What Kind of Technology Is This?

The packet of documents Beatrice had brought had already been opened. By the time Zoe came over, several technical priests from Empire Truth were gathered around it, studying it. They all greeted her when they saw her approach.

"Miss Zoe."

"How is it? Nothing wrong with it, right?"

"It doesn't seem like there's any problem. At least the contents match up. It's just..."

The technical priest sounded hesitant. Zoe leaned closer and peered at the documents, quickly understanding why they were so conflicted.

"What the hell is all this nonsense?"

Though Zoe was an office worker, she worked in a city like Castel, steeped in industry. Most of the people she dealt with on a daily basis were engineers and the like, so the documents felt especially strange to her.

"Rituals? Sacrifices? Burning lubricating oil? Eating furnace slag? Dancing while striking the furnace with wrenches? And it has to be at a frequency of three hertz?"

Zoe looked around at the others in confusion. Their expressions were equally bizarre.

"I thought there would be plans for biological modification surgeries, or at the very least techniques for fusing flesh and machinery. But this..."

Zoe suddenly recalled how Chloe, Gaia, and Monica had danced around the steam engine when they summoned the first version of the Machine Soul.

She had thought they were just fooling around at the time. So that really was a proper Mechanical Cathedral ritual?

And yet, it had produced such an intricate mechanical body...

It had the same bizarre charm as an ancient tribe finding a heavy machine gun and using a sling to launch its bullets.

"Wait, no. All those mechanical structures can't just dance themselves into existence, can they? The gears aren't going to mesh by themselves, are they?"

Zoe suddenly realized that these mechanical limbs