Chapter 123 — Crystal Grenades

"Mm-hm, Eggy made them!" Rebecca nodded vigorously. "I gave him the design drawings, and he machined them all out in a little while. Actually, if there'd been a bit more time, he could have turned out a whole pile of them."

Design drawings... a whole pile...

Gao Yang looked at the metal object in his hand. It was so perfect, so regular; its crisp lines and smooth surfaces even carried the distinctive aesthetic of industrially manufactured goods from Earth, and every one was identical in size and form down to the last hair. If ordinary blacksmiths—or even runesmiths—had been set to the task, how long would it have taken them to machine these things?

That Iron Star human really was a cheat.

Their whole race really was a bunch of cheats.

So long as the basic blueprints were designed and a supply of basic raw materials secured, they could convert the original drawings into finished products at the speed of light. Give him two hundred Iron Star humans, and to hell with building an industrial base—why not just leap straight into the space age?

Still, Gao Yang quickly suppressed the urge to rant, and asked Rebecca with curiosity: "How exactly did you manage the delay?"

"Gears, a mainspring, and a linkage," Rebecca said, evidently having anticipated that Gao Yang would ask, for she had specially prepared an unassembled delay device. "Look, this is it—very simple."

Gao Yang looked down and was struck dumb: steady, reliable reduction gears and an escapement...

So this silly doe was in fact the one who had transmigrated!

Hedy's expression turned exceedingly strange: "How... how do these things get into your head?"

"The mechanical structures on the arcane engine you designed, Ancestor, and all the times you explained various mechanical principles to me—I studied them all very carefully!" Rebecca blinked, her face utterly guileless. "And I've always loved these mechanical structures, Auntie, you know that."

Yes—because she could never master any other spell, she had thrown herself into studying every manner of magical mechanism, trying to make up with machinery for what she lacked in magic. Hedy still remembered clearly how, when her peers were busy drawing castles, flowers, knights, and princes on paper, Rebecca had painted an entire wall of levers and drive wheels in her own bedroom—and how she had been chased all over the castle afterward.

Gao Yang had no time now to study the circuitry inside the head of this silly doe... this clever doe, and instead asked the crucial question: "How's the reliability?"

"I've tested it over and over, in all kinds of conditions—high heat, soaking in water, even dropping it on the ground. None of it affects it. At the very least, it won't blow early. This iron strip here is the safety lock; you have to pull it out before it'll work. Then you press this little nub on top, and the inside starts going tick-tick-tick, and five seconds later it goes off. With the safety lock still in place, unless you drop it from dozens of meters up and the angle of impact happens to be just right, it absolutely will not explode—because the rune trigger is jammed fast against the safety lock and can't make contact with the detonation array on the inside of the casing."

Faced with a Rebecca like this, Gao Yang could only twitch the corner of his mouth: "...I'll give you proper praise when we're back."

Carrying the "crystal grenade"—a proof-of-concept weapon only just finished and still untested in battle—Gao Cen and the other three left the banks of the Whitewater River and vanished from Hedy's and Rebecca's sight on fast horses.

Only after they had disappeared did Rebecca cautiously glance at Hedy: "Auntie, what Zuyan said just now—that wasn't sarcasm, was it?"

"Why would it be sarcasm?" Hedy didn't react for a moment.

Rebecca scratched at her hair: "Didn't you always used to tell me, 'Wait till we get home and I'll give you a proper thrashing'?"

Hedy was taken aback, then couldn't help laughing as she rubbed Rebecca's hair: "Of course it wasn't sarcasm. We were too narrow-minded before—so much so that we failed to see your talent."

"...That's not sarcasm either?"

"Of course not."