Chapter 176: The Great Egg
The next morning, with Jenny left behind at the villa, Grawvor led the rest of them to the central magic tower — eighteen stories tall — and they entered on the fifth floor.
The moment they stepped inside, Evan spotted a black, egg-shaped object resting at the center of the room, held within a force field that gave off a soft, gentle glow. The thing was enormous — over six cubits long and more than two cubits high — though whether it was some creature's egg or an artificial construct, there was no telling yet.
The instant Evan and Jessica entered, their eyes went straight to it, same as everyone else already gathered there.
Few people had access to this floor at all — not even Grawvor qualified. Only ten stood in the room, six of them clearly Solomon mages by their robes, and two dressed in a style unlike anything from Tyrenese. Evan and Jessica recognized them and gave a small nod in greeting.
Balad and Youji were Arcanists from the Mirage Academy of Numonxi. The night before, Evan's group had paid them a visit — Evan's first encounter with mages from the Numonxi Empire, and he'd been genuinely curious. The conversation had gone pleasantly enough, at least on the surface.
Evan had come away with a rough picture of the Mirage Academy. As mages of the Numonxi Empire, they should have counted, in principle, as rivals to Tyrenese mages — the two regions held different faiths entirely — but scholarly exchange between mages, it turned out, proceeded normally regardless, which surprised Evan more than he'd expected.
This gathering at Solomon had come together specifically because of the great egg before them. Whatever else divided these mages, the pursuit of new knowledge had drawn them all to the same room.
Evan stood studying the egg, murmuring quietly with Jessica, unable to decide whether it was artificial or some creature's shell. Jessica couldn't say either.
Yov Simhak, headmaster of Solomon Academy and a high-ranking legendary mage, surveyed the gathered crowd and spoke. "My thanks to the mages of both academies for coming. What you see before you — we've studied it for a long while now, and we still don't know what's inside. What we can confirm is that it's an artificial construct. It's made of metal."
Simhak wore a pleasant smile, though he'd had little choice but to extend this open invitation to Hollingburton and the Mirage Academy alike. No one knew quite how word had leaked, but Hollingburton's crafty headmaster had already sent a letter of greeting mentioning the object directly, leaving him no way to avoid inviting them.
Not that he'd been happy about Hollingburton merely pretending to send observers either — since Solomon's own strength fell short of Hollingburton's, he'd gone ahead and invited the Mirage Academy as well, if only to make the whole affair look properly balanced. Better that than keeping the discovery to himself and failing to crack it alone.
"Made of metal — has anyone tried scanning the interior with magic?" Balad asked.
"We've exhausted every method we can think of. Magic simply can't penetrate its interior at all. It behaves like some special anti-magic metal. We've tried acid, we've tried fire — nothing leaves so much as a mark on it."
"You've tried all of that?"
"Indeed. I won't pretend otherwise — not a scratch on it. We even burned it for a full two hours, and it stayed cold to the touch the entire time," Simhak said.
Evan asked, "How did you find it in the first place?" The Mirage Academy delegates turned toward Simhak at once, equally curious.
"We found it at a goblin ruin. As you know, ten thousand years ago, the goblin empire stood alongside humanity's three great empires. Goblins had little aptitude for magic, but they were renowned for their mechanical civilization — the strongest branch of it that ever survived among the great civilizations, formidable enough to be feared. Then, overnight, something changed. No one alive today knows exactly what happened. Some say they angered the gods, that they were struck down by some forbidden art — a fireball like a thousand suns lighting up the entire night sky. The goblins vanished almost entirely in that single night, and humanity suffered from the fallout as well. Ever since, humanity abandoned mechanical research and turned entirely to the study of magic instead — which is how we've reached where we are today," Simhak said.
Hearing this, Evan sank into thought. A light like a thousand suns burning — wasn't that a description of a nuclear detonation? His mind drifted back, unbidden, to a classroom from his old life. He hadn't been in good health back then, but he'd still made it to school on occasion, and that particular physics teacher had never been much of a teacher, though he'd been an excellent talker. Evan remembered an entire class period spent almost entirely on bluster, somewhere in the middle of which the man had explained the basic principle of an atomic bomb — simple enough, he'd claimed: bring two pieces of highly enriched uranium together past a certain critical mass, and that was it. What exactly that critical mass was, the teacher hadn't known either. The bomb simply detonated on its own — a superheated fireball first, then a shockwave from the compressed air, finally a mushroom cloud rising as radioactive dust began to spread.
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Jessica noticed Evan looked lost in some memory and asked quietly, "What's wrong? What did that make you think of?"
"Nothing important. Just something unrelated," Evan answered just as quietly.
"You found it at a goblin ruin — are there more goblin ruins out there?" Youji asked.
"Indeed there are. Historians dismiss it as nonsense, but as mages, we can't afford to ignore something like this. One of our own students stumbled onto it quite by chance, while traveling," Simhak said, clearly unwilling to elaborate any further. Evan suspected there was more to the story than he was letting on.
Evan gave a faint smile. "Might we touch it?"
"Of course. Please," Simhak said, nodding, glancing toward David Lewis standing nearby. Lewis understood at once, forming a strange gesture with his hands and beginning an incantation. A ring of shimmering, multicolored light bloomed around the group standing behind them. The four visitors startled, and Simhak said, "No need for alarm. Mage Lewis has raised a protective ward — we still don't know what's inside this egg, after all."
The four relaxed. Simhak began his own incantation, and the faint glow surrounding the egg went dark. It rose slowly into the air, a low platform emerging from the floor beneath it, lifting the egg to the same height as the gathered mages. Around them, intricate sigils surfaced across the floor, coalescing into an enormous hexagram array that shimmered with cascading light.
The Solomon mages were clearly being careful — Evan couldn't help wondering whether they'd already been burned once by this egg, in some way not yet mentioned.
The four visitors crowded closer. Evan tapped the shell — no echo came back from within. He turned. "What's its density like?"
"Very low. It floats on water," Simhak said.
Evan's brow furrowed. That suggested the interior was hollow. He ran through the metals he knew — aside from a handful of light metals from Earth, like the alkali metals, most were denser than water by a good margin.
He ran his hand gently over the shell's surface, then stopped abruptly. It felt extraordinarily smooth — smooth enough that it should have reflected light like a mirror. And yet it was black, absorbing light entirely rather than reflecting it. What was going on here? Could it actually be absorbing light itself?
Understanding struck him at once. He layered Magnification onto his own eyes — the surface remained perfectly smooth even under that enhancement. He turned to Simhak. "Do you have a magnifying lens?"
He wasn't worried Solomon would lack one — ever since Leonardo had revealed the principle behind the microscope, lens-crafting had spread like wildfire across the magical world, and a renowned academy like Solomon would surely be keeping pace with the trend.
Simhak looked at him with curiosity. "We do, of course. I'll have someone fetch one."
He spoke a couple of words into the air, and after a moment, a flicker of light produced a full set of magnifying lenses before him. Evan took one — a twelvefold magnifier — and studied the shell's surface through it. Still nothing visible; the surface remained smooth as a mirror. He set the lens floating in midair, then added a second, a thirtyfold lens, suspended just behind the first, carefully adjusting the focus. Together, the pair formed a compound lens assembly magnifying the view a full three hundred and sixty times.
Looking through it again, the surface remained flawlessly smooth. Evan pressed his own hand into view for comparison — his skin, long since rough and worn beyond recognition as ordinary skin, showed clear texture under the lens. Something seemed to click for Simhak at the sight.
Evan added a third lens. Without a proper tube to house them, the assembly still managed roughly a thousandfold magnification. Dust motes drifting in the air became clearly visible through the lenses now — and yet the egg's surface stayed perfectly, unnervingly smooth.
"Why not add another lens?" Simhak asked, understanding Evan's intent — to examine the surface at the microscopic level and uncover something new.
"No point to it. We're close to the limit already. Adding more lenses won't push much past two thousandfold," Evan said flatly. The others found this puzzling — shouldn't adding more lenses simply keep increasing the magnification?
Seeing their confusion, Evan didn't bother explaining. The limit had to do with the wavelength of visible light itself, and this world's optics hadn't reached that level of understanding yet, let alone anything resembling an electron microscope. Optical magnification alone could never reveal molecules or atoms directly. A thought surfaced in Evan's mind — perhaps this metal's atomic structure was arranged with extraordinary regularity, forming a perfect crystalline lattice, which would explain its near-indestructible strength.
"So what did you see?" Simhak asked.
"Nothing directly. But I can theorize. This is a special metal, inherently anti-magic, with an atomic structure arranged with flawless perfection — which gives it extraordinary strength, strong enough that ordinary methods simply can't breach it," Evan said.
"Atoms? You're explaining this through the old Xilun atomic theory, rather than elemental doctrine?" Simhak's brow furrowed.
"That's right. Picture the atoms arranged with perfect regularity, the internal stresses distributed flawlessly. But why is it black? Could it be absorbing energy from outside itself?" Evan said.
"You're not wrong there. It does absorb outside energy — magical energy especially, which is exactly why we've had to seal it behind an array. We still have no idea what's inside it," Simhak said.
That answer lit something up in all four visitors' eyes at once. Balad's hand flared with light immediately, casting it over the great egg.