Chapter 257: The Birth of a New Substance

For the next few days, Adèle no longer spent all night in the alchemy laboratory, and Lia also temporarily set aside her own research.

The two of them became secretive, and Adèle would often sneak into Lia’s room while Klein was busy in his own laboratory.

“No, Senior, you can no longer think of ‘fire’ as an independent element.” Lia, holding two glass spheres that emitted a faint glow after being enchanted, was trying her best to explain the concept of atoms to Adèle.

“Think of it as a social event. This red ‘oxygen’ atom is a social butterfly; it’s very lively and always wants to pair up with other atoms. And this gray ‘carbon’ atom can also get along with it.

When they combine violently, they release a large amount of light and heat. That’s ‘combustion’.”

Lia touched the two glass spheres together, and they glowed even brighter.

Adèle sat opposite her, her brow furrowed, her pretty face a picture of struggle.

“So… the essence of so-called alchemy is to play matchmaker for these invisible particles, getting them to re-pair?” Adèle tried to digest it in terms she could understand.

“That’s a good way of looking at it,” Lia nodded in approval.

“And the periodic table is the family tree for these particles. Once you know their tempers and dispositions, you can better arrange their ‘social events’.”

Just then, the sound of unhurried footsteps came from the hallway outside.

Lia’s nerves instantly tensed. With a wave of her hand, all the glass spheres on the table vanished, withdrawn into her spatial ring.

Adèle also immediately sat up straight, picked up a book titled The Planting and Care of Flowering Plants, and pretended to read it intently.

The footsteps paused at the door for a moment, then continued on, heading towards the meditation room at the top of the tower.

Both of them let out a sigh of relief at the same time.

“That scared me to death!” Adèle patted her chest. “I feel like we’re apprentices peeking at forbidden books.”

“Pretty much,” Lia grumbled, still shaken. “If Klein caught me tutoring you, the scene would definitely be spectacular.”

However, the risk was worth it.

Inspired by Lia, Adèle’s thinking was completely opened up.

She no longer obsessed over how to optimize old alloy formulas but began to ponder a brand-new question.

“Lia, if you say that all matter is composed of these particles… is it possible for us to… break apart the particles of one substance, then recombine them with the particles of another to create a brand-new substance that doesn’t exist in nature?”

One evening, Adèle suddenly proposed this bold idea.

Lia’s eyes lit up; this was exactly the result she had hoped to see.

She didn’t give a direct answer but instead asked, “An excellent hypothesis. So, what’s the next step? How will you design an experiment to verify it?”

Adèle pondered for a long time, her eyes shimmering with excitement.

“With a mana field! Just like you said, use a mana field of a specific frequency to shake those particles and make their original connections break!

I remember reading in the notes of some masters that certain specific mana fluctuations can make some metals inert or reactive, but they all attributed it to mysticism. Maybe that’s the key!”

She decided to choose two of the most common and cheapest metals—tin and iron.

In past alchemy, alloys of these two metals were brittle and rusted easily, making them almost worthless.

But now, what Adèle intended to do was not to melt and mix them, but to completely shatter and re-bond them.

For the next week, Adèle practically lived in her alchemy workshop.

Lia punctually delivered food and revitalizing potions to her every day.

She watched Adèle fail time and time again, her own heart filled with anxiety.

In the first experiment, the frequency of the mana field was too high, and the metals in the crucible vaporized directly, causing a small explosion that blackened half of Adèle’s face.

In the second experiment, the frequency was too low, and the two metals had no reaction at all, only heating up into a molten liquid that, once cooled, was still a useless alloy.

Adèle was not discouraged. She strictly followed the method Lia had taught her.

After every failure, she meticulously recorded all the parameters—mana field strength, frequency, duration, ambient temperature. Then she would change only one variable and attempt the next trial.

Her alchemy notebook was filled with red crosses marking her failures.

Until this day.

After the last failure, Adèle had grown somewhat numb.

Following the data in her notebook, she set a brand-new value she had never tried before, one that fell between the frequencies of two previous failures.

“Last time. If this fails, I’m going to sleep,” she muttered to herself and activated the alchemical array.

A faint blue mana field enveloped the crucible, and the tin and iron ingots inside began to emit a weak red glow.

Time ticked by, second by second. No violent reaction occurred, nor were there any signs of vaporization or explosion.

Just as Adèle thought this was yet another failure and was preparing to shut down the array, the light at the center of the crucible suddenly changed.

It was a peculiar silver-gray, as if moonlight had been fused into the metal.

She held her breath, carefully maintaining the stability of the mana field.

After a while, the light dissipated, and an ingot of a beautiful silver-gray color lay quietly at the bottom of the crucible.

Success?

Adèle’s heart began to pound. She used a spell to cool the metal ingot and took it out.

The feel of it in her hand was strange; it was at least half as light as an iron ingot of the same volume, yet its texture was incredibly hard.

She took out her engraving knife, crafted from an enchanted diamond, and scraped it across the metal ingot with all her might.

It left only a nearly invisible white scratch.

Adèle sucked in a breath of cold air. This hardness far surpassed that of any known alloy!

She conducted another test.

She condensed a standard Arcane Missile and shot it at the metal ingot.

The moment the missile made contact with the ingot, the faint blue arcane energy seemed to be interfered with by something, its power inexplicably weakening by ten or twenty percent.

In the end, it only left a small scorch mark on the surface.

It… it actually had resistance to magic!

Adèle’s hands began to tremble slightly.

Success! She had created an unprecedented substance!

She was ecstatic but didn’t immediately go to Klein.

She forced herself to calm down and compiled all the experimental data from the past few days, including the records of over a hundred failures and the parameters of the final success.

Then, with clear and orderly logic, she wrote a thesis.

The thesis started with “Observation” on the limitations of existing alloys, moved to the “Hypothesis” that atoms could be reconstructed via a mana field, then to the “Experiment” section with its detailed controlled variable method and data records, and finally the “Conclusion,” which clearly elaborated on the various superior properties of the new alloy and boldly proposed that its magic resistance might stem from its unique atomic arrangement interfering with mana fluctuations.

The entire thesis was logically rigorous and powerfully argued.

Two days later, when Klein emerged from his laboratory, he saw the brand-new thesis on the study table, along with the metal ingot shimmering with a soft silver light beside it.

He casually picked up the thesis, his eyes scanning the title.

He flipped through it page by page, his pace neither fast nor slow. The only sound in the study was the soft rustling of parchment.

When he saw terms like “atomic resonance theory” and “electron transition,” his fingers paused for half a second.

His azure eyes narrowed slightly.

This way of thinking, which went straight to the essence of things and dissected them layer by layer, this logic of attributing complex phenomena to the movement of microscopic particles… it bore the all-too-distinct style of a certain person.

His gaze swept imperceptibly in the direction of Lia’s room.

Then, he picked up the alloy ingot, and a pure arcane light lit up his fingertip.

He constructed a Third-Circle spell model and conducted an energy dissipation test on his fingertip.

Just as described in the thesis, the spell’s energy showed a significant attenuation upon contact with the metal ingot.

The material was real, and the discovery was real.

Klein put down the metal ingot and picked up the thesis again.

He was very familiar with Adèle’s handwriting, and the record of the entire experimental process was detailed and authentic. It was clear she had put enormous effort into it.

Regardless of where the methodology came from, she was the one who had ultimately completed this pioneering work.

He was silent for a moment, then picked up the quill on the table.

This time, on the last page of the thesis, he signed his name.

And beneath his name, he wrote a single word.

“Pass.”

The thesis flashed and vanished, sent back to Adèle’s room by Klein.

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