Chương 263

The connection was gone. Orion reached for the Field, expecting to have to fight the Silence for mana, and for it to eventually answer his call, waiting to be shaped and commanded. Instead, he found nothing. It wasn't that the mana had been drained or that a Silence fog was scrambling his senses. The Field was still there, but it no longer recognized him. It was as if Uther had stripped him of his ability to draw on it. And it had to be him.

He hadn't done anything overt, not even a gesture, but he was looking straight at Orion with an amused grin, as if he'd played a prank. That someone, anyone, could wield that kind of power… It disturbed him. Orion had fought monsters far crueler and people far more callous, yet the fact that the Alchemist regarded them only as an entertaining aside to whatever he was doing left him feeling helpless. Archmage Valentia clearly did not share that sentiment, for mana gathered around his form.

He was among the Arcane Collegium's best battle mages, a man who had commanded the elements for a century. To be dismissed, to have his authority so casually overlooked by Uther, was an insult his pride could not stomach. For some reason, the Alchemist did nothing to sever his connection. Orion knew he could, given the absurd ease he'd had in stopping his own. Valentia was a tier-four mage, and with that came a significant Attunement stat.

Even if his connection to the Field was too deep to get rid of it, surely Uther could have impeded him if he wanted to. Yet he did nothing, not even looking at the man.

"Wait!" Asteria snapped, seemingly recognizing the futility of the action. It was too late. A beam of crackling blue lightning erupted from the crystal, tearing across the subterranean grove toward Uther's chest. It was a spell capable of punching through the hull of a Dreadnought. It had done so, in fact, during the battle for the mana pool. Uther sighed, as if in profound disappointment. He did not even bother conjuring a shield, simply turning his mechanical eye toward the incoming destruction.

The lightning struck the air three feet in front of the Alchemist and abruptly changed state. Plasma that had made the battlefield tremble instantly cooled, transforming into a gentle shower of inert, glowing neon gas that drifted harmlessly to the floor. Before Valentia could even process his spell's failure, the backlash hit him.

The man himself was merely thrown back, skidding roughly across the floor, while the staff—an artifact of significant power, which Orion knew was enchanted to the gills and thus technically impossible to transmute—shifted in color. The brown bark gleamed as its weight increased exponentially, groaning and shrinking. It hit the floor with a dull thud. By then, the staff had been completely transmuted into solid, if mundane, gold. Its enchantments were dead, and its internal matrix was permanently unraveled.

The matte-black guards surrounding Uther immediately raised their sleek rifles, locking their sights on the defenseless Archmage. Everyone tensed, knowing that if one of their powerhouses could be batted aside so easily, their chances of making it out were slim, yet unable to see another way out.

"You forced a proton-capture sequence without thermal emission," Orion spoke up quickly, his voice ringing out across the quiet grove. He stepped in front of Valentia, placing himself between the rifles and the Archmage.

"How did you handle the binding-energy deficit? Transmuting carbon and trace elements into gold requires an energy input that should have incinerated everyone in this room." Given his troubles merely compressing iron, he'd know. He was also not surprised that a man of that power could transmute elements, since it had been possible on Earth even without magic, using Large Colliders, but he needed to keep him talking.

The question was meant more as a distraction than a genuine request for information, a last-ditch effort, because he'd seen something of a scientist in Uther, and he could only hope he was not mistaken. The Alchemist raised a hand, signaling his guards to hold their fire. He looked at Orion as his amber eye whirred softly, locking onto him, while a genuine smile touched his lips.

"A keen observation, young man," Uther praised, seemingly back to his previous mood.

"You are correct. The deficit was immense. I simply shunted the thermal byproduct into the Field's latent background radiation. A trivial exchange of entropy, provided you understand the substrates of reality." The guards kept their weapons raised, but the immediate threat of execution was suspended. Orion felt cold sweat trickle down his spine. He had the man's attention. He just had to keep it.

"I have yet to succeed in treating the Field as a thermodynamic system," Orion noted, pushing his glasses up his nose.

"And any reading I've done goes nowhere because most casters treat it as part of the divine." Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Uther chortled.

"Faith. A beautiful, tragic crutch for those who cannot see beyond their noses. I hoped coming to Cyril would show me something new, but, as back home, your factions are content to linger in the dark. The Sanctum prays to the moon. The Collegium memorizes incantations like parrots mimicking human speech. They achieve results, certainly, but only by accident. Knowledge is the only true currency. Once you grasp it, magic ceases to be a miracle." For a moment, Orion hesitated.

He could pursue this line of discussion, but Uther's expression told him the man would likely grow bored. So, once again, he took a gamble, ignoring his mother's stare burning into his back.

"Which brings us to your current experiment," Orion prompted, gesturing toward the glowing root Uther had been treating.

"You can't be trying to destroy the Heartwood. If you wanted it dead, you would have disintegrated it as easily as you did your man. So, what are you doing?" Uther's smile thinned, turning guarded yet amused.

"Let us just say I am following a hunch. The ecosystem here is prone to... noisy frequencies. I am merely introducing a stabilizing agent. A minor correction should ensure a quieter future if we are to stay here long-term." He was altering the root to make it naturally produce Silence. Orion realized it with a jolt of horror. If the Heartwood served as the forest's mana engine, essentially a massive mana pool, Uther poisoning it would turn the region into a permanently magic-less zone.

It would make the Iron State effectively invincible within it. I already knew this was their plan. Why else would they seek out the mana pools? But whereas that had been more haphazard, without any understanding of what they were dealing with, he can do it.

"You mentioned my thermodynamic compression," Orion said quickly, pivoting away from the dangerous topic to keep the conversation flowing.

"Called it messy, even. What did you mean?"

"Because it was," Uther replied, his eyes lighting with a strange fervor. Orion would have thought such a poor attempt at manipulation would have been laughed off, but he wouldn't look a gifted horse in the mouth.

"Your equations seem to rely on rigid manifolds, meaning you forced the pressure inward using a crude gravitational singularity. It worked, but your energy waste was staggering. Tell me, how do you calculate the breaking point of your containment fields?" Asteria rested a hand on Orion's shoulder. For a moment, he feared she would pull him away, but a quick glance showed she knew exactly what he was doing and was willing to play along if it bought them seconds.

"Show him," she ordered softly. Uther looked pleased. He snapped his fingers, and Orion suddenly felt a tiny, confined bubble of the Field return to him. It was barely enough to cast a cantrip, but it was enough for a demonstration. With so little mana, he couldn't even think of his more active gravity spells, so he opted for [Event Horizon], which would cost much less. Soon, an invisible plane of spatial distortion hovered above his palm, barely as wide as his head.

He'd been aiming to make it at least twice as large, but the full might of the Field remained out of his reach.

"I calculate the limit using the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy formula," Orion explained, projecting the math into the CC to visualize it.

"S = (k A c^3)/(4Gh) is the formula. I treat the boundary of the spell as the event horizon, directly correlating the surface area with the maximum allowable kinetic entropy before containment fails." Uther stepped closer, peering at the hovering plane with unabashed fascination.

"Brilliant, if basic in application," he mused, tapping his chin.

"But fundamentally flawed because you assume a smooth spacetime topology for the Field. You are treating mana as a classical vacuum."

"It behaves like a vacuum when structured," Orion countered, feeling stirrings of his own academic pride despite the circumstances.

"Only in three dimensions," Uther corrected gently.

"Have you considered the Holographic Principle? If you map the Field as a lower-dimensional boundary that encodes higher-dimensional arcane phenomena, your spell's stability might increase, giving you more space to maneuver. Pun intended." He raised a finger, tracing glowing lines of amber light in the air between them.

"If you model the boundary conditions using the AdS/CFT correspondence—specifically by mapping a supersymmetric gauge theory to string theory in AdS_5 \ S^5—you would find that the cosmological constant of the Field is negative in this region." Orion stared at the glowing equations floating in the air. His mind raced as he integrated Uther's variables into his CC. The math was staggeringly close to what he'd once studied on Earth, and although some terminology differed, it was close enough for him to follow.

It would also grant his spells unprecedented stability. If he treated the surface of his shields as a conformal field theory, the energy required to maintain the boundary would drop by at least forty percent.

"The mass gap," Orion whispered, his eyes wide behind his lenses.

"By redefining the topological vacuum, the field excitations stop leaking. [Event Horizon] would then perfectly reflect the entropy back into the singularity, not merely diverting it but fundamentally changing anything passing through." This was… Ever since he'd dipped his toes into the higher magics with [Gamma Ray], he'd known he was missing something to truly harness the power of the concepts he was using as the basis for his spells, and it wasn't just raw mana.

His Attunement was a limiter, yes, but he'd clearly been able to wield at least a fraction of the cosmic powers. There was little reason he shouldn't be able to do more as he grew, yet that hadn't happened as much as he would have liked. But this new perspective shook his prior understanding, and he knew that with some effort and a lot of time to test things out, he'd finally be able to step beyond his previous limits.

"Exactly," Uther said, beaming with genuine delight. He clapped his hands together, the sound echoing sharply through the crystalline grove.

"I knew you'd see it!" The Alchemist looked at Orion, his amber eye whirring as it dilated. The condescending amusement was gone, replaced by an almost desperate hunger.

"You are wasting your life with them, Orion Voidwalker," Uther said, his voice dropping low. He gestured dismissively toward Asteria and the still-recovering Archmage.

"They are playing in the mud, calling themselves sculptors. They will never understand the search for the Truth. In fact, the further you tread the path, the more they will fear you, or they will use you as a weapon, but they will never be your peers." Orion stood perfectly still, even as his spell faded from his palm.

"Come with me," Uther offered, extending a hand.

"Leave them. Leave this primitive, dying shithole. The Iron State does not care for titles or gods, only for results. You will be able to research to your heart's content. I will give you a laboratory that far exceeds anything anyone here can imagine. I will give you the resources of an entire nation. Together, we can decode the Truth of the System. We can rewrite the source code of reality itself." It hurt to admit, but this was genuinely tempting. Orion's class, [Causal Epistemologist], hungered for the Truth.

Every instinct in his rational mind screamed that Uther was right. The Sanctum and the Collegium were bound by tradition and dogma. Uther offered him the keys to the universe, the unrestrained pursuit of Knowledge without boundaries. He could spend centuries at the Alchemist's side, unraveling the deepest mysteries of reality. Orion looked at the outstretched hand. Then he looked at his mother, who stood rigid, her silver eyes fixed on him, silent. He looked at Pauline, ready to die for him.

Finally, he looked at the glowing white root and remembered the sickly yellow acid that had mutated the forest above and the gray goo that had been a human soldier just minutes earlier.

"The offer is a good one," Orion said quietly. He looked back into Uther's amber eye.

"But your methods leave much to the imagination, given your intent to turn the entire region into a graveyard." Uther's hand slowly fell, and his eyes hardened.