Chapter 1332: Chapter 1331: Exploring the Unknown God

Listening to what the Goddess of Magic said, Gawain suddenly felt an inexplicable sense of weirdness welling up inside him. However, upon thinking about it, there wasn’t a single mistake in her words, so he could only wipe the cold sweat off his forehead and maintain an appearance of calmness while focusing his attention on the "experimental field" opened up in the shadow realm before him.

"Speaking of which, the experimental facilities you’ve set up here look quite... captivating," Gawain casually commented while observing the neatly arranged platforms and the numerous magical devices running automatically, "I heard before that you were creating something in the court of defied gods, but I didn’t expect you to have built these so quickly..."

"This counts as a sort of... ’dream’ that I’ve had for many years," the Goddess of Magic seemed to let out a self-mocking chuckle, "Sounds strange, doesn’t it? A deity meant to fulfill mortal desires, yet having unfulfilled wishes for years—a laboratory to explore truths and mysteries, to satisfy my curiosity. It’s something I’ve always wanted but never been able to do for thousands of years."

"...The driving force behind the advancement of magic and mystery is essentially the exploration of the unknown and mastery of natural laws. The Mage-created Goddess of Magic might be the most curious and exploratory deity in this world... Yet, from another perspective, gods in the minds of mortals should be all-knowing and omnipotent. As the master of mysteries, you can’t have unknowns nor step into unexplored territories..." Gawain sighed softly and shook his head, "If it weren’t for freeing yourself in time, you’d probably be the most prone to going mad among all the gods."

The Goddess of Magic seemed to smile, though her face was veiled by a smoke-like mist, the momentary bright and gentle smile still revealed in her eyes. She didn’t respond to Gawain’s sigh but instead glanced at the giant golden oak tree at the center of the courtyard and the white Giant Stag silently chatting with two flowers on its head beneath the tree. After a moment, she spoke slowly: "Seeing Amon build this garden reminded me of my wishes over the years. I felt I should do something instead of being idle every day, truly becoming a ’retired god’."

"But to be honest... I didn’t expect the council to approve my construction application so swiftly. I thought it would be a sensitive issue—after all, this isn’t simply gardening; my laboratory carries certain dangers."

"You and Amon aren’t prisoners held here, and the council isn’t a prison guard overseeing you—you’re like us, struggling beings in this world," Gawain said, shaking his head with a smile, "Besides, speaking honestly, you are, after all, God of Yore. This has been your wish for thousands of years. Even if the council hadn’t ’approved’ your ’application,’ would you really have given it up?"

"Yes," she replied calmly and without hesitation.

Gawain finally widened his eyes at this answer: "...Are you serious?"

"Absolutely serious," the Goddess of Magic said very calmly, "I promised you to join the council as a member of humanity, and I signed a contract with the council under the name ’Goddess of Magic.’ Although now I’m no longer bound by divine regulations, I still don’t intend to break my oath—for Amon and me, to truly step down from the divine altar, we should at least avoid doing things that transcend mortal status."

Gawain couldn’t help but take a deep look at this towering lady before him, but he said nothing, and after a few seconds, he withdrew his gaze to look at the experimental platforms created by the Goddess of Magic’s own hands—he spotted the "sample" he was seeking.

It was an aberration captured and placed at the center of a large platform, surrounded by a complex array of magic symbols, confined within a translucent magical force field. Several slightly luminous, entirely arcane magic condensed translucent pillars floated about two or three meters above the platform. Phantom chains extended from the top of the pillars, weaving a secondary layer of confinement around the magical force field.

For an aberration of grunt level, the sealings imposed by the Goddess of Magic were indeed of the highest standard. Upon seeing those formidable sealing spells, even Gawain paused, blurting out, "For containing a grunt-level monster, is this really necessary... Did this aberration violate heavenly rules?"

"What do you mean by heavenly rules?" The Goddess of Magic paused at Gawain’s curious phrase, but having spent a considerable time here, she had somewhat adjusted to "Emperor Gawain’s occasional quirky remarks," so she quickly brushed this aside and explained casually, "These seals aren’t just to prevent the aberration’s escape—truthfully, even without these additional sealing methods, it couldn’t escape my platform. What you’re witnessing—these barriers and seals—primary aim is to maintain... the environment."

"Maintain the environment?" Gawain paused, soon noticing the faint purple "mist" floating within the translucent magical force field, and the dark sheet structures between the magic symbols on the experimental platform, "Wait, is this... Did you simulate the environment of the Gondor wasteland?!"

"It’s not difficult. The ’contamination’ of the Gondor wasteland is essentially the result of uncontrolled deep blue magic interacting with elements that erode the material world. For me, creating similar ’contamination’ is easy. The real challenge lies in making this polluted environment ’precise’ and ’stable,’" the Goddess of Magic nodded, explaining in a rather relaxed tone, "The aberration you captured on the frontline—its state was very unstable. It weakened and deteriorated constantly after being separated from its group until I placed it in this simulated environment, which stabilized its physical structure somewhat..."

As the Goddess of Magic explained beside him, Gawain listened while contemplating, his gaze fixed on the "sample" at the center of the seals—a giant-like grotesque creature compared to ordinary humans, huddled with limbs touching the ground at the center of the force field. Filthy black-red "mud-like" fluid flowed on its surface, its featureless face swelling and contracting in the magical environment, generating a continuous low murmur from within, an unintelligible, disgusting "noise" issued instinctively by this chaotic creature.

Yet, aside from producing this "noise," the aberration within the force field made no other moves. Even when Gawain and Amber approached the edge of the platform, the creature maintained its motionless posture.

"This looks different from the aberration I dealt with last time," Amber recalled her past encounters with aberrations, "The one I faced before was far more aggressive, charging at me upon confrontation..."

"If Amon and I weren’t here, it would behave aggressively likewise," the Goddess of Magic’s voice responded, "Curiously, this monstrous aberration lacks intelligence yet can still feel fear. Its perception of certain auras is keen and precise—it dreads the power of Amon and me. However, if faced with battlefield-controlled aberrations, they’d act differently, but this one... It operates purely on instinct."

"Fear..." Gawain muttered softly, pressing his hand against the translucent magic barrier, "Perhaps for creatures like these, fear is not an emotion, but merely an instinct..."

A gentle glow approached, and Veronica, holding the platinum scepter, came to Gawain’s side. The leader of the ancient Defiers quietly observed the monster and said softly, "For years, I’ve been dealing with these things... They’re everywhere in the depths of the wasteland, but recently they’ve all been summoned elsewhere..."

"...I remember the creation of aberrations can be traced back to the ’divine evils’ project in the defied Plan," Amber instinctively glanced at the Saint Princess, "The Defiers extracted the initial ’Divine Blood’ from Amon and combined it with human cells to create the ’divine evils Factor.’ You originally hoped to use the transformation of humans into ’divine evils’ to survive the chaotic wave, but after the wave, the divine evils went out of control and mutated into aberrations... Hiss, in a sense, these aberrations are actually ’Gondor people,’ won’t you feel strange looking at them?"

Amber’s words seemed somewhat unpleasant, but Veronica understood this half-elf. She knew he meant no harm, so she merely shook her head: "...No, this is not a citizen of the Empire, it is merely a flesh shell grown from the remains of an Imperial citizen. The ’divine evils’ plan failed, and we should accept this failure calmly... As for the current ’aberrations,’ I am more concerned about their fundamental weaknesses and the essence of their existence."

"Yes, the essence of existence, I am curious about that too," Goddess of Magic nodded, "These creatures begin to deteriorate and fade once they are detached from the large environment, and yet when they gather to a certain extent, they cause the environment to ’wastelandize,’ creating a similar energy environment to the Gondor wasteland and then grow out of thin air... This seems to be entirely beyond the properties you associated with ’divine evils.’ In fact, it... might not even exist in the same way as ’life’ in the material world. Don’t you think so?"

The words of Goddess of Magic brought Gawain and Veronica back from their thoughts about the ancient defied Plan and the "divine evils" project, and instead, they focused on this very important, though for centuries misunderstood, "anomalous phenomenon."

The "deterioration" and "intensification" of aberrations, and their strange property of "growing from nothing."

"...After the second expedition, the human nations still held the hope of counter-attacking the wasteland and reclaiming their homeland. At that time, our scholars did much research on these monsters and even managed to capture and briefly control this ’living sample,’" Gawain recalled as he spoke, "Our experimental conditions at the time were limited, and the scholars could only use very crude methods to test the properties of these monsters. Most of these tests yielded little result, but the scholars gradually formed a consensus—that between aberrations and the Gondor wasteland... there seemed to be some kind of ’uniformity’ or ’connection’..."

"The aberrations are an extension of the Gondor wasteland, the cells of that magic-contaminated land. These monsters wander outside the great walls, like the ’blood of the wasteland’ flowing through the Realm of the Mortals," Veronica said, "I know about this research and the corresponding conclusions. Over the years, I have also done some research at the center of the wasteland, but progress has stopped here... Perhaps our understanding of the world is still limited, or maybe it’s because we haven’t found the right method of observation. We cannot explain how these monsters ’grow from nothing’..."

Amber looked at Gawain, then at Veronica, lowered his head, and thought for a moment before interjecting, "Leaving everything else aside, their ’growing from nothing’ itself seems to have a problem. If these monsters could really grow infinitely in the wasteland environment, wouldn’t the Gondor wasteland be filled with aberrations by now after so many years? With the collapse of the great walls, we would’ve been overrun long ago—but now it seems they are not so ’endless.’ When the main force is hit hard, they still need to retreat temporarily. When a front line is cut off, they still face a shortage of troops..."

"That’s right, that’s the fact," Gawain nodded, unusually agreeing directly with Amber’s view, "Though the bards and playwrights have always described aberrations as ’endless,’ if they could indeed proliferate indefinitely in the wasteland environment, the Realm of the Mortals would not have held out in this war until now. The real truth is, vast stretches of the wasteland are still empty. Although there are many wandering aberrations, they are not infinite, and those dark priests still require time to gather armies.

"So the aberrations’ ’growth from nothing’ either has a limit or... it isn’t really ’proliferation,’ but rather some kind of..."

Gawain stopped halfway, carefully considering a more accurate term, but Veronica beside him spoke out what he wanted to say: "Perhaps some kind of ’transmission,’ or maybe just a high-speed ’regeneration.’"

"You mean, after the land outside the great walls is contaminated, the aberrations that appear ’out of thin air’ are actually ’teleported’ from the depths of the wasteland?" Amber’s eyes widened when he heard this, "They have space teleportation technology?"

"That’s not called technology, perhaps just an innate power, belonging to the ’divine evils,’" Gawain corrected Amber, "And ’teleportation’ is just a hypothesis. After all, we’ve never personally witnessed the process of an aberration teleporting from one place to another. Various detection devices on the battlefield have also not detected large-scale energy transfers or manifestations."

Gawain and the others discussed possible principles behind the various strange properties of aberrations. Goddess of Magic, who at first was quietly listening and pondering, suddenly spoke after a while: "Do you want to hear my thoughts?"

"Of course," Veronica immediately nodded and said, "Perspectives from the ’Source of All Magic’—that is certainly worth considering."

"...These days, I’ve been focusing on data related to the Gondor wasteland. I’ve acquired data collected near the wasteland by frontline troops and obtained many contaminated material samples. Now, with a live aberration in hand, through my research on them, I’ve started to suspect something..." Goddess of Magic said, her gaze falling on Gawain, "Do you remember the ’Unified Wave Hypothesis’ we discussed together?"

"Of course," Gawain immediately nodded, "But how is this connected to the wasteland?"

"The essence of all things in the world is wave form, and the boundaries between the material and the immaterial show variability. At a certain microscopic interval or ’threshold,’ the ’Entity Wave Domain’ where matter resides and the ’Ethereal Wave Domain’ of non-matter have the potential to transform into each other or even completely merge..." Goddess of Magic spoke slowly, and her conjecture widened Gawain’s eyes, "So is it possible—that a major explosion at the Well of Deep Blue turned the entire Gondor wasteland into a ’Chaos Wave Domain’ on a macroscopic scale, and that aberrations have the property of converting between the material and the immaterial, they always wander at the edge of the material world, perhaps this could explain some phenomena..."

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