Chapter 632: Opening the Magic Box
“This is an epoch-making achievement. From now on, our energy supply has entered a new paradigm, no less significant than moving from burning charcoal to coal power generation.”
“Perhaps even that is an understatement. Although systematically it is similar to humanity beginning to use animal labor, the room for imagination is nearly limitless!”
“Maybe from now on, super-dimensional mana will gradually become universal.”
Legendary Immortal and Mythical Wizards discussed the development fervently. They saw further ahead; this was indeed unfair to the Level 5 existences of other worlds, but wasn’t this exactly how ordinary human civilization developed? Humans utilized animal labor and even enslaved their own kind—in some ways, their actions were worse than what the wizards were doing now.
The Lich Witte’s eyes flickered with a luster of deep-seated hatred.
“The Kaya World, the Wall of Sighs, the Gods of the Underworld.” He slowly touched the conch shell on his chest, seemingly able to hear Misha’s gentle and sorrowful murmur: “Witte, Witte, survive…” The pale female head floating beside him leaned in, rubbing against him affectionately.
“Misha, Mr. Turtledove, I will return. I will definitely return to the Kaya World and rescue you from the Wall of Sighs! One day, I will destroy the Wall of Sighs, can all the Underworld gods, turn them into eternal generators, split their souls into a million pieces to make Spirit Computers, and make them endure torment for all eternity.”
His expression was gentle yet firm, the flames of vengeance in his eyes never extinguishing.
Meanwhile, Warren, who was in charge of the Spirit Computers, also achieved phased results. Warren’s old friend, the Mythical Wizard Sulu, had participated in this massive project. Sulu wasn’t a proper academic wizard; at the step of advancing to Legend and stepping into the true immortal domain, he had hit a bottleneck.
His understanding of relativity was insufficient. This lack of theoretical foundation prevented Sulu from achieving true immortality. Participating in this project was a way to earn a recommendation. Warren wanted to secure a “Super-dimensional Guidance” for Suru.
Super-dimensional Guidance meant that Ace, the sole Tenth Ring Wizard, would personally lead a Mythical Wizard into four-dimensional space-time to help them condense their Fruit of Immortality, boasting a safety and reliability rate of nearly 100%.
“Success! The divine soul memories are completely formatted. The divine soul has been split into three million equivalent soul particles, enough to manufacture true Spirit Computers.”
“Every soul particle is a central processing unit. In other words, we can create three million micro immortal Spirit Computers from one soul.”
“Each of these micro-computers is powerful and possesses an incredibly high essence. The combined efficacy of three million micro immortal Spirit Computers is a hundred times the computing power of a whole divine soul. I believe our next step is to transplant this concept and attempt to split the physical body.”
Soon, both sides reported their progress to Ace. The Lich Witte received a new task: physical body splitting.
“Your Excellency Warren, your concept of physical splitting is simply perfect. An immortal body possesses extreme resilience; even a single cell contains a complete circulatory system. We can indeed reduce the body to primordial cells. You’ve given me great inspiration,” said Witte in his skeletal form, his voice hollow.
Warren bowed slightly in return and smiled, “It was just a humble opinion. If it helps our project, that would be for the best.”
Sulu also got his wish, gaining the qualification for Super-dimensional Guidance along with eight other Mythical Wizards.
The nine were kept behind by Ace. Sulu’s face was flushed with excitement. The greatest investment and fortune of his life was befriending the highly reliable and considerate Warren. Without Warren’s strong recommendation, he would never have obtained this qualification. Although Ace didn’t particularly favor Sulu, since Sulu had naturally advanced to this point according to the rules, Ace would abide by them.
“You have made tremendous contributions to the computing power and informational leap of the wizards. Please follow me; let us enter the Subconscious Sea together.”
Mana particles formed a multicolored, dream-like vortex. Ace walked in slowly, and the Mythical Wizards followed.
The Subconscious Sea was shrouded in mist, its waters sparkling. Ace walked on the water as if on solid ground, ripples spreading from his feet. The nine Mythical Wizards, however, only had half their heads above water; their strength wasn’t enough to walk on the surface of the Subconscious Sea, so they could only swim.
A halo suddenly radiated from Ace’s back. With a flicker, it transformed into nine bubbles, encasing the nine wizards.
“This is protection, pay it no mind. You are not strong enough yet and might be affected by the wandering souls in the mist. With these bubbles protecting you, there’s no need to worry.”
Sulu nodded subconsciously and swam slowly. The crystal-clear bubbles easily pushed aside the hidden reefs and algae of the Subconscious Sea, shielding them from the mist, and smoothly reached the Gate of Dimensional Ascension.
Passing through the high-dimensional gate, light flashed, and dream-like ripples undulated. The party of ten wizards vanished from the Subconscious Sea, leaping out of the water like fish and entering four-dimensional space-time.
Sulu found himself bound by a chain, maintaining a connection with the four-dimensional state of the great Firelinker, Lord Ace.
“The key to immortality lies in folding your three-dimensional history into a four-dimensional fruit, thereby achieving the permanence of history and three-dimensional immortality,” Ace’s information stream transmitted.
Countless images began to rise in Sulu’s mind. In an indescribable manner, he began to understand how to roll his past three-dimensional history into an infinite four-dimensional loop.
From the moment he cried as a baby, growing up in the slums of the North, hunting monsters with companions, striving to become a citizen, the ecstasy of obtaining a grimore, the unease after betraying his teammates, the thrilling escape from the demon-converted Northern Fortress…
Scene after scene connected like old photographs. He began to link the crucial nodes of his past, like stringing together crystal-clear pearls. But at this moment, Sulu encountered a difficulty again. He didn’t know how to “roll” the history up to turn the past into a four-dimensional Fruit of Immortality.
Suddenly, a massive force struck his back. The world spun, and his past history was forcefully rolled up by that immense power, instantly transforming into a Fruit of Immortality.
“External help does not benefit your further understanding of four-dimensional space-time,” Ace said very bluntly, almost unceremoniously, once they returned to the three-dimensional level and stood in the mirror-smooth hall of the Magic Sanctuary. “But with your current understanding of the fourth dimension, it was difficult to truly construct an infinitely looping three-dimensional history, so I gave you a push. You need to invest more energy into understanding the four-dimensional state, otherwise, a Ninth Ring Legendary Immortal Wizard will be the bottleneck of your entire life.”
But Sulu was not discouraged. Becoming a Level 5 Immortal meant he already stood at the absolute apex of the world. To use an inappropriate evolutionary analogy, it was like finally evolving into a human, possessing unique aspects that other creatures lacked.
Witte’s experiments continued. Three years later, they successfully split the physical body of the Angel of Holy Light into 130 parts, canning them in 130 Super-dimensional Mana Generators. Each part could open a high-dimensional rift.
The absolute total of high-dimensional rifts opened increased rapidly, declaring the success of this research. Ace made a prompt decision, canning the physical bodies of all captured Named Ones and turning their souls into Spirit Computers to provide massive amounts of super-dimensional mana and computing power for the great Wizard Civilization.
In the Prime Material Plane of the Wizard Multiverse, a megastructure appeared in the brilliant galactic center. Four rings overlapped to form a sphere containing 101,000 Super-dimensional Mana Generators. They opened an equal number of high-dimensional rifts, providing unimaginable super-dimensional mana for the Wizard World every second.
Even Ace himself could only open roughly this many rifts, and all other Legendary Immortal Wizards combined could open fewer than ten thousand. The efficacy of the Deity Slavery Act was beginning to show.
A total of 20 billion Immortal Spirit Computers were created. Ten billion were located at the galactic center, above the misty Fantasia, forming a megastructure that looked from afar like a crystal-clear cube with six transparent faces.
The remaining 10 billion computers were distributed across various star fields, uniformly allocated by the Galactic Alliance government, or sold to private individuals.
However, this was just the beginning. Ace’s utilization of the gods went far beyond this.
The gods captured from the Realm of True Names this time—except for a few Named Ones belonging to the Gem Order—were all treated as tools. And the members of the Gem Order, like John and Matilda, could only unconditionally accept the terms Ace offered.
They could either reincarnate as wizards or become Dream Gods. Ultimately, John chose to continue serving the Lord and became one of the 3,000 True Gods of the Dream Realm, while the rest accepted reincarnation, washing away everything to become wizards.
Ace erected two Steles of Fate deep within the Great Source. One was the Stele of Fate for the Dream Gods, which Ace would move to his own sub-plane. The 3,000 True Gods of the Dream Realm would be supplemented through natural evolution, voluntary selection by believers and Mages, and the naturalization of alien gods.
Becoming a Dream God meant being bound by Ace and relying on him for divine authority, but it also meant possessing divine power in the Wizard World and avoiding being canned. This choice was something many gods desired but could not obtain.
As for the other Stele of Fate, it was called the Stele of Slavery. This was a stele of blood and tears, the brand of all enslaved gods.
The enslaved gods had another crucial thing to be exploited: their sub-planes, which were independent four-dimensional particles.
The 3,000+ enslaved gods harvested from the Realm of True Names brought with them over 3,000 four-dimensional particles. Ace filled all these particles into the Prime Material Plane of the Wizard World, vastly enhancing the world’s foundation.
Unlike ordinary Legendary Immortal Wizards and Dream Gods, the enslaved gods were completely exploited, with no independence or potential for development. Aside from the all-important Fruit of Immortality, the source of a Level 5 existence’s power lies in their sub-plane. Ace turned their sub-planes into nourishment for the Great Source, multiplying its foundation several times over in one fell swoop.
In other words, the Great Source’s original maximum three-dimensional capacity was about 150 million stars, and now it had become over 600 million stars. This was massive progress.
Only a world with a powerful foundation could birth more Tenth Ring Wizards. Even the Realm of True Names could birth over 20 Lords of Time, let alone the Wizard World, whose three-dimensional foundation far surpassed it.
Ace had a premonition that in another 50 years, the Wizard World would see an explosion of Tenth Ring Wizards.
“After all, there are already nearly 1,300 Legendary Immortal Wizards and 30,000 Mythical Wizards. In the next 50 years, there might be 3,000 to 5,000 Legendary Immortal Wizards. It would be unreasonable if a batch of Tenth Ring Wizards wasn’t born. The threshold for the Supreme Council might have to be raised again,” Ace murmured, looking at the quartered rings continuously converting super-dimensional mana.
Three years later, back near the galactic center. Goldolo had arrived.
As an Legendary Wizard and one of the Top Ten Outstanding Young Wizards honored by the Galactic Alliance Council, the 60-year-old decided to pay respects to the three greatest structures in the current Wizard World.
An elegant witch wearing high heels hovered in mid-air, the hem of her skirt fluttering, her voice melodic as she gave the tour.
“Directly in front of us is the Super-dimensional Computing Cube. It is composed of 10 billion Spirit Computers. It looks like a mirror-smooth cube; in fact, its surface is far smoother than an ordinary mirror.
“The Super-dimensional Computing Cube is directly connected to the misty main body of the Fantasia world, accelerating its time flow ratio to 100:1 and vastly expanding its space-time. Moreover, a Spirit Computer is a true immortal-grade computer. Theoretically, even without Fantasia, one could use Spirit Computers to create an incredibly realistic virtual world.”
Looking at the Super-dimensional Computing Cube, flames flickered in Goldolo’s eyes. He seemed to have found the opportunity for his career to take off again.
Spirit Computers creating a virtual world? Ripples stirred in his heart.
The spaceship gradually approached the Cube. Looking at the incredibly smooth surface reflecting the brilliance of the galactic center and the shape of the spaceship, a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. While the guide introduced the Quartered Super-dimensional Mana Rings and the Magic Sanctuary, Goldolo’s mind had already flown away, drifting back to his business.
Five days later, after two curvature jumps, the spaceship returned to Planet Athena. Goldolo immediately began mobilizing his connections to purchase Spirit Computers. He wanted to use them to attempt building his own private Gensokyo.
The first person he sought for technical support was his good friend and company shareholder, Alexander. Unfortunately, Alexander’s experiments had reached a critical juncture, and he had neither the time nor the energy to help him.
Alexander was only a Gold Wizard, but he was a highly professional one. His dream was to open the atom—not through hearsay, but by using the methods of an ordinary wizard, or even a mortal, to observe the inside of an atom, which the naked eye absolutely could not see.
Fate is often miraculous. Just as Alexander was coming up empty-handed, he saw a very short experimental report in the academic journal Electromagnetism.
A First Ring Wizard named Plücker had pumped the air out of a glass test tube until it was extremely thin, then attached electrodes to both ends. Using magic to apply several thousand Thales of voltage to the electrode plates, he discovered a green glow flashing on the tube wall opposite the cathode.
Strangely, nothing seemed to be emitted from the cathode tube. So what exactly was this green glow?
It was such a brief report; the author didn’t even provide an answer because he didn’t know it himself.
Electromagnetic waves or particles—wave or particle—it had to be one of the two. In the entire Wizard World, wave theory was almost dominant. Light was a wave, electromagnetism was a wave, radiation was a wave, gravity was a wave. Wizards believed that perhaps waves were everything in this world.
The famous founder of electromagnetism, the Legendary Immortal Wizard Thales, attached a short experiment to this report. He placed the cathode ray tube in a magnetic field and found that the green glow deflected. Although he didn’t explicitly state it, the vast majority of wizards believed it was a type of electromagnetic wave.
Thales’s academic standing was unquestionable. Although in recent years he had devoted more energy to the struggle for humanity—opposing the Deity Slavery Act and hoping to promote a gentler Deity Naturalization Act to assimilate gods and build a diverse wizard civilization—his propositions were unpopular. Wizards had no interest in building a diverse civilization of universal love and tolerance. They mostly believed in themselves, believed that “alien races harbor alien hearts,” and their attitude toward aliens was extortion, enslavement, and destruction.
Although his political struggles yielded no results, and even his wife Blania stood in opposition to him, his authority in electromagnetism remained absolute.
This experimental report seemed to end there. Electromagnetic waves—that was that.
But Alexander didn’t think so. He didn’t blindly worship authority; he only believed in himself. He thought this might be a particle!
He ingeniously modified Thales’s experiment, adding an oscillating magnetic field in front of the cathode ray tube and a fluorescent screen in front of the magnetic field. By changing the strength of the magnetic field and measuring the position of the particle on the fluorescent screen, he could calculate the charge-to-mass ratio of this particle.
Alexander had extensively studied mathematics during his university years, and at this moment, it paid off. All his hard work bore fruit. Through incredibly complex calculations, he concluded that this particle was negatively charged, and its mass was far smaller than an atom.
Therefore, this was a brand-new particle. He wrote a paper titled Cathode Rays, concluding with:
“The great Firelinker, Lord Ace, once ‘saw’ the internal structure of an atom—the model of the atomic nucleus and electrons—through the grace of the Great Source. Today, I proved this point using the cathode ray experiment. Inside the pitch-black atom, there truly exists an even smaller particle: the electron!
“Mortals can also explore the microscopic world. Even though I only a Gold Wizard, but merely an ordinary mortal, as long as I have sufficient cultivation in mechanics and mathematics, it is possible to discover the electron.
“We have opened a brand-new door. Even without excellent magical aptitude, or even without any magical aptitude at all—even as a mortal—one can prove the existence of the electron by replicating this experiment.
“Mathematics and fundamental mechanics are our tools and eyes for understanding the world. They grant us the power that Tenth Ring Wizards obtained only through the Great Source. Just as Lord Ace said, a thinking person is the measure of all things. We shall use fundamental mechanics and mathematics to measure all things!”
A faint feedback from the Great Source responded—though not strong, it was enough to elevate Alexander to a Legendary Wizard. Although he wasn’t the first to discover and propose the electron, his research was, in a sense, truly the first time wizards had opened the pitch-black door of the atom themselves.
One stone stirred up a thousand ripples. The moment this paper was published in Magic, the previously unknown wizard Alexander became the hottest topic of discussion.
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