kscans

Chapter 154 - Chapter 21: Part One - Selection and Concentration

"What do you think? This is the power of Calidus Stūre, which creates high temperature flames from nothing."

Maytyl looked at me with challenging eyes. You must be joking, Maytyl-san. It's so obvious you're testing me.

"From nothing? That flame just now used only what was already there, didn't it? Besides, calling it a flame is a bit of a misnomer."

"...Oh? What do you mean by that? I don't quite understand."

I made a gesture of gathering the air with both hands.

"It's the selection and concentration of the heat that's already here, isn't it?"

Maytyl's face twitched.

It was just a hypothesis for now, but I believed Sorcery was a form of information processing, or computation, that used magic. In itself, this was not strange at all. From the world of atoms to human society, and even the cosmos, this universe is a network. In other words, it is a computer. It is not a matter of 'stop calling the universe a computer,' but rather 'stop calling a computer the universe.' That is how fundamentally identical the two are.

God is a mathematician. No, perhaps I should say God is mathematics.

Now, back to Calidus Stūre. What looked like a fireball was likely just high temperature gas swirling in a vortex. There are two conceivable ways to produce heat using the energy of magic. The first is extremely simple. Convert the energy called magic directly into thermal energy.

This is no different from burning oil to create heat.

First, what is heat? The heat of a given volume of air is the kinetic energy of the gas molecules within that space, like nitrogen and oxygen molecules. Simply put, it is the number and speed of these molecular balls flying around in space.

The more gas molecules present in a given area, or the greater the velocity of each individual molecule, the higher the temperature.

To create enough heat to appear as a flame, you must either gather a large number of gas molecules, in other words, compress them, or increase the energy of those gas molecules, in other words, heat them. In simple terms, those are the two methods.

For example, if you compress air, the density of the gas molecules within it increases, raising the temperature. If you burn a fire to accelerate the gas molecules, the temperature rises.

This is possible if you have energy. If magic is a type of energy, it should be possible in principle to convert it into heat. However, that cannot explain the phenomenon I just witnessed. Because if that were the case, the temperature around the caster would have risen by the amount of magic converted to heat. Furthermore, any heat you gathered would rapidly dissipate into the surroundings.

But when Maytyl used Calidus Stūre, the surrounding temperature actually dropped. Moreover, the flame she created remained in one place, albeit for a short time, and flew in the direction she willed. This means Sorcery is not such a direct process.

Which brings us to the second possibility for how Calidus Stūre creates heat. To put it simply, that heat was already there. It originated from the gas molecules already present in the surrounding air. What made it possible was the selection of gas molecules and the manipulation of their direction of movement. In other words, information processing.

The truth is, the energy, or velocity, of gas molecules is not constant. When we say air is 20 degrees, it means the average energy of the gas molecules is equivalent to 20 degrees. It does not mean it is composed solely of molecules with exactly 20 degrees of energy.

In other words, just like in human society, there are rich and poor. As an aside, suppose you were to place a large number of gas molecules, all with the exact same energy, into a container. Inside that container, the molecules would repeatedly collide, inevitably creating a certain energy distribution.

Amazingly, even if you gather identical entities and start them under fair conditions, inequality arises. In fact, an immense amount of energy would be required to average out this disparity. Nature itself forbids equality. It is enough to make you despair.

However, unlike the disparities in human society, this inequality can easily be reversed in the next moment. It does not become fixed. At any given instant, you will have a few rich molecules and a majority of poor ones, but a rich molecule can become a poor one in the blink of an eye.

I had gotten sidetracked. No, as a former economics student, I suppose I had not...

Anyway, to put it simply, within 20 degree air, you have a mix of a few hot gas molecules with energy equivalent to 100 degrees, and many cold gas molecules with energy equivalent to only 0 degrees. If the ratio of hot to cold molecules is one to four, that means one rich person to four poor people, averaging out to 20 degrees.

Conversely, if you only select the hot molecules, you can create a temperature of 100 degrees without directly heating the air. The gas molecules themselves are zipping around the caster at incredible speeds, so all you need to do is keep picking out the hot ones.

It is like continuously kidnapping only the rich people at a major city's scramble crossing. It is akin to taking the top ten percent of the wealthiest citizens from a nation of one hundred million and making them all live together on a small island, a tax haven.

Furthermore, by manipulating the direction of the hot molecules' movement and confining them to a narrow area, you increase their density. You just need to select the molecules and shift their direction of movement toward a specific set of coordinates.

For example, if you select only the gas molecules equivalent to 100 degrees from the air and manipulate their movement to orbit within a fixed area, you can create a high temperature as a result.

The important thing is that this process does not affect the total amount of energy in the 'simple sense.' You are not directly increasing pressure with magic, nor are you directly heating anything with magic.

Calidus Stūre 'selected' heat from its surroundings and 'concentrated' it in a specific area by manipulating the direction of gas molecules. In other words, it produced heat through that kind of calculation.

But in reality, this is an incredible cheat. I said it was as simple as selecting only the 100 degree molecules, but to do this through any conventional method would require an absurd amount of energy.

First, you would have to observe a vast number of gas molecules. The calculations just to record the observations and determine which molecules are the hot ones would be enormous.

It might be easier to say you would need a supercomputer just to simulate the gas molecules in a space the size of a needle's tip. It would be far more efficient to use that computer's electricity to heat the air directly, or better yet, just collect the waste heat from the supercomputer itself.

However, information processing via magic circuits has minimal energy loss, almost like the flow of electrons in a superconductor. In fact, when you run magic through a circuit, it does not generate any detectable heat. I had Fulsy do me a favor and test this.

And this is what is important for the product I have brought, the semiconductor. Sorcery does not directly convert the energy of magic into an effect. It mainly uses magic for information manipulation. This means its magical efficiency can be improved using the same principles as a computer.

You can understand this if you think about doing calculations with chalk. Let's consider the amount of chalk needed to write the equation 1 + 1 = 2 as the energy required for the calculation. Whether you use the side of the chalk to write the numbers with ten centimeter thick lines, or hold it upright for one centimeter thick lines, or even sharpen it to a point for one millimeter thick lines, the result is always 2.

The thickness of that chalk line corresponds to the width of the circuit. In other words, using the sorcery semiconductor technology I have brought will cause magical efficiency to jump several times over.

By the way, why are they doing something as inefficient as manipulating gas molecules? If you manipulated electrons instead of gas molecules, you could do some incredible things.

"So, yeah, that's more or less how Calidus Stūre works."

I shared about a tenth of the explanation floating in my head with Maytyl, who was waiting for my impression of her Sorcery. She apparently already grasped the concept of 'selection' and had some understanding of the relationship between pressure and temperature, so we were just barely on the same page.

...At this point, I'd place her intelligence somewhere between Mia's and mine. In other words, it's confirmed she's smarter than me. Why am I always surrounded by people like this?

For the record, her attendant mage could not follow at all. He reminded me of myself in my past life, when a professor tricked me into taking a statistical information theory class that was actually a hardcore physics lecture. I felt a sense of kinship with him, really.

"...I knew it the moment you showed me that on the battlefield. And to think she said, 'Without my mathematics, Ricardo Vinder is just some easy-to-fool rich boy.'"

Maytyl glared at Mia. That Mia, telling the enemy the truth like that. Her information security is terrible... Then again, I guess she did manage to hide the fact that I'm a fearsome strategist.

"I've made up my mind."

Maytyl pointed a finger at me and declared.

"I am taking you and Mia back to the Empire. No matter the cost. Doing so will mean this war is effectively our victory."

It seemed Maytyl had arrived at the correct answer. Now, all that is left is my own art of self preservation.