Chapter 524: Chapter 423: New Weapon
Boom!
The moment Dean Ma Deburg of the Crystal Core Research Institute was illuminated by the glowing light cannon, his excited expression was hardly recognizable compared to his usual calm demeanor!
"It’s the Crystal Core Cannon! I can’t believe it’s the Crystal Core Cannon!" Ma Deburg roared.
"Pretty amazing, right?." Long Yi laughed, setting down the light cannon.
"More than amazing! It’s downright miraculous! The light it emits resembles the one produced by our White Dragon!" Ma Deburg exclaimed.
"While its power may be weaker than Dragon Breath, at least we don’t need to rely on a dragon!" said Professor Ding Ge, who was standing at the side. Recently, he wasn’t very busy and had morphed back into his effeminate persona. However, likely due to his overwhelming excitement, his voice had taken on a slightly masculine edge.
"This is a standard power core. Are you telling us you intend to equip our battle armor with a light cannon?" Angidd, the head of the Mechanical Research Institute, rightly understood Long Yi’s intentions almost instantly.
"That’s right. That’s exactly what I intend to do." Long Yi responded with a smile.
"I knew it!" Angidd excitedly swung his fist in realization.
"What we call this weapon, be it a Light Cannon or a Crystal Core Cannon, is immaterial. Its power speaks for itself. Now, let’s discuss how to install the barrel," Long Yi said.
Initially, when reconstructing the battle armor, Long Yi hadn’t considered the need for an external light cannon, so he had not made provisions for an interface. Fortunately, there was a group of interfaces on the back of the battle armor, initially intended for transporting the armor to the front lines. Now though, it would require two of the hooks. Luckily, there were plenty of hooks available.
Designing a base for the light cannon, designing armor to protect the cannon, designing a mechanism to handle the operation of the weapon...
That’s when Long Yi truly realised the benefits of the magic world. Originally he had planned to connect the light cannon to the arm of the armor, but this would affect the flexibility of the soldiers in close combat.
Thus, Long Yi casually complained that it would be better if they could fire wherever they looked.
Professor Ding Ge responded with a strange counter-question.
Isn’t the visual lock-on spellcasting technique a basic action of magic? Is it difficult?
Within three days, Angidd and Professor Ding Ge had developed an auto-targeting system!
They used the invisible glasses provided by Ma Deburg as a controller, which enabled the base of the light cannon to automatically aim at the focus of the wearer’s right eye’s line of sight.
Long Yi was deeply surprised; visual locking wasn’t a novel concept in his world, but to develop it in just three days was shockingly fast, wasn’t it?
When Long Yi was immersed in his astonishment, Professor Ding Ge laughed and shook his head.
"It may have only taken three days, but this is built on the technical accumulation of the past decade!"
Long Yi couldn’t help but laugh sheepishly, he had committed an error of empiricism. When he wasn’t paying attention, the real owners of these research institutes were definitely not idle!
Drilling holes in the back of the armor, welding new components, connecting the power of the core to the base of the new light cannon using mithril cables...
Soon, a light cannon, protected within a triangular steel plate, was installed on the back of the armor. The linkage mechanism could control the cannon to adjust its firing direction within a 60-degree cone range in front of it.
"Come on, this time, let’s find a suitable test subject to fire it once!"
Long Yi said.
And then, Emperor Kirei arrived.
Kirei had absolutely no idea what Long Yi had been up to during this period. A while ago, all the Group Leaders from the Dragon Knight Order had gone to the Emperor to inquire about where Long Yi’s beautiful female warriors came from and why they were not being incorporated into their own Dragon Rider Legion. The Emperor could only tell them that even as an Emperor, he didn’t know where Long Yi found these powerful and identical beauties. If they wanted to have them, they would have to approach Long Yi themselves.
However, when they arrived at Long Yi’s camp, they found he was missing. Faced with the camp full of beautiful women and three unpredictable youngsters, these leaders of the Dragon Knight Order couldn’t bring themselves to ask and ended up returning dejectedly.
And now, Long Yi had suddenly popped up in the Imperial Research Institute. Not only that, but he had reportedly been staying there for four entire days! Moreover, he added a light cannon to the battle armor!
Did this surprise come too abruptly? There was not even a hint of preparation!
Kirei did own his own set of battle armor, but unlike his father, he didn’t take it with him and left it at the armor warehouse instead. The armor was user-locked - unless the user died or actively transferred user rights, the armor could not be used by anyone else. Any forced attempt to change the user would cause the core of the armor to overload and burn out all energy circuits.
The first automated targeting battle armor, modified by Long Yi, was Kirei’s own. At that time, watching Long Yi drill holes and weld things on Kirei’s beloved battle armor, the Deans could only laugh bitterly. In their minds, Kirei’s rights as Emperor were still paramount.
But in Long Yi’s perspective...
Heck, who knows what that scoundrel Long Yi was thinking!
And now, Kirei had arrived. Seeing his completely revamped armor, he was understandably excited. But evidently, Long Yi had completely disregarded his previous statement about notifying Kirei of what he was up to.
Never mind, Long Yi was still working for the Empire after all, so he could do whatever he wanted. Kirei was open-minded about it.
Ma Deburg handed over a set of invisible glasses, his masterpiece. He had produced a batch of these glasses before, but due to an uncertainty about their potential uses, he hadn’t continued production. Now, it seemed they could be put to good use!
The armored figure took heavy steps towards the firing position.
In Kirei’s right eye was a crosshair, required by Long Yi. It had to be a crosshair. When he looked in a direction, an X-shaped crosshair would move correspondingly. This was the aim of the light cannon. When the two crosshairs overlapped, it meant the light cannon had aimed at the target in sight.
"Fire!"
Boom!
A beam of light shot out from the cannon, directly blasting a large hole in the steel plate.
"My god, it’s just like the breath of White Dragon!" exclaimed Kirei.
"Hmm, you’re the second person to say that," Long Yi said with a laugh.
"The recharge time is one minute. As long as you can wait patiently for a minute, there will be no consumption of energy for this light cannon," said Long Yi.
A minute later, the light cannon began to hum, and with a gentle ding, it was ready again.
Boom!
A beam shot out again, blasting another large hole in the thick steel plate.
"Of course, if you can’t wait, you can force fire every three seconds, up to twenty consecutive shots. After that, it will enter a forced recharge time of twenty minutes," Long Yi continued to explain.
Boom!
Boom!
Boom!
Kirei fired a total of nineteen shots before the light cannon finally stopped responding.
"Perfect! Cool!"
When Kirei exited the armor, his face was flushed, and his heart was racing with excitement.
"But there’s one problem, the vibration of the battle armor caused my lens to fall out."
Kirei turned around and picked up the tiny contact lens from the crack of the armor. It was already broken and unusable.
"Oh no," Ma Deburg was planning to mass produce these, but he hadn’t expected them to be so sensitive to vibration.
"It’s okay, let’s discuss a helmet that can be used by both the Dragon Knights and our soldiers," Long Yi said with a smile.
When Long Yi first showcased the helmet, his audience was Elsa, who cunningly criticized it. But Long Yi wasn’t discouraged, because it was useless to Elsa, but it was very useful to the Dragon Knights, especially a certain functionality.
Like auto-adjusting to light, and balancing air pressure.
Auto-adjusting to light is self-explanatory. Traditional aerial combat often takes advantage of the sun. If one wears a helmet that can automatically reduce the brightness, then the success rate of counter-attacks will significantly increase when faced with such situations. And the so-called balancing of air pressure is not literally equalizing air pressure, but reducing the wind resistance encountered at high speeds. Dragon Knights can’t always protect their bodies with Fighting Aura as it would hinder their mobility. Therefore, if there is something that can reduce wind pressure, its effect would certainly surpass ordinary Dragon Knight helmets.
When Long Yi described this system, the emperor naturally agreed; Angidd thought there were no technical challenges from a mechanical perspective; and Ding Ge saw that the magical formations they would need were a piece of cake. But when everyone’s gaze turned towards Ma Deburg, he gloomily said,
"You’re eyeing my crystal cores again!"
Crystal core?
Long Yi paused for a moment.
"Oh right, I’ve got some more crystal cores recently. I need a bigger space," said Long Yi.
A bigger space?
Ma Deburg found a grumblingly found an underground warehouse for Long Yi.
"Not big enough," said Long Yi.
So Ma Deburg found a second warehouse for Long Yi.
"Still not big enough," Long Yi said.
At this point, Ma Deburg’s heart began beating faster.
And when Ma Deburg watched in awe as crystal cores filled up three small warehouses, he couldn’t feel his heartbeat anymore!
Happiness came too suddenly! It was too much to take in!
Once the matter with the helmets was settled, Long Yi was taken away by Emperor Kirei before he could leave.
The emperor told Long Yi that the White Dragon Empire’s plan to forge counterfeit money had stealthily begun. The first batch produced one million fake Black Dragon coins. Because they had experienced workers and technicians from the Black Dragon Empire’s mint, as well as experienced local mint masters to check the quality, the first batch of gold coins were excellent. Only those who deal with gold coins regularly could tell the difference if they carefully felt the weight. Otherwise, no one could tell any difference.
Originally, these gold coins were ready to be distributed, but the emperor was still unsure. As Long Yi was the mastermind behind this plan, he ought to check them out before they are sent out.
The counterfeit coin factory was not in Imperial City, but in a remote small village. On the surface, it appears to be a peaceful ordinary village, however, in reality, it’s a fake village. All of its inhabitants were soldiers of the White Dragon Empire. These soldiers had excellent salaries as they were there to maintain life in the village while covertly doing certain things under its protection.
One of them, of course, was the counterfeiting of Black Dragon Coins. (To be continued. If you like this work, please cast a recommendation vote at qidian.com. Your support is my greatest motivation. Mobile phone users can visit m.qidian.com to read.)
