Chapter Ninety-Three: Pilot and Dog Meat

Before they had gone on to the next chamber, Master Handy had already flown back.

"Well? Did you get the data?" Sun Licheng stopped and asked.

"Boss, there was so much data here that I only copied the important part," Master Handy replied.

His answer surprised Sun Licheng a little, but on second thought, it was not strange at all. Since this place was the main underground stronghold of the Goblin Empire, a vast trove of data made perfect sense.

And data was a wonderful thing. Coming from Earth in the twenty-first century, Sun Licheng was acutely sensitive to it. Though invisible and intangible, it could greatly strengthen his side.

In high spirits, Sun Licheng led Master Handy onward, following Azure Dragon to the next important chamber: the underground fortress’s air base.

It was an enormous space, packed with countless small bays, each one housing a single aircraft. A very broad main passage ran through the air base and led to a large airfield, where more flapping-wing planes stood shoulder to shoulder.

"How do these planes get out?" Sun Licheng asked, turning to Master Handy.

Azure Dragon knew the mechanical puppet warehouse best; he knew little of places like the air base.

"There’s a hidden passage up ahead that leads straight outside," Master Handy answered, then added, "But five thousand years ago, an earthquake caused the passage to collapse completely."

Sun Licheng nodded and walked over to a plane nearby.

"There used to be three thousand flapping-wing aircraft stored here, including transports, bombers, reconnaissance planes, and fighters. But now, probably only about thirty can still connect to the main control core," Master Handy said beside him.

Sun Licheng patted the hull and sighed. "So few left. What a pity, my sea of planes."

In the Battle of Dreams, when facing the aerial force commanded by Commander Roth, Sun Licheng had been deeply impressed by those airborne carriers, and even more fascinated by the swarms of flapping-wing planes that swept across the sky like locusts. After all, the airborne carriers were now stuck in the ground, while the flapping-wing planes were under his own control.

Only at close range did Sun Licheng realize that the aircraft’s shell was not steel at all, but made of some kind of resin.

He climbed onto the plane and bounced a few times on the wing. Finding nothing wrong, he followed Master Handy’s instructions and opened the cockpit.

It was a fighter, long and slender in body. Its cockpit was very spacious, styled in a kind of steampunk manner, with thick pipes everywhere. Even the gauges looked like the pressure meters on a boiler.

"How can such an primitive plane even get into the sky? What a shame, it doesn’t even have a display screen."

Sun Licheng was a little surprised. The interior of these aircraft was far too primitive, barely on the level of Earth’s First World War.

Then he noticed a crystal sphere on the right side of the cockpit.

"Good grief, the Goblin Empire actually uses artificial intelligence!" Sun Licheng cried out.

A crystal sphere was an artificial soul, capable of carrying out most of the plane’s operations. Earth’s fighter jets might look dazzling with all their instruments, but their degree of automation was still quite low. Seen that way, the Goblin Empire’s flapping-wing aircraft were far more advanced than Earth’s fighters.

"What is the main weapon of this flapping-wing plane?" Sun Licheng stepped into the cockpit and asked casually as he fiddled with the control stick and instrument panel.

Master Handy, who had already flown to the side of the cockpit, replied, "The main weapons are crossbow bolts and a crystal cannon. The aircraft has two bolt-launching ports and can carry two thousand specially made bolts, allowing continuous fire. The crystal cannon uses one crystal each time it fires, so the consumption is fairly high."

This aircraft could no longer be used. After tinkering with it for quite a while without getting any response, Sun Licheng jumped back down from the cockpit. He walked over to the bolt-launching chamber and, to his surprise, found a pattern that looked very much like a magic circle.

"What is this?" Sun Licheng asked, pointing at the design.

"This is the Goblin Empire’s magic-circle technology. It is said to have been developed during the war by studying the magic-circle information they captured. By relying on these modified magic circles, the flapping-wing planes are able to achieve continuous fire."

Master Handy explained. Even though Sun Licheng had many memories of Commander Roth in his mind, he still knew nothing about a great deal of the specific technical details.

Sun Licheng nodded after hearing this and thought to himself, "This really has the same kind of ingenuity as the rifle I designed! It’s just that my rifle uses conventional gunpowder, so it saves even more crystals."

In truth, Sun Licheng was mistaken. The Goblin Empire’s magic-circle designs were entirely different from his own; their starting points were fundamentally not the same. According to Sun Licheng’s design, crystals were merely an aid. Compared with the Goblin Empire’s weapons, which used crystals as their primary power source, it was far more economical. After all, crystals were scarce resources at any time.

Do not be deceived by the Goblin Empire’s abundance of crystals. That was only because they had once ruled nearly the entire plane and had accumulated them over several centuries. Even with such reserves, the Goblin Empire was still forced to research artificial crystals. These artificial crystals were far inferior to natural ones in every respect precisely because crystals were so scarce.

Aircraft were absolutely a trump card in war. Whoever possessed air superiority held the initiative on the battlefield, and Sun Licheng, who came from modern Earth, knew this all too well. He glanced at Master Handy and realized that the man’s oversized head could never fit into a flapping-wing cockpit, let alone the likes of Azure Dragon and the others. That gave him a headache.

At present, he alone could serve as a pilot and take these machines into the sky, which meant they had no tactical value at all.

At that moment, Dogmeat came barking over. Looking at the mechanical dog, Sun Licheng had a flash of inspiration. Though Dogmeat was a dog, it was in fact an artificial soul, and odds were good it could operate an aircraft.

Sun Licheng told Dogmeat to climb into the cockpit. Under his astonished gaze, the tip of Dogmeat’s tail opened, revealing a long tube that plugged into the cockpit’s connection slot. Then, astonishingly, the plane started up.

"Good grief! It really works!"

Sun Licheng was a little thrilled.

The aircraft moved slightly, then stalled again. Its engine was far too old and had completely failed.

Watching Dogmeat jump down from the plane belching black smoke, Sun Licheng silently gave it a big thumbs-up.

He decided that later he would discuss with Master Handy installing more processors in Dogmeat’s head to boost its computational power, and to carry out a deep overhaul so that Dogmeat could be forged into an outstanding scout.

"Uh..."

Imagining a graceful flapping-wing aircraft soaring through the sky, only for a dog’s head to appear from the cockpit, Sun Licheng felt awkward no matter how he pictured it. The image was just too damn evocative.

Leaving the air base, Sun Licheng and the others continued on to the artillery warehouse. There, stored within, was the Goblin Empire’s main land combat force, the true king of ground warfare: ten thousand crystal cannons.