Chapter 688 — Dragon and Sky

"Transform into one... let me see..."

Maggie stared at the "Her Royal Highness" before her with a somewhat stiff expression. Accustomed to conventional ways of thinking, she found herself completely unable to keep pace with Rebecca in that moment. Only after confirming she had not misheard did she begin to feel a flicker of irritation.

Transform into one for her to see!

Was she being treated as some rare specimen, some amusing spectacle to be gawked at?!

Already harboring a certain aversion to her dragon form due to her physical deformity, Maggie now heard Rebecca's words—which sounded for all the world like the thoughtless demand of a noble's spoiled child—and felt every blood vessel in her body throb. Yet reason forced her to suppress the anger in her heart. After all, the girl before her was the legally recognized heir to this newborn empire; even her own mistress had to remain courteous in the presence of this princess. So she held her emotions in check and replied as calmly as she could: "Why do you wish to see my dragon form?"

Unfortunately, the thick-skinned Rebecca did not sense the slightest shift in Maggie's mood—if she could read others' emotions, she would not have gotten herself beaten up every few days for her stubborn recklessness. The girl simply kept smiling brightly, her face radiant: "I want to fly too!!"

All of Maggie's follow-up words condensed into six dots and a question mark: "...?"

Then, under the even more bewildered and astonished gaze of this young lady of the black dragon, Rebecca suddenly produced a large scroll from somewhere and unfurled it with a flourish before Maggie's eyes—it was unmistakably a hand-drawn mechanical design blueprint, complete with numerous runic array patterns.

The next second, Rebecca spread the blueprint flat on the ground and began explaining with great enthusiasm to the utterly dumbfounded Maggie: "Look at this—this isn't a spike, this is a flying machine I designed. The ring at the bottom is called an anti-gravity ring; it provides lift, already sorted out, very stable. Then over here is the arcane energy wing panel... you know about arcane energy wing panels, right? Warships have them too. This is the flying machine version I designed... Hey, why don't you squat down? Can you even see clearly standing up like that?"

Maggie mentally rifled through her knowledge of attendant etiquette—how an attendant should wait upon a noble who is standing, how an attendant should wait upon a noble who is seated—but what about when a noble squats down in the middle of an open courtyard? There didn't seem to be any rule for that...

Because no noble in their right mind would squat on the ground in public!

After careful consideration, Maggie still squatted down beside Rebecca—after all, Rebecca had spoken first...

"That's more like it," Rebecca glanced at Maggie with satisfaction, her finger continuing to trace across the peculiar conical machine on the blueprint. "I referenced elven anti-gravity technology here. Their levitation spells are far more efficient than human ones, but I still haven't figured out how to make this thing move freely. The anti-gravity ring can only provide lift—or strictly speaking, it can only provide reverse gravity. That's where it differs from a repulsion cantrip: if you tilt the anti-gravity ring's force field, it won't gain a tilted thrust; it'll just lose control entirely. Last time I sent the prototype slamming into the ceiling...

"I also studied how the elven Court of the Shining Vault flies, but that thing is just too complex. It's a device called a 'wave engine,' and each propulsion unit is bigger than a house! The key issue is that there are many structures inside that even the elves don't understand and can't disassemble. They say it's their ancestral technology, and no one knows how to repair it anymore—you could say every one you take apart is one you ruin. I originally wanted to suggest they try disassembling one, but that didn't seem quite appropriate..."

A thought immediately sprang to Maggie's mind: You just asked me to transform for you to see—was that appropriate?

Rebecca, meanwhile, was still chattering on. Whenever it came to technical matters, her words seemed endless: "...I found mages who know flight spells, but their flight magic is practically 'by feel'—it can't be translated into machinery at all. I also designed a 'fireball pulse propulsion' method, but my aunt vetoed it, saying it would blow up our own people too easily. One of the arcane technicians under me came up with a scheme using wind-element runes to generate airflow for propulsion. It barely worked, but the power was pitiful—the test machine was practically crawling... But then again, I always feel that although this airflow propulsion scheme seems useless now, it might turn out to be something great in the future, if we can solve the power issue..."

Maggie listened as this princess drifted further and further into territory she could not comprehend at all, and quickly interjected: "Your Highness, these things you're describing... do they have anything to do with me?"

"Huh? You..." Rebecca paused for a moment, then caught on. "Ah right, they do, they do! How do you dragons fly?"

"With our wings, of course..."

"But your wings can't provide enough lift, nor enough thrust, can they?" Rebecca's face was full of curiosity. "Your wings are indeed very large, but your bodies are even larger. And more importantly, I've seen how you dragons accelerate and brake—it was a blue dragon. When she accelerated, some kind of force field clearly emerged along the edges of her wings, and then with a flash of magical radiance, she instantly accelerated to a speed the eye couldn't follow. During that whole process she only beat her wings once... That's not a speed you can get from a single wingbeat."

Maggie stared at Rebecca in utter astonishment. She had nearly forgotten the initial "transform into one and let me see." She realized that this rash princess harbored no ill intent whatsoever, nor was this a thoughtless demand made on a whim. She was researching something—something Maggie could not understand but which was of extraordinary significance—and this princess had poured her entire being into that research.

"I heard Master Kamael mention that dragons don't fly purely by beating their wings against the air," Rebecca continued enthusiastically, paying no mind to the change in Maggie's expression. "You're actually rowing through 'magic power'—creating some kind of force field, then riding that force field to glide at extreme speed along the ripples of magic. That's why you can fly so very high, even above the clouds where the air is extremely thin—heights that no human mage or bird could ever reach...

"I want to reference the dragons' method of flight to build a device that can glide along magic ripples. If your magical system can also be made compatible with runic logic... maybe I could fly too!"

Suddenly, a sentence Maggie had once read in a book from her homeland surfaced in her mind: Dragons can soar through the heavens on the waves of magic, even reaching the very edge of the sky, arriving at the top of the atmosphere, where they stand but one step away from leaving this planet—and it is for this reason that they are qualified to be called the masters of the sky, for beneath that sky, no living being flies higher than they.

She drew a soft breath and nodded slowly: "You're right. Dragons do not fly by beating the air—or rather, beating the air is merely an auxiliary method for adjusting direction and sensing our environment. Our true flight power is magic..."

As those words fell softly, the black-haired attendant raised her left hand slightly. In the air behind her, an enormous black wing suddenly materialized from nothingness, swaying gently in midair.