The Sect Leader System

Benton was just about ready to install the turrets on his two towers, but there was a problem. His plan was to have four separate weapon arrays located in four groups dispersed equally around the circumference, the idea being that when one set was damaged or destroyed, the turret would rotate the next set to engage the target.

Three of the four weapon arrays were simple affairs, each blasting an enemy with a burst of pure elemental qi. Honestly, they weren’t all that impressive unless the enemies were Foundation Establishment and below. A Golden Core’s shield would shrug off the attacks as nothing more dangerous that a mosquito bite.

The fourth array was supposed to make up for the lack by providing a weapon that might be considered strong enough to at least make a Nascent Soul hesitate. Maybe. If they didn’t have enough defensive techniques to deflect a purely mortal slug of metal hurtling toward them at supersonic speeds.

Hey, it could happen.

Basically, Benton was trying to build a railgun, but he had little to no idea how to do it. And the System was no help when it came to technology. The Shop wouldn’t let him purchase any weapon not common to the medieval level of development that was characteristic of his new world, and neither could he buy the direct knowledge of how to build a railgun or laser or any other type of modern weaponry.

In the case of transplanting technology from Earth, the System helped he who helped himself. From vague recollections from scifi novels, Benton knew that a railgun used electricity to create magnets or something, and those magnets somehow accelerated a munition to really high speeds. Which wasn’t exactly all he needed to know to build one.

His memory, however, did give him all the clues he needed to make the System provide him with the knowledge he required.

First, the System absolutely would not provide him with any information about electricity, but since Lightning was a naturally occurring type of electricity and a secondary qi element, it had no qualms about selling him Mastery of knowledge of that element for four Sect Points. The technique didn’t tell him how to create a motor or anything like that, but that lack was okay. He didn’t need a turbine or whatever was used to create electricity on Earth. A Lightning spirit coin provided the exact source he needed. Neither did he need copper wire as his inscribed channels performed that function.

Magnetism was even easier. Since it was also a natural phenomenon and, it turned out, also a secondary qi element, the System easily let him buy knowledge of it and, once he’d determined exactly what he needed, a Concept as well.

It turned out the device was actually pretty simply, though he had to scrap the hollow metal tube he’d had Xun Wu make since iron wasn’t nearly as conductive as he needed it to be. Instead, Benton used two ingots of one of the metals the kids had brought back from Sixth Flawless Flowing City to construct two rails and another tube, all five feet long. Importantly, he placed the two conductive strips parallel but opposite each other such that the positive end of one corresponded to the placement of the negative end of the other. The tube went between the two strips. A projectile, a large chunk of a different, more dense, conductive metal, was positioned at the start inside the tube.