Chapter 830 — Dragon Wings
Blade of Dawn · Page 3 of 4
Inside a special experimental facility on the outskirts of Xuanyao City, Rebecca was tugging at Maggie's arm and shouting with obvious excitement, then she stepped aside and proudly displayed the "research results" of her recent period: "This took us so much effort! We had no trouble on the technical side, but tailoring usable joints and connection mechanisms for a creature like a 'dragon' truly tested everyone's imagination—especially since the Origin Laboratory is temporarily unusable right now. Just the various models alone, we made piles of them…"
The Pearl of Cecil (the Steel Orb) chattered on beside them, while Maggie, dragged over early in the morning, only now slowly registered what had happened. This "dragon descendant" living in the human world slowly raised her head and looked at the "technical results" Rebecca was proudly showing her, her expression for a moment indescribably complex.
Inside the great shed built of lightweight metal panels and a steel skeleton, bright magic-crystal lamps shone down from the roof, and where their light converged stood a vast apparatus secured by chains, hoists, and braces alike—
It was composed of several parts and possessed an imposing form; its chief component was a pair of "wings" fully ten meters long, forged of metal and runes, a faint halo glimmering along the lightweight runic frame. Its structure was crude yet sturdy and durable enough that it seemed it could spread with ease. The wings looked incomplete, more like a "supplementary frame" fitted to the outside of a pair of wings proper, and beyond them could be seen things like runic armor plates and harness straps—every one of them enormous.
Enormous enough to serve a dragon as armor.
And indeed they were armor meant for a dragon.
Maggie gazed at that set of steel gear—crude in structure yet somehow imposing, steeped through with the style of Cecil magitech industry—and only after a long while did she let out a soft sigh. "You actually built the thing..."
"Honestly, it never could have gone this fast," Rebecca said, arms folded, chin lifted proudly as she looked up at the work her own technical team had produced, while explaining to Maggie. "You know how project approval works—time and cost are limited, so projects with high mass-production value get priority. We had only you, a single 'Dragon Descendant,' and forging a set of equipment for one person obviously wouldn't meet approval standards. But then—"
Here Rebecca deliberately drew out her voice, building suspense, but Maggie had already caught on. "...Because of the diplomatic progress with the Holy Dragon Duchy?"
"...You guessed it just like that?"
"It wasn't hard to guess."
"All right, that really is the reason," Rebecca said, scratching her hair. "The Zuyan people seem to want a few more bargaining chips when dealing with the Dragon Descendants, so they approved my application—after all, this counts only as a byproduct of 'dragoon' technology, and the scale itself isn't large."
At that, Rebecca suddenly looked at Maggie. "In your view, do you think this thing will stir the interest of the Dragon Descendants?"
Maggie lifted her head, her gaze settling on those steel wings, and seemed to sink into memory and thought. Slowly she said, "Many of the young Dragon Descendants long to fly, and they would certainly be interested in such a thing. But... in the Holy Dragon Duchy, it is the councilors and elders who hold the greater say.
"The Holy Dragon Duchy is a place stubborn and cold as ice and stone. There, the power of 'tradition' and 'taboo' exceeds anything you can imagine—and 'flight,' unfortunately, is one of the acts that challenges taboo. In fact, in my view, hereditary deformity is not even the main reason the Dragon Descendants are kept from the skies—tradition and taboo are.