Chapter 864 — On the Road Ahead
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
The Fire Month arrived, and the giant sun hung high in the sky.
Even in this northern kingdom of the continent, some regions were beginning to feel the touch of "scorching summer."
Gaoyang turned to the last page of the documents before him. The charts and figures on those pages settled slowly in his mind; after a few seconds of thought, he raised his head and looked at Rebecca and Maggie before him. "So the recent attempts to break past the 'missile limit' have all failed?"
"...Yes, all of them failed," Rebecca said, her head bowed, deeply dejected. "Whether it was increasing the thrust of the drive arrays or rearranging the wind-field layout, nothing worked. I organized the detailed records of every failure—those are the ones you just saw."
"Mm... I saw them." Gaoyang furrowed his brow, his gaze sweeping over the stack of papers he had set on the desk. A long-absent sense of the unknown and of contradiction seemed to seep from between the lines, stirring his racing mind. "And every test ran into a similar problem in the final stage of acceleration... the magic field sustaining the acceleration was suddenly hit by a massive disturbance, output plummeted, and the craft slowed down..."
"It felt like crashing suddenly into a chaotic, disordered, and extraordinarily powerful 'magic quagmire,'" said Maggie, who had personally carried out most of the test flights, immediately reporting what she had felt at the time. "No matter how much output we sustained before, it would be rapidly broken down by that quagmire, and the speed simply would not climb."
Gaoyang fell briefly silent, thinking in the silence.
The missile limit—the speed limit faced by all physical flying objects. Once one approached this limit, the flying object would be caught by an invisible but powerful "quagmire." For magic-driven flying devices, this manifested as the collapse of the magic field sustaining thrust. For birds and beasts in nature that flew without magic... the cause was unclear, but without exception none of them could break through this "barrier."
It was a very familiar phenomenon—familiar enough that Gaoyang could not help but think of the obstacle high-speed aircraft on Earth had once faced: the sound barrier. And yet...
He sighed softly, raised his head, and spoke as if to himself: "The currently known speed of sound in the atmosphere is..."
"According to data measured by scholars in the Northern Realm back then, the speed of sound in the atmosphere near sea level and around freezing temperature is 322 meters per second," Rebecca said at once.
The Northern Realm was the magical holy land of the former Ansou. Owing to the influence of the Wilde family, a great many outstanding mages and scholars had gathered in that cold land. And in order to probe the mysteries of various magical phenomena, even the mages of the old era would conduct a series of studies of nature. Concepts such as the speed of sound in the atmosphere, air pressure, and the melting and boiling points of various substances had thus long existed among the upper intelligentsia, and the data were quite precise.
At this moment, one of those precise numbers... was prodding at Gaoyang's nerves like an irritating little imp.
In this world, the speed of sound in the atmosphere at standard pressure and freezing temperature is 322 meters per second—two-thirds of the missile limit.
The speed barrier Rebecca's craft had encountered was not the sound barrier, but something else entirely unknown.
In fact, the "sound barrier" that had once troubled scientists on Earth for so long was no great problem at all in this world, and had even been solved long ago without anyone realizing it—although the existing "Dragoon" craft could not yet exceed the speed of sound, some accelerated flight devices Rebecca had built under laboratory conditions had already broken through this barrier several times.