After Barov left, Roland put the statistics table into the drawer. He looked at Nightingale, wanting to ask what was wrong with her, but after a moment of hesitation, he couldn't bring himself to ask.
He vaguely had an answer in his heart, but such things always seemed awkward to say, and it would be even more embarrassing if he guessed wrong. Roland had no choice but to swallow these words, "Let's go to the North Slope Mine next."
"Want to see what changes Soraya's new ability has?" Although Nightingale's behavior had become a little strange, her attitude was still the same as before. She took off her hood and smiled, "Let's go."
Perhaps I'm just overthinking it, Roland thought, watching the witch walk quickly to his side.
The impact of taking off in a hot air balloon that day was far more than just on one or two people.
He never expected that Soraya would become the second witch whose ability would undergo a qualitative change.
In fact, even she herself hadn't noticed this change.
Roland only happened to discover this yesterday.
Ever since the hot air balloon was given to Anna as a gift, it had been left in the castle courtyard. Anyone who wanted to go up to see the scenery would just ask Anna and Lightning to come along. Until one day when it was raining, Roland suddenly remembered that the rattan basket would soften and peel after being soaked in water. Even after drying, its toughness would be reduced, so he thought about taking it back to the castle.
He had originally planned to ask a servant to do this, but then he thought that the hot air balloon was a gift he had given to Anna, and the ropes and balloons were easily damaged, so he decided to move it back to the castle himself. He called Hummingbird to come to the front courtyard, and the result surprised him.
He saw that the basket was covered in paintings—all views of Border Town from the air. But unlike the previous photographic style, this time her paintings seemed to stand up. Roland ignored the falling raindrops and leaned closer to take a closer look, only to find that her paintings had "thickness" for the first time.
It's not strange for paintings to have thickness. In theory, all real paintings should have thickness—because the paint itself has thickness. In oil paintings, this thickness can even be used: using brushstrokes, brushes, or scrapers to create uneven textures, enhancing the texture and expressiveness of the picture through changes in layers.
But Soraya is different. Her paintings are not painted with brushes and paints, but are manifestations of magic.
So the thickness created by these magic powers seemed particularly strange.
He remembered that when he gently touched the raised woods, it felt like he was really scraping past branches and green leaves. They were not hard solids, but slightly soft gelatinous substances. And when he stroked the ground, the touch was much harder, as if he was really touching a stone.
It's simply incredible.
And the rain flowed down the landscape painting, unable to penetrate the rattan at all.
Back at the castle, he immediately called Soraya over, and Nightingale also confirmed this. Under the observation of the Mist, Soraya's magic was no longer like before, a golden, gaseous vortex, but condensed into a continuously rotating... ribbon.
...
Walking into the military factory courtyard, Anna greeted him with a smile and gave Roland a big hug.
Since clarifying their relationship, she has been much more affectionate towards him. Roland happily rubbed her head, the silver hairpin in her hair shimmering in the sunlight.
However, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Soraya, who was originally preparing to come over to greet him, standing there at a loss. Finally, she blushed and looked away, pretending she hadn't seen anything.
"Ahem," Nightingale pulled Soraya back to the table and deliberately asked loudly, "Did you paint all of these?"
Roland smiled and shook his head, released Anna, and walked over to her.
He saw the table covered with Soraya's paintings, depicting the scenery that could be seen in the courtyard. The only difference was the thickness of the paintings. Some were only about one millimeter higher than the paper, while others were close to three centimeters—this was also the training content Roland had arranged for her this morning, to test as much as possible how thick the magic-generated "paint" could be.
"Is this the thickest one?" Roland touched the painting that was three centimeters thick. When he touched the enchanted blue sky, that part of the paint was so soft that it felt like it had
no texture at all, but when he slid down to the courtyard wall, he immediately felt a sandy friction.
It seemed that, as he had guessed, the things painted after the magic pen evolved not only matched the real thing in appearance and color, but even the touch was close to the real thing.
"It can be thicker, but after exceeding this thickness, the magic consumption becomes very large," Soraya pointed to a patch of brown protrusions on the table. "I wanted to paint a tree outside the wall, but after only painting the trunk, I used up half of my magic."
"You painted this?" Roland stretched out his hand and compared it, and found that the paint was as thick as ten centimeters. "I thought it was just a piece of bark standing up."
Even so, it was exceptionally firmly attached to the table. The prince grabbed the bark and lifted it upwards until two table legs left the ground, but the bark still didn't separate from the table.
Nightingale pulled out her bishou and cut for a long time before cutting a small opening at the bottom. "This thing seems to be embedded in the table."
In the end, Anna cut it open. Blackfire turned into silk threads and swept across the table. The paint emitted a puff of white smoke and fell to the ground. The fracture was flat but not smooth, with black burn marks. Roland picked up the fallen piece of paint and realized that it was much lighter than he had imagined.
"How did you suddenly think of changing your painting style...no, I mean, how did you decide to fill the painting with thickness?" he asked.
"I think it's probably because I saw such a scenery for the first time," Soraya said while recalling, "I realized when I overlooked the earth from the air that those paintings I had made before—that is, the 'photographic works' that you said were almost comparable to real scenery—were actually not real, especially after I depicted the scenery in the basket, I felt even more so." She paused slightly and slowed down her speech, "The top of the tree is pointed and sways with the wind, the mountains are high and low, like undulating chests, the rivers are embedded in the earth, and ships travel on them. This is what I saw, not a thin plane. So I wanted to make the picture more real, to make it stand up like these magnificent sceneries. But I redrew it several times and failed... I suddenly remembered the little balls you mentioned when I was a little frustrated."
"Little balls?" Roland raised his eyebrows.
"Yes," she nodded a little embarrassed, "That's the knowledge you taught us. I thought that if everything was made up of little balls, then would the patterns drawn also be like that? I tried a few more times and imagined the patterns under the magic pen as colorful spheres that stacked on top of each other, eventually forming whole blocks of color. Then... the picture suddenly wriggled, the emerald green forest bulged upwards, and the dark green river sank downwards, eventually becoming what you saw. At that time, this change startled Anna and me. If you hadn't mentioned it to me later, I would never have thought that my ability had evolved."
"I see."
"But compared to Anna's Blackfire, my evolutionary ability doesn't seem to have any other use besides making the paintings more vivid." Soraya stuck out her tongue.
"No... how could it be?" Roland shook his head, "In my eyes, it's not just a simple painting."
It would be a waste to only use this ability for painting. He remembered the scene where the rain slid across the surface of the basket but couldn't penetrate it at all—rather than saying it was paint, it was more like a "coating" made of magic.