recharge themselves’. In other words, they need an external magical power source to be the ‘starting source of energy’ to continue proceeding with the subsequent detonation. In those Gondor crystals, this portion of energy was provided by the crystal itself; in the ‘Art 1’ that he conceptualized, there did not exist this portion of energy.
Other than being an explosive substance and being directly blown up, the magical power stored in Rebecca Crystals could not be extracted to be used in other magical reactions at all. As such, the explosive magical circles attached to the Rebecca Crystals would require another magical power to be the ‘starting catalyst power’, then where would this portion of magical power come from?
Use another piece of storage crystal to be the ‘explosive battery’? Then it would have lost the significance of being ‘inexpensive’.
Use mages’ magical power to stimulate the magic circles? Then it would lose the design objective of ‘having the average person be able to use it’.
“Speak your mind. Just looking at that gaze of yours, I know you have an idea.” Gawain scanned Rebecca. This young lady before him really wasn’t someone who could hide things; even if he didn’t ask, she would probably still spill her thoughts.
“It’s like this…” Rebecca, as expected, didn’t keep him guessing. “I studied that explosive magic circle for a bit and found that the magical power required to activate it… is actually pretty little.”
Gawain nodded. “That’s of course. It’s a magic circle used for spontaneous explosion when the crystal ceases to be effective, after all. Its activation-energy demand would definitely have been optimized countless times.”
“Then I realized one thing,” Rebecca went on. “The ‘rune trigger’ that I invented, it produces an extra ‘spark’ of magical power. Very weak, but it really exists…”
“Wait a minute!” Gawain interrupted Rebecca instantly. He realized that he had caught a key problem which had been neglected for a long time. “You said that the rune-trigger construct produces magical power at the moment it closes? Are you sure that it isn’t magical power dissipated from the magic web buried underground?”
“I checked several times because I’ve been able to sense magical power very well from a young age. I can see it very clearly.” Rebecca nodded hard in emphasis. “There is an extra portion of magical power when the rune trigger shuts, and I even found that it’s not restricted to the rune trigger. As long as a pair of originally intact runes is taken apart and put back together, an ‘instantaneous spark of magical power’ would be produced. This bit of magical power comes and goes in a flash, just in the blink of an eye. But if one wants to ignite something, just this blink of an eye would be enough.”
Gawain immediately sank into deep thought, only coming back to his senses when he saw he’d left Rebecca utterly nervous. “Ah… Very good, very good. Then, you can test out your rune trigger together with the explosive magic circle according to your ideas. You can get Heidi to help. Just tell her the order comes from me.”
Rebecca presently beamed with a smile. However, before she left, she suddenly remembered something. “Ah yes, Lord Ancestor, have you thought of what to name such explosive articles in the future?”
Gawain thought for a moment and replied solemnly, “Art.”
“Eh? Does this have any relation to art?”
Gawain’s expression was serious. “We’re naming it Art!”
Rebecca’s eyes rolled up as she gave it some thought, thinking that Ancestor might have some significance in that, so she nodded along happily. “Mm! Art!”
Rebecca left joyfully, but Gawain couldn’t find peace for a long time as he sat in his tent.
He fiddled with a pen, spinning it around subconsciously. When he recovered from his daze, he realized he had scribbled a line of words on the rough paper: “Magical power. What exactly is magical power?”