Chương 189: Chapter 187 [Coding Enchantments]

Marcus followed Ronan through the streets of Monkhaven, trying not to let his mind wander too far ahead of his feet. He took in the new sights with great interest, a genuine appreciation for all these strange marvels he knew these people had made without even the slightest help from enchantments. The buildings, the clothes the people wore, even the roads all looked to be built with a purpose which he could only guess at.

He and his family had split up at the training field not ten minutes ago, Lyra and Lucas peeling off with the rest toward wherever Growlie had made himself at home, and Marcus had caught the look on his son's face the moment Luka mentioned the dragon by name. He'd wanted to go with them. Every instinct in him had wanted to go with them, to watch Lucas's face when he finally got to see the thing properly, gold and small and apparently prone to nudging its way into whoever's lap happened to be nearest.

But there'd be time for that. Once this was in hand.

"Just through here," Ronan said, already reaching for the door. Marcus caught himself doing the thing he always did before walking into unfamiliar work, making note of what he already knew and bracing for how much of it was about to turn out to be wrong. He didn't know what to expect from a human scientist working with magic she barely understood, using knowledge from a world that had never had it at all. He knew what he expected from himself, though. Curiosity, mostly.

The kind he hadn't felt properly in longer than he wanted to admit, not since he'd worked out most of what his own book had to teach him and started running out of new things to be stumped by. He was aware, in a distant sort of way, that whatever came out of this room over the next few weeks might end up mattering to more than just the town or even the northern border as a whole. Ronan had said as much on the walk over, half joking, half not. Marcus hadn't laughed as much as he probably should have.

Ronan pushed the door open.

"Hey Di. Got Marcus here for you." Diane looked up from the far desk, and it took her a second to place who'd just walked in before her expression cleared properly. Carl, at the bench beside her, set down whatever he'd been holding and turned to look as well.

"That was fast," Diane said.

"Portal makes everything fast now," Ronan said.

"I'll leave you to it." He gave a short wave and ducked back out. Marcus stepped further into the room, taking it in properly now that he'd actually arrived. Shelves of sorted crystals lined the back wall, one much larger than the rest sitting apart from the others in the corner of the room. The desks were cluttered with papers, strange instruments and what looked to be metal drink containers.

Apparently work taking so much focus, keeping everything organised at all times fell to the wayside was a trait that spanned worlds.

"Diane," he said, offering his hand.

"It's nice to finally meet you. Sam and the others filled me in on the way over. Sounds like you've got quite the project on your hands."

"That's one way of putting it." She shook his hand, then gestured at the shelves.

"I've got the raw materials. What I don't have is any idea how to actually get them working the way I want." Marcus crossed to the shelf and studied the crystals without touching, turning his head slightly as he moved along the row.

"Show me what you're hoping for," he said.

"Broad strokes. I'll tell you what's realistic and what isn't."

"Lighting, to start. Something that doesn't need oil or a flame." Diane crossed to the whiteboard still propped against the wall, tapping the corner where her old notes sat, dated weeks back now.

"But it's not really the endpoint. We worked out a while ago that anything trying to force a large release of energy doesn't work here anymore. Combustion, mostly. Car engines, generators, anything that burns something to get power out fast. It just doesn't fire." Marcus frowned slightly.

"Doesn't fire?"

"Nothing happens. We tested it properly, more than once. But passive systems, things that just sit there and receive energy rather than forcing it, those work fine. Better than fine, actually. Solar panels have been outperforming what they should be capable of since we arrived." She tapped the board again.

"Which told us the environment isn't hostile to energy. It's hostile to a specific kind of energy. The forced kind."

"And the crystals use the mana they draw from the surroundings to work," Marcus said slowly, working it through.

"So it should fit what you're looking for." He nodded once, something settling into place behind his eyes.

"Clever."

"That's what I'm hoping. If enchanting is a passive process the same way the panels are, then a crystal built to hold and release mana properly might do everything an engine used to do, without ever needing to burn a single thing to get there." She looked at him properly now.

"So, power sources, mostly, to start. Lighting first. But eventually, further down the line, I want to know if a crystal can hold enough charge to run something bigger. Something that needs a steady pull of energy for hours at a time, not just a quick burst like light." She paused.

"Back home we'd call that a battery. Or, if it's meant to actually move something, an engine." Marcus turned both words over.

"I don't know either of those. But I understand what you mean. I think."

"That's fine," Diane said.

"I don't need you to already know how to build me an engine. I need to understand how the enchanting itself actually works, at the fundamental level, and I'll take it from there."

"Fair enough." Marcus pulled a stool over and sat, gesturing for her to do the same. Carl drifted closer from his own bench, not quite sitting, hovering near enough to listen properly.

"Let's start simple, then. A light source. I do these constantly, so I can walk you through exactly what's happening as I go." He took one of the smaller crystals from the shelf, and from an inner pocket of his coat produced a slim tool, something between a stylus and a fine chisel, the tip catching the light in a way that suggested it wasn't ordinary metal.

"Every enchantment needs three things," he said, turning the crystal slowly in his other hand.

"A source, which is the crystal itself, or whatever's holding the mana. A trigger, which is what activates it. And an effect, which is what actually happens once it's triggered." He set the tip of the tool against the crystal's surface and began carving, careful, precise strokes building up into a single compact symbol, dense with small internal marks that all belonged to the one shape. A steady hand mattered, he explained without looking up, more than most people realised.

Rush it, or let your hand shake even slightly on one of the smaller strokes, and the whole rune came out wrong, meaning something else entirely or nothing at all. If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement. The symbol held gold for a moment where his tool had passed, then settled, small and dense on the crystal's surface.

"This here is the source rune. On its own it does nothing. It just tells the crystal it's meant to be holding mana, rather than just sitting there being a rock." Carl leaned in properly now, arms folded.

"So that's like declaring a variable. Telling the program this thing exists and what kind of thing it is, before you've told it to actually do anything with it." Marcus glanced up.

"I don't know that word. But if it means what I think it means, then yes." He tapped the rune lightly with the flat of the tool.

"Each one of these is its own language, in a sense. A single character can carry what would otherwise take a full sentence to write out properly. That's rather the point of them. A lot of meaning, compressed down small enough to fit somewhere like this." Diane didn't say anything, just watched the crystal, tracking the rune with her eyes, quiet in a way that meant she was working something out.

"I don't know every rune," Marcus went on, starting on the second, another small dense character forming stroke by stroke beside the first.

"Nobody does, as far as I'm aware, not out here. When I don't know one, I can write the meaning out in full instead, but it's harder to get right. Has to be exact, every time, and it takes up a great deal more room on something this small." He finished the second character.

"The ones I do know all came from the one book I own. Someone put a great deal of work into it, whoever they were, a long time before I ever got hold of it. I'd wager the core has books with a fair few more than mine does."

"This one's the trigger," he said, tapping it.

"Responds to touch. Someone picks it up, presses their palm against it, and that's what tells the source rune to actually do something." A third character followed, more intricate than the other two combined, layered with smaller marks packed in close together.

"And this is the effect. Light, in this case. Everything the trigger releases gets funnelled through here, and this is what shapes what actually comes out the other end." He held the crystal up. The three characters sat close together, small enough that Carl leaned in further to make them all out properly.

"That's it?" Diane asked.

"Three marks and it works?"

"That's the basic version, yes. More complex enchantments stack more of these together, layer them, have them reference each other. Your stone, the portal one, from what little I could follow, has dozens layered on top of each other, maybe more, all feeding into one another. I couldn't find where it started because there wasn't a single starting point. It was built to loop." He set the light crystal down between them.

"Go on. Try it." Diane picked it up and pressed her palm flat against it the way he'd described. A soft light bloomed from somewhere inside the crystal, steady and warm, nothing like a flame, more like the light had simply always been there waiting to be asked for. She turned it slowly in her hand, watching the glow shift as she moved it, quiet long enough that Carl eventually said her name.

"Diane?"

"Give me a second." She set the crystal down, still lit, and looked at Marcus properly.

"That rune you started with, the source one. It's not just marking the crystal as something that holds mana, is it? It's giving the crystal an instruction. A very short one, but an instruction all the same. And the trigger rune is a condition, if this happens then that happens, and the effect rune is the actual outcome once the condition's met." She leaned in close again, studying the three characters properly now.

"They look sort of like kanji, but not quite. And there's something almost Norse rune about them too. Strange, having something in between."

"It's less like keywords, then," Carl said, working it through.

"More like... a compression syntax. Same idea as using a symbol instead of writing the whole function out longhand, except here the shorthand's optional. You can still write the long version if you know what it needs to say. It just costs you more space to do it." Diane nodded slowly, still looking at the crystal. Then she straightened, eyes fixed on Marcus now instead of the runes.

"Marcus. Do you have a spare stylus, or whatever you'd call that tool? Something I could use myself." She glanced between him and the crystal.

"I want to try copying what you just did. Slowly, if you don't mind doing it again for me to follow along with. I've got a hunch, and the only way I know to test it is to actually attempt it myself."

"What sort of hunch?" Marcus asked.

"Every new bit of magic anyone's picked up here seems to come with its own tab eventually. Sam got one the first time he had two working portals. Jenny got one the moment her first seed actually started incubating properly." She shrugged slightly.

"The system seems to notice when something's genuinely new, not just theory. I want to know if enchanting works the same way. Whether actually doing it myself, even badly, is enough to trigger something." Marcus took a fresh crystal for himself, and Diane took one of her own, spare stylus in hand.

"Right," he said.

"Slowly, then. Watch mine, then do yours after." He set the tip of his tool against the crystal and began the first stroke of the source rune, pausing halfway through to let her catch up before continuing. Diane copied each movement as best she could on her own crystal, her version rougher, a little uneven at the edges, but holding together by the time he'd finished his.

"Good," Marcus said, checking hers over.

"Trigger next." He worked through the second character the same way, one stroke at a time, waiting after each before moving on. Diane's hand hesitated more than once, but she followed it through, the second rune settling in beside the first. The third was the hardest, more strokes than the other two combined, and Marcus talked her through each one properly this time, explaining what it needed to reference back to the first two runes to actually connect.

Carl had gone quiet at some point during it, watching closely, eyes moving between her hands and the crystal like he was checking for a mistake before it happened rather than after. When it was done, Diane sat back and looked at the crystal in her palm, three uneven little characters catching the light.

"Go on, then," Marcus said. She pressed her palm against it. The light bloomed, softer than his had been, flickering slightly before settling into a steady glow, but it was there. It worked. A chime sounded somewhere at the back of her mind.

"Diane?" Carl said.

"Thought so," she murmured, distant for a moment, then refocused and looked round at the rest of them properly.

"New tab. It's not labelled the same as anything you've all described to me before. Calls itself Enchant Interface." She turned to Marcus.

"It's laid out like an actual programming environment. Fields for source, trigger, effect, all editable directly through the UI, rather than having to hand-carve every rune myself."

"That's remarkable," Marcus said.

"It's not going to make this instant, though," Diane went on.

"I still need to learn the language properly. Whatever the actual syntax is, the rules for how these things reference each other, what's possible and what isn't. I can see the fields. I don't know yet what I'm allowed to put in them."

"That I can help with," Marcus said.

"What I know, at least. It's not everything. There's a limit to what I've been taught, and a fair bit of what I do is closer to memorised patterns than genuine understanding of the underlying language, if I'm honest about it."

"Understood patterns are still useful," Diane said.

"Better than starting from nothing."

"There is something else, if you're serious about pushing this further than lighting and small conveniences." Marcus paused, choosing his next words carefully.

"The academies in the core use proper manuals to teach enchanting students, more advanced than anything I've got. I know that much for certain. Beyond that, I'd wager the noble families keep their own, better again, kept close the way they keep most things close. That part I can't promise you, only guess at." He shrugged.

"But if we could get hold of even one of the academy manuals, that alone would take us a long way further than I can manage on my own."

"But it exists," Diane said.

"It exists. That much I know." Marcus considered it.

"Whether we ever manage to get our hands on one is another matter entirely." Diane looked back down at the small glowing crystal in her palm, turning it once between her fingers.

"One thing at a time," she said.

"Let's start with what we've actually got."