Pillar of Yita

A heavy rain arrived without warning, the falling water forming a white curtain up and down, and over the distant rainforest it was as if a hazy veil of mist had descended.

Water streamed endlessly over the deck, and with the rolling of the ship formed layers upon layers of ripples. The water flooded over the steps, but at the vents and cabin doors it seemed to be blocked by an invisible force—that was the waterproof Array at work behind it.

Such showers were very common in Nogness; although it was already the end of the rainy season, you could still see them once or twice almost every day.

Fang Hong watched the torrential rain outside from the Alchemy Workshop on the ship, while gently shaking the Magic Solution in his hand until it showed a dark purple hue.

He stood before his own workbench, put the test tube of purple solution back onto the rack, then picked up a quill and wrote a number on the paper, cut it out and stuck it on. This was Solution No. 9; preparing an Earth Origin Crystal required a total of seventeen kinds of solutions, and this was only one of them.

The Earth Origin Crystal could not be used directly as it was; its ultimate purpose was to be made into a base to carry the ”Stars—Alchemy Array.” Placing it into a Magical Suspension Liquid to precipitate impurities was merely the first step—purification.

One big drawback of the Closed Loop Device was that its volume was too large, and the fundamental reason lay in the materials that made up the Array Base that carried the Alchemy Array—mostly cheap copper and magicified silver—whose operating efficiency was far too low.

For a single Closed Loop Device, this in itself was not a defect, but rather an advantage. Using inexpensive materials to control costs was entirely reasonable; cost had always been an important factor an Alchemist needed to consider when designing a Magic Guided Conductor.

But when placed on a stackable ”Stars” device, bulkiness and clumsiness became a conspicuous bottleneck that had to be prioritized. Because his mastery of the ”Stars—Alchemy Array” was still very shallow, Fang Hong found it difficult to work solutions from the Alchemy Formula itself, so replacing the material of the Array Base became a simple and direct approach.

Put simply, it was using money to solve the problem.

Because of their excellent Elemental Affinity and Ether conductivity, Primordial Crystal Stone bases were usually less than one percent the thickness of copper or magicified silver bases; and that was still limited by craftsmanship. It was said that in certain Alchemy Laboratories of the Imperial Workshop, the Artisan Masters could even make Primordial Crystal Stone bases down to one-thousandth the thickness of copper bases.

Above that, only Mithril and Dragon Soul Crystal could further improve conduction efficiency. But Mithril was already astronomically priced, and Dragon Soul Crystal was something Fang Hong didn’t even dare to think about.

In fact, any Primordial Crystal Stone could be used to make an Alchemy Array Base; Earth Origin Crystal was not even among the best of them. The performance of Wind Source Crystal and Water Source Crystal was much better, and even superior to those was the rarer hetero-Attribute Thunder Source Crystal—a variant of Wind System Crystal.

However, the Earth Origin Crystal’s advantage lay in its cheapness compared to other Primordial Crystal Stones, and it also carried the heavy, solid Attribute of the Earth Element, making it easier to process and more suitable for a half-new, half-green entry-level Crystal Craftsman like Fang Hong.

In short, when you boiled it down, he was both poor and weak.

Of course Fang Hong would never admit that. The Seven Seas Travel Group did have some savings, but money had to be spent sparingly; thrift and frugality were virtues. As for being weak, wasn’t that just because his Level was still low.

With the Earth Origin Crystal, the improved version of the ”Device of the Stars” was put on the agenda. Fang Hong planned to use this set of devices in the Spear Cavalry plan. The Spear Cavalry he envisioned were indeed not the same type of Construct as the Dragon Hunters, but that did not mean the two were to be used separately; rather, in a single piece of Combat they were to coordinate and fight together.

However, he and the Dragon Hunters were still in a running-in phase, and this kind of high-performance Flexible Construct demanded equally astonishing Calculative Power. Controlling four Dragon Hunters was almost his Limit. As for Miss Tata, even though she still had a large amount of spare Calculative Power under the blessing of the Heart of Fairy, Fang Hong already had another plan in mind for that surplus and did not intend to spend it on the Dragon Cavalry plan.

So for the Dragon Cavalry plan, how to occupy as little Calculative Power as possible became a hard requirement that had to be built into the design.

The solution Fang Hong thought of was naturally to use the ”Device of the Stars”—

If the ”Device of the Stars” could grant the Dragon Cavalry a certain degree of self-initiative, thereby greatly reducing the Calculative pressure on him and Miss Tata, and if it could even achieve a certain level of autonomous Combat, then that would be close to perfect.

It was only simple to say; actually implementing it was far from easy.

First of all, melee definitely had to be ruled out. The internal motion structure of melee-type Flexible Constructs was far too complex, requiring too many control commands to realize. Moreover, there were too many variables in close-quarters Combat; if you wanted to take all of that into account, the control laws would become unimaginably complex, and even with an Earth Origin Crystal Base, the volume of the ”Device of the Stars” would be difficult to keep in check.

Among Ranged options, Fang Hong first considered live ammunition, because it consumed little energy. Although there were a series of issues such as loading and carrying capacity, encoding a fixed action like loading into the ”Device of the Stars” was not complicated, and for medium-sized or larger Constructs, ammunition capacity was often not that big a problem.

But in the end he still ruled out this plan, mainly because a whole series of problems—aiming live rounds, handling recoil, and maintaining Balance in the air—were difficult to solve. Just figuring out how to operate a pair of gun-wielding arms similar to those of the Dragon Hunters already gave Fang Hong a splitting headache.