Chapter 2709: Six-link, New Textbooks

Thinking this way, Xia Duo still decided to wait until the Water Vapor Migration Plan was completed at the end of the month to have a good talk with Talafu, preferably to obtain the technology related to elemental farming directly from the Mairide Family.

At the very least, he had to ensure the long-term, stable, and large-scale import of Elemental Essence at a relatively reasonable price; the price of the essence Xia Duo had previously purchased from the Mairide Family was not reasonable, as the price of Primary Elemental Essence was clearly too high.

Even for Advanced Elemental Essence, there was still quite a bit of room for bargaining.

Considering that future automated industry would consume a large amount of Elemental Essence, he could start negotiating prices or even stockpiling in advance right now.

If the blood of industry on Earth is oil, then in this magic world, the blood of industry should be Elemental Essence; without Elemental Essence, automation is out of the question.

Perhaps there are other ways to achieve automation, but even Xia Duo had no clue about them; it could be said that Spirit Automation is currently the only possibility for automation in the magic world.

The importance of Elemental Essence is self-evident; Xia Duo did not want to wait until the day automation was fully rolled out to consider this matter. Why not lay the foundation in advance if one is able to?

……

In the days that followed, Xia Duo had a relatively relaxed time, improving the Spirit Automation Equipment while tutoring the Quasi-High Mages who were undergoing the Inheritance Ritual.

By about the end of the month, he had successfully improved the Spirit Automation Equipment to a Six-link specification; compared to the previous Four-link, it could only be considered a small step forward.

However, he recorded the research and development process as closely as possible, most notably the improvement ideas and the specific process of the experiments.

Once new mages grow up in the future, they can continue to develop based on his R&D process; Seven-link, Eight-link, or even Sixteen-link are all possible.

But just as the difficulty of updating a Mythallar increases geometrically as its complexity grows, the scale of an Essence Array capable of Coordinated Casting also has a limit under a certain design philosophy; theoretically, there is no limit, but in reality, it is simply impossible to achieve.

When the scale of an Essence Array reaches a certain level, one must consider making improvements from the perspective of design philosophy.

Of course, besides improving the automation equipment itself, there is a simpler way to increase production efficiency, which is to increase the number of devices.

This also has a limit of marginal utility, but under the current circumstances, it is far from that limit. In the process of improving to the Six-link automation equipment, Xia Duo also manufactured many Four-link, Five-link, and Six-link automation devices.

Most were manufactured for experimental verification, but after the experiments succeeded, those devices did not disappear; instead, they were slightly adjusted by Xia Duo to produce Node Magic Artifacts.

After this expansion of production capacity, those 280,000 Node Magic Artifacts could all be completed by the Winter Solstice Festival at the latest; if maintenance during this period were abandoned, the completion time could be advanced by a few more days.

If these automation devices were used to produce conventional mass-produced Magic Items, the Tower of Time would be fully capable of crashing the Magic Item market of Netheril, provided, of course, that other Mage Towers did not organize to intervene (by means outside the market).

……

Besides completing the improvement work on the Six-link automation equipment, in the last half-month of Nese Li 839 Nian, Xia Duo also finished compiling all the textbooks for the new Mage Middle School Course.

With the ready-made textbooks from the Ruide Heart Alliance as a reference, this part of the work did not consume much of his energy; it was mostly translating the original textbooks into the Netheril language and then replacing all the terms and cases involving the Ruide Heart Alliance with new ones.

The magic system is the same; this is one of the fruits grown from the seeds Xia Duo sowed in the early stages of that Projection Plane. If it weren't for the fact that the new mages' Elvish was still lacking, he could have even used them exactly as they were.

In any case, the Ruide Heart Alliance does not exist in the Main Plane; the new mages would at most be curious about how such a force came to be, but the Knowledge in the textbooks is true and real.

But since he decided to recompile them, Xia Duo was by no means satisfied with just copying the Ruide Heart Alliance's textbooks; he also added his own understanding to them.

At the middle school stage, and even the subsequent university stage, there is a very big flaw in the Ruide Heart Alliance's textbooks: there is almost no content related to the Plane Domain.

This was not something the Ruide Heart Alliance deliberately ignored, but was determined by the nature of the Ruide Heart Alliance; the Projection Plane is ultimately not a real Material Plane, but merely a virtual world evolved from a wisp of strange spirit in the Astral Plane.

However, the new mages of the Tower of Time are in the Main Plane, which is a real Material Plane, and many of them will subsequently join in the exploration and research of the Plane Domain in the future.

Therefore, Xia Duo had to fill this gap in the Tower of Time's middle school textbooks.

Besides this, the Ruide Heart Alliance's textbooks do contain content related to mind spells, but Xia Duo felt that mind spells—at least those involving external influence—should not be open to everyone, but should be the exclusive domain of specific Law Enforcers.

Ordinary people only need to know how to protect against mind spell attacks; this alone is not enough to allow them to confront Law Enforcers, but it can prevent them from being harmed by the few criminals who have mastered mind spells.

Therefore, Xia Duo made significant cuts to the content related to mind spells in the textbooks.

As for other lethal spells, the Ruide Heart Alliance's approach was—as long as it is not direct killing, it is retained; for example, Fireball is essentially just a directional explosion of fire elements. This can indeed kill people, but a kitchen knife can also kill people; should one ban kitchen knives as well?

What the Ruide Heart Alliance truly restricted were various targeted spells, or to put it more bluntly—curses; these were not allowed, or at least students were not allowed to master them.

Mind spells could actually be counted in this category, but mind spells are not directly lethal after all, and they are relatively easy to defend against.

But in Netheril on the Main Plane, mind spells themselves can be considered a taboo. The new mages of the Tower of Time are fine, as they have grown too fast and have not yet been influenced by mainstream views, but Xia Duo's aversion to mind spells is even greater than the mainstream.

Currently, the mainstream aversion to mind spells in Netheril stems more from the selfishness of Spellcasters; they only dislike others using mind spells on them, but do not dislike using them on others.

The root of Xia Duo's aversion, however, is the respect for the freedom of every individual's Personality; he not only does not want others to use mind spells on him, but in the vast majority of cases, he will not take the initiative to use mind spells on others.

Unless it is an enemy or a criminal; this is also the main reason why Xia Duo would list mind spells as the exclusive domain of specific Law Enforcers.

This approach was not his original invention, but came from the Arcane Empire in the Projection Plane. Apart from the near-perverted population policy, Xia Duo's impression of the Arcane Empire was quite good; good policies should of course be absorbed and introduced.

Not to mention, the current Tower of Time and Daxia Territory are still under his strong guidance, and the textbooks were also compiled by him; whatever he says is banned, is naturally banned.

……