"The sun?" Listening to Darren's explanation, Maka's face showed a trace of astonishnt.
"Yes, it's a very large, self-luminous and self-heating fireball... no, it should be called a plasma ball," Darren boasted, flaunting the limited knowledge in his mind.
The astonished gazes of the natives brought him a strong sense of superiority.
The halflings around murmured among themselves, and Maka also rembered hearing this term in his tribe.
It seems that long ago, this world too had a sun, but Maka had never seen it—only understood from the sparse words of his ancestors that it possessed endless light and heat capable of illuminating the vast land, emitting light a hundred thousand tis stronger than the glow of the luminous mushrooms in the forest.
Maka could hardly imagine what kind of force could fill the whole world with light!
You know, in this cold, dark foreign land, light and heat are precious resources.
Instinctively, Maka thought Darren must be lying, but he couldn't help feeling a bit hopeful, for these outsiders indeed demonstrated abilities beyond expectations.
For instance, they could conjure a soft, fluffy food out of thin air, and these people could manipulate flas, frost, and lightning, easily defeating powerful and dangerous magical beasts.
The high priest had once jealously stated that if the Moon Goddess were still in this world, they could certainly do the sa things.
Of course, that high priest had been killed for resisting the outsiders, his body turned into an ice sculpture, and buried along with his followers.
The remaining halflings were quite stable emotionally, for in this god-forsaken world, the strong get everything, and it was only too clear that the weak had to submit.
Years ago, when the temperatures in this foreign land weren't so low, this area had several tribes, and raiding, enslaving, and fighting were common occurrences.
Maka had no reverence or faith in that Moon Goddess, Diana, for the tribe had never ceased their sacrifices to her since his birth, yet that goddess had never cared about their fate.
Perhaps, as these outsiders had said, she had indeed fallen!
A dead god naturally no longer held any value, not even offering a faint hope.
"You ntioned that chairman Lynn... is he also a god?" Maka couldn't help asking, in his understanding, a god was the most powerful existence, the root of all miracles.
"No, he is a wizard, the most powerful wizard!" Darren corrected him,
"Wizard..." Maka repeated the sowhat awkward term, which didn't exist in his tribe's language, so Darren used the common language of the Eternal Continent.
Maka etched this foreign term deeply in his mind; in his view, a wizard represented a powerful force, as mighty as a god.
"Since you can create a sun, could you..." Maka hesitated for a long ti before he finally said, gritting his teeth. "Could you make one for us too?"
If this world had a sun, perhaps everything would be better?
At least they wouldn't have to worry about light and heat.
But years of surviving in this foreign land made Maka understand that there were no free favors; he struggled to think of anything they could offer in exchange.
Because the very existence of his tribe hung on the outsiders' whim, theoretically, their lives belonged to them too; using the outsiders' own things as terms of exchange was not sothing Maka could do.
"Wait, there's also faith! As long as you help us create a sun, we will offer you our belief!" Maka suddenly thought of this and said firmly.
The freedom of thought was the only thing they possessed; since the Moon Goddess needed or liked their worship, perhaps the wizards would want this too.
After all, they always prayed during successful hunts; now, it was simply a matter of changing the object of their worship.
"Wizards don't need faith..." Darren shook his head, rejecting Maka's offer, and then spoke again.
"You just need to... well, work hard. As long as you make enough contributions, making a sun for you is not impossible..."
Darren kept painting a rosy picture for the halflings, although in his view, it wasn't exactly deception.
Before heading to this foreign land, Darren had heard that the council was planning to build solar furnaces in all the major cities to provide a continuous source of energy.
If these halfling brethren could indeed make significant contributions, he felt the council might actually build them a 'sun'!
With Darren's constant encouragent, Maka and the others began to fantasize about what life with endless light and heat would be like, and many halflings beca even more interested in the world beyond the ti-space gate that Darren described.
Compared to the dark, silent, and dangerous land filled with fierce beasts and undead, Darren's world seed like heaven.
As the hal
flings discussed animatedly, Raphael had already received a ssage, and the scouts who had gone out to explore the outside world had returned.
Several dark bats flew in first, followed by the alchemist Tiek and a small team of halfling sentinels.
Tiek's face was full of worry, but he didn't speak; instead, he couldn't help but look at the gathered native halflings.
Raphael imdiately understood his aning and silently unfolded his domain to envelop them, instantly completing a soundproof barrier.
Tiek then spoke urgently. "Master Raphael, the situation outside is grim. A large number of undead are gathering here!"
"What happened? Could it be that our position has been exposed?" Raphael's expression changed slightly. Although he had anticipated that Tiek would bring bad news, he hadn't expected it to be this dire.
Yulande imdiately scanned the native halflings present.
He suspected that these people had leaked their information.
Although Raphael had controlled this settlent and had psychic wizards set restrictions in each of their minds, it clearly wasn't safe enough, as their opponents were best at manipulating souls.
"No, I don't think they are here to capture us."
Tiek shook his head, as the undead hadn't directly surrounded them but were aimlessly searching the area, seemingly ready to dig three feet into the ground.
"Could it be that the frequent opening and closing of the ti-space gate has been detected..." Yulande speculated.
Raphael was also considering this possibility; each ti the ti-space gate was opened, a significant amount of magic flowed into another world, like diverting a small stream from a large river. Although the loss was slow, it could indeed be detected.
"How far are they from us now?" Raphael asked gravely.
"Less than fifty kiloters," Tiek replied. "These undead are searching every possible place. I even saw a dragon flatten a small hill to make sure there was nothing inside."
"Four days, at most four days, and they will find this place!" Tiek added.
Although the search area of the skeletal soldiers was expanding, the tireless undead would eventually find them.
Raphael frowned and thought for a long ti; this was undoubtedly the worst possibility.
"We must find a way to divert them, to delay as much as possible the ti these undead find the ti-space node." Raphael declared decisively.
During his stay in this foreign land, aside from subduing this halfling settlent and having them gather intelligence, Raphael had also done quite a bit, such as setting up an alchemical array near the ti-space node in the valley to block sight and magic detection.
But Raphael didn't think his arrangents could deceive those damn skeletons; the opponents would undoubtedly not hesitate to level every place they could find.
So the only way was to attract them to another place.
Because the flow of ti was different in the two worlds, each day they delayed was like gaining seven days!
However, this also ant they had to face a vast, powerful, and dangerous legion of undead.
"Let's send soone back to report the news first," Raphael sighed, then looked at Yulande, Tiek, Ivina, Darren, and others, not speaking but letting them choose who would go and who would stay.
Returning ant survival; staying was almost certain death, as they would have to go as far from the ti-space gate as possible, with a slim chance of making it back.
"Ivina, you go back and report," Tiek suddenly said. She was the youngest here and deserved this one chance at life.
However, the girl shook her head; the mont she joined the foreign land exploration team, she was prepared to sacrifice.
The others remained silent, and a heavy atmosphere imdiately enveloped the encampnt.
"Then let's decide by drawing lots!" Raphael finally decided. This was the fairest way, and there was no need for further argunt.
...
In the magic kingdom, inside the newly built magic tower, Victorio, who had just returned from the northern border with intelligence, was interrupted by a shocking piece of news before he could report.
"What did you say? Althok... turned into a probability cloud?" Victorio almost spit out the tea he had just drunk, looking incredulously at Lynn and others as if they were telling a ridiculous joke.
"Although I don't want to believe it, it seems that this is indeed the case..." Aurora shrugged, recounting everything they had seen in that laboratory in the land of wizards.
An entity that was both consolidated and separated, Victorio could not recreate such an image in his mind...
Bizarre... That was the only word to describe it!
"Is this still magic?" Anthony was also stunned; like Victorio, it was his first ti hearing this news.
Harof and Aurora were also pondering this issue. Since they started researching the microscopic world, the common knowledge of magic had been torn to shreds, and the world seed to be becoming more and more bizarre.
"There's nothing strange
about it, it's just the sense of disjunction that arises from looking at higher dinsions from lower ones," Lynn interrupted the conversation, flipping through a book written by Althok about elental spirits.
"Higher dinsions?" Harof and others looked over, surprised by the new term Lynn introduced.
"Exactly!" Lynn nodded. "Perhaps it would be more intuitive to express it in arcane mathematics."
"For example, you can imagine zero dinsions as an infinitely small point, and one dinsion as an infinitely long line, having only the concept of length, two dinsions as a plane, composed of length and width..."
As he spoke, Lynn raised his right hand, and under the surge of magic, an imperceptible point appeared in front of everyone, then changed from a point to a line and then to a plane...
"So the third dinsion is a cube with length, width, and height?" Aurora imdiately understood.
This was the concept of the coordinate system in arcane mathematics; each additional axis represented an added dinsion.
"What about higher dinsions? Where would they extend from?" Harof asked, puzzled. Length, width, and height were accounted for, so from where could the fourth dinsion extend?
"Could it be ti?" Anthony suddenly spoke up.
According to Lynn's explanation, dinsions are sothing invisible, untouchable, omnipresent, and theoretically infinitely divisible, with ti undoubtedly corresponding to every point.
Moreover, like space, it could be warped and affected by gravity...
Lynn didn't respond, tapping the table lightly with his hand. Regarding how many dinsions the universe has, whether the fourth or fifth dinsions exist in any particular state, even the researchers of his previous world's federation couldn't co to a precise conclusion, leading to significant disagreent.
For instance, the renowned Einstein had proposed the four-dinsional spaceti theory, suggesting that the universe was composed of ti and space, with a ti axis added to the ordinary three-dinsional space's length, width, and height frawork.
That is, a three-dinsional static universe and a four-dinsional dynamic universe.
However, many of the federation's researchers didn't accept this and proposed an interesting hypothesis: if their current universe contained two-dinsional beings who could move freely in two-dinsional space and also perceive the passage of ti, would their scientists directly consider ti as the third dinsion?
So, many advocated distinguishing spatial dinsions from temporal dinsions, studying dinsions purely in terms of mathematics and spatial concepts. The famous string theory even suggested that space has as many as eleven dinsions!
After seeing Althok's state, Lynn was even more convinced that space had more than three dinsions, because apart from the ti dinsion, it was now confird that there indeed exists a fourth spatial dinsion!
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