Women's World: I am the man with the most OP auxiliary class

Chapter 206: Engine Room; Energy Generating Buds; Force Field Generating Fruits

"Nao, do you know where the machine that generates force fields is?"

"What is a force field, aao?" Nao looked at me and tilted her head again, placing the index finger of her left hand between her lips.

"One would think that having an AI would make life easier, but the truth is that it does not..."

"What is an AI, aao?"

"I have no choice but to search here." I said while raising my left hand and looking at the bracelet.

Following the knowledge I had absorbed from the bracelet and the intuition of someone who comes from a world in the age of computing and the digital era, with my right hand I gently touched with my fingers the spot where the faint pink light blinks in rhythm with the beat of a human heart.

Then, confirming my idea, a crystalline screen appeared in front of my eyes.

Then I thought of a map and the screen displayed the architectural blueprint of the ship, placing a small cursor on a section of the ship’s map that showed a zoom effect until the image was centered with the cursor in the middle of the map.

Beside the cursor — which looks like a triangle pointing upward — there was a small light blue dot.

It seems the cursor is pointing to my position and the blue dot is Nao, who is beside me.

Following the same motion one would use on a touchscreen, with my right index finger I began to move the image across the screen.

When I tapped each -machine- shown on the map and each pipe, bold letters appeared along with a smaller text underneath.

"I do not understand what it says here... There are words similar to our language. But others are different."

"This one says black water drainage and this one says heavy material filter, ao!"

"Right! You can read this. Can you see which one says force field, or energy field, or generator...?"

"None of them say that... Ao."

"Well, it seems we are looking in the wrong place — let us go to another section."

Walking alongside Nao, we began to explore and examine every machine and pipe covering the engine room.

This ship does not have a wired network. With Nao’s help I was able to discover that although the ship’s technology uses tubes to transport substances like gases and liquids, the energy is transmitted through the very wood from which the ship is built.

It is something truly unique. I do not know whether in my previous life anyone was researching materials that could conduct energy, eliminating the need for cables or for etching circuits onto electronic boards. The entire hull of the object conducts energy!

I know that all plants have the capacity to transport energy and resources, but achieving this in a wood that does not lose that property and uses it in its entirety is genuinely ingenious.

Nao and I arrived at a section where I have always sensed the greatest concentration of energy in the ship, even though the energy seems -dead- and only a kind of remnant remains.

Before my eyes is a large egg-shaped sphere accompanied by many more — smaller ones that resemble a flower bud since they appear to have closed petals. They have a natural beauty, but that beauty has been destroyed.

The largest sphere is truly enormous. It stands over ninety meters tall, and the cocoon is very wide — sixty meters across.

It is almost the size of a city block. The others are scattered around this great cocoon and are shorter and narrower.

But even the smallest one is at least two meters tall.

These cocoons grow from the wood of the ship; using my spatial perception I can see how they are naturally connected to the entire structure of the ship.

Although biology was an important part of my medical studies, I never studied it in depth in the realm of plant life. But I do have a basic understanding of plant structure.

The ship’s wood seems to have a cellulose capable not only of transporting energy but of storing it; inside the cocoons there appears to be a kind of -honey- that was responsible not only for storing the energy, but for generating it.

The great engines that power this enormous ship are in fact biological engines.

It is a shame that the cocoons appear to have received an energy overload and, from the damage I can see, they exploded from the inside out.

The explosion did not only destroy all the egg-shaped spheres but a large part of the engine room as well.

What caused this -Ark- to run aground on this planet? And caused the captain to die?

The captain died in his chair in his office, not in the command chair in the control room. Although the captain shows damage in his bones, that tells me he was able to stay alive long enough to make it to his chair and sit down.

There is also the damage on the outer hull. Everything seems to indicate that the damage came from the inside and not from the outside, which rules out the theory that the ship suffered an attack from the exterior.

I do not know whether this species of tree was specially cultivated to serve as timber for the construction of star ships, or whether this is simply its natural species. Either way, the capabilities of this tree are truly remarkable.

"The Pollen Flies and Life is Born, AA OOO~ ! Fruit!" Nao, who had been sitting on one of the small two-meter-tall capsules, was swinging her feet happily and pointed in a direction.

The direction Nao pointed to is the far end of the route. Beyond the ethereal energy present in this section of the engine room, on the other side there is also another energy signal — but fainter.

After another stretch of walking, now doing the same as Nao and touching with my hands everything I could reach, we arrived at the other side of the engine room.

This time the area is different from the previous one and seems cleaner and more -cordoned off-.

In front of Nao and me stands what Director Roselle sent us to find: a transparent crystal container in a black structure identical to the one the spider queen stole from the human capital.

But now seeing it up close, I can sense that the crystal is actually a kind of tree sap that flows and protects a fruit inside.

The black material surrounding the sap crystal is in fact wood and leaves, but they appear to have been designed to serve as support and protection for the fruit within.

The fruit is black in color and floats on its own inside the sap. My spatial perception can sense the energy bubble covering the black fruit that is not visible to the naked eye — only as a kind of distortion of the light.

Now I can understand how humans were able to use this artifact to generate a defensive field around a city. It is simply a matter of feeding the fruit with energy through the black wood, and the fruit itself will expand its energy bubble.

But what does the spider queen want with the fruit?

And why did the survivors not take this fruit with them?

Nao began playing around the black fruit’s capsule, jumping around and shouting AA OOO.

Around this place there appear to be materials and machines to create more of these black fruits, but everything seems to be out of order now.

Thinking about the cocoons from before that serve as energy generators and about this fruit, along with the trees growing in the ship’s hull — maybe I can find a way to recreate these plants. Who am I, after all? Am I not the Fairy Queen? Ahem, ahem! King...

"AA OOO The Captain’s face is red!" Nao stopped dancing around the defensive force field generator artifact and trotted over with little hops until she was standing in front of me.

"No, I..."

I wanted to defend myself but a sparrow chirped above me, drawing my attention.

A small sparrow with silver feathers and a light surrounding it — as if the full moon were watching over it — appeared and flew a couple of circles around me.

I raised my hands with the palms facing up and the small silver sparrow landed on my palms. In its beak it carried a piece of white parchment folded in half, which the sparrow released into my hand.

"tweet - tweet, tweet tweet ~ " the sparrow chirped a few times, then rubbed its little head against my right thumb and dissolved into many specks of silver light.

"The bird got away! Ooaaa"

I turned to look at Nao, who was stretching up on her tiptoes with her hands reaching toward mine — it seemed she had wanted to touch Xifia’s little sparrow, and it had disappeared before Nao could reach it.

"Outside, Ling, Bing, and Yue are waiting so you can play with them." I told Nao and stroked her head.

Although my gesture of stroking Nao’s head was done on instinct, to my surprise my hand could actually feel contact with Nao, who in essence seems more like a ghost than a tangible being.

Is Nao not simply a holographic projection of an AI?

Setting that thought aside, I opened the note that Xifia had just sent me.

[Vremya, Professor Rudelle has arrived. Breakfast is ready.]