Chapter 451: Change The World!
With the Mark-1 having accomplished all it was going to for his purposes today, Lucas doused the stove’s flames, allowing it to slowly come to a halt.
In truth, the Mark-1 really was nothing more than a proof-of-concept Lucas had been forced to build in order to better explain to the other members of Project Revolution some of the basic scientific and mechanical principles necessary to design and build a more complicated version.
It worked well enough as a teaching aid, but the Mark-1 was quite poor at illustrating the full potential of a real steam engine; if anything, it only reinforced the idea of it not being very useful.
Anyone who saw the light-weight Mark-1 only slowly rotating, even while blasting out jets of white-hot steam, would probably conclude that it was too weak for any kind of practical application.
Lucas understood this very well, as he had been confronted with similar doubts many times over the past few months, so he had naturally come up with a number of ways to better enlighten others to the potential of a working steam engine.
Turning to Pauline, Lucas asked, "The giant metal wheel back in the central workspace, could you have lifted it?"
"Hm?" Caught a bit off-guard by this sudden and unexpected question, Pauline took a moment to recall the scene before nodding, "That thing looked like it only weighed about 2 tons, so yes, it wouldn’t be too difficult for me to lift it."
Pauline hadn’t noticed, but she had already adopted metric units of measurement into her daily life, probably because it was far more accurate and comprehensive than the system she was using before.
Lucas wasn’t surprise by this answer, of course, for as ridiculous as it seemed according to the common sense of the other universe, and even of Redwood Town where he had grown up, Pauline saying it was ’easy’ for her to lift a 2-ton weight was simply the norm for True Cultivators.
Celestina, for example, was somewhere between 400 and 500 times stronger than an average adult woman in the First Step Body Tempering Realm.
Of course, that didn’t mean she could run 400 times faster or lift 500 times more weight than your average mortal; far from it in fact.
As Lucas had slowly learned over the past year or so, cultivation and Internal Qi allowed living beings to defy the laws of the universe, or at least bend them, but doing so came at a cost.
Put simply, if a Cultivator wanted to lift more weight than physics said they should be able to, they had to use their Qi to reinforce their body first, and depending on one’s internal reserves, how much Qi they could channel at once, and how effectively they could do so, the amount of strength they could display varied.
All told, if Celestina ’went all out’, she could sprint at a speed of about 250 kph or deadlift roughly 25 tons for a short period of time.
Now, performing either of these actions would rapidly drain her Internal Qi, and if she wasn’t careful, she could seriously damage to her body in the process.
If Celestina were to ignore all the warning signs her body was giving her and persist past her limits, this kind of extreme exertion could even result in her literally tearing herself apart.
Assuming she got lucky and survived such injuries, she would still be permanently crippled, but the much more likely scenario was an excruciatingly painful and gruesome death. Even so, when Lucas had asked Celestina about what exactly she capable of, and this had been her response, the only thought that came to his mind was ’that’s insane’.
Such was the nature of cultivation.
Pauline wasn’t quite as outrageous as her mother, but as a Mid-Rank Spirit and Low-Rank Martial Adept, simply lifting a 2-ton block of iron wasn’t a challenge for her.
"How about spinning it, then?" Lucas followed up, "while holding it up, could you rotate it at say... 50 times in a minute?"
This time, it took Pauline a bit more time to consider her response, but in the end, she still nodded, "Yes. That would be much harder, but I’m pretty sure I could still do it."
The calculation was a bit complicated, but what he was asking her was essentially the same as him asking if a strong, fit Fourth Step Body Tempering Realm Mortal, like Lucas himself, if they could twirl a 12 kg wheel at 50 RPM for a full minute.
By now, Pauline had a pretty good idea where Lucas was going with this and asked him directly, "How many revolutions could your Mark-5 steam engine pull off?"
"At full pressure, it did 100 revolutions per minute, RPM for short, for 2 minutes 44 seconds," Lucas replied flatly.
That certainly got Pauline’s attention, just as it had gotten Braxton, Marco, and the entire development team working on the steam engine’s attention back then.
It had been such an amazing sight that Marco and several others couldn’t help running over to get a close-up look at the machine they had built, none of them able to believe it was really real.
When Lucas saw them rush up to the rattling, clanking, wildly shaking Mark-5, he had nearly had a heart attack and screamed for them to get back, but none of them had listened to him and all of them had suffered as a result.
At 2 minutes and 45 seconds, the Mark-5 exploded, sending metal shrapnel flying everywhere while the flywheel literally flew off.
Several people had been injured that day, and Marco had almost been flattened when the flywheel rolled past him and smashed through the workshop’s thick wooden walls.
Had the flywheel been a few centimetres further to the right, Marco would have been severely wounded, if not killed; yet, instead of being frightened, the young man only seemed more enthusiastic after this near-death experience!
Such power, from nothing but a few hunks of metal, a little water, and some charcoal!
Lucas still remembered running over to the disheveled young man who had fallen on his butt and desperately asking him if he was alright, only for Marco to burst into wild laughter and shout, "HAHAHA! WE’RE GOING TO CHANGE THE WORLD!"