Comprehensive network wizard, magic emperor.

Chapter 34 Two Kinds of Silence, What is the True Name of Steel?

This morning the rain stopped and the sky cleared. The brisk autumn wind was like thick silk, casually telling the mage that there would probably be no rain for the next two days. This would be the last rare period of good weather before the hurricane arrived.

On the way to the woodland, Lin Bo passed by the outskirts of Shita Town. The houses here were basically locked, with only a few guard dogs and dogs strolling around the door. When they saw the mage approaching, they whimpered and circled around him.

Lin Bo paused and played with these furry, smelly little monsters for a while.

"Good morning, night watchman." A greeting came from an open courtyard gate.

Lin Bo looked in the direction of the voice and saw a stranger, but he also raised his hand to greet him.

The person who greeted me was a shirtless middle-aged man with a lean figure. The fine sweat on his skin looked like fish scales in the sunlight. He was sitting astride a thick log, holding a carpenter's adze (pronounced the same as "ben") in his hand. He was a shipbuilder and had started working early in the morning.

"Night Watchman, would you like to sit down for a moment and have some coffee?"

"Thank you, but I won't disturb you from work." Lin Bo declined with a smile.

"Ha, it seems we're all busy people." The shipbuilder pretended not to care. "I heard you know medicine? Everyone says so."

His expression seemed to say: It’s not that I don’t trust you, I just want to broaden my horizons.

Lin Bo immediately understood what he meant and said, "Then please give me a cup of coffee."

The shipwright chuckled shyly.

While the coffee pot was boiling on the stove, Lin Bo gave the shipbuilder a physical examination. It was just some common strains, so he did some massage to correct the dislocated muscles and bones.

The shipbuilder had an extremely relaxed and comfortable expression, as if feathers had grown in his bones and he felt as light as a feather. When he looked at the night watchman again, the look in his eyes was completely different.

The best coffee at home, with milk and sugar, and the butter and cocoa cookies made by his wife, the shipbuilder was so attentive that he wished he could switch jobs and become a waiter at the White Snail Tavern.

Lin Bo sipped his coffee and ate a couple of biscuits, his eyes scanning the objects in the living room, searching for traces of the remnant. He said casually, "You can continue working. I'm quite curious about shipbuilding technology."

"no problem."

The shipbuilder readily agreed and returned to the yard, where he began to rapidly hammer away at the log with his adze. An adze is similar to a hoe, but one is for digging the earth, while the other is for hammering wood.

Lin Bo did not find any remains of the remnant, so he went outside to watch the craftsmanship of the shipbuilder.

Benedict! Benedict!
Metal was chiseled and wood was peeling off. The mage listened attentively to the vibrations of iron and wood.

Based on his existing experience, Lin Bo summarized two conditions for true name detection: the forced silence of the object being listened to, and the active silence of the listener himself.

The wizard listened patiently, his ears filled with the wood's complaints. It was complaining about being beaten with an axe, about being stripped of its outer coat, about being cut down by a saw, and about a freezing rain in the woods many years ago.

You could tell it was very resentful, but what Lin Bo was really concerned about was the sound of the iron.

However, Iron Stone was a very, very cold being that almost never spoke. He could not catch a single sound, let alone the hidden true name rune.

On weekdays, if you want to listen to the steel talk, besides the subtle perception of tactile endoscopy, the other way is to listen to the church bell ringing at noon.

If you want to force steel to remain silent, you need another voice to suppress its language, just like rain to the waves, which is even more difficult. If gold and iron do not speak, it is fine. But when they speak, they always make a big splash, and it is difficult for other voices to cover it up.

"Can I try?" Lin Bo put down the cup and saucer, patted the biscuit crumbs on his hands, and walked to the shipbuilder.

"of course can."

Lin Bo took the adze, and his endoscopic technique activated naturally, revealing its entire structure to him: a wooden handle, an iron blade. With a gentle swing, the iron blade seemed to open up to the mage. It grumbled about the dampness of the continuous rain rusting its bones, and about the iron filings that flew off when it clashed with the wood.

Lin Bo raised the adze and chiseled the log.

Benedict!
At the moment of the collision, Tie Ren's words were interrupted by the complaining of the wood. In this split second, Lin Bo also caught a glimpse of Tie's real name rune.

But it was too short and too vague to be captured.

He knocked repeatedly, and the sound became continuous.

The shipbuilder standing by was terrified and wanted to remind him, but he found that every blow of the night watchman was just right and did not go beyond the range of the ink line. So the words of worry kept circling in his throat and he couldn't say them.

The oldest canoe-making technology in Shita Town is to hollow out logs into hulls. It is now relatively rare, and only fishermen in coastal villages and towns still use canoes to go out to sea.

Lin Bo chiseled a bit and confirmed that metal would be forced to remain silent when processing other things. However, he could not calm his mind in the midst of the intense labor, and there was no silence enough to accommodate the true name rune.

If the two conditions cannot be met at the same time, the true name detection will not be effective.

Lin Bo pondered how to find out Jin Tie's true name, then stopped and returned the tools to the shipbuilder. The shipbuilder tutted his tongue and praised the night watchman for his ability to become an excellent carpenter if he changed his profession.

After finishing the coffee in the cup, Lin Bo stood up and prepared to say goodbye. The shipbuilder hurried to get the medical fee, but was turned away. In the end, he stuffed the remaining delicious butter cookies to the night watchman.

Lin Bo really liked these cookies. They were made with solid ingredients, including refined flour, butter and plenty of sugar, and baked to just the right temperature. They were the result of wealth, patience and craftsmanship, and one could taste the housewife's preference for her family.

The shipbuilder smiled as he saw him out, and watched the dogs along the street jumping and circling around the night watchman. Only when the man walked away did the dogs reluctantly go home.

Autumn is harvest time, when bushes bear cranberries, sea buckthorn, gooseberries, and other small berries.

Lin Bo picked a cranberry and put it in his mouth to taste it carefully. This fruit, which looks like a blueberry, has a richer taste.

When I watched "Ratatouille" before, the rat could perceive the taste of the food in its mouth as flowing colors and music. This synesthesia experience was very wonderful.

Lin Bo's pharmacist tongue recognition ability couldn't produce synesthesia, but it was sharp enough to reflect the various medicinal properties of food through changes in the flow of qi in the meridians. This delicate sense allowed the ingredients and herbs to speak to the master.

He savored the faint sourness, sweetness and fruity aroma of the blueberries, and without waiting to swallow them, he picked a bunch of pyracantha berries and put them in his mouth to chew.

The bitter pyracantha juice spread, and its noisy and warm sound immediately drowned out the blueberry's confession.

In this passive silence, Limbaugh savored the true name of cranberry.

Relying on the conflict of food taste, the mage sat cross-legged in the woods and pretended to be dead, engraving the real names of many plants in his mind.

Not long after, he discovered a rather interesting phenomenon: the petals, calyx, fruit and roots of the same plant all had their own true names, and when the lines of these true names were pieced together, they were consistent with the true name runes of the complete plant.

"The true names of all things in the world are probably fragments of the original true name."

Lin Bo thought that the true name might also have the property of being infinitely divisible. If someone could know the true names of all things in the world, it might be possible to piece together the true name of the universe.

As the sun rose higher, the lighthouse keeper, who had been busy all morning, prepared to pack up and go to the East Cliff Grottoes to continue plastering.

However, he suddenly decided to go to the town to see if there were any iron wind chimes for sale. Lin Bo thought that perhaps the noise of the sea breeze could drown out the whistling of metal, allowing him to glimpse the true name from its silence.

(End of this chapter)