Chapter XLVII: Warship III

Shizukana Gake, Heian Kingdom

Month of the Tortoise 3, 172 ,328 DE

"I'm impressed. You make friends and influence people everywhere you go." The reek of warped pleasure fills Vorn's scent. That kind of twisted scent normally comes from sexual deviants and sarcastic assholes.

"I see some stray cats. Why don't you go blow a few."

"I'm complimenting you, and you insult me. You're a real asshole." Vorn's smug smirk makes him look more like a big fat cat than normal.

"Look in the mirror if you want to see what an asshole really looks like. Let's load up. That damn shadow showing up twice in two days, when I've never seen him once before, irritates me."

"In can you haven't noticed, everything irritates you." Vorn's flippant comment and expression do not match the worry in his scent. He glances back at the closed door of the office, and a cold gleam flashes momentarily in his eyes.

Not counting a few insults, we load the steamer truck in silence. As both of us carry five hundred kilogram crates of Sky Iron ingots like they are nothing, a few of the metal broker's yard men watch from the shadows of another warehouse. The idiots probably think we do not notice them.

"Another two joined the audience." Vorn's soft-voiced comment would not be heard by a normal human more than ten meters away.

"Ignore them. They're just common human trash."

I only came for three tons of Sky Iron, but I take ten. Makura pissed me off. He can give me the extra free metal as an apology. When he finds out how much I took, maybe, he will burst a few blood vessels in his vein. A very faint smile turns up the corners of my lips at the pleasant thought.

* * * * *

Back at the factory, when the door close, Vorn looks at me with one eyebrow raised. "Not even a Martial Lord can hear what goes on in here, right?"

I nod. "Old Man Jones inscribed the ward sigils on this building. A Martial Emperor would have to expend some effort to get through them."

With his eyes opening wide, Vorn turns around to inspect the faint tracery of the sigils on the inside of the bay doors. After a few moments, he scratches his head. "I don't really understand half of meaning in the finials, but they don't look that impressive."

I snort. "That's what's so scary about the shitty old man. He hides most of his strength. If you don't know what he's really like, you could never tell the difference between him and any other common middle-aged lecher missing half his face."

"When we first came here, Ragnar couldn't find any real information on that Otoko no Kage. He dismissed him as a myth or deliberate fabrication of the City Lord's house. After I told about what happened, he suspected that it was one of the old monsters, if you can call a Martial Lord an old monster, hiding behind the City Lord's clan. Who the hell is he?" With each word, Vorn's frown deepens.

I shrug, "People in the Heian Kingdom are weak. Martial Warrior is just a pipe dream for almost all of them. According to Old Man Jones, even the king is only a peak Martial Lord. It's why they Kingdom bows and scrapes to the Sengoku Empire and their ten Martial Kings."

Vorn frowns. "I'll never understand why people fear challenging higher realms. The idiotic stories blow everything out of proportion. It's not like there is some heaven and earth by going up one realm of cultivation. They should be afraid of the difference in raw military power between the kingdom and the empire."

I snicker. "Most of the nobles are too self-absorbed to think about the difference in military power. The military is just commoners and who cares how many commoners die in a war? They're just too cowardly to want to face significantly stronger cultivators. A base Martial King is still about twice as strong as a peak Martial Lord, and that only accounts for their Body. The power level of the Yuan Qi each controls is too hard to measure. Different Cultivation techniques vary so widely in their strengths, it's a real mess trying to evaluate them. Old Man Jones has experimented on hundreds of Cultivators, and he has a hard time making accurate judgments.

"I can get a reasonable sense of the basic strength of the Yuan Qi in a Cultivator, but without knowing what their Martial techniques are and how well they've mastered them, I can't make a good estimate of a Cultivator's strength once the enter Foundation Establishment."

As I talk, Vorn's eyes slowly change. By the time I speak the last word, he seems to be looking at some kind of freak beyond his understanding. The mix of conflicting odors in his scent makes it impossible to pin down what emotions might be dominating his thoughts.

After a few moments, Vorn shakes his head. "You really are different. Even with the Blood of the Great Bear in me and practicing Beast Blood Cultivation, I can barely sense the presence of Yuan Qi in another. For Core Formation and down, I can make a guess at someones minimum possible Cultivation. Making a clear estimate of strength based on Yuan Q is impossible.

"The legends about the Great Wolves my father always told, when I was a child, painted you to be monsters among monsters. I think I'm beginning to understand. I don't know how someone with enough Blood of the Great Wolf in their veins to take on the form of a Great Wolf managed to be born today. But if you're like this now, what will you be when you mature?"

I keep a frown from showing on my face, but I feel shocked by Vorn's revelation. Like me, Old Man Jones can measure the flow of Yuan Qi in another, and he is far more accurate in his measurements. It has nothing to do with Beast Blood for that shitty old man. He is as human as they come. More or less. After a decade, I, still, do not know what to make of that living metal that makes up a quarter of his Body. It could be that the metal prosthetics give the shitty old man better senses than Vorn's Beast Blood gives him. The shitty old man never talks much about his own capabilities and abilities.

"Unload the truck. It'll take a couple weeks to rebuild that airship. The gondola section is mostly good as is, but the superstructure for the gas bags need to be stripped and plated with Sky Iron."

Once the crates are unloaded, Vorn rips off the nailed-on lid of one, with a casual one-handed wrench, and picks a Sky Iron ingot. Twisting his hand to look at the ingot from multiple angles, he frowns. "I'll never understand why people call this 'iron'. Other than being a metal, it's almost nothing like iron. Iron has completely different properties when you forge it."

I snort. "Because the Dragon Gods told them to, most likely. The ancient War Masters called it teledrite. Old Man Jones calls Sky Iron aluminum. He says that where he came from, people used it to make flying craft different from our airships. Its light weight was just as important for them as it is for us.

"Cultivators slavishly follow the Daos and the scriptures from the Dragon Gods and their priest for all their knowledge. If it's not in the Daos, it's heretical, false knowledge. For the Daos all metals are variants of iron, copper, silver, and gold. No other types of metal can possibly exist. I don't understand how Elemental existences can believe that. It contradicts the War Master, whose leaders were Transcendents serving Life, the ultimate creator of this and all other universes. Most likely, they use that fake knowledge to manipulate and control what their followers think and believe."

From the frown on Vorn's face and the sour odor of distrust in his scent, Vorn does not believe everything I said. One day, he will learn, maybe the hard way, the Dragon Gods and the Daos are not the friends of humans or anything else in the Amalgamate Realms.

Dumping a ton of Sky Iron into a crucible, I add fifty kilograms of copper and light gas fire underneath it. The gas jets set up by Old Man Jones create much higher heat than anything I have seen in the foundries or smithies of Shizukana Gake, and Sigils etched into on the outer surface of the crucible amplify the effects of the heating.

No matter what the shitty old man builds, he calls his own work and designs simplistic, but they still put anything that the so-called Master Engineers of the Heian Kingdom can build to shame. Our factory may be small and as much a research facility as a manufacturing facility, but no factory in the Heian Kingdom compares to it for the quality and efficiency of the equipment.

After laying out molds for the alloy I am making, I head for a ladder to the roof of the factory. "Come on, smug kitty. It's time to put your bulk to work again."

On the roof, I look at the Silver Princess. Our factory is not particularly large. There is no way to bring the airship inside, which means I can only work on it up here. Using chains and winches, we shift the airship to one side of the factory. With the bottom of the gondola resting on the roof, we tie it down securely. Once we finish, a hundred kilometer wind would not blow the airship away, and Shizukana Gake seldom sees wind even close to that velocity.

"We can use the crane to lower the debris down from the roof, but we're going to have to strip the metal mesh and plywood from the superstructure by hand. Don't damage the fame while your at it. I already need to rebuild the section where the shell hit us. It pisses me off. Your asshole aunt was using one of my cannons or someone's knock off of one of my cannons."

While waiting for the ingots to melt, we strip the mesh from the airship's superstructure. Once we cut the mesh across the top of the superstructure and get the top of it loose, we just use gravity and Vorn's body weight to tear huge sections away from the plywood. Watching him slide down the airship, dragging sections of the metal mesh with him, I do not bother to hide my smirk. This is the first good use I have gotten from him since extorting my latest steamer bike.

"Hey, you asshole boar. Why don't you help out?"

"You weigh more."

"Go fuck a cat."

"Your the smug kitty that loves his cats. I just kill the things and make stir-fry out of them."

With a strange expression on his face, Vorn stares at me while pulling on his middle-aged man's beard. "You know, you should open a restaurant in the Wu Empire. I hear they eat cats there too. They even stir fry them. You would probably make money."

"Less talk. More work. I need to set up the mixer in the crucible."

Inside the factory, overhead rails allow us to move bulky equipment around more easily, but we still move it with pure muscle. Old Man Jones calls it a waste of time and effort to build a motorized system for moving equipment, but with his strength, he could probably lift half the factory barehanded. After hooking the electric-powered mixer to a carriage on the overhead rails, I shove the mixer over the crucible and run a power cable to our generator. The mixer does not spin very quickly, but a slow mixer is better than molten metal spattering all over the factory.

While waiting for the mixer, to blend the metals together, I adjust the rolling machine that we use to press metal stock into sheets and plates. I won't be running the Sky Iron alloy through it until tomorrow or the next day, but it is better to get the setup out of the way.

Once I pour the molten metal into the sand molds, I load the crucible with another ton of Sky Iron ingots and fifty kilograms of copper ingots. With the second batch of ingots in the crucible, I lay out another set of molds.

From the factory roof, the thumps of Vorn's feet periodically resound. He really does weigh a lot, but it lest him strip the mesh from the Silver Princess faster than I could.

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