That day, Cui Ciyou arrived at Nanahoshi Shizuka's Laboratory as promised.
He was there to help her conduct an experiment that, according to her, was "vitally important."
Nanahoshi Shizuka was not sitting behind her desk piled high with papers as she usually did.
She stood in the very center of the Laboratory, with an enormous Magic Circle beneath her feet that covered almost the entire floor.
"As long as this Magic Circle activates successfully..."
Nanahoshi Shizuka did not turn around.
She simply spoke slowly, her voice a mixture of exhaustion, excitement, and a slight tremor. "We can move on to the next stage."
Cui Ciyou's gaze fell on the enormous Magic Circle.
Compared to the giant teleportation circles hidden in the Ancient Ruins, each as large as a basketball court, the room-sized circle before him hardly qualified as "huge."
Still, the complexity and precision of its structure were plain to see.
It was drawn on a single enormous sheet of pristine white paper, an extreme rarity in this other world, where paper was more expensive than gold. Cui Ciyou knew Nanahoshi Shizuka must have made it herself using knowledge from her own world.
Tens of thousands of incredibly intricate patterns and runes, finer than strands of hair, densely covered the snowy paper, drawn in a special paint that shimmered faintly silver.
A single glance was enough to make any mage with weaker mental power feel dizzy.
This was not merely a Magic Circle.
It was more like a work of art.
A magnificent work of art that had taken months of painstaking effort to complete.
It was also the culmination of all her research over the years since she had arrived in this world.
"May I ask..." Cui Ciyou asked cautiously as he studied the Magic Circle's mysterious beauty, "what