Engineering

Fineous Darkvire turned around and was surprised to find the human following close on his heels, his face full of the ingratiating deference of a nobody.

"Was there something else?" he asked with a slight frown. To be honest, he rather liked this human and did not want to call the guards over to drive them away.

"Well, master," Diago said, bowing and scraping. He noticed that the title considerably eased the dwarf's frown, which gave him much more confidence. "I used to repair engineering devices back home in Stormwind City. Of course, they were all crude provincial contraptions, nothing compared to the grand creations you've seen, but I thought perhaps I could offer a humble suggestion. After all, even the greatest designer might overlook some tiny, inconspicuous detail, wouldn't you say?"

The chief dwarf craftsman chuckled. In this human, he could almost see himself before he had risen in the world. That ambition to climb higher, that calculated pursuit of every possible opening-it all felt so familiar. Almost in an instant, some impulse led him to make a decision: he would give this human a chance. Perhaps a miracle might happen?

"The four most important safes in this vault won't open. Where do you think the problem might be?" Darkweir asked, pointing into the vault. This was a small test. If the human knew nothing about engineering, he would turn around and leave, without wasting another moment on him.

"I think there might be a problem with the trigger between the Gold Power Core and the Delicate Arcanite Converter. I've repaired this sort of spring switch many times before. The Mageweave Cloth wrapped around the mithril framework isn't very secure and slips off easily, causing energy leaks. Replacing the Mageweave Cloth with Runecloth would help..." Diago rattled on. He acted exactly like an ambitious fellow who would seize any opportunity and refuse to let go, completely dispelling the dwarf craftsman's last trace of wariness.

"Why do you think it isn't a problem with the fuse between the Clockwork Synchronization Gyroscope and the Truesilver Transformer?" Darkweir pressed. In fact, he had just inspected that fuse, and it had indeed not blown-it was one of the few devices he could make sense of. What he failed to notice, however, was that his tone had changed. Now they were two engineers discussing a technical question as equals.

"You may not have noticed, but there's a looped mithril pipe behind that fuse. That thin pipe is actually filled with coolant to cool the fuse, but that defeats the original purpose of installing it. It's there to blow when the energy becomes unstable!" Diago explained, deliberately exposing his own ignorance at the same time. In truth, with his Draenor master-level engineering expertise, there was no way he would not know what was going on.

"That fuse protects against mechanical stress, not energy overload. It was designed to prevent the Clockwork Synchronization Gyroscope from spinning too fast." The chief dwarf craftsman smugly pointed out Diago's "ignorance," since it highlighted his own expertise. Just then, however, he suddenly realized that there might be something to what the human had said. Perhaps he really had overlooked something.

"So that's how it works! You truly are a master of vast learning!" Diago said, as though the truth had suddenly dawned on him.

"Here, come with me. Perhaps you really can help." Darkweir turned and headed into the vault. He could hardly wait to take another look at that damned complicated machine with this human.

Diago and Masley exchanged a glance, then hurried after him.

The guards at the vault entrance did not question their arrival at all. To their minds, Fineous Darkvire's identity and standing already guaranteed their trustworthiness. The guards even pushed the vault doors open for them and closed them behind them once they had entered.

Darkweir locked the doors from the inside, then walked farther into the vault.

"Now no one will disturb us. Let's find out what's wrong with the mechanical toy Franclorn Forgewright left behind!" Like a host showing visitors around his home, he gestured for the adventurers to follow him.

The vault was deserted at the moment, apart from two Heavy War Golems a full three meters tall. Fortunately, neither was active, but even so, they radiated an oppressive presence. They were simply too enormous for an indoor space like this.

"Wow, this really is impressive!" Diago exclaimed, his eyes darting over the countless safes lining the surrounding walls. He acted exactly like a country bumpkin who had never seen the world.

In reality, however, he had been coolly searching the vault all along, and he soon found what he was looking for: a painting hanging on an inconspicuous stretch of wall.

Diago gave the portrait a seemingly casual glance. He recognized the old dwarf in it at once. His red braided beard was extremely rare among the Dark Iron Dwarves, whose beards were generally black, white, or gray, making him easy to identify.

Dark Guardian Him'rel, he silently repeated. In fact, this portrait was a marker indicating who held the keys to the four most important safes. For security, the keys to those four safes were kept by six Guardians in rotation.

Moreover, these six Guardians never stayed in any fixed location. They constantly wandered around Shadowforge City, dressed in ordinary clothes and looking utterly unremarkable, no different from any ordinary Dark Iron dwarf. But for a veteran like Diago, finding them would pose little difficulty. Still, Diago did not intend to do that. As the engineer about to repair the mechanism that opened the safes, he had an advantage no one else possessed.

"All right, stop standing there gawking. Come over and help!" Darkweir snapped smugly. Around this human, he could constantly savor the superiority of being a cut above him in both knowledge and intelligence, and it left him rather full of himself.

Darkweir stood in an inconspicuous corner. Diago, however, keenly noticed that hard tiles covered the entire vault floor. The tiles were regular hexagons, making the floor look like an enormous honeycomb. The tile beneath the chief dwarf craftsman's feet looked no different from any of the others. Under the adventurers' puzzled gazes, Darkweir smugly pressed its six corners in a particular sequence.

Amid a series of creaks, clangs, ticks, clacks, and hisses from machinery in motion, a section of floor three meters square rose with a grinding noise in the center of the hall, then slid aside.

A world of machinery appeared before them. Beneath that floor lay thousands of bearings, gears, pipes, and all manner of strange devices-a dazzling, breathtaking sight!

These components and devices constantly turned and swung like an enormous clock, some occasionally venting bursts of scalding white steam.

"Wow! This is nothing short of a miracle!" Diago exclaimed sincerely. If his earlier praise had been somewhat affected, now he was genuinely awed by the exquisitely ingenious design. It was like a primitive man seeing a television or an Earthling seeing an alien spaceship-he could not understand it at all, but he knew it was incredible!

"Can you make sense of it?" Darkweir asked mockingly from beside him. He meant no real malice, for he remembered very well how he had felt when he first saw this machine.

"I'll have to examine it carefully before I can say for sure." To the chief dwarf craftsman's surprise, the human did not look utterly at a loss. He bent down-in fact, he practically climbed onto it-and carefully identified every part of the machine.

"This should be the Gold Power Core, but it's installed inside a mithril casing. As far as I know, though, mithril can't prevent energy from dissipating. That makes no sense at all..."

"This is the Clockwork Synchronization Gyroscope, but it's been designed in an elliptical shape. That makes it very difficult to calculate the effect of air resistance at high rotational speeds. I wonder how Franclorn Forgewright solved that problem back then..."

"This linkage uses high-speed bronze gears, but as far as I know, bronze gears can't withstand the wear at this rotational speed. They'd break down very quickly. Oh, this gear is an odd color. Its edges are emerald green. Good heavens, he mixed thorium into it! But can an alloy of copper, tin, and thorium really work?"

"..."

Only now did Diago realize that his Draenor master-level engineering expertise amounted to nothing more than making things from blueprints. Compared with the machine before him, it was merely a collection of scattered fundamentals. Perhaps it was a few steps ahead in the use of new materials, but without ingenious inspiration and ideas to connect it all, it was as loose as scattered sand, utterly incapable of systematic construction and integrated combination. He was like an old craftsman: ask him to make something from a blueprint, and he could do it very well, but ask him to design a blueprint himself, and it would be immensely difficult. (Writing this, I was reminded of China's manufacturing industry. Sigh...)

He felt like a frog sitting at the bottom of a deep well. At that moment, his sense of superiority as a transmigrator was shattered by this machine. The M1 Garand Rifle he had once considered so brilliant was child's play beside it, not remotely worthy of comparison. In a word, the gap between him and Franclorn was a lack of creativity. Like a stonemason and a master sculptor, they embodied two entirely different concepts: technique and art. A single step separated them, yet the difference was worlds apart.

Diago found himself completely immersed in an ocean of engineering. Every ingenious design here offered him insight, and every wildly imaginative idea could spark his inspiration. By now, he had completely forgotten why he had come. Like a parched sponge, he greedily absorbed the design ideas and inspiration of the foremost dwarf craftsman. He believed that if he could get out alive, his engineering skills would surely break through their limits and advance by leaps and bounds.

Only after Fineous Darkvire had impatiently tugged at him several times was he dragged out of the world of engineering.

"What is it? Can't you see I'm busy?!" Diago roared angrily at the interruption. But when he saw that it was the chief dwarf craftsman, he hurriedly put on a different, deeply deferential expression. "What are your instructions?"

"Have you found the problem?" Darkweir asked, visibly displeased, his face somber.

"Uh, well..." Diago scratched his head. To be honest, he had been so absorbed in working backward from the actual machine to reconstruct Franclorn Forgewright's design process that he had completely neglected to look for the fault. He hurriedly searched his mind for anything in the device that had not been operating normally. Fortunately, he soon found it.

Note: The engineering terms and devices mentioned in this chapter all actually exist in Azeroth. You can look them up.

Unlike engineering in its broad real-world sense, engineering in Azeroth covers a rather narrow range. It would be more accurate to call it mechanical engineering or explosives engineering.

In Azeroth, engineers can use their outstanding creativity to make a vast array of highly practical mechanical devices. Through constant repairs and improvements, while putting up with mechanical failures and duds, engineers eventually create quite distinctive items: little gadgets such as goggles, scopes, and parachutes; powerful firearms; unstable explosives; robotic servants and mechanical pets; mechanical vehicles; and all the strange and wonderful components these devices require.

Successful engineers can use their inventions to overcome difficulties and make themselves and their teammates faster and stronger. A competent engineer also often dabbles in blacksmithing and mining, since metals and ores are the basic materials for their inventions.

In Azeroth, engineering has different branches: the Goblin Engineering school and the Gnomish Engineering school. Both races take pride in their own technology and compete with one another. Sometimes, this competition is not healthy.