Chapter 678: Data Analysis
He had tested it many times in Panlong City. Even when he used the formula to determine the positions of the other stars in the sky, the calculations were very accurate. Just as Xu Shichu had said, the formula could be used not only to calculate Tianluo Star’s path, but all nine stars of the Big Dipper.
But tonight there were no stars and no moon. The night sky was like a blank curtain, which sorely tested He Lingchuan’s abilities.
Of course, he did not dare complain. Who could guarantee that, on the actual day of the operation, the sky would be bright and clear? What if it turned out exactly like this, with clouds covering everything?
Juju looked sideways at him. Though it was a fire creature, its tone was icy. “Can you actually do this or not?”
Whether I can or can’t isn’t for you to decide. He Lingchuan shushed it. “Don’t make noise. Mental math was never my strong suit.”
If only Teacher Sun were here.
“Fly back fifteen meters. Yes, yes. Now descend. It should be right there!”
Under the three of them’s gaze, the little bat in the air suddenly spun around, then involuntarily veered sideways, slipping more than thirty meters away.
“Huh?” Dong Rui controlled it to steady itself, then had it circle back and fly toward that place again.
Once more, the little bat was pushed aside by some invisible force.
It soon flew back down and returned to its master’s side.
Dong Rui communicated with it for a while, then said to He Lingchuan, “There seems to be turbulent air there. Birds that get close are swept away.”
Air currents often appeared high in the sky, and birds borrowed them to fly.
“Could that be the spot?” He Lingchuan thought for a moment. “Change direction and try going over again.”
This time, the little bat flew from the west side. Sure enough, once it drew close to that area, the airflow swept it away again.
“This stretch of air current is about forty meters above the peak, but its horizontal diameter is at least a hundred meters. Is that reasonable?”
Juju pondered. “There’s a whirlwind array attached outside the Grand Spirit-Gathering Array’s array eye? Why wasn’t that mentioned in your intelligence?”
In the memories of the Deputy Director of the Public Works Department, Zaifu Kua, there had been no whirlwind array outside the array eye at all.
“Maybe the Heavenly Palace added it later? It pushes away unrelated objects. Otherwise, if birds flew over and smacked into it, wouldn’t that be awkward? It would also expose the array eye’s position.” He Lingchuan exhaled. “Birds often encounter air currents, so they probably wouldn’t find it strange. Besides, the array eye moves regularly, so it won’t be here tomorrow. Of course, these are only guesses. It would be best to confirm it again.”
“How do we confirm it?” Juju twisted its head. “Should I throw a few big fireballs up there and test it?”
“Don’t!” Its attacks were always loaded to the brim with sound and light effects. He Lingchuan hurriedly stopped it. “Are you afraid others won’t know we’re hiding here?”
“You can crouch lower.” It was the local guardian spirit. What was wrong with it shooting a few fireworks into the sky for fun? Was that not allowed?
Seeing Juju itching to try, Dong Rui could not help but say, “If you hit it, the Heavenly Palace will be alerted. How are we supposed to launch a surprise attack afterward?”
If it landed a shot at the Grand Spirit-Gathering Array’s array eye while the array eye was supposed to be hidden in the void, then the Heavenly Palace would definitely be alerted and become wary, regardless of whether it had only accidentally done so or not.
This mission’s already hard enough. Can we please not make it harder at this point?
Juju had already formed a fireball in its hand. Hearing this, it extinguished the fire with a puff. “Then what do we do?”
So this fellow’s merely sly, not clever. He Lingchuan understood and immediately said, “You’ve governed Mount Xu for more than four thousand years. Can you affect the weather here?”
“Tch.” That was something even ordinary guardian spirits could do, and Juju was far more powerful than some ordinary guardian spirit. Mount Xu itself was Juju’s body. It could summon wind and rain here as it pleased. “A piece of cake.”
“Then bring down a hailstorm. The finer the ice pellets, the better.”
Dong Rui secretly gave him a thumbs-up. Its main body is rock and fire, so reasonably speaking, it should hate rainwater most, yet you actually asked it to call down hail.
Unexpectedly, Juju did not resist at all. “No problem. It just so happens that it rained tonight.” And the weather’s rather cold, perfect.
Volcanic eruptions often brought hail and torrential rain. Besides, it was a greater monster that had lived thousands of years. Would it be afraid of a little rainwater?
He Lingchuan heard its whole body begin to clack and grind.
This kind of monster did not chant spells with its mouth. Instead, rocks across its body struck against one another, producing collisions at a specific frequency. The sound was not exactly pleasant, but it had a percussive rhythm.
The collisions also set the mountain peak trembling slightly, roughly equivalent to an earthquake of intensity three or four.
Of course, Juju knew the disturbance could not be too large, lest it alert the Heavenly Palace. Therefore, the tremors were limited to this small mountain peak.
After that, it made a bowing gesture toward the heavens like a person, arms extended, palms facing upward, each scooping up a little gravel.
With a shrill whoosh, a great wind swept in. The gravel in its hands instantly vanished without a trace.
The wind was so fierce it nearly blew people into the sky. The guards on Tianji Peak quickly hid inside the hollows of the Dao-Seeking Tree.
After a dozen breaths, the gale stopped, and tiny hard objects began falling from the sky, pattering against rock and wood.
He Lingchuan was struck in the face a few times too. He reached up and felt small, cold, hard grains of ice, which melted the moment they were warmed by his hand.
Hail had arrived.
According to Juju, summoning violent wind and rain was simple, and hail the size of eggs was even easier. What was most difficult to control was continuously drawing in tiny young ice pellets barely larger than raindrops.
If the force was too great, it might trigger the defensive array attached to the array eye.
He Lingchuan and Dong Rui looked up at the sky. “Do you see anything unusual?”
“No.”
A quarter of an hour later, the hail stopped.
Dong Rui seized the time and tried to send the bat monster puppet into the sky again.
But Juju shook its head and said, “There’s no need. The volcanic rock dust I had the gale carry into the sky is now suspended at the very center of the turbulence, completely still. I can sense it!”
It had mixed tiny grains of gravel into the hail and sent them down into the turbulent air. Those grains were equivalent to small pieces of its body. It could clearly sense where they landed.
This was the advantage of being the local landlord. Others could not envy it.
He Lingchuan could not help but snap his fingers. “Excellent. My calculation wasn’t wrong. The array eye really is there!”
Being able to calculate the position of the array eye accurately meant their mission was already a quarter successful. That was tremendous progress.
“The defensive array also didn’t activate.” Otherwise, the gravel would not have landed inside the array eye. This confirmed their earlier idea that objects too small in volume and too light in mass would not be judged as attacks by the defensive array if they fell inside.
Though turbulent air guarded the array eye and the wind blew outward in all directions, something as tiny as rock dust might not necessarily be blown away completely. After spinning around a few times and knocking against the hail a few times, there was instead a very small chance that it could make its way through the turbulence and fall into the array eye.
“But if there’s turbulence around the array eye, how are you going to get close?” Dong Rui raised the question. “Do you have a way through it?”
He Lingchuan rubbed his hands together. “We may need a wind-warding magical artifact.”
When a problem appeared, one had to solve it. That was the meaning of a test flight.
Juju immediately said, “That’s a small matter. I have a wind-stilling pearl here. I got it from killing a spellcaster 2,700 years ago. Nourished by my spirit qi, it has never lost its effect.”
He Lingchuan happily accepted it. The pearl was only the size of a quail egg, with fine speckles across its surface. It was not as smooth and luminous as a real pearl.
The moment the pearl entered his hand, the wind blowing around him indeed became extremely faint.
“You have to calculate the timing before taking it out,” Juju reminded him. “You can’t wear it the whole time. Otherwise, even the bat you’re riding won’t be able to take off.”
It was a wind-stilling pearl, after all. How were winged creatures supposed to fly without wind?
“Only one?” He Lingchuan was not satisfied. “I need at least two for it to be enough.”
“...” Juju really wanted to slap him to death. “Do you think this is an artificially farmed pearl? That I can cut some oyster open and find more whenever I like? If the one in your hand were auctioned, it would fetch at least 10,000 taels of silver.”
He Lingchuan only chuckled. 10,000 taels for a single wind-stilling pearl? If not for a special use, who would have a head swollen enough to spend that kind of money?
“One really isn’t enough,” he said seriously. “Purely from a technical standpoint.”
Juju said impatiently, “Then scrape some powder off the pearl and make do!”
“...That works?”
“I tried it before, but powder scraped from the pearl only remains effective for two hours.”
He Lingchuan let out a breath of relief. “That’s enough.”
Powder is even better, with it being light and convenient, but exactly how bored was this old thing usually that it had even thought to scrape powder off a pearl?
“We also need to test the radius of the turbulence.” After all, once he was in the sky, he would not be able to see anything. If he activated the wind-stilling pearl at the wrong time, then he and the bat would crash straight into the defensive array.
“I’ll handle that,” Juju said with full confidence. “I’ll play with it.”
It was the local guardian spirit, after all. It had plenty of time and energy and could test slowly through trial and error.
Since Juju had taken on that task, Dong Rui sent the little bat into the air again, approaching the array eye from different directions to calculate its actual size. Of course, he could not do this too frequently, or someone might notice.
The monster puppet flew into the sky a dozen times or so, taking more than four hours in total.
“This thing is round.” After many tests, He Lingchuan could now judge it fairly well. “Including the outer airflow, its diameter is about a hundred meters.”
That meant Juju’s task was to measure the “thickness” of the airflow, so He Lingchuan could control when to activate the wind-stilling pearl.
After recording several data points, the two men descended the mountain.
This time, Juju led them along another hidden path and out through a dark valley.
This was an underground waterway carved over years by flowing stream water. Later, the stream changed its course, leaving this place a dark underground valley. Standing on the mountaintop and looking down, there was no way to see it at all.
Once they reached this place, Juju suddenly stopped. “The rock dust has been cleared away.”
He Lingchuan had been silently calculating the time all along. At this point, he said, “About half an hour.” Strictly speaking, it was thirty-three minutes. “The rock dust was too tiny. It was probably not cleared manually. It’s likely that a cleaning array activated and swept the dust away. Anyway, it seems the array isn’t that diligent.” The interval between each activation was quite long.
In the end, how many arrays had the gods layered onto the array eye later? In Zaifu Kua’s memories, there had not been these messy arrays at all.
He Lingchuan suddenly remembered something and asked Juju, “Right, has there been any unusual activity at Star-Plucking Tower these past few days?”
“No. It’s the same as always.” Juju had a guilty conscience, so of course, it had been paying extra attention to the Heavenly Palace.
“Have any uncommon people gone up there?”
This time, Juju thought for a while before saying, “Oh, right, State Preceptor Qing Yang came up the mountain this morning.”