When piloting that antique machine, the pilot would feel an extraordinary sense of ease and control.
The sword techniques executed would be more refined, and the accuracy of long-range shooting would also improve significantly.
However, this was not the strangest discovery they made.
At that time, neither the Night Guard-type Magitech Knights nor the Eternal Night Knights had yet been created.
Thus, Ye Xu had Navila pilot a standard military-spec Magitech Knight to spar with him.
When his battle intent surged and he supplied the antique machine with magic far exceeding normal specifications, this handgun—which was clearly equipped with only five rounds of magic-piercing armor-penetrating ammunition—actually fired a full six shots!
After the battle, when counting the ammunition, Ye Xu and Navila stared at each other in disbelief.
They had carefully inspected and maintained both machines beforehand, confirming there was absolutely no possibility of a round being jammed in the chamber.
In the end, Ye Xu discovered a peculiar phenomenon that had never been noticed by the world before, and he named it…
—“Magi-Spirit Effect.”
In this world, there exists a peculiar species known as “fairies.”
Just as the spirituality within a soul can give birth to magic, in specific environments with sufficiently high magic concentration, pure energy beings possessing souls can similarly be nurtured.
These little ones are extremely fragile, with minimal spirituality. The slightest disturbance causes them to dissipate, offering no practical value, so no one had ever studied them deeply.
But Ye Xu was different.
He reverse-engineered the principle behind fairy birth and verified it through repeated disassembly experiments. He discovered that this antique machine, having been in a high-magic environment for years, had naturally nurtured an existence similar to a fairy within its magitech core.
Based on its characteristic of being catalyzed not naturally but through human activity, Ye Xu named it a “Magi-Spirit.”
As the component in a Magitech Knight that serves both energy and core processing functions, a Magi-Spirit born within the magitech core could assist the pilot in controlling the machine, even achieving all sorts of inconceivable feats under specific conditions.
For example, in the instant ammunition was depleted, using magic to construct precise rounds out of thin air, refilling an empty magazine.
In fact, throughout history, when people used weapons, staves, rune-engraved armor, or robes in combat, similar phenomena had occasionally occurred. It was just that the people of this world did not focus on the artifacts themselves, so they had never discovered it.
Especially with something like Magitech Knights.
Because their cores were extremely highly integrated, once damaged or aged, they were nearly impossible to repair.
The cost of directly replacing the core was far lower than repairing it.
Even if someone had once noticed the “Magi-Spirit Effect,” it would have been dismissed as meaningless.
After all, according to Ye Xu’s precise testing, the comprehensive combat power boost provided by the Magi-Spirit in this five-thousand-year-old antique machine was only about 18%.
This also required the pilot’s own skill to be sufficiently advanced to perfectly receive the Magi-Spirit’s assistive effects.
In comparison, any military standard Magitech Knight five thousand years later possessed comprehensive performance several times greater than this antique.
In other words, rather than foolishly waiting for a core to nurture a Magi-Spirit, directly replacing the machine yielded far more significant and efficient improvements.
However…
Ye Xu was a transmigrator—how could his thinking be the same as ordinary people?
His first thought was: if he could imitate the principle of Magi-Spirit birth, artificially catalyze Magi-Spirits in a specific environment and implant them into magitech cores, the performance leap they could bring would likely be beyond imagination.
To ordinary people, this was nothing short of fantasy.
An environment with magic concentration high enough to birth fairies was already a miracle far beyond human capability; and fairy-like Magi-Spirits would require years upon years to naturally form.
But Ye Xu was different.
As a transmigrator, he possessed a soul whose limits even he could not fathom—containing infinite spirituality—and a body nurtured by that soul, hiding terrifying magical power.
Using the “Magi-Spirit Effect” as the theoretical foundation, he constructed within his own soul a place capable of systematically cultivating and nurturing Magi-Spirits.
In this process, he further discovered: as lifeforms composed entirely of magic—this powerful energy known as “God’s fuel,” which could ignore physical laws and directly achieve results.
When a sufficient number of powerful Magi-Spirits reached a certain quantity, they could actually cause distortions in the laws, even manipulating this peculiar phenomenon.
This phenomenon was more direct than resonating with laws by releasing magic to cast spells, possessing greater efficiency and power.
Based on this discovery, he began consciously guiding and cultivating Magi-Spirits with special functions, constructing—in the form of authorities—an artificial pseudo-divine authority capable of systematically mastering the power of laws.
In the end, the “Night God Throne System,” modeled after the legendary authorities of the Night God, was officially born.
Ye Xu then used this system to create eleven high-tier Magi-Spirits directly controlled and dominated by the system, possessing the “divine envoy” rank and capable of mobilizing the power of the Night God Throne’s authorities. Eight of them were used to forge the Eternal Night Knights.
The first Eternal Night Knight—the prototype for all Eternal Night Knights—had its core transformed from the magitech core of that very antique machine.
That prototype was later refitted by Ye Xu into Navila’s exclusive mount: “Butterfly.”
The native Magi-Spirit within it was extracted by Ye Xu and elevated to the first “divine envoy”-rank Magi-Spirit of the Night God Throne System.
The cores of the later Night Guard-type Magitech Knights, meanwhile, originated from ordinary Magi-Spirits born in the environment created by the Night God Throne System—lacking authority power but similarly not forcibly dominated by the system.
Ye Xu custom-designed suitable magitech cores for them, then pulled them from the system and inserted them inside.
Back then, when the people at the empire’s machinery research institute heard his lecture, they all sat there dumbfounded for hours.
Within three days, they hurriedly copied the same magitech cores as the Night Guard-type and came knocking with them, begging him to insert Magi-Spirits.
Not long after, she heard news that the empire had successfully developed a new generation of Magitech Knights.
Thereafter, those people would arrive punctually every month with a batch of cores, asking him to continue inserting Magi-Spirits.
It was precisely because of this that, when planning his escape from the empire, he had specially counted the total number of Magi-Spirits taken from the system—fewer than four thousand.
Though Magi-Spirits could continue to be born over time, so losing some didn’t hurt.
But if his guess was correct…
It probably wouldn’t be long before the supply of these “Machine Soul Cores” for the Radiant Sun Type-14 ran dry.
“Hmm…”
Watching Elena, completely immersed in her own world, Ye Xu glanced at her with a guilty conscience and casually asked:
“Um… Do you all really admire that ‘Night’—”
“No, I mean, that Emperor’s Daughter?”
He had originally wanted to say “Night Princess,” but in the end felt that nickname—which he had no idea how it had spread—was far too embarrassing, so he switched to the relatively formal title.
“Huh???”
Hearing this, Elena—who had just been entranced by Nightfall’s beauty—whipped her head around, staring at Ye Xu as if she’d seen a ghost, her face filled with disbelief:
“You… you wouldn’t happen to not admire the Night Princess, would you?”
“Uh, well… huh?” Even Ye Xu, who could remain unflinching before thousands of troops, felt a flicker of panic under that gaze, awkwardly stepping back half a pace.
But Elena reacted like a cat whose tail had been stepped on, instantly bristling and launching into rapid-fire chant mode:
“The tenth imperial daughter who lived in seclusion under a hidden name, rebelled against the imperial family to save her homeland, and formed a rebel army!”
“With her own strength turned the tide, leading the ten-thousand-year empire toward rebirth!”
“The Star of the Empire’s Night, the incarnation of the Night God walking the mortal world!”
“Her achievements! Her power!”
“Her creations—whether the Nine Eternal Night Knights or the Night Guard-type Magitech Knights that served as the prototype for the Radiant Sun Type-14—”
“Whether the commoners who received her grace or the mages immersed in magic, magitech, and alchemy—”
“Who would dare say they do not admire the Night Princess? Who would dare say they do not revere the Night Princess?!”
“Those are miracles personally crafted by a god!!!”
Ye Xu: “…”
(Gu… please just kill me.)
In this moment, Ye Xu only wished for death.
She desperately wanted to know—what exactly had those bastards in the empire done in her name during these two years when she had been focused on her escape plan, distancing herself from the outside world, and increasingly living in seclusion?!