Chapter 1169 — The Technical Frontier

Moments later, a shrill, urgent bell rang out across the plant, and the workers and technicians who had long been ready came into the workshop one after another. Although wetware control of the main unit could greatly raise the efficiency of production and reduce the number of operators needed at many posts, the system still required human assistance and supervision—and given that it was currently in trial operation, a certain number of operators were still needed in the workshop.

A window opened in the middle of the "wetware control tower" deep in the workshop, and Ropney and Selena stood together before it, watching the situation in the workshop below. They saw personnel taking their positions and readiness signals coming in from every quarter; behind them, the technical director came to the Prime Brain's console and pulled down hard on the black lever at the very center.

A string of bubbles rose through every vessel, runic light flickered between the bases and the pipes, and the sleeping Prime Brain was instantly awakened. These loyal control units seriously considered the matter—and then the whole workshop came alive.

In Selena's field of vision, she saw those rivers of thought that had been quietly flowing suddenly grow extremely active; continuous thought pulses raced along the neural cables spread throughout the workshop, like a dim network abruptly lit up. The servo-brains' "thinking" was injected into the great machines arranged in neat rows, and all the heavy gears and connecting rods began to turn with a roar—

"All execution units operating normally!" "Neural cable signals normal!" "Biomass pipe network monitoring normal!" "Servo-brain blood glucose normal!"

Amid the ceaseless stream of reports, Selena wore a faint smile. Though a phantom, she drew a deep breath as if she were alive in the world and let it out with a sigh: "At last... those dark knowledge of the old days has found the light of the proper path once more."

……

North of Bedrock Fortress, downstream of the Gorgon River, in the Pompeii District, a warm wind blowing from the south swept across the vast wasteland beyond the boundary of the development zone. The wind carried a faint, damp smell of earth—a sign that a summer rain was about to come.

This year's rainfall was more plentiful than in years past, and the water level of the Gorgon River had been rising all along, but after careful study the scholars confirmed that rainfall of this magnitude would not cause flooding. The people living in the central reaches of the Holy Spirit Plain therefore set their minds at ease, and at the same time hoped that the last stretch of summer would bring favorable weather, so that the year might close with a good harvest.

A large factory stood in the development zone east of the riverside city. Put into operation only this year, it had multiple arcane obelisks and several towering magic-dissipation towers, and a broad, straight road cut through the plant grounds and ran all the way to the wharf on the bank of the Gorgon River. All these features marked it as a heavy factory producing large magitech devices—and one on which the local civil affairs office pinned great hopes.

In the loading area of the plant, a heavy truck stood beside the transfer platform, waiting to carry goods out of the factory. Several workers and technicians bustled about on site, operating machinery to move the heavy crates while inspecting the contents of each one.

Among the on-site operators, a tall, middle-aged man stood out. Apart from a physique sturdier than most, visible scars and faint crystallization symptoms could be seen on his face and around his neck—signs that revealed the man's identity: he was a "Recovered," a survivor of the great crystal-cluster disaster, and one of the glorious rebuilders of this land.

The mechanical hoist was running, and the last large crate was set securely onto the heavy truck. After confirming that the machinery had come to a stop and locked, the middle-aged man put down the controller in his hand and jumped onto the truck with two other workers, preparing to secure the crates in place with locking hooks.

"The first batch of finished products... finally done," one worker said beside the middle-aged man. "These are precision things... I hope they all get delivered safe and sound to the test site in the imperial capital."

"By the way... why build anti-gravity units this big?" another worker said in a puzzled voice. "I've seen dragoons up north, and those 'Cloudbase' transport flyers too—they don't need anti-gravity units this big... One unit alone is already this size. I can't imagine how huge a ring they'd make when put together..."

The middle-aged man with the scars and crystallization marks glanced at his two workmates and warned in a low, hoarse voice, "That's not something we should be paying attention to. Don't go speculating about the Empire's plans."

"Oh, Sam, you're just too serious—talking about the product inside the plant doesn't violate any confidentiality agreement, and these parts aren't classified in themselves anyway," one worker said with a wave of his hand, then lowered his voice. "Hey, aren't you even a little curious? Oh, right—you were only transferred from the north recently... you probably don't know much about this factory..."

The middle-aged man called Sam ignored the chattering fellow. He merely lowered his head and let his gaze sweep over the label on the crate, where the goods' brief information was printed in stark black-and-white letters:

Standard Type-III Anti-Gravity Unit (Fusion-Welded Type), Produced by: Pompeii Special Manufacturing Center, Bound for: Xuan Yao City.

Below the label was an additional line of annotation: Imperial Ministry of Arcane Technology, authorized by Minister Rebecca, domestic transit.

"Secured." "Secured on this side too."

His colleagues' voices came from beside him, and Sam drew back his gaze.

These large magical units could be assembled into anti-gravity rings more than ten meters across. They represented the limit of modern factories' machining capability in runic devices. Setting aside whatever scheme that princess—whom His Majesty praised as having a "mind of steel"—had devised with that head of hers so skilled at dealing with steel and machinery, behind these rings there must lie some great creation capable of astonishing the world—like the arcane engines and runic great-cannons of old, or the racing magitech trains and the terrifyingly powerful steel warships.

But none of this had much to do with him.

As far as he was concerned, these mysterious magitech components mattered far less than the healing of this land and the lush abundance of this summer.

Sam stood on the truck, gazing into the distance at the young grove north of Pompeii—a place that only last year had been a burned wasteland, a landmark marking the boundary of the contaminated zone from the old Crystal Cluster War.

Though the Crystal Cluster armies had never pushed into Pompeii itself, the Cecil Legion of that time, seeking to halt the spread of contamination, had deployed heavy incinerators to burn a vast stretch of land north of the city outright, carving out a "purification belt." Those scorched wastes had once been a harrowing sight, but as His Majesty had said, new shoots always grow more vigorously from burned ground.

And now that vigor had shown itself—though to Sam the grove seemed to be growing a little unnaturally fast this summer, those trees that appeared to have sprung up overnight were truly a pleasure to behold. Their lush green had covered the last patch of scorched earth on this land, a sign that its ecology was moving toward complete recovery.