Chapter 864: Chapter 863: On the Road Ahead

As the Fire Moon arrives, the giant sun hangs high in the sky.

Even in this northern continent nation, some areas are beginning to feel the "scorching summer."

Gawain turned to the last page of the documents in front of him. The charts and data started to slowly settle in his mind. After a few seconds of contemplation, he looked up at Rebecca and Maji in front of him, "So the recent attempts to break through the ’Missile Limit’ have all failed?"

"...Yes, they all failed," Rebecca said dejectedly with her head down, "No matter if it’s increasing the thrust of the propulsion array or changing the layout of the Wind Force Field, none of the methods worked. I have organized all the detailed records of each failure; those are what you just saw."

"Hmm... I saw it," Gawain frowned, his gaze sweeping over the stack of files he had placed on the table. A long-lost feeling of the unknown and contradiction was seeping through the text and disturbing his rapidly working mind. "And all the tests encountered similar problems during the final acceleration phase... The magical power field sustaining acceleration suddenly faced great disturbance, the output dropped sharply, and the aircraft decelerated accordingly..."

"It felt as if I suddenly plunged into a chaotic yet extraordinarily strong ’magical quagmire’," Maji, who had personally carried out most of the test flights, immediately reported her experience, "No matter how much power was sustained before, it would quickly be dissolved by that quagmire, and the speed just wouldn’t increase."

Gawain fell into a brief silence, contemplating in the calm.

The Missile Limit is a speed limit faced by all physical flying objects. Once approaching this limit, the flying objects get captured by an invisible yet powerful "quagmire." If it’s a magic-driven flying device, it presents as the dissolution of the magical power field maintaining thrust. If it’s a bird or beast flying unaided by magic ... though the reason remains unclear, none can break through this ’barrier’ either.

This is a very familiar phenomenon—so familiar that Gawain couldn’t help but relate it to the challenges faced by high-speed flying devices on Earth: the sound barrier, but...

He sighed softly, looked up, and, as if talking to himself, said, "The currently known speed of sound in the atmosphere is..."

"According to data measured by scholars from the northern parts, near sea level, at around freezing temperature, the speed of sound in air is 322 meters per second," Rebecca immediately said.

The northern parts, once magical sacred ground of old Anzu, due to the influence of the Wilder Clan, concentrated a large number of excellent mages and scholars in that cold land. In search of various magical phenomena mysteries, even in the old times, mages carried out a series of studies on nature. Thus, concepts like airspeed of sound, air pressure, and the melting and boiling points of various substances were always present among the upper-echelon intellectuals, with quite accurate data as well.

At this moment, one precise figure among them... is like a bothersome little demon teasing Gawain’s nerves.

In this world, the speed of sound at standard atmospheric pressure and freezing point temperature is 322 meters per second—two-thirds of the Missile Limit.

The speed barrier encountered by Rebecca’s flying device wasn’t the sound barrier; it was something entirely unknown.

In fact, the "sound barrier" that had troubled Earth’s scientists for a long time wasn’t a big issue in this world, and almost unconsciously, it had already been solved—although the existing "Dragon Cavalry" flying devices still could not surpass the speed of sound, the acceleration flight devices Rebecca built in the laboratory environment have repeatedly succeeded in breaking through this barrier.

Laboratory data indicates that wind force field-type spells sourced from elves can almost perfectly solve a series of problems brought by atmospheric resistance—although "Dragon Cavalry" and some other flying machines in Gawain’s eyes have no aerodynamic concepts at all, the visible parts of those flying devices are not truly their "aerodynamic shells" when flying; it’s the layer of force field surrounding the aircraft dealing with the atmospheric environment. That force field has perfect aerodynamic characteristics, even capable of resolving issues like shock waves encountered during supersonic flight. Combined with the powerful force offered by dragon language propulsion arrays, this world’s flying devices breaking the sound barrier is far simpler than Gawain ever imagined.

Of course, this does not imply the technology of breaking the sound barrier is simplistic—the elf’s wind element force field spells have thousands of years of history and had undergone a prolonged and arduous process of development. It happens to play an unexpected role in the magic technology system, but this technology wasn’t something that fell from the sky.

Anyway, the sound speed is not the real hurdle blocking the advancement of Cecil Clan’s flying machine technology. The true hurdle... is after breaking the sound speed, that mysterious Missile Limit, or as the elves call it, the ’Entity Flying Speed Barrier.’

And Gawain knows nothing about it.

He can only rely on intuition and the existing experimental phenomena to determine that this speed barrier likely has nothing to do with air resistance, air shock waves, or factors; it may relate to some characteristics of this world’s magic-pervasive environment and possibly involve some more fundamental issues.

"Currently, the tests we conduct in the Origin Laboratory and the real-world experimental results have already diverged significantly," seeing Gawain remaining silent for a long time, Rebecca gingerly took the initiative to speak, "In short... the real world’s Missile Limit exceeds the understanding of the Origin Laboratory. So I intend to focus the next crucial experiments about high-speed flying devices in the real world."

"Correct judgment," Gawain nodded lightly, "so what are your thoughts on what to do next?"

Rebecca glanced at Maji beside her and then cautiously peered at Gawain. After some noticeable hesitation, she nervously took a step forward: "I want to try using a projectile to test this speed limit..."

Gawain raised an eyebrow: "A projectile?"

"Well, it’s not literally a projectile, but the principle is similar," Rebecca waved her hand, "At present, all our tests involve placing the propulsion devices on the flying machines, and the results, as you can see, are apparent. When the speed approaches the Missile Limit, those propulsion devices nearly become unusable. Therefore, I am thinking of trying a different approach, using a fixed propulsion device to launch a non-powered entity, to see what happens...

"This way, the propulsion device itself won’t relate to the speed limit and theoretically won’t be affected by that ’magical quagmire,’ so it should be able to continue functioning till the end, accelerating the flight entity up to the device’s withstandable limit.

"Naturally, there are also many non-magic birds and beasts in the natural world whose speeds cannot break through the Missile Limit, but I believe that’s simply because their flesh and blood have limits—if I used steel to make a solid projectile, the situation would definitely be different."

Gawain’s slightly furrowed brows gradually relaxed as Rebecca narrated, and he listened with interest to her thoughts: "Then how do you specifically plan to do it?"

"I want to build a larger acceleration track, using more and higher-power repulsion devices, using stronger overloaders. If necessary, this track can even be one-time use—I want to use it to launch a projectile. This projectile will not carry any magical effects besides the wind symbols. I want to see if it can break the Missile Limit that way."

Gawain rubbed his chin with his fingers, starting to actively assist Rebecca in refining the idea: "Have you considered that when approaching the Missile Limit, the wind symbols on the projectile might also be affected, leading to the ’magical quagmire’ trapping the projectile?"

"So the acceleration track must be long, and the rune power must be strong. Even if the wind element rune on the projectile disintegrates, the acceleration track must continue to push the projectile forward," Rebecca immediately said. "If it doesn’t work, we’ll build a vacuum tube to house the entire device. This way, we can simply remove the wind element rune, turning the projectile into just an iron lump, and with the vacuum environment, we might achieve a better acceleration effect..."

As expected, this headstrong girl proposed quite a forceful idea to create miracles.

But Gawain had to admit, Rebecca’s ’forceful miracle-making’ idea made a lot of sense, and at the current stage, it was the best idea. Even if he offered some suggestions and optimizations, he could only make minor tweaks within this approach.

However, after a brief contemplation, he casually mentioned, "There’s only one issue, the cost might not be low. Have you talked with Aunt Heidi about it?"

"Not yet," Rebecca immediately rubbed her head, her voice dropped by two notches, "Such a large set of acceleration tracks, plus the accompanying energy supply, observation, and safety facilities, and we might even need to build a vacuum shell. The cost calculated might have Aunt chasing me down, so I came to you first, thinking..."

Her voice became softer and eventually turned into a mutter to herself.

Seeing the conspiracy exposed and the uneasy Rebecca before him, Gawain couldn’t help but laugh. To Rebecca’s surprise, he nodded, "I’ve already approved this project, specially permitted."

"Re...Really?" Rebecca looked at him with disbelief, "You just approved it like that?"

"This project is very important, and the results produced later might exceed everyone’s expectations. I think it’s necessary to increase investment," Gawain said with a smile, "But I also have some suggestions. We might first not consider the vacuum shell and optimize the ’projectile’ itself..."

An invisible gust suddenly blew into the study, and a familiar presence appeared beside the desk. Gawain immediately paused and looked to his seemingly empty side, "What’s wrong? Rushing over like this."

Rebecca and Maji, seeing Gawain’s reaction, guessed who arrived, and sure enough, Amber’s figure emerged from the air in the next moment. She simply nodded to Rebecca and Maji and then leaned down to Gawain’s ear, reporting a few words softly.

Rebecca noticed that her always stern and reliable ancestor had an obviously stiff expression for the next few seconds.

The next second, Gawain suddenly stood up, his expression solemn and intimidating.

"Rebecca, I’ve approved the project, you can start preparing your accelerator," Gawain spoke quickly and then turned to Maji, "Maji, I need your help."

Maji immediately lowered her head, "Of course, whatever you command."

"We must go to the Plains of the Holy Spirits and Sorinburg immediately."

Rebecca sensed something from Gawain’s attitude and immediately asked, "Ancestor, what happened?!"

Gawain quietly looked at Rebecca, taking a slow breath and exhaling.

"Norris is critically ill," he said slowly.

"Norris?" Rebecca’s eyes widened instantly, as if she didn’t understand the meaning of the ancestor’s words at first. Two seconds later, she reacted and instinctively took a step forward, "I want to..."

Gawain looked at Rebecca, seeing a stubbornness suddenly emerge in her eyes. This child usually had some character issues, but she rarely showed this stubborn and willful attitude when facing Gawain or Aunt Heidi. 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

He recalled that Norris was one of the people from the old Cecil, one of the eight hundred people saved by Rebecca.

Norris, who was of peasant origin, finally became the Empire’s Minister of Agriculture, also thanks to Heidi and Rebecca’s recommendations.

After a moment of silence, Gawain nodded, "Okay."

Rebecca showed a clearly relieved expression, immediately smiled and thanked her ancestor, but soon her smile faded, replaced by a look of sadness and concern spreading across her face.

Gawain’s brow gradually furrowed, recalling the recent information from Sorinburg and pondering the things Beltira mentioned during their last conversation, gradually sinking into thought.

After a moment, he slightly nodded to Amber beside him, "You go to the northern bank..."

It’s said that resurrection is a miracle.

Gawain felt that he had already achieved this miracle.

So... maybe he should go create another miracle.