Chapter 53: The Unseen Order of Elements

Laplace’s laughter reverberated through the room, filled with a childish glee and the supreme pleasure of about toppling a long-standing rival.

As Lia watched him gesticulate wildly, like an old prankster clutching that thin parchment, the lingering tension she had felt from pointing out his error completely dissipated.

Suddenly, her thoughts turned to another archmage who had behaved rather unusually.

“Master Laplace,” Lia couldn’t help but interject, interrupting the old mage’s uproarious laughter. “That day in the lounge, Master Horace… didn’t he say he didn’t understand the physics section?”

This question instantly extinguished Laplace’s mirth.

He paused, carefully rolling up the treasured parchment, his expression turning peculiar, as if he were holding back a monumental secret.

“Didn’t understand?”

Laplace pursed his lips, leaned closer to Lia, and spoke in a hushed, mysterious tone.

“My dear child, you are still too young.”

He subtly gestured towards Klein with his chin.

“That old stubborn man is incredibly thin-skinned.”

“In front of you, the genius who proposed the theory, and Klein, a junior he’s always disliked, would he really let himself show that a new theory had shaken his spiritual power, almost making him lose face on the spot?”

“Doesn’t he care about his reputation?”

Laplace recounted this with vivid animation.

“Let me tell you, his declaration of ‘I didn’t understand a single word’ was arguably the most exquisite lie he’s ever uttered.”

“What he truly meant was: ‘I will not comment on the physics section of this theory because I haven’t reviewed it; I merely helped you check the mathematics. The math is sound, so you may proceed as you see fit.'”

“You see, by doing so, he both preserved the dignity of a Ninth-Ring Archmage, refrained from discrediting your theory, and bought himself time to study it at his leisure.”

“Killing three birds with one stone! That old fox is incredibly shrewd!”

Lia’s worldview was subtly shaken.

It seemed that even academic titans carried such a heavy burden of image, no matter the world.

“I’d wager,” Laplace declared, stroking his beard with satisfaction, “that after he returned, he locked himself in his laboratory, poring over your thesis word by word. He might even be contemplating how to construct that gravity measuring instrument right now!”

“However…” Laplace’s smile widened into an exceptionally brilliant grin,

“he’ll only ever conceive of the static method, no matter how hard he thinks. When I use your dynamic measurement method to slap that constant’s value right in his face, heheh…”

Observing the undisguised schadenfreude on Laplace’s face, Lia silently lit a candle for Master Horace, wherever he was.

“Alright, alright,” Laplace waved his hand contentedly. “Business concluded; you may leave. Don’t disturb me while I conceptualize my grand experiment!”

Having dismissed them, he immediately turned and plunged into the pile of blueprints, muttering to himself, completely immersed in his own world.

Lia and Klein exchanged a glance; the latter calmly rose, offered a slight nod towards Laplace’s back, and then led Lia towards the teleportation circle.

***

With a flash of light, the two found themselves back in the familiar ground-floor hall of the tower.

Unlike Laplace’s bright, airy observatory, filled with the scent of stars and pastries, Klein’s tower was perpetually quiet and solemn, permeated by the aroma of old parchment and a faint magical glow.

They ascended the spiral staircase in silence.

Lia followed behind Klein, listening to the rhythmic echo of their footsteps within the empty tower.

Her mood today had indeed been a rollercoaster, shifting from shock to tension, then to a sense of accomplishment, and finally, amusement at the ‘matter of face’ among the great masters.

Now that she had calmed down, a strange weariness washed over her.

She felt like a lemon that had been repeatedly squeezed dry, her mental reserves slowly being extracted, only for her to then personally teach others how to blend these juices into an unparalleled vintage.

This sensation left her not only exhausted but also imbued with a profound loneliness—the solitude of one who held all the answers to the future while living in an age of ignorance.

‘This burden feels rather heavy.’

Lia sighed softly.

Ahead of her, Klein’s rhythmic footsteps made an almost imperceptible pause.

Without turning, his steady voice drifted back to her from the front.

“Tired?”

“A little.”

Lia replied weakly.

Klein’s voice remained steady, though it was several shades deeper than usual. “The weight of knowledge can sometimes be heavier than mountains. Go rest.”

Lia pursed her lips, just about to speak, when they arrived at the third floor.

Suddenly, with a resounding “Bang!”, as if an alchemical furnace had exploded, the door of the third-floor alchemy laboratory was violently flung open from the inside, slamming hard against the opposite wall.

A figure, enveloped in a wave of heat and the pungent aroma of reagents, burst out, nearly colliding with Klein.

It was Adèle.

Her normally composed and calm senior sister now wore a flushed expression, a mixture of ecstasy and extreme exhilaration. Her hair was disheveled, and a smudge of grayish-black stain clung to one cheek.

Yet, her eyes shone with astonishing brilliance.

“Lia!”

Adèle’s gaze instantly fixated on Lia, like a drowning person grasping at the only piece of driftwood.

She darted forward, her hands clamping tightly onto Lia’s shoulders.

“It worked! I succeeded!”

Her voice trembled slightly with excitement.

“What worked?” Lia asked, feeling a little dizzy from being shaken.

“The elements! The elements you spoke of!”

Without further explanation, Adèle pulled Lia into the alchemy lab.

Klein followed silently, his footsteps a little heavier than usual.

Inside the alchemy lab, it was no longer the chaotic mess of various material scents it had once been.

Though still filled with bottles and jars, everything was neatly categorized according to some new logic, appearing remarkably organized.

Most striking was a newly cleared section on the central workbench.

On it, a dozen labeled crystal bottles were neatly arranged.

“Look!”

Adèle pointed to one end of the workbench, where a piece of red cinnabar ore lay, and beside it, a crystal bottle containing a silvery-white liquid.

“This is cinnabar. Following your idea, I heated it, and it ‘decomposed.’ I obtained this liquid metal, and a gas that I couldn’t successfully collect.”

Adèle pointed to the liquid in the bottle. “This is mercury!”

In the past, this had merely been an alchemical formula to be memorized. Now, in Adèle’s eyes, it was an understandable decomposition process. Cinnabar was a compound formed from ‘mercury element’ and another ‘gaseous element.’

“And then look at this!”

Adèle’s tone grew even more excited as she led Lia to another set of experimental samples.

There lay a dark piece of wrought iron ore, and a pile of green crystalline powder—green vitriol. Beside them were two small dishes, both containing the same dark red powder.

“I heated the wrought iron ore with carbon, obtaining pig iron, which, after hammering, became iron. I then heated the green vitriol, and it decomposed into a pungent gas and this red powder.”

Adèle pointed to the red powder in the two dishes, her eyes gleaming with the light of discovery.

“They are the same substance! And then, when I heated this red powder with carbon, I again obtained iron!”

“Lia, your theory is correct!”

Adèle’s voice was laced with a tremor.

“Wrought iron ore and green vitriol, they appear completely different, yet internally, they both contain the same fundamental substance—the element of iron!”

This discovery completely overturned the alchemical knowledge system she had built over more than two decades. An unprecedented sense of clarity made her tremble with excitement.

Lia looked at Adèle, observing the pure joy shining in her eyes, and, infected by her emotion, she too smiled.

“Congratulations, Senior Sister. You have opened the door to a new world.”

“This is all thanks to you!”

Adèle vigorously shook her head, trying to calm her rapidly rising and falling chest.

“After that, I tried to decompose many things. Salt, malachite, all sorts of minerals…”

She gestured towards the row of a dozen crystal bottles.

“Look, these are the fruits of my labor over the past two months. The ‘elements’ I’ve separated that can no longer be decomposed.”

Lia’s gaze swept over the crystal bottles.

The yellow, very light solid was sulfur.

A block of silvery-white metallic luster, sealed in oil, was either sodium or potassium.

A sealed bottle was filled with a pale yellow-green gas, its pungent odor so strong that Lia felt as though she could smell it even through the glass. It was chlorine gas.

There was also silvery mercury, black carbon…

Relying solely on Lia’s vague theory, Adèle had, in just two months, painstakingly isolated over a dozen elements using the rudimentary equipment available in this world.

However, Adèle’s excitement slowly receded, and confusion gradually appeared on her face.

The smile vanished from her face, her brows knitting together once more.

“But, Lia…”

She pointed to the row of element bottles, each differing in form, color, and properties, her face etched with bewilderment.

“What next?”

“I’ve separated them, but between them… there doesn’t seem to be any pattern.”

Adèle picked up the bottle containing sulfur, then pointed to the chlorine gas beside it.

“Look, one is a solid, one is a gas. One is mild, one is highly toxic.”

She then gestured towards the bottle containing sodium and the bottle containing iron.

“They are both metals, yet one is so light it floats on water and reacts violently with it, while the other is so heavy and chemically stable.”

A hint of entreaty entered her voice.

“Why are they like this?”

“What exactly determines the differences in their properties?”

“How should we classify them? How should we order them? There must be some order, right? There must be!”

Adèle’s questions tumbled out one after another.

She felt as though she had hacked her way through thorns and brambles, finally escaping a convoluted labyrinth, only to find herself standing at the edge of a vaster, more bewildering wilderness, facing an endless unknown.

The entire alchemy lab fell silent.

Klein’s gaze slowly swept across the element bottles, finally resting on Lia’s face.

In his eyes, there was a hint of anticipation that even he hadn’t noticed.

Lia met Adèle’s eager eyes, and also felt the quiet yet intensely scrutinizing gaze from beside her.

She knew the answer.

Not only did she know the answer, she could even personally draw that divine chessboard, arranging all the ‘elements’ of the world’s matter like pieces, neither too many nor too few, neither skewed nor biased, placing them exactly where they belonged.

‘A pattern?’

Lia’s lips curved into a smile.

‘Of course there is.’

‘Moreover, it would be the most sacred order, the most beautiful symphony, something alchemists could never hope to break through in a lifetime…’