Chapter 516 — A More Powerful Tool
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
At the edge of the industrial district in eastern Xuanyao City, inside one of the research rooms of the Machinery Manufactory, Gao Yang stood gathered together with Rebecca and Nikoleid.
The round, spherical iron-star being floated in the center of the room. Beside him floated a complex and exquisite metal model—plainly the chassis of a vehicle. Under Nikoleid's ultra-precise machining capability, every gear and connecting rod had been reproduced with the utmost fidelity, and now, drawn along by magnetic fields, the whole assembly was running through all manner of motion demonstrations.
"This is the finalized general-purpose towing chassis—a model only, of course. How exactly to build the real thing will still take work from the technicians," came a voice tinged with a metallic quaver from within the iron-star being. As he spoke, he rotated the model so Gao Yang could see its internal details. "Building on the previous design drawings, we re-adjusted the connection between the magic-net unit and the power spine, and added a layer of shock absorption. That lets the chassis handle more complex and harsher roads. This damping structure is detachable—take it off and you can swap in an extra magic-net unit, which gives the chassis more output, so it can serve as a tractor for engineering machinery in relatively flat regions."
Gao Yang studied the model Nikoleid presented and listened to his explanation, then gave a slight nod. "...Not bad."
The magic-guided vehicle had been born, and the first problem it faced was this era's wretched roads and the difficulty of maintenance and repair.
This era had no smooth, solid highways; across the vast wilds between cities there were no service stations or repair shops. True, ever since Rebecca had conjured up cement, Cecil's road-building projects had never stopped—but even with convenient means like magic at hand, the road infrastructure of the Southern Marches was still severely incomplete. At this stage, only three roads in Cecil could be called "modernized." Among them was a broad cement avenue running from Xuanyao City to Kant, another roughly comparable road from Cecil to Tansang, and the road leading into the Gelan region had just been completed a few days ago. Everywhere else, there was little beyond the haphazard roads the old Southern nobles had built.
Of that mess, the best was the "provisional highway" running from Tansang to Horsman City—but even that had merely been given emergency leveling and reinforcement by mages and engineers with magic-guided terminals using "mud from stone" and "stone from mud" spells. It would do for now to move people and supplies, but in the long run, from durability to scale, it fell short of Gao Yang's standards.
As a legacy of the old feudal partitions, "roads" were a major obstacle standing in Gao Yang's path. The nobles had each ruled by their own law within their own domains, and the roads they built were wildly varied; not only were quality and scale a mess, but the planning was a tangled skein as well. Sometimes, to guard against raids by neighboring nobles, they had even deliberately wrecked the stretches where roads met between two domains, using magic to sculpt vast fields of artificial potholes, sand pits, and mires. Now the Southern Marches were unified and the old lords had exited the stage—but all these infuriating things had been left behind for Cecil's builders.
Fortunately, this world possessed wondrous magical technology, and magic-guided terminals designed for ordinary engineering crews had become widespread. With the aid of spells like "mud from stone," "stone from mud," and "lighten weight," the road-building projects in the Southern Marches had progressed reasonably well. Even so, given conditions in most remote regions and beyond the Southern Marches, the early magic-guided vehicle chassis still had to account for how to handle bad roads.