Zhiyuan

At the top of the Tower of White Bone, White Bone fell to her knees. She gasped for breath, sweat nearly soaking her hair. She promptly dispelled the screen of light, letting the rain wash over her and using the cold to rouse herself.

"Miss White Bone, are you all right?" Su Ming established Mind Synchronization and clearly sensed her exhaustion.

"I'm fine." White Bone took a moment to recover. "It's been too long since I went all out in this form. My stamina has gotten a lot worse."

Blocking the Temple priests' Solar Flame had already been a struggle. Deceiving the Detection Spell afterward had taken everything she had, and she hadn't dared be careless for a moment.

Fortunately, she had anticipated it and prepared extensive disguises in advance. Otherwise, she would have been exposed long ago.

"They won't let this go. We can't keep them fooled for long," White Bone said. "The only reason they stopped..." She paused. "It's time for their late-night meal."

No amount of tactical skill or vigilance could stop the people on duty from having a late-night snack. In particular, the Temple of Light was famous throughout the Western Continent for its excellent food.

Time was short. White Bone stood up. She made the Tower of White Bone's shell rise, then leaped into the air alongside it, plunging toward the sea.

In midair, Su Ming took over, contracting the tower's shell into a ball and dropping it into the sea beside the bone ship.

Underwater, Su Ming finished assembling the deck and superstructure, completing the hull. As the boilers fired at full power, scorching gas was vented directly into the ballast tanks. Water poured from the bone ship through its various outlets, and the hull gradually rose.

Driven at full power, the steam engines spun faster and faster. The propellers began churning the surface violently, creating waves visible to the naked eye. The hull kept rising, pushing the sea aside, and the Zhiyuan showed itself once more, as though born from the water and arriving in the darkness.

Because there had been no particularly obvious magical fluctuations, the sentries at the Temple of Light's camp thought the cliff might have collapsed again and were a little slow to react.

It was the Pearl Duchy's navy that spotted the problem first. After warming up their searchlights, they shone them over and discovered that the Tower of White Bone was gone.

Three red signal flares rose from a naval warship, strikingly bright even through the curtain of rain. The Temple camp on shore hurriedly sounded the alarm.

White Bone went to the top of the superstructure and activated the magic array there. She had drawn it on this bone plate in the tower that afternoon, and Su Ming had kept it intact throughout the assembly.

The steamship had reached optimal power and waterline conditions, and its speed continued to climb. A beautiful foaming wake had appeared behind the hull, spreading out to either side in a V. Su Ming operated the steering gear, correcting the bone ship's course to the left and charging toward the Pearl Duchy's fleet.

As they passed the sunken ships, White Bone waved a hand, and many pieces of broken wooden hull were pulled aboard.

"Is that enough?" White Bone asked.

Su Ming gave them a rough glance. There were at least several dozen tons. "Enough for now."

As planned, the zombies stepped forward, broke apart the hull pieces, dragged them into the hold to be ground up, and then sent them to the boiler room as fuel.

"It's amazing. Burning grass and wood can actually release such tremendous power," White Bone remarked.

"Burning wood releases several orders of magnitude more energy than the same volume of magic crystal, so the key is controlling and using it," Su Ming said. "There was no magic in my world. We were very good at using this kind of energy."

Feeling the wind ahead growing stronger and the raindrops beginning to sting her face, White Bone's expression relaxed a little without her realizing it. "It's faster than I imagined, Su Ming!"

Su Ming didn't reply. He had noticed the same thing and was busy dealing with it. The speed indicator had long since passed fourteen knots, and it was still climbing.

There were many factors. The seawater in this other world was saltier than Earth's, giving the ship a slightly shallower draft. The White Bone Fortress's jade-like bones created less drag than expected. In particular, this was a new ship, with no barnacles or the like clinging to its hull, and because of its magic, there never would be.

Su Ming had to open the White Bone Mark and adjust the bone ship's center of gravity by feel, restoring its static stability. He then changed the gear ratio to a higher propulsion setting and adjusted the steam engine's valve parameters to match.

Since he also had to hold his laptop and consult the manual at the same time, he was kept scrambling for a while.

By the time he finished, the ship was approaching sixteen knots and heading straight for the nearest enemy warship, the Pearl Duchy navy's Ship No. 1!

Ship No. 1 chose to evade. Its sails had only just been raised, and the rigging had yet to be tightened. For now, its only means of propulsion was magic. The bone ship's long, narrow hull and extreme speed forced the commander to guard against a ramming attack.

So, despite the heavy cost, Ship No. 1's commander had no choice but to expend the mages' precious magic power to get the stationary warship moving and out of the bone ship's path.

His objective achieved, Su Ming immediately turned the steering gear to port.

In the light of the signal flares, the steamship traced a beautiful curving wake. The spray reflected a faint red, like a giant curved blade, revealing the tip of the iceberg of an entirely new kind of power to this world.

At that moment, Su Ming even felt a trace of joy through the White Bone Mark.

Was the dead's lingering obsession being satisfied?

Suddenly, for reasons he didn't know, Su Ming thought of another group of heroic dead in his own time and space, who had also refused to accept defeat.

"Miss White Bone, may I give the ship a name in this form?"

"Do as you like."

Su Ming opened the White Bone Mark and carved two Chinese characters on the bow: Zhiyuan.

As if under an illusion, Su Ming felt that for an instant, the Zhiyuan went a little faster.

Through Mind Synchronization, White Bone also learned what the two characters meant. "A good name for a ship: heading for the distant horizon," she said.

Su Ming wanted to say that the name Zhiyuan held far more meaning than that, but he figured it would be hard to explain and gave up.

The Pearl Duchy's warships were scattered in a curved formation around the outer reaches of Cuian Sea Cliff, positioned to block every direction in which the White Bone Fortress might break through. But everything had happened too quickly. When the White Bone Fortress abruptly transformed into a ship and closed to engagement range at an incredible speed, none of the warships had even finished preparing for battle.

The sails had only just been raised, the gunpowder for the cannons had barely been unsealed, and most of the sleeping sailors had only just rushed to their battle stations in a panic. Only three ships lay within attack range along the White Bone Fortress's course.

Ship No. 1, ahead and to the right, had already used its mages' magic power to evade the ram and was temporarily unable to influence the battle. The ship on the left, Ship No. 2, was slowly closing in, and its commander ordered the mages to fire a volley.

At the distances involved in naval combat, mental lock-on was meaningless. Ship No. 2's gunnery officer calculated the necessary lead, and the gun captain used a beam spell to guide the mages as they began their attack.