Chapter 29
Chapter 29
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 29
Chapter Title: Clay Dolls Have No Wings (3)
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For cultivators or yokai, attacks using spiritual power are effective.
Fire and water attributes commonly rely on spells.
Wood, metal, and earth attributes tend to prefer spiritual tools.
The new weapon Seoran was crafting sat somewhere between a spell and a spiritual tool.
Yi Agum asked Seoran, who was diligently kneading the clay.
“Sister, what’s that?”
“This is called a guided missile.”
“Missile? Like the bullets for a matchlock gun? But why does it look like a bamboo shoot instead of a sphere?”
Ho Hye-mun, who had been watching alongside her, spoke up.
“Aha, it’s like fireworks! I’ve heard of this amazing weapon that launches fireworks at the enemy. I think it was called the Fire Chariot.”
As someone from a prestigious family in the capital, Ho Hye-mun was well-informed.
Yi Agum, from a rural farming family in the remote land of Yu who didn’t even know what fireworks were, immediately asked.
“Elder Ho, what are fireworks?”
“It’s an object made by stuffing gunpowder into a cylindrical paper tube. Light the fuse, and it flies off on its own. In the capital, they launch fireworks to fill the sky during every festival.”
Yi Agum knew a little about gunpowder.
She had picked up the knowledge while cleaning the Medicine Hall.
Long ago, gunpowder had been an accidental byproduct of pill refining research.
“Sister, should I fetch some gunpowder? If I ask at the Medicine Hall, they’ll give me at least a bowlful.”
“No need. It’s already done.”
Seoran unveiled her bamboo shoot rocket prototype.
The internal structure was simple.
There was a stone bead at both the front and back of the bamboo shoot.
The front one was the warhead for explosion, and the rear one was for propulsion.
For now, she planned to fill only the propulsion bead with spiritual power and check if it launched properly.
“Alright, let’s step way back. It might be dangerous.”
The three of them set up a barrier at a safe distance and waited.
Unlike fireworks, the bamboo shoot rocket didn’t need a fuse.
It used a built-in timer that activated the propulsion mechanism automatically.
The high-pressure spiritual power injected into the bead would then spray out along a set path, propelling the rocket forward via reaction force.
The puppetry-based timer worked perfectly.
When the propulsion bead was triggered, the compressed spiritual power reacted.
Unable to withstand the surging internal pressure, the rocket body exploded right there.
“Ah, right.”
Watching the wreckage, Seoran realized her mistake.
On second thought, a rocket body made purely of clay couldn’t endure the propulsion force.
It needed to be made of at least stone or brick.
She used earth spirit power to carve the stone into the desired shape.
It wasn’t an overly complex structure anyway.
It was about on the level of a water rocket an elementary schooler makes for a science day event.
The second prototype was completed quickly.
And as soon as the launch process began, it exploded again.
Shattered stone fragments swept in all directions.
It looked just like a cluster grenade.
Seoran’s conclusion was the same as the previous experiment.
The rocket body couldn’t handle the internal pressure from the destabilizing high-pressure spiritual power.
She needed to boost its durability.
So she decided to reinforce the rocket with reinforcement spells.
The spiritual power needed to maintain the reinforcement would come from an additional third bead.
Inevitably, the rocket’s size grew a bit larger.
This time, she was confident it would really succeed.
But if rocket launches were that easy, aerospace engineering as a field of study wouldn’t exist.
The third rocket put on an even more spectacular explosion.
Seoran had a bad feeling about this.
*****
Her premonition came true.
There was no paradise at the place she fled to.
Seoran, who had escaped puppetry due to the torment of law programming, was now getting wrecked by aerospace engineering.
It was the same everywhere—riddled with errors that needed fixing.
The only difference was that in rocket-making, every mistake just resulted in a massive explosion, repeating the same clichéd outcome.
It had blown up so many times that complaints were rolling in.
Seoran bowed her waist in apology.
“Yes, I’ll hold back from now on.”
The civilian complaint handler pleaded once more.
“Good, please do. Honestly, the constant booms day and night have brought in tons of complaints. I won’t tell you to stop, but at least do it farther away.”
“Yes, understood.”
Feeling truly sorry, Seoran bowed repeatedly.
As soon as the handler left, she packed up and departed the riverbank.
Driving her transforming puppet ship all the way to the barrier-blocked border, Seoran finally found an abandoned quarry.
Even if she tested a nuclear weapon here, it surely wouldn’t reach any settlements.
Seoran reshaped the transforming puppet ship into a two-story pavilion and settled into the quarry.
Then she repeated her experiments.
Over the past summer, Seoran went through many trials and errors.
She hadn’t been mindlessly causing environmental destruction and noise pollution.
Her prototypes now actually looked like rockets.
First, she overhauled the propulsion system entirely.
She adapted her spectral art, which shot yellow beams from her finger.
Now she had a technique to eject high-pressure spiritual power steadily.
The issue of internal pressure fluctuations causing the whole rocket to burst was mostly solved.
When she first saw a rocket launch toward the sky, she couldn’t hold back tears.
It failed to maintain attitude control and crashed into a nearby cliff, but it was still tremendous progress.
Seoran celebrated alone, munching on jerky soaked with her tears.
And starting the next day, she endured mental torture.
The next phase after propulsion design was attitude control programming.
Error fixes and optimization issues greeted her.
For attitude control, she first needed sensors.
Before solving problems, she needed the ability to detect that a problem had occurred.
She had to create an equilibrium sensor usable in three-dimensional space.
Seoran slammed into nearby stones and shouted.
“Why didn’t I go to an engineering school?!”
But the past couldn’t be changed.
Screaming at the heavens wouldn’t magically produce an engineering degree.
With repeated headbutts, the stone split in half.
As always, Seoran wiped away her despair, lifted her head.
And with a calm face as if she’d never rampaged, she picked up the part she’d been working on moments ago.
The part was a handmade gyroscope.
She planned to use it for attitude sensing.
The goal was to calculate propulsion vectors based on the rotation angles of the gyroscope’s three rings.
Link it to the attitude control program, and done.
She didn’t know if this was scientifically correct.
But with Seoran’s brainpower, it was the best she could do.
Seoran wasn’t a rocket engineer; she was a cultivator.
A spiritual power propulsion rocket was occult from the ground up anyway.
If it didn’t work, she’d keep at it until it did.
She had over two hundred years of lifespan left.
Autumn passed, and winter arrived.
Finally, she succeeded in rocket attitude control.
After endless improvements, the bamboo shoot rocket was now a cutting-edge model equipped with hovering capabilities.
Hovering in place midair at constant output was truly beautiful.
In the control room carved into the stone wall, Seoran wiped her moistening eyes.
With a barrier instead of reinforced glass, visibility was no issue.
The quarry had long since become a missile silo.
The bamboo shoot rocket kept growing larger, leaving her no choice.
After upgrading the propulsion, adding equilibrium sensors and attitude controls, she needed more space.
To handle the increased weight, she enlarged the propulsion bead and redesigned the engine.
Weight increased, engine grew, weight increased again—the cycle repeated.
In the end, the rocket that had started knee-high was now the size of a stone pagoda.
The silver lining was the lack of a cooling system.
High-pressure spiritual power propulsion generated no heat.
No heat meant no need to worry about cooling methods.
In high spirits, Seoran invited Ho Hye-mun and Yi Agum.
She let them watch a rocket launch.
Both marveled at the sight of the rocket.
“To think something this big flies like a firework—amazing.”
“Sister, could a person ride in that thing?”
“Not yet. But who knows in the future.”
Deep down, Seoran was even planning a space trip to the moon.
Next came the launch.
The target was a distant peak visible far off.
She had gotten permission from the handler in advance.
The three gathered in the control room, awaiting launch time.
When the moment arrived, the rocket spewed a yellow light stream and launched.
It rose vertically, then small attitude thrusters activated, tilting it midair.
It accelerated sharply toward the target peak.
Flying faster than sound, the rocket collided with the peak.
The impact sensor signaled, and the dormant spiritual power in the warhead reacted violently.
In a flash like the sun crashing down, the entire peak vaporized.
A massive shockwave followed belatedly.
It was a speed and destructive power impossible to mimic with mere spiritual tools or spells.
With this, she had every right to strut around claiming she could end the world.
Naturally, Ho Hye-mun and Yi Agum were stunned.
This was no spectacle a single Foundation Establishment cultivator could produce.
They had witnessed power beyond realms.
So no one recalled Seoran’s original purpose.
She had immersed herself in puppetry for a different reason entirely.
To develop a personal defense measure.
A few days later, Seoran realized a new issue.
The bamboo shoot rocket was too big to carry.
After a moment’s thought, she found a solution.
She would detach and carry only the small attitude thrusters.
Add a handle and tweak it a bit.
In one day, a portable light cannon was complete.
She carved a yellow dragon into the stone cylinder barrel and named it the Yellow Dragon Light Cannon.
It wasn’t clay or a puppet anymore, but at this point, she didn’t care.
She had reached her destination, so it didn’t matter.
Thus, a weirdo lugging around a stone pillar was born.