Chapter 167: Newton's Laws
Over the next few days, Evan took the two of them sightseeing — around the campus, up into the mountains nearby, and back to the market once more. Andrea bought a handful of small trinkets, a magic top among them, all of it paid for by Evan. He picked up two little gifts for Tina as well — a magical ecosphere and an owl — which naturally prompted Andrea to demand an owl of her own, and Evan bought her one too.
On the way back, they passed a man coming the other way — golden hair, blue eyes, strikingly handsome, tall and lean. At the sight of Evan, he offered a gentleman's bow. "Good day, honored ladies and gentleman. I'm Reinhardt von Rosenkram. Might I ask if there's a magical market nearby?"
"Good day. Head that way — less than five miles," Evan said, pointing toward the market. "You're a mage?"
"I am, though this is my first visit to Norse. I heard there's a magical market during the Plowing Festival and thought I'd come see what's on offer. And your names, if I may ask?"
The three of them gave their names, and Reinhardt took his leave with impeccable courtesy. Evan thought nothing more of it, but Reinhardt walked away deep in thought, a cold glint in his eye. He remembered this man perfectly well — the one who'd ruined his scheme back on Shrimp Peninsula. That night, under bright moonlight, Evan hadn't noticed him at all, hidden in the brush, but Reinhardt had seen both him and Jessica clearly enough. He'd lingered in that town for several more days afterward, coming to understand just how reckless his plan had been.
He'd never imagined that a forgotten backwater like that — nothing but a nowhere town, by any outsider's reckoning — actually housed not just Hollingburton's own transport array, staffed year-round by real talent, but that the town's unassuming little chapel hid a genuine master in Father Storm as well. Either one of them could have crushed him without effort.
Only then had he understood how small a player he truly was, how green, how shallow his own magical skill still ran.
He'd come here now hoping to see Hollingburton for himself, perhaps even find a way in, to further his own training. What opportunity might present itself, he still didn't know.
The Plowing Festival drew to a close before long. Leonardo and Tina said their goodbyes, and Robin's party bid Evan farewell as well — Andrea plainly reluctant to leave, though after considerable coaxing, Evan finally managed to send her off with the others.
Once they'd gone, Evan felt genuinely lighter. Some part of him still leaned toward avoidance where matters of the heart were concerned — no one could ever quite make sense of feelings like that. Best to take things one step at a time.
The latest issue of Magic arrived, and several articles caught Evan's attention. One, by an alchemist named Melo, was titled A Device for Generating Electrical Current — the man had accidentally invented a battery. He'd discovered, by chance, that inserting two different metals into a certain dragon-acid solution and connecting them with a wire caused the metal leaves of an electroscope to spring open. Evan recognized it at once — wasn't this the basic principle of a voltaic pile? Melo had spent months building on the discovery, proposing the concept of an electrical circuit, and his battery had come to be known as the Melo Cell.
Another article concerned magic itself — Heathermere's Analysis of Magical Force Fields, approaching the subject for the first time not through elemental theory but through the lens of force fields, finding that the fields produced by every school of magic bore striking similarities to one another. On its surface, the paper seemed measured and orthodox, but Evan could sense real doubt about elemental doctrine simmering beneath it.
The standout piece, though, built on the earlier work of Matale, in which Newton proposed, for the first time, the law of inertia, the law of action and reaction, and the fundamental law of mechanics — that an object's acceleration is directly proportional to the net force acting upon it and inversely proportional to its mass, with the direction of acceleration matching the direction of that net force.
Weren't these Earth's own three laws of motion? Evan felt genuinely startled. He knew of Newton — that same alchemist from Rotterberg he'd once spoken with, already working on gravity. Had the fundamental laws governing the motion of matter really ended up being worked out by him, in the end? These three laws alone were more than enough to secure the man's reputation as a master of the field. Evan wondered what others made of it, and decided, after some thought, to write a paper of his own. Coming from Earth, he knew exactly what this discovery was worth. A thought stirred in him — why not ride this momentum and leave his own name etched into history alongside it?
With that in mind, he took up his pen and wrote the title: On the Manifold Applications of Newtonian Mechanics. He opened by praising Newton's genuine brilliance, then pivoted to introduce the concept of absolute space and time — that the laws governing matter held identically across every inertial reference frame — and formally coined the term physics itself. Newton's own paper had gestured toward this idea without stating it outright; Evan made it explicit. He also proposed the principle of parsimony — that between two equally valid explanations for the same phenomenon, absent further evidence, the simpler explanation should be taken as correct.
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He went on to describe the practical applications of the three laws in detail. Nowhere in the paper did he say so outright, but the Creator had been quietly written out of the picture entirely.
Evan submitted the paper. Though framed as an academic work, it rode entirely on the coattails of Newton's own — Evan worried it might not clear review at all. Fortunately, word came through within days that it had passed. He had no idea just how contentious the internal debate over his paper had been, ultimately approved by only the narrowest of margins, appearing in the same issue as Newton's own new paper: Universal Gravitation.
The issue caused an immediate sensation the moment it went out. Evan understood exactly what this meant — the foundation stone of physics as a discipline had just been laid. Since Evan had coined the term "physics" himself, everyone seemed to find it a fitting label — in truth, magic and physics had already begun to diverge as separate fields, though this world had always understood mages and alchemists as pursuing overlapping research anyway, so no one found it especially strange. Mages, after all, were forever probing at the nature of the world.
Newton became an instant celebrity. Ortlando sent him a formal invitation to lecture at the school, which he accepted with genuine pleasure.
Evan was delighted at the news, and Xiaoshuang no less so. When Newton arrived, greeted warmly by Ortlando and the assembled faculty, he gave an impromptu speech. "Ladies and gentlemen, my thanks for Hollingburton's warm welcome. This academy, with its long and storied history, has produced countless mages and alchemists — the celebrated alchemist Matale himself was once a student here. He described the principle of inertia over a century ago; I've simply made it more precise, building on his foundation. If I have seen further, it is only because I stand on the shoulders of giants.
"For the achievement I bring you today, I owe thanks to another mage as well — the one who first pointed out to me that gravitation exists between all things, and who first told me that only the language of mathematics could give a quantitative description to any true knowledge. That same man, after my paper's publication, was the first to use the phrase 'inertial reference frame' with any precision, the first to coin the very word 'physics.' My friend, Evan Wang..."
Thunderous applause filled the hall. Evan, standing among the crowd, felt genuinely embarrassed hearing himself credited this way — he'd only nudged Newton along knowing full well what the answer would be, and he'd harbored an ulterior motive of his own besides, curious whether this world's physical laws truly matched Earth's. Now he knew — at least within the bounds of Newtonian mechanics, the two worlds aligned perfectly. But what, then, of magic?
Once his speech ended, Newton smiled toward Evan. "Wang. Good to see you here — I have questions I'd like to discuss with you. Xiaoshuang, hello there." He stepped down from the stage and made his way over.
Evan rose, smiling as well, and gave him a light punch on the shoulder. "Didn't expect you'd turn into a great theorist, touching on the very domain of the divine." Xiaoshuang flew up in delight.
"Ha! If not for your nudge, I'd probably still be chasing shadows now. And I've actually become a mage — I found something in the theory of gravity and mechanics that, well, I'd assumed only applied to my alchemy, but it turns out it's affected my magic too. Some invisible force seems to have carried over, and I've broken through in magic as a result," Newton said.
Evan froze for a moment. Theory affecting magic directly — hadn't he made his own theoretical contributions too? Why hadn't he felt anything like this? Then again — when he'd worked out fantasy-born theory, a lich shouldn't have been able to summon anything outside dark-aligned creatures, and yet he had, successfully. But his own achievements in electrical theory — why hadn't those opened up lightning magic for him?
Could it be that the knowledge wasn't truly his own — that he'd simply recited what he already knew from elsewhere, and so received no reward for it? If that were the case, the implications ran deep. Or was there some other explanation entirely?
Newton's words had sharpened Evan's thinking considerably, a thousand possibilities flashing through his mind in an instant. He smiled. "Congratulations, then. What did you break through into?"
"Gravity manipulation, and spatial magic too — tied to shifts in reference frame, force fields appearing seemingly from nowhere in non-inertial systems. Too much to explain all at once. I'll come find you after dinner. I'm here on Hollingburton's invitation for another four or five days. After that — I've been invited to take up the post of Minister of Magic for the Kingdom of Kabudan. Their king is granting me a barony," Newton said.
Ortlando arrived at his side. "Sorry to interrupt your reunion — Baron Newton, if you'd come this way, there are several laboratories in the half-plane worth touring first."
Evan nodded, watching Newton's back as he was led away, still turning the question over in his mind. Jessica approached. "Hello. I hadn't realized you knew Baron Newton personally. He's a Sacred Mage and Sacred Alchemist now — I'd love to reach that level myself someday."
The titles of Sacred Mage and Sacred Alchemist were honorary distinctions, generally awarded only to those who'd made major contributions to understanding nature's mysteries — they said nothing about raw combat strength, though anyone who earned them invariably carried real depth in magic or alchemy.
This world had its own peculiar quirk — even an ordinary person with no magical talent at all could, through a genuine breakthrough in natural theory, seem to be rewarded by the heavens themselves, becoming an alchemist or a mage as if by grace. Evan finally recalled the thing that set this world apart from his own — he'd assumed, bound by his own understanding of physical law, that everything here worked exactly as it had on Earth. It seemed that wasn't quite true after all.
"By the way — you wrote those papers on the electric eel and the werewolf mechanism. Did either one open up any magical breakthrough for you?" Evan asked Jessica.