Chapter 91: Secret Research Lab
When Lucia located Ranni, she was thoroughly immersed in auditing a sequence of ancient astrological texts inside the Great Library anchoring the absolute center of the main hall.
The chamber comprised a perfectly circular geometric room spanning a diameter of over twenty meters, its perimeter completely insulated by dozens of monolithic wooden bookshelves that towered more than ten meters toward the rafters. A massive, rotating mechanical machine connecting the ashlar floorboards directly to the high ceiling operated at the absolute center of the space. Extending outward from the side of this trunk-like magical axis was a thick, counter-weighted mechanical arm, upon which was mounted an exquisitely crafted, comfortable velvet chair—an engineering marvel designed to lift an operator to harvest any text across the library's entire vertical registry at any watch of the clock.
At this specific watch, the mechanical seat was suspended at the absolute apex of the room, hovering a mere yard beneath the structural roof. Ranni was leaning her spine against the leather cushions, her small hands holding the weight of a heavy treatise bound with a gold-embossed spine. While her eyes mined the data pages, she leisurely swung her long, slender legs beneath the hem of her pale blue mage robes, softly humming an un-mapped Carian lullaby to the empty air.
"Has your nervous system grown entirely accustomed to executing your reading assignments at that altitude, Princess?" Lucia asked as his boots cleared the entry threshold, his silver eyelashes lifting to track the slender silhouette whose back was turned to the floor.
A sharp, startled gasp violently tore from the upper rafters of the library, followed a microsecond later by a frantic, chaotic cascade of rustling silks. Ranni violently straightened her posture to re-align her balance, but the sudden physical jerk caused the heavy magic tome clutched within her fingers to slip past her guard, dropping toward the floorboards with a loud, echoey thud. By the time her active mana managed to arrest the secondary books across the desk, her chassis frantically spinning the seat to audit the baseline floor, her blue pupils locked squarely onto Lucia—who was standing near the door with an expression of barely suppressed amusement written across his face.
"You absolute bastard—!"
Ranni's aristocratic mask completely fractured into a state of pure, un-mitigated fury. Her right hand whipped through the air, seizing a thick, leather-bound lexicon from the cradle to launch the object in a high-velocity trajectory directly targeting Lucia's forehead plates. "Does your manual of foreign diplomacy omit the requirement to knock against the wood before breaching a lady's private perimeter?!"
Lucia extended a casual gauntlet through the air, effortlessly snapping the flying dictionary out of its flight track before the leather could kiss his silver horns, his features shifting to broadcast an image of absolute, un-fused innocence. "My memory channels preserve the data perfectly, Princess. The exact watch my boots cleared your outer courtyard, your personal handmaid wove her line into the palace to report my presence to your chair, correct? She comprised the exact administrative officer who escorted my mantle to this archway just a moment past."
Ranni's furious posture instantly went dead-still.
Running the internal data loops back across her memory banks, it appeared an administrative event of that specific nature had indeed logged its signature roughly ten minutes down the clock. However, across that watch, her intellect had been so thoroughly gridlocked by the primeval formulas written into her starlight texts that her jaw had merely generated a passive, automated syllable of compliance—leaving her conscious filters entirely blind to the words clearing the handmaid's teeth.
Now that her processors had aligned the full sequence of the misunderstanding, the Moon Princess found her ego locked in a state of extreme, suffocating embarrassment. Just as the blood was rushing to turn her pale cheeks a deep rose, her mind frantically searching the court dictionaries to forge a viable defensive excuse, Lucia casually waved his gauntlet to delete the friction from the floorboards, his tone smooth and entirely relaxed.
"But my own calculations suggest your focus was simply operating under a massive, high-voltage concentration loop to parse your sorceries, leaving your senses unable to immediately re-verify the material world outside. Forcing my boots through the threshold without a secondary verbal warning comprised a distinctly abrupt, un-optimized movement on my part. My shield will execute a more careful approach down the future timeline."
Ranni's blue pupils shifted through a rapid sequence of emotional calculations before she finally snapped her gaze away, her visor locking onto a distant marble molding as her voice emerged in a tiny, defensive murmur. "My office registers the explanation. Your house is granted an absolute amnesty across this turn... but your boots are conformed to preserve a stricter caution next time!"
"The baseline is secured—" Lucia answered the line, his jaw straining to preserve its flat courtly alignment, keeping the smile safely behind his teeth. "My carriage turned west to clear your gates today because my progression tree requires the diagnostic assistance of your intellect."
Ranni executed a fluid wave of her fingers. Guided by a shimmering, pale blue aura of glintstone mana, her frame floated weightlessly down from the high mechanical apparatus to claim the stones of the floor. Reaching out to retrieve the dictionary from Lucia's gauntlet, her eyelashes lifted. "Disclose the parameters. Identify the asset class your inventory lacks."
"My system requires your hand to engineer a trajectory... to guide my nervous system to trigger its initial magical awakening."
"Hm—" Ranni delivered an intuitive nod, her boots tracking the floor to systematically return the reference texts back to their assigned numeric slots across the shelves. But her fingers violently froze mid-movement the exact microsecond her logic parsed the syllables clearing the dragon youth's teeth. She slowly turned her chassis, her visor locked onto his profile. "Re-state the data. What specific bottleneck did your vocabulary just cite?"
She wove her blue robe across the space, closing the gap to survey the Ancient Dragon up and down with an un-blinking, intense focus, her small nose even tilting closer to sniff the wind surrounding his mantle before her brow furrowed into a knot of absolute bewilderment. "My sensory grid logs the reading stating that your genetic affinity index for ambient mana streams scores at a premier tier. By what manual of biology is it mathematically possible for your pathways to remain completely blind to magic power after clearing the state Enlightenment Ceremony?"
"The... Magical Enlightenment Ceremony?" Lucia's courtly mask froze into a rigid blank slate. "Identify the terminology. What blueprint defines that ritual?"
"It comprises a fundamental alchemical ritual that utilizes a high-purity glintstone core saturated with condensed starlight mana to function as a baseline conductor, guiding young apprentices who possess an innate magical talent to perceive and open their initial internal pathways!" Ranni explained, her beautiful blue eyes widening with an immense, academic incredulity. However, she truncated her lecture mid-phrase, her silver-gloved fingers reaching up to rub her forehead in a gesture of profound, helpless resignation. "The vocabulary is entirely worthless to your current inventory... pack your mantle; accompany my boots down the line—"
Lucia conformed his stride to track her slipstream, the two demigods navigating the full length of the circular library to drop anchor before a colossal, shadow-drenched bookshelf commanding the absolute opposite flank of the room.
Ranni extended her hand, her fingers gently applying a precise kinetic pressure to pull an ordinary, un-embossed text resting within the hidden corner of the third row. Instantly, a soft, heavy mechanical click reverberated through the stone behind the wood. The monolithic bookshelf systematically receded a foot into the wall, before its massive tracking tracks slowly rotated ninety degrees outward to reveal a wide, descending limestone passageway.
"The space nesting beyond this threshold comprises a private, highly restricted research laboratory engineered entirely on my personal design blueprints," Ranni introduced, her tone reclaiming its default, proud Carian gravity. She executed a sharp wave of her small hand through the air. "Advance the line!"
The two royal youths stepped through the frame, tracking a long, subterranean corridor where the regional illumination scores dangerously dim—the darkness managed only by a sequence of dark blue starlight lamps mounted every few paces along the masonry walls, projecting an eerie, liquid violet twilight across the stones.
Lucia's spatial processors immediately registered the data indicating that the corridor was cutting into the bedrock of the capital plateau at a very slight, continuous downward gradient. Following a non-stop march that consumed nearly ten minutes of the clock, a gargantuan, heavy stone gate deeply etched with millions of glowing runic circuits finally materialized across their path to seal the thoroughfare.
"These massive structural installations... your masons managed to excavate and compile this entire infrastructure within the span of the last few suns?" Lucia asked, his voice thick with a genuine, un-fused surprise.
"An absolute certainty," Ranni replied, her chin tilting upward with a matter-of-fact composure. "The absolute night my carriage initial dropped anchor before this estate, my eyes observed the full internal load-bearing geometry of the palace architecture. My hand spent the midnight watch drawing up the structural blueprints, before hand-delivering the files to the royal craftsmen ministries the next morning. The physical masonry finalized its compliance three or four days past. Regrettably, the intellectual database clutched by the architects of Leyndell regarding the mechanics of advanced cosmic sorcery remains dangerously shallow; their work scores vastly inferior to the standards set by my mother's guilds when executing permanent stabilization arrays... but the laboratory is sufficiently responsive to carry my calculations."
She wove her frame toward the threshold, her open palm dropping flat against the primary geometric wheel anchoring the center of the stone door, her pathways discharging a continuous stream of pure glintstone mana into the grid. A brilliant, dark blue light rapidly raced along the etched circuits like burning liquid starlight, and the entire monolithic stone gate ignited its indicators—looking exactly like the massive magical lifts Lucia's memories traced from the high-tier zones of his past life behind the screen.
A vertical sliver of blinding light cracked open along the absolute center of the gate. The twin heavy stone doors—each measuring half a meter of solid, reinforced stone density—systematically receded into the flanking wall slots to lay bare the interior chambers of the research laboratory.
This comprised an immense, cavernous underground macrocosm whose volumetric dimensions completely out-registered the parameters of the grand library upstairs. Looking through the sweeping perspective, Lucia's visors logged the vast quantities of precious magical materials and rare crystal elements hand-delivered by Queen Marika's Female Official—every single crate had been systematically broken down, categorized, and arrayed across specialized storage quadrants. Furthermore, the immense floorboards were mapped by a massive directory of complex, un-mapped geometric arrays, backed by dozens of astronomical instruments and magical artifact apparatuses whose mechanical designs appeared exceptionally intricate.
"Evaluate the layout, Prince. Does the engineering configuration score within the parameters of your satisfaction?" Ranni asked, her delivery intentionally maintaining a flat, calm courtly indifference, yet a distinct, irrepressible sliver of pure childlike pride wove across her lips—looking exactly like a young dragon sovereign who had successfully cleared her vaults to flaunt her finest treasures before an outland traveler.
Lucia finally forced his cognitive processors to snap out of their daze, his head executing an automatic nod of profound ratification. "The architecture... completely out-classes my expectations, Princess. Magnificent work."
Auditing the sheer material velocity of the hall's construction, his modern mind was once again thoroughly awed by the terrifying industrial and logistical output clutched by the Golden Dynasty's central ministries. But cross-referencing the data of the lakeside tournament pavilion—which had literally materialized from the mud within the span of a single midnight watch a few suns past—this scale of subterranean palace renovation comprised nothing more than a baseline task for the royal craftsmen.
While the Carian Dynasty anchoring the distant Western Continent scored slightly lower across the parameters of total aggregate military manpower, their specialized development within the sector of the magical industry far out-registered the baseline technologies of the Erdtree. Even down the historical lines behind the screen, the cataclysmic, near-impenetrable magical defense matrix safeguarding the perimeter of the Carian Manor was more than sufficient to verify that scientific superiority.
Following the termination of the Forbidden War a thousand winters past, the Ancient Dragon Dynasty had crawled backward from the absolute precipice of civilizational annihilation, expending an infinite volume of generational labor to reconstruct their spires to their current height. Yet, balanced against the two young, hyper-aggressive empires that had risen across the last few centuries, his nation had unconsciously fallen drastically behind across several critical technological sectors.
How many winters must bleed off the calendar before my gauntlet can supply the necessary counter-data to mend these national deficits?
Lucia clutched zero definitive answers inside his strategic matrix.
Right as his consciousness was turning over the macro-political equations of the continent, the sharp, resonant snap of Ranni's fingers violently cut through the silence of the vault.
A sequence of heavy, stumbling, mechanical scraping sounds suddenly erupted from the deepest, un-lit basements of the research hall. A towering, monolithic shadow class materialized across the absolute outer edge of his peripheral tracking field, sliding across the limestone flags with an extraordinarily high, terrifyingly smooth kinetic velocity.
The exact microsecond Lucia's optical sensors mapped the baseline physical silhouette of the approaching nightmare, a freezing spike of raw adrenaline violently shot straight down his spinal column. Guided entirely by his permanent, hard-wired combat instincts, his chassis executed a violent half-step lunge forward, his left arm plate expanding to forcefully shield Ranni's robed form entirely behind his center of gravity, while his right gauntlet un-clasped to unleash a roaring, crackling sphere of dark red Ancient Dragon Lightning across the dark!
The Iron Virgin—?!?! his mind screamed in absolute horror.
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