Throne of Magical Arcana

“What is that?” asked Lucien while knowing the answer. He would now call himself a better actor.

The finding was discovered way faster than Lucien expected, which was to his surprise.

Rock said to Lucien excitedly, “We’ve probably discovered something new! It’s f**king awesome. Come on, Lucien! Come and take a look!”

When Rock got all excited, he would not mind his words.

It was very rare that a young sorcerer managed to grow into a level five arcanist from scratch within only a couple of years like Lucien. Although the finding might not be something outstanding to Lucien, as every single one of his papers had received very high comments or had triggered heated discussions, to most arcanists below middle-rank and the apprentices, a new finding meant at least ten arcana credits and more citation earnings, which was a lot to them. A new finding could help them become a level two arcanist in a few months and lay a solid foundation for their further progress.

“Rock, calm down.” Lucien stopped his work and followed Rock into the lab next door.

“Now I feel that I’m a f**king genius, not because I’m talented in arcana or something, but because I chose to work with you, the real genius!” Rock was right now very talkative because of his excitement, “Without you, we’d have never thought of studying gas discharge from the conductivity of solutions. After several months, when I can wear the level two arcana badge back at school, the idiots from the School of Electromagnetics will for sure drop their chin!”

The sorcerers from the School of Electromagnetics had never put too much thought into this because they were too used to the fact that lightning could be produced in the air.

Lucien slightly twitched the corner of his lips. Although Lucien for now still had no idea whether what Rock had found was cathode ray (stream of electrons) or plasma, in Lucien’s eyes, Rock was obviously being overly excited. If Rock knew what was still waiting for him up ahead, Lucien was afraid that Rock might get too thrilled to retain his right mind.

However, at the same time, the arcanists below middle-rank, such as Rock and Lazar, could be Lucien’s good potential supporters because their meditation world had not been completely built, therefore, it was easier for them to accept new theories.

Mr. Planck, the scientist on the Earth who first put forward the assumption of energy quantum once said, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

Of course, however, for the Congress, every senior-rank mage was very precious. Avoiding the explosion of even one single senior-rank mage’s head could be a great victory to the Congress.

After the refurbishment, the new lab was shining in metallic luster. The countless cold lines formed the many complex magic symbols and circles. The arrangement of the lines and pipes was almost like an abstract picture. The claws made of metal or cut from the real magic beasts hanging down from the ceiling could help the apprentices avoid some dangerous operations.

Lucien had applied for it that all the alchemical operation areas and magic circles should be protected by the counter-curse spells because many sorcerers had died from doing the experiments unprotected. Meanwhile, Lucien was clearly aware of the fact that the several counter-curse magic circles that he had carefully chosen all contained some amount of lead, or the radiation would sooner or later kill him, which was for sure not fun.

“Show what happened to Lucien. Do the experiment again.” Rock led Lucien to the discharge magic circle, and asked the two apprentices, Sprint and Heidi, to repeat the process. Lazar was also there.

Sprint and Heidi, because they were not steady and calm enough, were not picked by Jerome and did not manage to join the experiment group studying ultralow temperature, but now they had found something new with Mr. Rock, so they were also very encouraged, as if they could already see the picture that they were putting on the arcana badge.

Sprint first activated one magic circle and pumped out most of the gas from the discharge magic circle. Then Heidi turned the discharge magic circle on to produce a high voltage.

The gas started to discharge and give out light, however, what was strange was that, on the piece of glass opposite to the cathode magic circle, green light also appeared. When Heidi turned the magic circle off, the green light disappeared.

“The cathode magic circle did not have anything directly projected onto it. Nothing similar like this can be found in the papers. Maybe… maybe we have found a new kind of invisible ray.” Rock looked expectantly at Lucien, feeling a little nervous waiting for his answer.

In most of the middle and junior-rank arcanists’ eyes, Lucien was already an authority in arcana and thus he should be able to tell what this phenomenon meant.

Lazar, Heidi, and sprint were also holding their breaths, waiting for Lucien’s response.

The atmosphere became somewhat frozen, like how Lucien felt in the face of the Lord of Storm. Lucien knew that, sure enough, what they had discovered was cathode ray. Lucien was a bit relieved.

This was a kind of electron current, through which the existence of electrons could be found, and thus the fact that an atom could be further divided and it also had its own inner structure could be revealed. The finding would overthrow the current theories on atoms!

However, there was still a long way in front of them to prove that a cathode ray, in fact, consisted of electrons, which were the internal particles of an atom. They still had to do lots of experiments to reach the final conclusion.

Lucien shook his head with a smile, “It’s only our hypothesis until it’s proven experimentally. The only thing we can be sure about is that no one has noticed this phenomenon before in doing discharging experiments. However, we can’t rule out the possibility that this ray is some kind of electromagnetic wave or streams of particles that we’re already familiar with. We now have to design different experiments to verify this. All of you should put your hands on the research. You design the experiments on your own, so you can publish your own paper.”

As Lucien was saying, he turned on the discharge magic circle. When the green light appeared on the glass on the other side again, Lucien put an object in between. The corresponding shadow of the shape of the object appeared on the glass immediately, which showed the fact that the green light was from the discharge magic circle.

“Got it!” All the arcanists and apprentices answered excitedly. Their mind was full of hope, and they were also grateful to Lucien’s kindness. To their surprise, Lucien allowed the institution members to publish papers on their own. Unlike other projects, no matter if the leader was involved in the design of the experiment in person or not, the project leader should always be the first author of the paper.

If they had really found something new, their papers on the designed experiments would for sure be cited very frequently. Although the credits they would earn would never be as high as the major paper announcing the existence of cathode ray, the gain would still be very decent.

The arcanists and apprentices all agreed that Lucien should be the first author of the major paper, not only because he was the leader of the institution, but also because he designed and arranged the whole experiment.

Seeing that all the institution members were quite excited, Lucien smiled. “I’ll join you, too. Jerome’s group can also try to design the experiments during their spare time. By the way, here I want to announce a couple of regulations in our Atom Institution. First, I’ll never steal the idea from you if you come up with the new research design on your own. As the exclusive author, you’ll have your own name on the paper. Second, for the rest of the research findings, no one can publish them personally without permission. As the leader of the institution, I have to sign my name on the paper and endorse the findings first, and this is the regulation of the Congress. Third, on the Monday of each week, there should be a regular meeting to discuss the progress and the current stage of each experiment.”

Lucien changed the monthly meeting to weekly because they were working on the specific projects. After saying this, Lucien was amused by himself because now he felt himself like a mentor or a boss.

The arcanists and apprentices all agreed on the regulations put forward by Lucien. In fact, they were already grateful because of the space Lucien left to them.

…

Because of the great stir caused by the last month’s Arcana, although Lucien’s new paper was not yet published, many senior and middle-rank arcanists had found their own ways and managed to borrow the paper explaining the arcana meaning of the formula.

Heidler, in the Kingdom of Holm, in the headquarter office of the Hand of Paleness.

After becoming a senior-rank mage, Felipe had been working on building magic structures in his soul. Right now, he was standing beside the window looking out with his hands in the pockets of his black long coat.

Felipe never expected that there was such a big secret in the Hand of Paleness—they had found the World of Souls in another dimension and not even the Congress had any clue.

Talented and full of potential as Felipe was, he soon became a core member of the Hand of Paleness and got to know the existence of the World of Souls. Felipe now knew that it was a creepy dimension which was more or less like a projection of this world. Also, many souls and spectres in there were, in fact, intelligent, and they also had their own language. The name, the World of Souls, was actually translated from their language.

Because connecting to the World of Souls could help the necromancers summon even more powerful spectres and thus strengthen the power of the group greatly, the Hand of Paleness concealed the secret and took their time exploring the dimension.

At this time, when everything appeared to be rather dim and gray, a colorful parrot landed on Felipe’s right hand with a roll of parchment on its neck.

“Mr. Felipe, this is the paper you wanted,” said the parrot.

Felipe nodded slightly and grabbed some fine rice grains to feed the bird. He wondered whether his competitor had really figured out the meaning of the formula.

After the parrot left, Felipe unrolled the piece of parchment and his face became even paler when seeing the level five arcanist title in front of Lucien’s name. Although in the past couple of years his experiment on synthesizing life substances had earned him decent credits, he was still a thousand credits away from reaching level six. Right now, they were both of level five, and there was not a very big difference between them.

When reading the paper, Felipe frowned. He wondered if Lucien had ever thought of the possible criticism and attacks from the sorcerers supporting Energy Essentialism when making such an assumption.

As a necromancer who also studied elements, alchemy and illusions, whether the form of energy was continuous or discontinuous did not matter to Felipe that much, after all, his cognitive world did not require his understanding in the form of energy to stay stable.

In fact, for Felipe, it was very difficult for him to read the paper on thermal radiation. He just did not want to miss the information from his competitor, Professor, or he would never touch a paper like this.

…

In the Kingdom of Brianne, a sorcerer with a mustache now looked rather pissed.

“How can such a paper pass the review? Are those members of the review board afraid of Fernando that much? Ridiculous! The assumption is total nonsense!” The archmage, Lauren, talked to himself angrily.

His hands behind his back, Lauren walked back and forth. Then he sat down behind his desk and grabbed the quill. He needed to write a paper to point it out that the assumption was absurd.

However, the point of the quill paused above the paper. After all, Lucien also said that this was just an assumption which had not been verified yet. Furthermore, Lauren totally had no idea what the other possible explanations would be.

Lauren put down the quill. He had decided to just let go of Lucien’s paper and let it just be gradually ignored by the arcanists.