Chapter 1210: A Cube-Powered Vehicle
In the underground laboratory in the Third Border City.
Roland brought Anna immediately. Through the thick protective glass, two activated Magic Ceremony Cubes sat at the laboratory’s center. Lead plates lined the walls. One Cube pulsed as usual; the other emitted red laser beams that were clipped to a fraction of their normal length, as though the range had simply been shorn off.
“Is the one with the shorter beams the new replicate?” Anna asked.
“Yes. It was an accident, actually,” Celine said. She had the brightness of someone who has not yet finished being pleased with herself. “Normally, Slimwrist carves the patterns on the parts. If the material is damaged, the patterns won’t transfer reliably, so we discard those stones. But a week ago, while Slimwrist was working on Part No. 236, the stone cracked. A defective piece.”
Roland said, slowly, “But you didn’t throw it away.”
The tablets came from the Southernmost Region, buried underground for a thousand years. Material damage was ordinary enough.
Celine tapped her main tentacle. “It seemed a waste. I kept it — just in case — then installed it on a previously completed Magic Cube to see whether it would still function.”
Roland stared at her. That was a nuclear torture device she had been casually tinkering with.
“Don’t worry, Your Majesty.” Celine read his expression without difficulty. She raised her blobbed head with serene confidence. “I conducted the test in the Impassable Mountain Range. Even if something had gone catastrophically wrong, Neverwinter would have been unaffected. This is a principle the Quest Society has always held. You need not feel sad for me in the event I am killed. For the sake of truth, I genuinely cannot prioritize my personal safety…”
Roland looked at eloquent Celine and accepted that his concern was beside the point.
“Your finding,” he said.
“Ahem. Right.” She cleared her throat. “As you can see, the Magic Cube activated. The red beam’s range shortened by ninety percent. However, the tri-tank magic power unit continues to transmit energy without interruption. I conducted a heating test to determine whether the shortened beam affected heat transmission — it took two to three days. When I examined the uranium chip afterward, the change was negligible. Apparently, much less magic power is consumed when the beam’s range is reduced.”
Anna was quiet for a moment. “So most of the magic power was being spent to sustain the red beam’s reach?”
Celine turned toward her. “I now understand why you became a Senior Witch faster than Agatha. It took me considerably longer to arrive at the same conclusion. If the beam is composed of numerous tiny particles, directing them all to the same point over distance would require significant effort. The experiment indicated that heat transmission on the front, left, and right sides was unaffected as long as one avoided contact with the beam itself. The reduction in range did translate directly to power savings.”
“Wait,” Roland said.
They both looked at him.
“This means Part No. 236 governs the radiation range specifically?”
The room held still for a moment.
A Magic Ceremony Cube contained more than three hundred parts. No one had understood how magic power moved through those patterned stones — the whole apparatus had functioned as an inscrutable unity, a black box that worked without yielding its logic. Now, for the first time, a single part had been identified with a single function. The structure was not inscrutable. It was decipherable. Possibly.
“Yes,” Celine said, and the word carried a current beneath it. “Perhaps every part’s patterns serve a distinct function. If we could read those patterns — decode them — we might understand how magic power actually flows through the cube.”
“Each part with its own function,” Anna said. “That’s our way of thinking too. We’re lucky.”
“Very lucky,” Roland agreed.
He knew exactly what Anna meant. Civilizations diverged in profound ways — in language, in logic, in how they divided the world into categories. Finding one that shared your assumptions was not guaranteed. The underground civilization, for instance, could only operate its core device after transferring consciousness to a carrier. Celine had spent hundreds of years attempting to understand it from the outside, without shared premise, without common ground. Nothing had come of it.
Every civilization, in a certain way, is alone.
Roland had promised before that humanity could still learn from lost civilizations even without legacy shards, and he believed it — but it was not easy. It required something to hold onto: a point of resemblance, a way of thinking close enough to build a bridge between. The radiation clan appeared to be the first external civilization to offer that. If Celine’s reading was correct, it might be the key that began to open the whole question of magic power.
“By the way,” Anna said. She turned to Roland and smiled — not the professional smile she wore in the laboratory, but the other one. “Since the magic power unit has been finalized, and we’ve solved the sustainability problem, isn’t it time you fulfilled your promise?”
Her blue eyes did not waver.
Roland found there was nothing useful he could say to that expression.
“Yes, Your Highness,” he said, smiling back. “I’ll start working on it as soon as I’m back at the castle.”
The dawn broke with noise.
Soraya sat up from sleep, blinking.
She yawned, fumbled for her clothes. Steam engines — that was what she heard every morning in the industrial zone. The sound marked the start of another day’s work and she had learned to ignore it, the way a sailor stops hearing the sea. She began dressing automatically.
Then she stopped.
This was not the industrial zone.
She cast a glance at Echo, still deep in sleep, and tugged her clothes on quietly. Steam engines had no business running outside the castle on a weekend morning. The witches slept in on weekends. The castle lay empty until lunch. She wasn’t dreaming — was she?
The roar came again, and with it, voices. Bright and awake and pleased with themselves.
“This is so interesting!”
“Your Majesty, let me try it!”
“Me too, me too!”
“What happened?” Echo asked, surfacing blearily.
“No idea. Probably Mystery Moon.” Soraya stretched and pulled the thick curtains aside.
Sunlight flooded the room. Not early at all — she had simply assumed it was. She pressed her face toward the glass and looked down.
A crowd of witches had gathered at the castle gate, ringed in a loose excited cluster around something at the center of the yard. Soraya followed their eyelines and found it.
A four-wheeled carriage. No horses. It moved under its own power, smooth and purposeful, turning a tight circuit across the courtyard stones.
Anna sat in the driver’s seat, and her face held the unguarded delight of someone doing exactly what they wanted to be doing.
Soraya’s eyes fixed on the vehicle and did not move.