For a mature adult who'd seen their share of storms, what could be more humiliating than being lectured by someone with a patronizing, dad-like attitude? Being lectured by a stodgy old robot, probably.
Fortunately, Little Gray had no intention of pressing her advantage. She turned back to the matter at hand. "To protect this cobbled-together engine and stabilizer assembly, you also hung something at the midpoint... What the hell is that? A meteorite?"
"It's a fragment of an asteroid rich in heavy metals. Uh, yeah, it's a bit ugly, but it's cheap and gets the job done! There's no problem with air resistance in space, so who cares if it's a little bulky?" Yu Lian said.
"Heh heh heh heh~~~ What a brilliant idea."
Yu Lian figured she wasn't praising him so much as being sarcastic, and hurriedly added, "It wasn't me. It was the Marauders!"
Little Gray let out a helpless sigh, tinged with three parts exasperation, three parts headache, three parts weariness, and one part blood-vessel-bursting high blood pressure. She looked just like a young mother watching her mischievous child get covered head to toe in mud.
"Fine. An asteroid it is. It's better than nothing, at least. I'll send you some data in a bit—a formula for a composite material. This stuff... well, it shouldn't be much more advanced than the materials you already have, so it probably doesn't count as a prohibited item."
Yu Lian's eyes immediately lit up.
To be honest, what made Little Gray so exciting to have around wasn't her nanotech warship after she recovered all her functions, nor her formidable ability to simulate psionic powers. It was these "prohibited items," waiting to be unlocked one by one.
Just then, Little Gray added, "It's the material used for building blocks in our kindergartens,