“Cough,” Nightingale took Soraya’s hand and pulled her to the table, and asked deliberately, “Did you draw this?”
Roland smiled and shook his head, letting go of Anna and went over with her.
Only seeing that the whole table was covered with the demanded pictures, the paintings were exactly what you could see in the yard, the only difference between the paintings were the thickness, some of them were only about a millimeter higher than the paper, while some came close to three centimeters — this was exactly the training concept Roland had arranged for her this morning, testing how far it was possible for her to thicken her magic “paint”.
“Is this the thickest one?” Roland touched with his fingers a nearly three centimeters thick picture. The enchanted blue sky, that part of the picture was soft as if it has no texture in general, but when he slid his finger down to the yard’s wall, he immediately felt a sand-like friction.
It seemed to be exactly as he had expected, after the evolution of her magic pen, the pictures drawn by her were not only in line with the shape and color of the original, even the tactile sensation came close to the original object.
“It can also become thicker, but increasing the thickness, even more, the magical consumption becomes very large,” Soraya pointed at a brown protrusion on the table, “I wanted to draw the tree trunk outside of the wall, but I had barely drawn the basics of the tree trunk before I had already spent half of my magic power.
“This is your painting?” Roland reached with his hand for a ten centimeters thick painting, “I thought it was really a bark.”
That being said, however, its connection to the table was exceptional firm, the Prince used his hand to grab the tree bark and tried to pick it up until his two feet had left the ground, but even with this he was unable to separate the bark from the tree.
Seeing this, Nightingale drew a knife, yet even after a long time she was still only able to cut a small hole at the bottom. “This thing seems to have been embedded into the table.”
In the end, it could only be cut by Anna, she changed her black fire into a thin thread and swept it over the table. Afterward, the pigments began to emit white smoke and then it dropped off. The cut was smooth but not glossy. Instead it had several black scorched marks on it. Roland picked the fallen pigments up, and when he held it in his hand he discovered that it was far lighter than he had imagined.
“Why did you suddenly want to change your style… No, I mean, how do you decide to add thickness to your painting?” Roland asked.
“I think it was probably because I had seen this kind of scenery for the first time,” Soraya stated her memories. “When I was high up in the air and looking down on the earth, I felt, that the paintings I had made before — which you had said to be almost comparable to the real scene and had called a “photo”, was in fact not accurate. Especially when I used the basket to portray the scenery, and also when I had come down I thought even more in this way.”
She paused, then continued slowly, “The tops of the trees are pointed, and the wind always blows through them carefreely. The mountains are high and low, resembling the ups and downs of a chest. And the river is embedded in the earth, the ships on top of it are pushing their way through. This was the scenery I had seen and not the extremely thin painting.
So I had wanted that my picture would become more like reality. I wanted it to stand up, just like this magnificent scenery. But even after several tries I failed to succeed… during a moment of frustration, I suddenly remembered what you had said about those balls.”
“Balls?” Rolland raised his eyebrows questionably.
“Well,” she nodded shyly, “that was at least what you had taught us. I thought that everything was made out of those small balls, then shouldn’t the pattern I drew also be the same? I made a few more attempts and imagined that the pattern illustrated by my magic pen were made out of colorful balls, all stacked to each other, and together formed a whole block of color. Then… the screen suddenly wriggled up, the green woods grew upwards, the dark blue river sunk, finally turning into the pattern you normally see. At that time, these changes shocked both Anna and me. If you hadn’t mentioned it, I would never have realized that my magic had evolved.”
“So, it was like this.”
“But compared to Anna’s black fire, with the exception that after the evolution my paintings seems to be more vivid, it seems it doesn’t have any other useful effect.” Soraya spat out.
“No … why?” Roland shook his head. “In my eyes, they are not just simple paintings.”
It would be a waste if she only used this ability for painting. He remembered the scene where the rain had slid over the surface of the basket but was still unable to immerse into one of the scenes — rather than a painting it was a kind of “coating” magic.
Chapter 182 Shaft furnaces
As long as the object’s surface was covered and formed a definite contiguous skin, it could be called a coating. The coating itself could be gaseous, liquid or solid, with all sorts of different applications to them. From the initial beautiful decoration, and later enforcing the durability of the object, all of these things could be considered as coatings.
Afterward, Roland launched a series of tests at the substances.
He became extremely pleased by the test results, its concept could be roughly summarized with the phrase: “The more energy her paintings consumed, and the longer she drew, the better they would become.” Her previous pictures were already hard to completely erase, as long as their medium wasn’t also destroyed, and now, after her ability had evolved, this characteristic would become even stronger in the future.
Firstly, there was the high adhesive force and the light mass of these “pigments”. While on top they showed some of the physical characteristics of the object — it could also change its flexibility according to the depicted object. Things such as painted clouds or skies, would be as soft as cotton candy, while still having a high resistance towards stretching and cutting. But when replaced with something made out of iron ingot, glass or material of a similar nature, it then became hard and brittle, and could be directly smashed with a hammer. In other words, due to its limited mass, its performance regarding flexibility was far superior to its display of rigidity, which was consistent with Soraya’s understanding of how the pigments worked.
Secondly, regardless of which characteristics were shown, its chemical properties remained very stable. Not only didn’t it react with dilute of sulfuric acid or dilute of nitric acid, but it also repelled water and oil.
When Roland filled a coated paper box with water, the thin bottom of the box didn’t show any marks of any water seepage. After pouring water into it, the clear liquid beads rolled in the box like dew on a lotus leaf. And when he touched the bottom with his finger he confirmed that even then it still remained dry.
For the high temperature resistance test, Anna went to the paper box and dropped some molten iron into it, the paper as supporter caught fire immediately, the coating itself however, except for stretching a bit didn’t change much. Only when Anna used her black flame to directly burn the coating, did it begin to deform and melt, emitting a white smoke until it finally turned into a mass of black jelly.
The fact that the coating also had an insulating effect totally excited Roland. After all, coated copper wires could be used the same way as enameled wire, which he had already proven by building a simple DC motor in the yard.
At this point, Roland had completely understood the capacity of Soraya’s new ability.