Crystals

Camp construction would have to proceed slowly. Although Gawain had written a large number of regulations and plans, and even drafted a plan for the camp's future expansion into a permanent settlement, none of these things could be achieved overnight. Considering the general knowledge level of most people in this era, the literacy rate among commoners and serfs was zero. Knights could only manage basic reading and writing, and warriors trained by families (excluding serf soldiers) could at best write their own names and count numbers up to one hundred. Therefore, many things had to be advanced slowly.

Moreover, there weren't enough people here yet, and the current Cecil Territory couldn't support many.

Deeply realizing this fact, Gawain returned to his tent and sat down at his desk.

This desk was one of the few finished pieces of furniture the party had brought from Tanzan Town. It would take some time for carpenters to use the timber obtained from the western forest to produce the first batch of furniture. The wood used for furniture couldn't be as makeshift as that for simple board houses. Therefore, having a desk was Gawain's greatest perk as the lord of this place.

A pile of papers lay somewhat messily on the desk, filled with various things: construction plans, resource statistics, camp sketches, and a rough future construction plan that included walls, a dock, residential areas, production zones, farmland, and more, all laid out. On one side of the desk were ink, a quill, pencils, and a wooden ruler, while on the other side, Amber was sprawled out.

Gawain stepped forward and casually grabbed Amber by the collar, lifting her aside. The half-elf girl was still asleep when he picked her up, but halfway through, she yelped in surprise, then transformed into a shadow and disappeared from Gawain's grasp, rematerializing nearby.

"You scared me!" Amber finally woke up, glaring at Gawain with a face full of anger. "I thought there was an earthquake!"

Gawain looked at her, feeling both annoyed and amused. "I asked you to watch the things in the tent, and this is how you guard it?"

Amber looked righteous. "I was practically covering all your scribbles with my body!"

Gawain looked down at the desk, then glanced at Amber. "You even drooled on them?!"

"What can you do when you're asleep?" Amber mumbled, then curiously watched Gawain sit down by the desk, shuffling over twice to get closer. "What are you doing? Are you going to start drawing your scribbles again?"

"These aren't scribbles, they're plans, regulations, construction drawings," Gawain was quite exasperated with this uneducated half-elf. "These things are the foundation of the camp, which is why I specifically asked you to watch them."

Amber picked up a paper with symbols and numbers and looked at it for a long time, then pouted. "What kind of gibberish is this? I can't understand it at all."

Gawain looked at her helplessly. "You're holding it upside down."

Amber looked innocently. "I've never seen your blueprints or anything before. They're harder to understand than magic formulas, how could I possibly tell front from back!"

"That's why you need to learn. Knowledge is very important," Gawain sighed. He wasn't surprised at all that Amber couldn't understand these things. She was just a small thief who hadn't received a proper education since childhood. She learned her sleight-of-hand skills under the guidance of her adoptive father and master. Coupled with an inexplicable affinity for shadows, she was capable enough to wander and adventure in this world. Learning culture was neither possible nor necessary for her. Therefore, Amber's literacy level was only enough for basic reading and writing. The drawings he made not only contained a bunch of strange terms but also various data and shorthand notations. Even Heti would probably be bewildered if she saw these…

Thinking of Heti, Gawain looked into Amber's eyes. "I asked you to learn more from Rebecca or Heti in your spare time, and it seems you haven't taken it to heart at all."

"That's so boring, and I don't like dealing with nobles," Amber rolled her eyes. "Besides, your beautiful great-great-great-granddaughter is too busy to pay attention to me. Rebecca is more leisurely, but she always wants to hit me with fireballs."

Gawain looked at her with a half-smile. "You don't like dealing with nobles—but you seem quite comfortable dealing with me."

Amber answered honestly. "I always feel like you're not like a noble..."

"You're also very different from the elves in my impression," Gawain said, beginning to sort and gather the papers in front of him, and at the same time taking out those few crystals, placing them one by one on the tabletop.

Amber mumbled, "I'm just a half-elf, and I was picked up by humans. How would I know what a proper elf is like... Huh? You're not writing today? Are you going to study these stones?"

After confirming that these crystals had no magic power and that Gawain didn't intend to sell them, Amber's perception of these items downgraded from crystals to mere stones.

Gawain looked at the half-elf with a headache. "I would be extremely grateful if you could be a little quieter over there."

"Tch, there's nothing interesting about it. You study your stones."

Saying that, her body flickered, and she seemed to melt into the air, gradually disappearing. However, through a faint perception of her aura, Gawain was certain that the girl was still standing in the same spot, curiously staring in his direction.

Fine, as long as she stopped talking nonsense, he'd let her be.

Gawain focused his attention on the crystals before him.

For some time now, research on these crystals had yielded no progress.

He had taken out the crystals to observe them closely more than once on the road. When he was in Tanzan Town, he even had Heti attempt to probe their interiors using magic resonance, but there was no progress. Especially with magic resonance—Heti admitted that these crystals had nothing to do with magic items at all. When magic was applied to them, it caused no ripples whatsoever, as if they were just ordinary stones.

But crystals that the Gawain Cecil of seven hundred years ago had so carefully stored in a mithril safe and even purchased a permanent preservation service for in the Mithril Treasury—could they possibly be some unremarkable stones?

Gawain could only boldly assume that these crystals definitely had something special about them, but their specialness was not on a magical level.

Or perhaps current magical theories couldn't explain them.

He set aside the crystals that were clearly fragments and picked up the intact one.

The broken crystals had already exposed some of their inner crystalline structure, but it was difficult to observe accurately with the naked eye. Once Heti's magic laboratory was built and a crystal resonator was available, he could try to examine them from a structural perspective. As for this intact one... he was hesitant to tamper with it.

Who knew if the crystal resonator might damage some kind of "information" within the crystal?

He lifted the crystal and observed it against the light.

Along the crystalline edges, which were clear and beautiful, he could see light moving. As he changed the angle of incidence, each facet and edge displayed various colors and light structures.

This was a crystal with extremely precise geometric form, indicating highly skilled craftsmanship. Moreover, when testing with the broken crystal fragments, Gawain had already verified that these crystals possessed astonishing strength—they were extremely hard and not easily shattered like ordinary brittle crystals. They could even easily scratch a mithril ingot without any wear on their tips.

This made him wonder how those four crystal fragments had broken in the first place.

After observing them in the sunlight for a while, Gawain then tried to cut his finger and smear a bit of blood on the surface of the crystal before the wound healed.

Of course, it was utterly useless.

He vaguely heard the sound of a half-elf suppressing laughter...

Ignoring Amber, Gawain held the crystal and fell into thought, wondering how many more incomprehensible things there were in this world—crystals of unknown origin, mysteriously lost memories, a suspected gas giant that differed in nature from normal gas giants, the "sun," and those "surveillance satellites" that should still be in the sky, with unknown purpose and origin...

As his thoughts drifted to the "surveillance satellites," he suddenly felt a slight warmth emanating from his hand.

At first, he thought it was his imagination, but then the crystal actually vibrated slightly, and the faint blue light in its core also lit up a little.

Heat, vibration, and light—these three things combined couldn't possibly be a hallucination.

Gawain looked at the crystal in astonishment, but before he could grab a pen to record the crystal's changes, a voice suddenly echoed in his mind—

It was less a voice and more like information directly flooding into his mental world. He "heard" and understood its content:

"Mental frequency reset, re-establishing connection."

His consciousness then felt a wave of dizziness.

It was as if something had abruptly intruded upon his thoughts, a "data stream" that didn't belong to him had connected, but it wasn't an intruder. After a brief moment of shock, he felt an inexplicable sense of familiarity with it.

These "familiar data streams" quickly generated corresponding clear images in his mind.

Scenes began to appear in his mind.

It was a view of the earth from high above.

The first thought that flashed through Gawain's mind wasn't surprise or shock, but rather "Holy crap."

"Holy crap, am I going to the sky again?!"

Cold sweat immediately broke out on his forehead.

But he soon realized the situation wasn't as he imagined. He was still sitting properly in his chair, his soul hadn't left his body to be dragged back into the sky as a synchronous satellite. All his senses were normal, and he could control his body freely. It was just that an extra image had appeared in his mind.

This instantly calmed him considerably, and then he became excited and focused his attention on the image in his mind.

It was then that he noticed the image was highly unusual, not at all resembling anything familiar to him.

The image had become blurry, as if a filter had been applied, presenting strange color distributions. It was smeared into blobs like an image from a thermal imager, allowing only a general identification of structures like mountains, forests, and rivers. Furthermore, this blurry, strange image was confined to a very small area.

It was precisely the area around the new Cecil Territory north of the Dark Mountains. From above, the White Water River, the western forest, and even a hint of the camp could be vaguely seen.

This image could not be zoomed.