330 A Conjecture with Basic Certainty

"You finally realized that my sculpture resembles you the most?" Huskar asked.

'Another amusing question that only a barbarian's incredible brain can think up.'

Baiyi shook sideways his head and asked, "Where did you find these rocks?"

"Um, a stone wall... besides someone's crop field," Huskar answered honestly. Baiyi assumed that Huskar meant a dry-stone wall which farmers made by stacking stones in order to protect their crops from animals. 

"I see; alright, sorry for bothering you. Good night!" Baiyi replied and returned to his room.

With a face brimming with confusion, Huskar watched Baiyi leave his room. He soon shook his head and went back to sleep. 

"What was the impetus for that inquiry?" The Scholar Walker asked, as soon as Baiyi returned to his room. "Is there a quantifiable distinction between this rock and others?"

"Yea, there is something odd about it," Baiyi said as he placed the three sculptures under the light. "Just before, I was thinking of touching up their sculptures my myself, and just as I was about to do so, I realized that the rocks possessed some interesting structures."

"For starters," Baiyi began, "they are abnormally tough. Normally, if we want to carve stones or rocks into something, we will need more than just brute strength, right? We will need to have an appropriate level of craftsmanship, or else the material would break into pieces. Now look at our friends, the barbarians, they aren't skilled at sculpting, and that's putting it mildly. They were just messing around, yet... instead of the rocks to shatter, they began to respond to the force of the barbarians!"

These barbarians had enough strength to crush rocks as though they were eggs. If they had been sculpting with normal rocks, those rocks would have long since been reduced to sand, but that was no the case with the rocks they used to make the sculptures. 

From this alone, one could tell that the rocks were far from normal.

"Hold on, this rock looks like a 'soft concrete' — a material that we used to sculpt magical idols," said the Engineer Walker.

Although the Engineer walker had coined the rocks 'soft' concrete, they were actually a special type of metal that not only resembled normal rocks but also had the sturdiness and density of normal rocks. They were called "soft concrete" only because alchemists extract them by pulverizing and condensing the material.

Soft concretes were much harder than natural rocks, and they possessed greater force and temperature endurance. They also possessed a significant degree of anti-magic properties, and this was why they were used as alternatives for Anti-magic metal and obsidian. The only flaw that soft concrete had was its mass. If it was made into armor, the armor would be too heavy; therefore, soft concrete was used to create joints, and other important parts, for automatons.

Other than that, they are also used to build Magic Cultivation sites so that when sorcerers could practice their magic in simulated a real-world setting.

Although soft concrete was not rare, it was not so common that one would use it to build stone walls in a village.

"Now that you mentioned it, well, yea. It does look like soft concrete, and it is sturdy enough to be played around with by the barbarians. But I also remember that soft concretes can be yellowish-grey or ashen-grey, just like normal rocks, right? This one is completely black—" Baiyi pointed out.

"Aha! Now here's when your expertise runs dry!" The Alchemist Walker suddenly popped into the conversation. "The color of soft concrete can be altered manually! Make some alterations in the formula, and voila, you can get colors like red, yellow, or infidelity! The only downside is that altering the formula for the sake of colors is expensive as heck, and also, frankly, quite pointless — especially when one can just paint the soft concrete themselves"

"Do you mean that someone made an effort to turn these chunks of soft concrete black? But what's the point? Could they have done it with paint?" Baiyi asked.

"Not really, else you could tell the difference. The paint will begin to come off after a day, you know, and the soft concrete will revert back to its original look. However, if one alters the color whilst the soft concrete was being processed, that color would last longer. But that rock in your hand right now? I don't think it's black. Or more accurately, it's not originally black," the Alchemist explained. "I'm sensitive to colors, you see. And I can tell you with confidence that the black on those chunks of soft concrete isn't normal."

"You can actually tell that?" Baiyi asked in surprise.

"Part of my incredible and unparalleled expertise!" The Alchemist Walker beamed proudly. "You already know the dangers of my work, right? Sometimes, two colors may look the same but end up having very different properties. If I added the wrong addictive to a concoction, the effects will be way of expectation. So! If I don't have an acute sense to tell colors apart, I would have died a loooot sooner."

"Alright. I believe in your incredible, unparalleled expertise. Tell me, what is its original color?" Baiyi asked quickly.

"According to my expansive and pragmatic experience, these chunks of soft concrete were originally either pure gold, or perhaps blonde, or perhaps medallion; either way, they all share the same base color — gold. Their current black color is as a result of oxidation; this is similar to how small gold pieces turn black after being tarnished," the Alchemist Walker elucidated. "In fact, during the processing of these chunks of soft concrete, they may have thrown gold into the mix, and when sufficient time had passed, this happened."

"Gold? Seriously? Using gold to process soft concrete? That's just ostentatious. This action certainly fits somebody we know to a tee..." Baiyi murmured. "If that teacher of mine was to build himself a magic cultivation site, it is very likely that he would choose to build a cultivation site made of flashy gold. He's exactly that tasteless, that man..."

"Are there any other corroborations that support the conjecture that these chunks of soft concrete, indeed, came from the First Walker's magic cultivation site?" the Scholar Walker hurriedly.

"If the Alchemist wasn't wrong in his assessment, then all of our clues up till this point does project this possibility," Baiyi replied. "The barbarians' animals brought them there. Animals possess more acute senses than we humans do, and those animals followed the frequency over to that place. They also happened to discover alchemic metals which had no business being there; this all fits my teacher's characteristics..."

"Most importantly, that cannot just be a cultivation site alone. It must have also been his magus lab! And that would be the best location to store the Book of Servitude!"

"I am perplexed. Is it a magus lab or a cultivation site?" the Scholar Walker asked, curiously.

"Both. They are one and the same. Do you know why a modern, complete magus lab would have a cultivation site at the side? Long ago, the two were separated. It's just that after generations of sorcery, a certain emperor thought that sorcerers should always be able to experiment any time they wanted to; he merged the two facilities together, placing the cultivation site in front of his research table and magical furnace. That way, he could experiment on his magic anytime he wanted," Baiyi explained.

"Of course, they ran a risk with this. If the magic went haywire, it might create a chain of events that will lead to an explosion, leaving the sorcerer as a part of its firework display," Baiyi added.

"Following the emperor's example, other sorcerers began to employ the same architectural design, despite its risks. During the time of the Ancient Rohlserlian empire, the magus lab was often built right inside the cultivation site. Modern men replicated the layout but added safety precautions; the magus lab and cultivation site were close to each other but were not situated in the same place. That is how we came to have our modern layout."

"Let me guess… that emperor was none other than the First Walker himself, right?" The Thane Walker chimed in.

"Oops, this time, you're wrong. The emperor that began this dangerous fashion was the First Walker's father. Emperor Rohlserl the Eighteenth may not have been as naturally gifted as his son, but he was more ardent in magical research than anyone else. This passion of his was passed down to his son, the First Walker. The difference was, unlike his father, the Archmage conducted his experiment on his foes in the battlefield, and perhaps that was the reason why the national regalia, the Book of Servitude, chose him." Baiyi said.

When the Archmage exchanged memories with Baiyi, he did not share the memories of his childhood and teenage years. He had kept those memories to himself because he did not want his student to see how dark his childhood and teenage years had been. He had only let Baiyi view the life he lived as an adult and the battles he fought.

"If the topic of discussion is the location of the First Walker's magus lab, you of all people should know where it is, right?" The Explorer Walker said, joining the conversation. "Everyone in the academic field of archeological-adventure knows that the location of the Sage-Emperor's lab has remained an unsolved mystery. People discovered and combed through the Rohlserlian Royal Mausoleum, but no one found the lab. Everyone was starting to wonder if the lab just was claimed by someone else as soon as the First Walker was sent to the Void."

"What 'academic field of archeological-adventure'? That's just bloody gravedigging!" Baiyi snapped. "You actually think that my teacher would have allowed his lab to be found easily? That's just underestimating him."

"The truth is, he had three magus labs throughout his life. Two of them are not even in Isythre; they are currently in a private mini-realm that belongs to him. Only he knows where that is, and with him gone, no one would ever find their location," Baiyi continued.

"That other lab was, in fact, his very first lab, which he inherited from his father. It was in that lab he first laid his hands on the Book of Servitude."

"I get it! He placed the book back in his first lab!" The Explorer Walker exclaimed in excitement. The hunt for this treasure had triggered his dormant gravedigger instincts. "He did that so that you can claim the book where your teacher had once obtained it. In that way, the sacred sense of passing on a regalia could be imbued into your inauguration ceremony as well... That's it! The Book of Servitude is most definitely in that magus lab!"

"So, do you know where it is? You know, right? It must be in Isythre, somewhere around here? He hid it so well that no one could find it yet." The Explorer Walker added excitedly.

Baiyi's next words burst the Voidwalker's bubbles. "If it were that easy, I wouldn't be in the dark for so long, my friend."Strangely, as I was trying to see if there was a specific term for this sort of walls, I came across articles about stone walls in Wikipedia aaaaaand... I got hooked onto it for half an hour. There's something about stone walls that mesmerized me…When your spouse is unfaithful and sleeping with another person, you're wearing a green hat. So what's the color of infidelity? /winks and nudgesThaaaat's racist! Ding!!! (Anyone here is a fan of the YouTube channel Cinemasins? It's, um, a reference.)In our world, pure gold does not oxidize under normal circumstances, but gold alloys do. I'm not sure if the gold in *their* world holds different properties, though