"Continuing, then. The idea that extraordinary things have been fading from the world, or fading from Hyrule, has been around for a while, and it's always been hotly contested. If I'll count the reasons why for Cam's sake:

"Magic creatures have been seen less and less through all of recorded history, which scholars used to hypothesize was due to population expansion and natural industry driving them away from the mundane wilds into the fae realms. But as far as I know, there's never been any evidence ever found of 'fae realms' as a thing that exists, so it's a bit of a nonsense explanation! More likely, we've always thought, is that the old stories and legends are all exaggerated, and the more exaggerated the more mouths they've been passed down through.

"What's a bit more concrete evidence is that Hyrule has always seemed poor in magic compared to other parts of the world. We don't have legendary creatures, not as other lands would reckon them, anyway. The extraordinary effects of our plants and animals are weak, if you compare potions brewed from Hyrule stock to the ones we used to import over the sea. Again, it's often dismissed a selection or word-of-mouth effect, though there were studies that suggested there's truth to this."

Link looks up for a moment, then goes back to cleaning.

"Most undeniable, however, is that measured against foreign kingdoms, Hyrule's crop yields are worse, our livestock is more feeble, our people live shorter lives, and our child and infant mortality rates are higher. There hasn't been too much research into this because the royal family likes to cover it up, but it's very suggestive, and for this problem specifically, magic has been proposed as a cause... though usually about curses and evil spirits, and not planar energy exhaustion. For a while, people thought it was Calamity Ganon's fault!"

"But if we're talking about after the Calamity? The effect is much more stark.

"Blupees have been seen less and less. Bubbulfrogs and fairies are near extinct. No one's heard from a Great Fairy in forty years. The Great Hyrule Forest's overtaken by an growing, unnavigable miasma. Crops are struggling. Some of that people have attributed to the effects of the Calamity, again, but you know what can't be blamed from Ganon?

"The Zora are growing less powerful. The new generation's powers express weaker, and there hasn't been a healer even close to Mipha's ability since she died. If you ask them they'll tell you that when Mipha died, the Will of Water died with her—what nonsense! Tens of beloved Zora princesses and ladies have fallen to war or tragedy in recorded history, and nothing of the sort has happened before. The Zora live so far away from the epicenter of the Calamity, and are so completely fine otherwise, that something shifty has to be going on there."

...Link is continuing not to say anything.

"...What the data from the Divine Beasts tells us is that over the last ten thousand years, their ancient cores have been generating less and less power. After we reactivated them, they began drawing hundreds of times the power again, but much less than the amount when they first launched. And over the last century, guess what? Power output falling. Again, and faster than ever.

"Robbie and I think this is why the world's powers have been draining out of Hyrule. Ancient energy only collects a very specific cross-section planar energies from the world, and small scale tests showed it was safe before. But on such a large scale, in such great volumes... I think the planar landscape is running out of slack to compensate, and this is what happens."

"Is this a renewable resource, if the drainage stops?"

"Yes, but—"

"...mmmaybe."

"Wrong question. When an ancient furnace or Divine Beast draws planar energy, the energies aren't destroyed! They're converted. Stored. When the ancient energy is expended, most of it is released back to the environment, in other forms! And should get recycled back into the equilibrium of the planes."

"The Divine Beasts have been storing up most of the power it's been generating through these thousands of years. If they simply stop drawing more... it's possible Hyrule will recover by itself. At the very least, after a few hundred years, free energies from the other parts of the world will flow back in slowly.

"If we discharge the beasts, by firing them at Ganon or bleeding them off in other ways, the energy will return to the world, as Robbie says. But we also don't know how long it'll take for the returned power to recycle back into the energies of natural magic. Could be years or decades or hundreds of years. It probably depends on how we discharge it."

"I have heard rumors of giant lasers being involved?"

"That's the obvious way. But using the lasers not only renders the ancient energy in an output format that's as about far away from natural as possible, it also ends with a lot of the power scattered as astral radiation into the higher and lower planes... which effectively means if and when they return to nature, it'll be nowhere near Hyrule. I'd have to do more calculations to be sure how exactly it'll pan out."

"What are the nonobvious ways, what's the divine beast feature set?"

"I'm not aware of anything built into the Divine Beasts useful for that, but in theory we could hook any sort of device into a Divine Beast's power core with the right transformers and elbow grease, so it's a matter of inventing the right solution, some sort of autolytic decompositor, perhaps. But there's the obvious dilemma..."

"If we bleed out the Divine Beasts to save the fishes, we can't use them to EXPLODE GANON!"

"If he can only die to magic lasers I can't help but if a nonmagical laser might work, or interpolation..."

"Test it on the Blights." He's reassembling his weapon. "What happens to the Champions?"

"If we deactivate the Divine Beasts or run them dry, their spirits should be released. I should also mention we don't need to use all of the power on Ganon. The current power stored is a bit over two times what the Divine Beasts fired at Ganon ten thousand years ago. So there's a possible hybrid solution."

"Where will I find a Blight? And what hybrid solution?"

"I mean we could figure out how to fire some of the energy to burn down Ganon, and bleed the rest in a better way, and we can calibrate those proportions depending on how confident Link is feeling. I wouldn't have been so confident about messing with the Divine Beasts yesterday, but with you we have access to all the original design notes! The Blights—there's one in Akkala Citadel, one on Eventide Island, I heard rumors of one at the end of Tanagar Canyon... that's a good idea. They're probably the closest there is to whatever Link needs his darkness-sealing sword for."

"There are Blights guarding inside the Divine Beasts."

"I don't want to wreck another beast so I should probably start with a blight that is not in one."

"Akkala?"

He straps his giant mace to his back.

"I'm a teensy bit concerned about the thing where some Gorons ended up infected with Malice after the Calamity..."