Chapter 251
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The minds the Empire needed. The minds the Empire did not need.
And the minds that must never be handed over to the enemy, whether the Empire needed them or not.
Salzmann belonged to the third category.
Before the regression, a technology called the Mana nuclear bomb existed.
Its principle was as follows:
The mana within a mana stone was originally trapped inside a stable crystal lattice, leaking out little by little over its entire lifetime. Mana stones could serve as sources of light and heat because of this slow leakage. It would not be far off to call mana engineering the study of controlling that rate of extraction.
Yet among ten thousand tons of refined mana stone, there was a rare variant that might yield only a handful, if that. It possessed an unstable resonant core. The material the academic world named 「Critical Stone」 released all the mana trapped within it at once the moment a powerful wave struck its core.
The problem was that the release itself became another wave and struck a neighboring core. That core rebounded and struck the next one.