Mercury Lamp

"Are you all right!"

Gu Sheng had brought Liu Daimei running all the way. After making sure the bugs had not followed them, he hurriedly turned around to check on her. Although he had been using True Essence to protect them both the entire way, he was still worried that something might have slipped through.

"I’m fine!"

Liu Daimei covered her chest and let out a long breath. Gu Sheng had carried her through the first burst of sprinting, and later she had pushed herself with all her strength just to barely keep up with his speed instead of being dragged along.

"What were those bugs? What exactly were they?"

Liu Daimei was still shaken. The bugs, which resembled black mist, had truly broadened her horizons. Even a master like Gu Sheng had been worn down until he fled in disarray. One could imagine what would happen if ordinary people encountered them.

"I don’t know. They might be some kind of biochemical mutation or something. In any case, they aren’t supernatural creatures."

Gu Sheng looked back, then shook the packet of bugs in his hand. "That place we just visited was the lair of a Grandmaster of dark arts. If these things were supernatural creatures, they would have been wiped out long ago. Why would they have been left there until now?"

The bugs in the side tunnel of the Gold Mine where Yue Qiluo’s lair was located had no specific origin in the original story.

All that was known was that these bugs were extremely terrifying. They specifically attacked living things and ate flesh. Other than sunlight, they had no weaknesses. They were not related to dark arts, so there was no spell that could specifically counter them. They could only be dealt with by conventional means, such as burning them with fire or burying them in water.

Of course, that was also because the Wu Xin: The Monster Killer World had no large-scale elemental magic. In a Western fantasy world, a priest’s holy-light spell might have been enough to finish all these creatures off.

"I wonder if what I prepared for them will work. I’ll try it when we get back!"

Gu Sheng weighed the swarm of beetles he had stunned with a shock of True Essence and muttered to himself. He was not the fussy type, though. Once Liu Daimei had rested, he took her toward the mountain road where the carriage was waiting.

"Chief of Staff!"

"Chief of Staff! Chief of Staff!"

Just as Gu Sheng approached the camp, a sharp-eyed young man spotted him and became alert. Two others soon came over as well.

"Gather some firewood and start a fire. We’ll spend the night here."

Gu Sheng gave the three men an order, then led Liu Daimei to the carriage. After taking a wooden chest from inside, he found a black crock and put the swarm of stunned bugs inside.

"What are you keeping this for?"

Liu Daimei looked at Gu Sheng in puzzlement. She had already found it strange when they returned from Shanghai. Why had Gu Sheng gone to such lengths to bring this thing back?

This thing was a powerful weapon against vampires, and she was a vampire herself. Just thinking about keeping it beside her made her uncomfortable. Yet every time she asked Gu Sheng, he brushed her off with a joke, leaving her maddeningly curious.

"Of course, we’re using it tonight!"

Gu Sheng raised his eyebrows and shot Liu Daimei a flirtatious look. Grinning, he said, "Mei-jie, don’t you think this light is wonderful? Under this hazy glow, you’d be completely powerless to resist. You could only… heh heh!"

"In your dreams! I’m not risking my life to play such a dangerous game with you!"

Liu Daimei’s pretty face flushed. She angrily smacked Gu Sheng several times, then said seriously, "You’re getting worse and worse, you brat. But don’t joke about things like that.

"If I happened to be caught in this light while transforming, that would be no joke. I’d feel unwell for days afterward. We’ll see who would suffer more then."

"How could that happen? Mei-jie, you’re my darling sweetheart. How could I bear to let you get hurt?"

Gu Sheng put down what he was working on, wrapped an arm around the beauty’s slender shoulder, and lightly kissed her pursed red lips. He then rubbed affectionately against her for a while, teasing her until her heart raced before finally letting her go.

"Bad little brother! Someone’s watching!"

Liu Daimei rolled her eyes at Gu Sheng. She accepted his intimacy in her heart, but of course she had to pretend to refuse it on the surface.

"Right, you still haven’t told me the truth! What exactly are you going to use this Mercury Lamp for?"

After tidying her appearance into the style of a Republic-era concubine, Liu Daimei made sure nothing was out of place. Then she patted Gu Sheng, who was busy assembling the equipment, her eyes filled with undisguised curiosity.

The incandescent lamp ushered people into the age of electric lighting, officially bringing the "Dark Age" to an end. Its greatest flaw, however, was that it used only ten to twenty percent of its electrical energy. Most of the electricity was converted into heat and dissipated into the air, wasted.

Science was a process of constant exploration and progress. Scientists had noticed the problems with incandescent lamps long ago, and afterward they continued improving electric lighting. The American scientist Hewitt was the first person in this field to make an effort and achieve results. He invented the Mercury Lamp.

In 1902, Hewitt filled a vacuum tube with mercury and a small amount of argon gas, an inert gas. Once electricity was applied, the mercury vaporized and, stimulated by electrons, emitted an intense light. The Mercury Lamp was born.

The Mercury Lamp was far brighter than an incandescent lamp, and its energy efficiency was also higher. Unfortunately, it emitted large amounts of ultraviolet radiation, and excessive ultraviolet light was harmful to human health. Its light was also similar to sunlight and excessively glaring, making it unsuitable for widespread use.

Although the Mercury Lamp never came into widespread use, scientists recognized its tubular shape and basic principles. On that foundation, neon lamps and fluorescent lamps were born one after another. In the end, fluorescent lamps replaced incandescent lamps and became the most widely used household lighting fixtures.

Since Gu Sheng had chosen the Wu Xin: The Monster Killer World, he had naturally devoted himself to recalling the details and carefully studied some of the events within it. The mine outside Wen County would later become the key to Zhang Xianzong’s downfall, so Gu Sheng had naturally sorted through its entire chain of events with care.

The Black Mist Beetles inside the Gold Mine had only one weakness: under sunlight, they turned into pus. Genuine sunlight was something one could encounter only by chance. Unless he blew up the entire mountain and turned it into an open-pit mine, even then he could not guarantee that some stragglers would not hide in the tunnels. It was not a viable solution.

So he changed his approach. In Underworld, the Werewolves had created ultraviolet bullets with the help of an expert vampire traitor, and they were extremely lethal against vampires.

The Black Mist Beetles were similar to vampires, both being creatures that feared sunlight. Could ultraviolet light be their nemesis? Gu Sheng believed it was, but he could not be certain before seeing the result. Thus, he had specially commissioned someone in Shanghai to make a Mercury Lamp.

When Liu Daimei had first seen the thing, she had frowned. At the time, Gu Sheng had even joked that they could use it to set the mood when the two of them were being intimate, so that this beautiful vampire would be too frightened to keep clamoring about drinking blood.

"Didn’t you notice? These bugs don’t dare go into the sunlight at all. Even the ones that charged out left no corpses behind."

Gu Sheng rubbed Liu Daimei’s hair and answered with a smile. While she was distracted, he flicked the beauty’s delicate nose, then picked up the assembled Mercury Lamp and turned to leave.