Chapter 722 — The Dragoon Mark I
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 4
Several technicians around them also lifted their eyes toward the space behind Rebecca; one after another they wore strange expressions and, with tacit understanding, edged backward a little.
Rebecca looked around, took stock of the atmosphere, thought it over briefly, and reached a conclusion—
Oh momma, I'm done for.
The seasoned princess needed no one to remind her what to do; she wiped both hands on her outer robe, then clutched her head and slowly crouched down. "Could we maybe not hit the head this time..."
Rebecca was only halfway down when a strong hand reached from behind, seized her by the collar, and hoisted her up. "Stop crouching. Hedy isn't here."
Recognizing Gao Song's voice, Rebecca hastily twisted her head around despite being held up by the collar, and there she saw her thoroughly exasperated ancestor—and Amber, standing beside him. Just the two of them; Aunt Hedy really wasn't there.
The expression she had only just reined in instantly blazed bright again. "Ancestor Yan, you came!"
Ancestor Yan had always doted on her. He might look stern day to day, but his sternness was not like her aunt's—he never rapped her on the head. On this point, Rebecca was absolutely certain.
From childhood she had been an optimist, and that optimism showed mainly in her ability to go find the sunshine herself, and then shine all on her own.
Gao Yang did rather want to knock this girl's skull, actually. As far as he knew, Rebecca hadn't taken a beating in three days, and by his experience that meant the silly doe's state of mind was currently wandering somewhere between tearing the roof tiles off and setting the mountains on fire. But before he could act on it, his attention had already settled on the peculiar-looking machine beside them.
He gazed at that device—so utterly different in form and principle from the "airplane" in his memory—for a long while, his thoughts surging, before he finally said softly, "So this is our aircraft..."
Truly different. Completely different.
It was an inverted-cone apparatus, roughly like a spinning top, its main body perhaps two to three meters across. Around the lower half of the cone floated a metal ring densely etched with runes—that ring must be the anti-gravity ring, sustained in perpetual levitation about the base of the cone by a long-lasting force field, governing the whole device's ascent, descent, and gravity balance. On either side and atop the device were crescent-shaped main wing panels and rudder-wing panels modeled on dragon wings, so that overall it resembled an enormous, upright steel insect—bizarre, yet brimming with the singular beauty of thaumaturgical industry.
Nowhere on it could he see any shadow of an "airplane."
This was the aircraft Rebecca and her thaumaturgical technicians had built upon this world's existing technological foundations and logic, after he had set aside his Earth experience entirely and told the technical team only the application requirements and a few performance characteristics.
A bold experiment, and its result proved the line of thinking Gao Cen had held all along: the magical world's own technological path was the path best suited to this place.
It wasn't that he had never considered transplanting Earth's airplanes wholesale into this world. After all, though many of this world's rules differed vastly from Earth's, this world at least had wind and had birds—which meant an aircraft built on aerodynamics had a chance of being realized. But in the end he had not done so.
Because he did not know everything. Even with his enhanced memory and his vast store of miscellaneous knowledge, he had fields he was not good at, and aircraft manufacturing was unquestionably one of them.