Chapter 2708: Improving Automation, Being Throttled

Outside the barracks, Xia Duo and Laidun conversed for a long time, once again imparting his thoughts and concepts regarding the construction of new towns in the Territory to Laidun.

Laidun, as a pioneer of this new model and new path, might be unqualified at the moment, but as an executor, he was absolutely competent!

In fact, in the early stages of development like this, Xia Duo did not need an Administrator with too many ideas of his own; being able to execute his orders without compromise was enough.

……

Returning to the Tower of Time, Xia Duo continued to compile the Middle School textbooks for the new Mages, while not forgetting to improve the Spirit Automation Equipment; his recent trip to Evereska had shown him more commercial possibilities in Elf society.

Therefore, he decided to accelerate the layout of the Communication Mythallar, and to achieve this, the first step was to increase the production capacity of the Node Magic Artifacts, so as to bring the 1.0 version of the Communication Mythallar to the public as quickly as possible.

And to increase the production of Node Magic Artifacts, there was no doubt that the Spirit Automation Equipment needed to be improved; in the future, no matter how many generations the Communication Mythallar was upgraded, he would need to keep at least two-thirds of the nodes in his own hands.

The more potential users there were, the more Node Magic Artifacts needed to be prepared in advance; accordingly, the Spirit Automation Equipment used to produce those Node Magic Artifacts needed to be more efficient.

Currently, the Spirit Automation Equipment Xia Duo used to produce Node Magic Artifacts was at the Four-Linked Spirit level, which was equivalent to four High Mages working in coordination.

It took about half a year to produce 280,000 Node Magic Artifacts.

But half a year was still somewhat unacceptable to Xia Duo; it took half a year for just 280,000 units now, and in the future, once the Communication Mythallar was upgraded, the number of users it could support—that is, the number of nodes—would have to be increased to at least the million level.

Under such circumstances, 280,000 nodes would not be enough to ensure that the Tower of Time could fully control this public-facing Communication Mythallar, so before the upgrade, two-thirds of the Node Magic Artifacts would need to be prepared in advance.

If the Spirit Automation Equipment was not improved, how much time would he have to wait then?

Xia Duo's goal was to let everyone in Netheril and even the Northland Alliance possess a Communication Magic Tool from the Tower of Time, that is, to become users of the Tower of Time's Communication Mythallar.

Netheril alone currently had a population of nearly twenty million (ten million originally in the Main Plane, and seven million later returned from the Other Plane), which meant twenty million nodes.

Controlling a Mythallar of this scale would require at least twice as many Node Magic Artifacts, or a Spell carrier containing forty million node elements.

If he still used the current Four-Linked Spirit Automation Equipment to produce them, the time required would be nearly a century!

This was clearly not a good choice.

Either improve the Spirit Automation Equipment to increase production efficiency, or improve the Myth Lock Design so that the Tower of Time could control the Mythallar with fewer nodes.

But the latter required a redesign of the overall architecture of the Mythallar, and doing so would also leave larger loopholes for enemies; by comparison, Xia Duo preferred to improve the production equipment.

In this way, the only flaw of the Communication Mythallar would be the number of nodes, but the number of nodes released by the Tower of Time would always be only one-third, so enemies would never be able to seize control of the Communication Mythallar.

However, there was a downside to this: as the number of nodes increased geometrically, the difficulty of upgrading the Mythallar would also increase geometrically.

Xia Duo estimated that it might actually be impossible to upgrade to a version with sixty million nodes; although the complexity of the Mythallar itself was not directly related to the number of nodes, at a level as high as sixty million nodes, the time required for a single update could be as long as several months.

In other words, he would need to prepare enough Spellcasters to relay continuously, working for a month without error, to have a chance of completing such an update.

Once there was a mistake in the middle, it would have to be restarted, and the difficulty would be no less than repairing the Dragon Madness Mythallar.

However, considering that in the future, a method for real-time Mythallar updates might be researched, allowing for "online hot-patching" instead of a complete remake before going live.

Although the Red Heart Alliance had not researched such a method, whether such a method existed was certain; it was merely a matter of investing more resources and time into research.

The Red Heart Alliance had not researched it not because of insufficient investment, nor because of insufficient research strength, but because research in this field had just emerged and belonged to the frontier of the frontier.

Only a few Laboratories were engaged in research in this area.

Once the Mythallar update problem became severe, the Red Heart Alliance would certainly invest more resources into research; it was just a pity that the timing of Xia Duo's second entry was still a bit early—if it had been later, he might have directly obtained the relevant theories and technologies.

But at the time, he worried that if he were late, the Projection Plane might disappear directly, which would be a loss that outweighed the gain, so he tried his best not to waste any time.

Yet even so, the time within the Plane still differed by more than a thousand years from his first entry; if he had hesitated for even a moment, he might really not have been able to wait for the Projection Plane.

……

In fact, for now, Xia Duo did not have a particularly strong demand for real-time Mythallar updates; after all, for quite some time, the Tower of Time's Communication Mythallar would not be able to reach twenty million users at all, and he had enough time to prepare for all of this.

But while twenty million was not possible, the million level was not difficult to achieve, especially in Xia Duo's own Territory; he would make it possible for everyone to possess a Communication Mythallar, which would be five hundred thousand people.

If he gathered more from other places, a million users was really not an unreachable goal; if the Node Magic Artifacts could keep up, it might only be a matter of a year or two.

Under such circumstances, improving the Spirit Automation Equipment appeared even more necessary.

……

And improving the Spirit Automation Equipment actually involved two aspects: one was, of course, the equipment itself, and the other was the Elemental Essence that existed as a consumable.

Currently, the Tower of Time's Elemental Essence all came from Calimshan in the south, and only a very few were "dropped from wild hunting" by Xia Duo himself in the Arctic; but now that production was automated, the little Elemental Essence he harvested from wild hunting simply could not keep up with the consumption.

Therefore, a larger-scale and more stable supply of Elemental Essence was inevitably needed.

What Xia Duo worried about most now was that Calimshan would raise prices or refuse to sell to him; in the long run, he worried that the entire output from Calimshan would not be able to satisfy his consumption.

However, could he use potential demand to demand that Calimshan continuously increase production?

If there were other essence suppliers, perhaps he could, but currently, Calimshan was almost the only place in the Main Plane that could stably provide Elemental Essence.

Exclusive business was the easiest to conduct—this was, of course, for Calimshan, but for Xia Duo, this was not good news.

Therefore, Xia Duo needed his own Element Ranch, or even if he did not own one, he at least had to master the relevant technology; otherwise, once he was throttled by Calimshan, the currently emerging prospects of Magic Industry automation would have to be marked with a big question mark.

One must know that Spirit Automation could not only be used to produce Node Magic Artifacts; any other Magic Item designed for mass production could be produced using it.

The reason Xia Duo did not take it out to use now was mainly out of two considerations: one was technical accumulation, and the other was the current development state of the Tower of Time.

The number of new Mages was constantly increasing; if he brought out automation equipment at this time, how would those new Mages conduct themselves? Continue their advanced studies, go out to travel, or just lie flat instantly?

None of these were very appropriate.

But even if he did not use it now, he would have to use it in the future; in this situation, Elemental Creature farming absolutely could not be missing!