Chapter 415: The Technical Challenges Behind the Communicator

A cheap, convenient, stable, and reliable means of long-distance communication—its impact on societal development is undeniable. Especially now, after Gawain dismantled the old noble powers in the Southern Territories and began integrating and rebuilding the New South, its significance rivals that of the very firearms that toppled the old aristocracy.

Many factors constrain social progress. For the rapidly expanding and booming population of the Cecil domain, the two greatest challenges to maintaining control over the South are transportation and communication. The ability to move goods and people across the territory, to build infrastructure, to circulate information, and the overall responsiveness and effectiveness of the governing structure—all hinge on advances in transportation and communication technology.

Efficient transportation enables swift movement of resources and personnel, ensuring production and construction, fostering commerce, and tightening connections between regions so they don’t drift apart. In emergencies, it’s the foundation for rapid military deployment. Meanwhile, effective communication allows the government office to monitor the entire territory, ensuring timely and smooth intelligence flow, and enabling the fastest possible response to crises. Achieving both depends on technological and productive development.

Gawain saw Ansu’s feudal noble system as a relic of backwardness, but it was an inevitable consequence of limited transportation and communication technology. Rulers couldn’t promptly grasp situations beyond their domains, nor dispatch troops quickly to distant frontiers. The difficulty of moving supplies between cities cemented the nobles’ fragmented, city-based fiefdoms. In fact, until the year 557 of Ansu, nobles and scholars still upheld this ancient maxim:

“A lord’s effective domain is as far as his knights can reach within three days and nights; his absolute dominion extends only as far as his mage advisor’s Eagle Eye spell can see.”

This saying had endured for centuries—until the summer of 557, when a noble mage named Delta from the Holy Spirit Plains invented a crystal device that amplified the Eagle Eye spell. Installed atop his mage tower, it expanded the lord’s “absolute dominion.”

In the following decade, acting on this visionary noble’s advice, the Ansu royal family began construction in 567 of the “Kingdom Avenue” (also called the Cross Artery)—a grand road centered on Saint Sunir City, stretching east-west and north-south across the Holy Spirit Plains and extending into the four border regions. This greatly strengthened royal control over the realm. Nobles across the land soon followed suit, building roads within their territories. Alongside the successful breeding of the new “White Feather” griffins and the introduction of the “Messenger Passage Act,” Ansu’s transportation and communication saw major improvements, marking a significant leap forward in noble and royal governance.

Yet, the centuries-old feudal system’s inertia remained strong. Except for the Kingdom Avenue, nearly all roads were fragmented by the patchwork of fiefdoms. Road standards and carriage specifications varied wildly between noble domains. Griffon messengers remained symbols of noble prestige—costly and far from widespread. Nobles clung to their pride, reserve, and self-imposed isolation, enjoying the benefits of strengthened local rule while instinctively resisting developments that might undermine their absolute authority.

Given enough time, this deadlock would have eventually broken. The old nobles couldn’t halt progress forever. But unfortunately, before the Kingdom Avenue could reach the borders, the Mistmoon Civil War erupted.

So even today, Ansu still relies on the king’s investiture of vassals, and vassals’ investiture of subordinates, to maintain order. The civil war severely drained the kingdom’s strength; surviving nobles barely have the resources to maintain roads, and the White Feather griffin population plummeted. Transportation and communication have nearly regressed to pre-557 levels.

Worse still, the horrors of the Mistmoon War—when allied forces stormed the Holy Spirit Plains via the Kingdom Avenue—are still fresh in the minds of nobles and the Second Dynasty’s royal family. In the war’s later stages, noble power waned, and roads leading directly to castles became liabilities, sources of anxiety. Postwar population decline and chaos forced nobles into defensive retreat, a passive regression that persists to this day.

It wasn’t until 735 that a resurrected ancestor rose up, wielding the authority of the founding forebears, backed by millions of years of experience from two people and one star, and disdainful of the traditional noble system, began to build Gawain’s new Cecil order in the most unorthodox way.

Looking at the still-experimental communicator before him, Gawain’s mind saw more than just a device. He envisioned orderly roads connecting the South and even all of Ansu.

Transportation and communication—he had cement and rapidly advancing magi-mechanical technology for the former. For the latter, he finally glimpsed the fruits of Kamail and Rebecca’s tireless efforts. The two age-old problems plaguing all rulers seemed to have solutions.

“This communicator uses a hybrid rune array,” Kamail floated beside the device, explaining some technical details to Gawain. “Most of the runes come from Sleeper technology, but the sections controlling magical resonance still rely on traditional transmission spells. Unfortunately, we haven’t figured out how the Sleeper network transmits signals through the natural ‘primal mana field,’ so this device currently only works within a standard mana field.”

Gawain was intrigued. “Standard mana field… like the range of a Mana Obelisk?”

“Yes. The standard mana field generated by a Mana Obelisk is like the ‘surface of a lake’ you described. The communicator’s ripples propagate through the mana field, traveling from one obelisk to another. So we call this communication method ‘Mana Net Communication,’” Kamail explained. “I’ve devised a way to use Mana Obelisks as relays for continuous signal transmission and succeeded on a small scale, but the effects over longer distances remain to be tested…”

“How do these communicators pair or identify each other?” Gawain asked. “If I have a hundred of these devices scattered around, how do I use one to contact a specific other device?”

This was a question Gawain had been curious about. Kamail’s communicator was very different from traditional transmission spells or the grand Elven Walls. It combined transmission magic with Sleeper technology, using the “standard mana field” generated by the advanced Mana Obelisks as its medium. In principle, it was more like an unfiltered broadcast device, sending signals through the mana field for all similar devices to receive. Without a matching pairing or identification method, all signals would be openly broadcast, turning the entire mana field into chaotic noise—hardly the “communication network” Gawain envisioned.

“We referenced technology from the ancient Gondor era,” Kamail said, seemingly anticipating Gawain’s question, his tone proud. “You’re an Imperial man yourself—you should know about the Empire’s information network. It was already operational during the Spark Era.”

Gawain nodded, recalling knowledge from his memories. “Oh, yes, I know that. When I was a knight apprentice, I often listened to operas broadcast from the imperial capital at my mentor’s home. That device could not only receive broadcasts but also allow conversations with people in the capital. Back then, only noble or wealthy merchant families had a ‘Deep Blue Terminal,’ but even so, it was remarkably widespread for its time.”

Before Kamail could respond, Rebecca’s voice came through the communicator—she hadn’t hung up and had been making faces while Gawain and Kamail talked. “Wow! So those communicators were really that common back then?”

“Compared to the number of transmission spells and devices now… Gondor’s communication technology truly was a marvel,” Kamail sighed softly, then continued, “I added a ‘resonance’ structure to this device. Only signals matching the resonance conditions can be transmitted between devices. To achieve this, I used four basic wind-element runes and four neutral runes, scrambled and randomly arranged on a three-by-three slot baseplate. They don’t form any rune patterns or spell effects, but based on mana resonance principles, when another device with the same rune arrangement participates in the magical oscillation, this ‘resonance baseplate’ produces an identical response…”

Kamail paused, giving Gawain and Hetty time to calculate and ponder, then went on: “There are many possible arrangements of the eight runes on the three-by-three baseplate. When one device calls another, it uses a rune trigger set—like a ‘palette on an experimental bench’—to easily assemble the rune structure of the target. I just controlled this process with my own mana, but for ordinary users, the rune trigger set is here, on the side of the device…”

“Dialing,” Gawain interrupted, feeling Kamail’s heavy use of ancient Gondor and modern magical terminology made a simple process sound overly complicated. “We can just call this process dialing. Also, we can number the eight runes from zero to seven. That way, each communicator has a unique string of numbers as its identifier, making dialing easier for users. After all, remembering numbers is simpler than memorizing runes, and numbers are easier to record in tables.”

Kamail, Hetty, and even Rebecca on the other end all seemed accustomed to Gawain’s habit of acting like a seasoned expert whenever a new gadget appeared. They accepted his suggestion calmly.

To be honest, Gawain wasn’t quite used to it yet…

(End of chapter)