Upper-air sounding
Little Spiky Head soon reached the destination.
It was already eight in the evening, but the company was still open, with goods moving in and out. Su Ming had no intention of forcing his way in. He climbed onto the warehouse roof and sat down.
After an hour, some of the staff finished work and left, leaving the office empty. Su Ming slipped inside with ease and began searching the product catalog on a computer.
Sure enough, the company hadn't listed all its products on online shopping platforms. It clearly had plenty of non-consumer-grade products as well. Su Ming looked through them one by one and, considering the limitations of his materials, chose a set consisting of a soft balloon, an airborne remote sensing system with S-band radar and a ground terminal, and several bottles of helium.
Outside, the warehouse staff finished receiving goods and began closing up and leaving in ones and twos. Using the warehouse index he had found, Miao Xin easily located the products they needed on the shelves with the corresponding numbers.
After taking the goods, Su Ming did nothing extra. Leaving a note out in the open would have been too stupid. He was already afraid of attracting the attention of the state machinery.
He really couldn't afford to provoke it!
He simply made a note to himself: if there was a later, he would come back and return them.
Back aboard the Zhiyuan, Su Ming began organizing the materials for the balloon.
The remote sensing equipment and control terminal were no problem, thanks to the two new-energy vehicles. They had so many chip-related materials that Su Ming wondered whether they were cars or computers that came with free cars. The unassuming balloon, on the other hand, was the most troublesome part. The enormous industrial chain behind polymer materials never failed to make Su Ming marvel at humanity's ability to break new ground.
Su Ming began the summoning technique's preparatory form and checked the materials for matches.
Fortunately, polyester fiber, the material he had been most worried about, matched. There was actually quite a bit in the cars, in all sorts of places like the airbags, sunroof shades, and tires.
Once the materials were ready, Su Ming proceeded methodically, casting Simplest Form: Summoning of All Things and loading the model. A few materials were missing, so he cast a second technique at the same time: Boneless Form: Synthesis Summoning!
Zijin glanced over. "You found a technique to make up for the flaw."
"I only did it to save you," Su Ming replied. He had already grown proficient at using two techniques at once. Almost all of Zijin's medicine had been sent over from a sanatorium on Earth this way.
"Well, thank you for that," Zijin said.
The light scattered, and the sounding balloon and remote sensing equipment appeared on the bone platform in the workshop, stripped of their packaging.
Another flash of light passed. Sacrificing one of Zijin's rather useless books, Su Ming obtained the product manuals.
"Your spell duration has increased too."
"Actually, I'm already at my limit," Su Ming replied. "This equipment is more complicated than the steam engine and takes more out of me-if it were me a few days ago, I wouldn't have been able to hold out."
"Your rate of improvement is already very fast," Zijin said. "Even by the standards of a conventional elemental mage, it's outstanding."
"It's rare to hear you praise me. Thanks!"
Su Ming opened a manual and began reading.
"I can't read your world's writing. Is there anything we can do about that?" Zijin asked.
Su Ming gave it some serious thought. "Comprehend Languages... Find a corpse on Earth and load fragments of their knowledge across space. That seems doable-but I can't use water magic."
"Comprehend Languages is actually a general-purpose spell. A water-element imprint is simply the gentlest option. It can be powered by other elements," Zijin explained.
"Oh?" Su Ming thought for a moment. "Wouldn't changing the element that powers it mean rewriting the spell formula?"
"It would. Let me think. There's a fire-element case we could use as a reference," Zijin said. "There was once a mage who tried to teach a blockhead a language, but every time the spell's duration ran out, the fool forgot it. In the end, the mage rewrote it as a fire-element version. That blockhead's head burned so badly he howled for a week, and then he never forgot it again."
"Tsk, the otherworldly version of tying your hair to a roof beam to stay awake while studying, huh?" Su Ming remarked. "Even assuming it can be powered by the dark element, we'd still need someone whose soul can withstand the...corrosion of a dark-element imprint." His voice grew quieter as he spoke.
"So what's the problem?" Zijin asked.
Right. I forgot this girl isn't the normal sort, Su Ming thought with a sigh.
Su Ming kept poring over the S-band radar manual, marking the important points.
Ever since coming to the other world, he had found that he had grown unusually fond of studying. Even including the time he was sick, he spent every day either studying otherworldly magic or researching Earth's technology, never stopping. He hadn't worked nearly this hard back in school. Otherwise, he wouldn't have ended up studying engineering or working on a factory production line after graduation.
At the very least, he would have landed a job where he could slack off in an office!
Su Ming felt a deep nostalgia for the novels he had once read. Their protagonists endured all sorts of pain in cultivation, whether by resisting inner demons, tempering their bodies, or swindling and cheating their way through wondrous realms, all in exchange for greater strength. What suffering? Could any of it compare to me studying day after day?
After finishing the manual, Su Ming first powered up the remote sensing equipment, built a bone platform in the control room, and fitted the ground control terminal into it. Then he installed and tested everything together until the communications system, control link, and data transmission were all working properly.
A tethered sounding balloon, as the name suggested, was tethered to the ship. It was released and retrieved by paying out and reeling in a rope. Simple and straightforward.
With Su Ming's current resources, he really couldn't manage anything too fancy. What high-end modern drone didn't rely on BeiDou satellite positioning support? That alone was an insurmountable obstacle.
Granted, he could find a way to rewrite the industrial control program, but he would still need to set up ground-based signal receiving stations and a positioning system to replace it. The more complete a system was, the more tangled its demands became.
Su Ming did want a stratospheric airship. In this other world, how satisfying would it be to have something even an F-22 couldn't reach?
In any case, the system had been tested and adjusted, and Zijin's cable was finished too.
"Liquid?" Su Ming was full of questions when he saw the large jar of viscous stuff the skeleton servants had brought over.
He had imagined all sorts of possibilities and had even been prepared for Zijin to lead out a giant spider-but what was this pot of soup supposed to be?
"Isn't this the cable you asked for?" Zijin asked. "Don't the ropes in your world look like this?"
"Not at all!"
"So I have to teach you how to use it?"
"Definitely!"
Zijin pointed to three of the control runes in the first row on the jar. "Activate the first to release the rope, the second to stop it, and the third to reel it back in." Then she pointed to the second row. "This adjusts the cable's thickness. Left to increase, right to decrease." The third row: "This adjusts its strength and toughness, also left to increase and right to decrease. Don't set this too high; it'll increase the mana consumption." The fourth row: "This displays the length in meters. I've already converted the scale to the units used in your world. Remember to reset the length to zero before releasing the cable. Press this one at the bottom."
"..." Why did something so different work exactly the same way? A herd of horses galloped through Su Ming's mind.