old dream

Chapter 140 Chaos Reappearance
When Colin summoned the Shuttle Demon again, its severed limbs had recovered.

There seems to be no incompleteness in the body made of spiritual elements.Perhaps different from material life, the "shuttle demon" does not have a complete structure.Maybe it is just a vortex in the torrent of spiritual elements, a phenomenon that I just recognize as a unified and coherent entity for myself.

After confirming that there was no problem, Colin took the Shuttle Demon back and extinguished the hearth.At this time, Ke Lin still held a small piece of solid in his hand, which was just a small part of the substance formed out of thin air earlier.It is black-gray, and it seems that a lot of air has been mixed in during the solidification process, so there are some sparse hollows inside.It has the lightness of bone, and the hardness is like a mass of lime, which will shatter under the slightest force between the fingers.

Colin watched those delicate debris disappear from between his fingers, thinking.

Through the handwritten information on the ticket, Colin has learned that the wizard's name is "El".According to Giovanni, the man had been acting alone lately.

"I only stared at him for three days, and he didn't go to his camp once in the three days. Apart from the reason of better habits, I think he is going to abandon his camp in this city."

Three days is too short. According to past practice, Giovanni will follow up for about a week on average.But this time the opponent's threat was too great, so he had to act in a hurry.Fang, now retired, continued:
"I can tell you where the hotel he lives in is, but it's up to you to think about the specific room."

The threat Capello faced has been lifted, and if he wants to get anything from the wizard El in the future, it can only be regarded as his own private matter.So Giovanni left the wilderness first after explaining the information in his hand.

Ke Lin stayed here alone, looking at the increasingly dense night, and there were a few wild dogs howling not far away.The release of the shuttle demon made him feel strongly uneasy, because the battle between wizards began to be completely different from what he understood. He couldn't help feeling a little thankful that he had never relied too much on witchcraft, nor had he frivolously challenged anyone. challenge.

Colin guessed that his mastery of witchcraft must still be missing an important link.El had been fleeing in a panic, but after being attacked, he calmed down and launched a counterattack, because he noticed the obvious flaws in his opponent.Until now, Colin has still not been able to understand the specific logic of the battle just now. This feeling of fluke and confusion has always been what he hates the most.

My own use of the Shuttle Demon is still incomplete, and the last piece of the puzzle is still missing.And this last component may be related to the materialization that occurred on the Shuttle Demon.

Colin had read about the knot of matter, but he thought it was an extremely distant concept.Just as nuclear physics is not used in hand-to-hand combat, he did not expect that the duel between low-level wizards would involve the highest mystery of the formation of the material world, the mirror image of the creation of the master.

So Colin is unwilling to let go of the clues on El.

Twenty minutes later, Colin came to El's residence for the past few days, an unremarkable dilapidated hotel in the depths of the alley. El would choose this kind of place, probably because the identity of the guests will not be registered here.Until tonight, El should have always thought that he was the hunter, but he didn't know that he had been targeted by Giovanni.

The innkeeper had a huge rosacea and his mouth stank of rotting wine.Such alcoholics should be the main source of income for bootleggers.Ke Lin said that he was a friend who was entrusted by others to help pick up the things. He showed the house key and accurately stated the name of the house owner.But the boss strictly stated that none of these can prove anything.

So Colin ordered another 2 Aas, almost equal to the room rate, but in the eyes of the boss, it should be two glasses of wine that are not too bad.So just [-] minutes later, Colin was brought directly into El's room.

……

……

After taking out El's suitcase, Colin didn't stay here for a long time, and he didn't bring the things back to his residence. Instead, he went directly to another hotel to avoid the existence of a tracking device similar to the object-finding technique in the suitcase.

He disassembled the suitcase and piled all the ordinary clothes inside aside. Even the leather interlayer was cut open with a dagger and examined carefully, but only a small amount of cash was found.Colin couldn't help but feel a little disappointed.

But it is not incomprehensible, a wizard with a hidden consciousness will not carry extraordinary items with him.At least, not blatantly carried.

After thinking for a while, Colin took out El's pocket watch. Not surprisingly, this is the "trigger" made by El, but it is too bulky for a spell trigger device, perhaps because of the unusual scale of the ceremony .Colin disassembled the pocket watch bit by bit, and saw the unnatural routes engraved on the mainspring. They were twisted and intertwined, and trembled slightly under the drive of the movement, like a mechanical heart.

Colin took the pen and paper, measured the proportion with the tip of the pen with one eye, and traced the lines bit by bit.They act as triggers, part of the spell that dismantles the shuttle.But with El's death, the connection between Trigger and Trunk has been broken.So the position where El placed the ceremony is now nowhere to be found.

But even so, Colin felt that there was still a ray of hope.

As he further disassembled the pocket watch, Colin became more and more sure of his guess—the ceremony was of an unusually large scale.Even without considering the more complicated interior of the movement, just tracing the precise lines on the clockwork, the content has already filled the entire page.And these are only part of the "trigger", a small component of the whole ceremony.

Did El really have the whole ritual in mind?There is such a possibility, but Colin still has a little luck in his heart.El's character should be cautious, so even if he can remember, he should have some backup somewhere in case his memory goes wrong.

Colin spread out the clothes on the bed again and checked them more carefully.This time I found that some of the styles were a bit old, but there were no traces of wearing them. This was an obvious anomaly, and maybe it was the carrier of information.So Colin even began to observe whether there were hidden ciphertexts in the stitch density of the cuffs.As a result, because he held it closer to his face, he vaguely smelled a strange smell of potion.

It's not the smell of laundry soap or moth-proof spice, and no one would use poison in their luggage, after all, the possibility of accidentally touching it is too great.After sniffing the smells of the other clothes one by one, a sense of enlightenment rose in Colin's heart.

After sorting out a few pieces of clothing that smelled faintly of potion, Colin found a candle in the corner of the room, lit it, then straightened the surface of the clothes with his hands, and carefully roasted them on the wax flame.

As a result, as expected, some fuzzy scorched lines appeared faintly on the yellowed fabric.

Ke Lin didn't expect the other party to use such a "classical" steganography, but the idea is generally correct.It is no wonder that Giovanni's use of detection devices did not bear fruit.When the object of defense is a wizard... maybe using purely physical means is the most effective.

The potion smell should be some kind of special ink, and after applying another potion, it can make it develop color.This should be a practice that has been handed down from centuries ago. Under some kind of alchemy thinking at that time, some people believed that only a certain way can promote a certain transformation, so this "secret ink" can ensure that the information is kept secret and will not be leaked .But I don't know that many organic liquids are rich in carbon, and they will burn to black when heated slightly, and another color will emerge.

The flow of information in the dark world is extremely poor, and some wizards tend to worship ancient things. As a result, even this antique-like practice has been preserved somewhere in the world.

Colin heated those strange clothes one by one, and some details were destroyed because of this, but he still got the complete "mass solution" structure in the end, which was a huge masterpiece assembled from seven complete tops.On the inside and outside of the garment, all surface areas are covered with information in special ink, and the spell is also preserved in the form of a pattern.The reason should be similar to Vajra and Object Finding: to prevent it from spreading over a large area.

At the same time, it is different from the previous two Jalan witchcrafts. After all, this atlas is made for inheritance, so it is full of annotations on each part.There are detailed explanations for almost every mirror image principle and ritual components, which shows that it came from the hands of a systematically trained scholar.The amount of information contained in it far exceeds the previously obtained object finding and diamond art.

Although, this may have been the fruit of knowledge centuries ago.

But it contains the mysteries about the material world built by masters.Matter, the basic material that constitutes the body in this life, I know very little about it.

One difference from consciousness is that they have no immutable "coordinates" of their own, and in this sense they are very close to ghosts.

Or the dead and non-living objects are originally of the same kind - forgetting the existence of coordinates.

Matter cannot return to the imaginary world, but spirit elements are continuously entering reality.This implies the cycle of power between the layers of the universe, which is basically consistent with the philosophical conjectures of the ancients.

Or it can't be called a cycle, it's just a one-way flow from the virtual world to reality.

And the asymmetry and imbalance of this one-way flow seems to imply doomed destruction like entropy increase, death and eternal time.

And life and consciousness are the only countercurrents in it.

But where did those spirit elements that continuously flow into reality go?

According to the Holy King's point of view, they are promoting the formation and operation of this world.

But most movements today can already be explained on a material level.If matter itself can form a complete and closed system, then it would be contradictory to various existing theories of occultism, especially the point that "deep forces drive all things to run".

People have already been able to use mathematical models to describe the entire process of various macroscopic low-speed movements, and there is no trace of Lingsu in this.

So the idea of ​​chaos appeared again. Two parallel laws can explain the world but contradict each other.It is subtly similar to the predicament faced by the Ankh people for thousands of years.So this time the priests were forced to make a temporary explanation, that is, there are two reasons for the occurrence of material world events, the first cause related to the spirit element, and the second cause that can be explained through the material level.

It's just that compared with the first generation of holy kings thousands of years ago, this time's explanation is obviously weaker and weaker.

According to the materials transmitted in the newsroom of the seminary, in the past ten years, the priests have agreed on the new explanation for the problem of "absence of spiritual elements from mechanics": the observable spiritual elements of human beings are only from the process of force overflow. Few crumbs that flake off.Only in relation to these detritus does the physical world appear as an independent system.But in fact, the experimental condition of "excluding the influence of Lingsu" itself cannot be established.

Because before all measurements, it has been disturbed by those invisible psychic elements because of the "tight and perfect" combination.

So those laws of physics are the result of the interaction of invisible spirit elements and matter.

This idea is not new, it is documented in the "Ashmolean Collection" unearthed in the Dark Ages.Because it can span thousands of years to answer the question that was raised at the beginning of this century, it has regained the attention of the world.

The original version of the point of view is a dialogue written in the name of the holy king "Elgard" in the literature group, which says that the overflow of deep power to the surface of matter is as quiet as "wheat ears that are fruitful in the light", in which Only the part "disturbed by the wind" will make a subtle sound.

"When the wizards heard the rustle of the wheat fields, they thought the ears of wheat grew from the wind."

At the beginning of this dialogue, the fictional "Elgard" compares the spirit element and the deep power to two different concepts, "wind" and "light". The former is noisy and weak, while the latter is silent and powerful.In later pages the author gradually adds:
"Wind is light stripped".

Those free spirit elements that can be used by life are just the parts peeled off from the overflow of silence.

In this metaphor, the question of today's Anhe scholars is actually just: "Why can ears of wheat grow in the absence of wind?" The answer is already hidden in the question, and the growth of ears of wheat has nothing to do with wind.Just getting rid of those free and peeling debris would not hinder the operation of the universe.

If the spiritual elements flowing in the ether channels of creatures-stars-minerals are all the forces from the deep world, then they are obviously far from enough to support the formation and operation of the entire material world.Another evidence is that if the ether field in a certain range is evacuated as much as possible, the nearby matter will not collapse, the movement will not be static, and even the obvious impact cannot be detected.

But if the assumption of the "scenery metaphor" is true, then there exists a power far greater than these easily detectable spiritual elements, silently and silently dominating the real world every moment.

And if the overflow of this power is still perfect, and the spiritual elements (detritus) observed by human beings do not fall off from it, maybe witchcraft will no longer exist in the world.

So, what is it that makes the "wind" peel off from the "light"?

(End of this chapter)