Black Claw and Dr. Vincent both looked grim. If the Alchemy Computer failed on its first test, they would lose face.
Just then, there was a sudden bang!
The glass tube at the very top of the glass pyramid exploded! The tiny figure inside burst into a bloody mess, and the illuminated tubes below rapidly went dark. The Alchemy Computer stopped running.
Black Claw and Dr. Vincent were deeply discouraged. They wanted to explain themselves to Green, but neither knew what to say.
Black Claw felt especially bad. When Green had first described his idea for a computer, Black Claw had thought it sounded simple and confidently promised he could do it. He had never expected it to turn out like this.
Green, on the other hand, was not angry at all. He was quite pleased with the result.
He had only hoped Black Claw and the others would manage an experimental prototype on their first attempt. Instead, they had built a large computer with considerable practical use. That alone satisfied him, and its computing power was not bad either. It had eventually overloaded and exploded, but calculating more than sixty decimal places in just a few seconds was already an impressive result.
It would also be easy to increase the computing power of Black Claw's design: they could simply make the glass pyramid bigger. Or they could follow the example of a multicore CPU, build several pyramids, and connect them in parallel in a tree structure to handle multiple tasks at once.
As for that cumbersome hundred-digit counter, Green ignored it. In his plans, these Alchemy Computers would eventually connect to Glasses Woman's brain through a Soul Link. They would not need displays at all...
Back at Lake Zevar.
Nearby troops had arrived and joined the surviving Factory Guard