Chapter 198: Eighth-Circle Precision Machining

Waves of heat rolled through the temporarily commandeered alchemy workshop in the eastern district of the Royal Capital.

It had been converted into the forward command post for the Iron Eagle Empire’s envoy.

Dozens of gas lamps illuminated the interior as brightly as day, the air a mixture of the heavy smell of machine oil, the acrid scent of cut metal, and the sweat of the engineers.

Konrad von Richter stood before a massive oak table, his hands pressed flat on its surface. A button on the collar of his uniform had popped open, revealing a section of flushed neck.

The sound of arguing around him was about to lift the roof.

“The cross-section of the coil must be doubled!” an engineer with a full beard waved his charcoal-dusted fist, spittle spraying onto the blueprints. “The current wires can’t handle such high voltage; they’ll burn out like a woman’s hair!”

“Double it? Then what about the magnet array?” another man slammed the wrench in his hand on the table. “If it gets any bigger, we’ll need a crane to move this machine! We’re building a display piece, not a city wall!”

“Then we’ll build a city wall!” Konrad suddenly spoke, his voice like iron striking the ground, instantly suppressing all the noise.

He looked up, his gray eyes burning with fanaticism.

“We will make those mages in their silk robes understand what industrial beauty is. Volume is power, caliber is justice. Even if this generator weighs ten tons, as long as it can light up half the Royal Capital when it runs, that is victory.”

He grabbed a thick charcoal pencil and drew a huge circle at the core of the blueprint.

“Add a three-stage transmission to the gear assembly, and switch the power source to a twelve-man capstan. I want its rotational speed to break the limit.

I want that little girl named Lia to be so scared when she sees this machine that she can’t even remember her formulas.”

The engineers looked at each other, the fanaticism in their eyes ignited.

This was the Empire’s style. Simple, brutal, effective. If there was a potential gap in technique, they would fill it with absolute material quantity. Brute force was always the truth.

***

Top floor of the mage tower, the study.

In stark contrast to the clamor outside, it was so quiet here that one could only hear the soft crackle of firewood in the fireplace.

Lia was curled up in a deep red velvet sofa, holding a steaming cup of cocoa, a dab of cream on the tip of her nose. She looked at the black smoke rising from the direction of the factory in the distance and blew on it gently.

“They’re building something big.”

Klein sat in the high-backed chair opposite her, flipping through an ancient text on high-level magic architecture. He didn’t look up. “From the sound of it, you’d think they were forging a battering ram.”

“To them, it is a battering ram,” Lia sipped her cocoa, the sweet taste making her squint. “Konrad wants to use ‘bigness’ to intimidate us. Typical linear thinking, believing that the more coils, the better.”

“So what’s your plan?” Klein closed the book, his long fingers interlaced on his lap. “Are you really going to build a generator that’s five percent more efficient? That’s too boring, it doesn’t fit your aesthetic.”

“Of course not.”

Lia put down her cup, stepped onto the carpet with her bare feet, and walked a few steps to the blackboard covered in formulas. She picked up the eraser and cleared a section of the fluid dynamics derivations, leaving a blank space.

“Konrad’s thinking is locked. He’s only thinking about how to turn ‘motion’ into ‘electricity’,” she drew an arrow on the blackboard, with a gear on the left and a lightning bolt on the right.

“But that’s just the first step. If electricity can only be used to light lamps, how is it different from a whale oil candle? Even if it’s a bit brighter, it’s just an expensive toy.”

Lia turned around, deftly twirling the chalk between her fingers, and then drew a reverse arrow below the diagram.

From “lightning,” pointing to “gear.”

“What we need to do is turn electricity into power.”

Klein’s pupils contracted slightly.

As a man standing at the pinnacle of the magic world, he almost instantly grasped the terrifying weight behind this concept.

“You mean… reverse conversion?”

“Exactly. An electric motor,” Lia wrote the word on the blackboard, her strokes sharp.

“Since cutting magnetic field lines can generate electricity, then a current-carrying wire in a magnetic field will naturally be subjected to a force and move.”

She quickly sketched out a rough diagram of a stator and a rotor.

“We don’t need those bulky permanent magnets, no mechanical commutator that sparks and crackles every half turn, and certainly no brushes that get worn down to red hot stubs.

We’ll use alternating current to create a rotating magnetic field.”

Lia drew a circle in the air. “The magnetic field is running, and to catch up with it, the rotor will spin desperately. Like a donkey chasing a carrot, as long as the power is on, it will keep spinning.”

“And, it’s quiet. No grinding of gears, only the sound of the wind.”

Klein stared at the incredibly simple structural diagram on the blackboard.

‘Stator, rotor, air gap.’

No complex connecting rods, no heavy flywheels. This thing was as clean as a mathematical theorem, yet it contained the power to move the world.

‘Konrad is still using human labor to drive machines to generate electricity, while Lia already plans to use electricity to drive machines to replace human labor.’

This wasn’t a competition; it was a dimensional strike. It was the ruthless crushing of an agricultural civilization by an industrial one.

“Brilliant,” Klein commented, a playful curve on his lips. “If Konrad sees this, he’ll probably be angry enough to swallow his wrench.”

“A blueprint alone isn’t enough,” Lia tossed the chalk aside and dusted her hands.

“We need a physical object. The principle is simple, but the precision required is high.

The insulation of the stator windings, the dynamic balance of the squirrel-cage rotor, the control of the air gap width… those old men at the Royal Alchemy Workshop have hands that are too shaky. I don’t trust them.”

“Indeed.”

Klein stood up. He undid the button at his collar, took off the elaborate outer robe that signified his status as an Eighth-Circle Archmage, and casually draped it over the back of the chair.

Underneath was a well-tailored white shirt. He slowly undid his cufflinks and neatly rolled his sleeves past his elbows, revealing his smoothly muscled forearms.

“To entrust something this revolutionary to others would be a blasphemy against the truth.”

He walked to the lab bench, his left hand slightly raised, and a ball of ethereal blue magical flame ignited silently in his palm.

The flame had no temperature, yet it was extremely stable, the space around it even distorting slightly due to the high density of magic.

“You’re going to do it yourself?” Lia was a little surprised. Having an Eighth-Circle Archmage act as a machinist was a colossal waste of talent.

“Why not?”

Klein picked up an ingot of high-purity mithril, and the magical flame instantly enveloped it. The hard mithril began to deform and stretch in his hands like soft clay, eventually becoming uniform wires thinner than a strand of hair.

He turned his head to look at Lia, his blue eyes shimmering with a light more dangerous than any magic.

“Besides, I don’t like the idea of a third person being the first to see it run.”

“Especially… something from your mind.”

Klein lowered his head, focusing on the material in his hands. With a slight movement of his fingertips, the mithril wires automatically wove themselves into a perfect array of coils in the air, with a precision reaching the micrometer level.

“Watch closely, Professor Lia. Let me show you what eighth-circle precision machining looks like.”

(TN: The author has been posting smaller chapters than usual as of late, hopefully it will go back to usual lengths soon)

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