Chapter 197: The Lifeboat
Evan looked at her, genuinely surprised. "No wonder you're a mind mage of real skill. Spot on — a lifeboat, exactly."
"What use would a lifeboat even serve? Everyone who'd live up here is already a proper mage. If danger comes, a simple Levitation spell gets you clear — no one would need a lifeboat at all," Jessica said.
"True enough, you're not wrong there. But you're missing something. People wouldn't buy it for the rescue function at all — they'd buy it as a status symbol, something to show off. That's exactly why the floating city hasn't installed lifeboats itself — though we shouldn't even call it a lifeboat. Call it a private yacht instead. Faster than the floating city by a considerable margin, and it could come in three grades. A basic model — simple, seats two or three, purpose built just to shuttle between the floating city and the ground, powered by a magic core or crystal, triggered by any mage or alchemist. A practical model — seats five to ten, doubles as cargo transport, ideal for magical merchants moving goods. And a luxury model — built on the practical frame, but spared no expense in finish. What do you think — is there business in it?" Evan said.
"That does sound reasonable. What's your plan for it? I recall your bicycle made a fair sum — if this catches on properly, it might spark a real trend among mages. Pity magic and ordinary life still sit so far apart — this could never really reach common people," Jessica said with a sigh.
"Give ordinary people wings, like mine!" Xiaoshuang piped up.
Evan laughed. "Xiaoshuang, that wouldn't work at all. Do you think ordinary people haven't thought of it? A person's body weight and muscle simply aren't built for flight the way a bird's are. A balloon, though — that's a genuine solution."
"You mean flying by balloon? Not a bad idea, though awfully slow," Xiaoshuang said.
"A hydrogen balloon's too dangerous. A hot-air balloon would work better. I'll try it once we're back," Evan mused.
"What's a hot-air balloon?" Xiaoshuang asked — and not just her; Jessica and Jenny turned their attention to Evan as well.
"A balloon that works on the principle of heated air," Evan said. "I'll show you once we're home."
Back at Hollingburton, Xiaoshuang pestered Evan until he made her a sky lantern. She watched, delighted, as the lit lantern actually lifted off the ground and floated free. Jessica watched too, and Xiaoshuang flapped after it, chasing it a good distance before finally blowing it out and letting it drift back down. A few students spotted the display and simply assumed some teacher was demonstrating a spell, thinking nothing further of it.
Xiaoshuang carried the lantern back — much bigger than herself, though light enough to manage. "Wang, that thing's fun. I'm off to the mountains." With that, she flew off toward the distant forest, lantern bobbing along with her, and Evan shook his head.
Jessica spoke up suddenly. "What's the actual principle behind it? Expanding air — worth studying properly. Wang, would you be interested in researching this with me?"
"Sure, air expanding under heat is a legitimate subject. Since you're already working on your pea experiment, and that one will take years to bear fruit, why not open up a second project on thermodynamics of gases," Evan said easily.
It wasn't that he had no interest of his own — he was already deep into electrochemistry and preferred not to draw more attention to himself than necessary. Too much ground to cover; better to let Jessica take this one.
"I'd like you to join me on it," Jessica said, eyes flicking with interest — she suspected Evan already knew more than he let on. "As a principal contributor. Oh, and we should recruit someone else too."
"Jenny, then. She could use the practice assisting you, and if the research triggers natural feedback for her, that would be a rare boon — depends how deeply she grasps it," Evan said. He'd more or less worked out the true nature of natural feedback by now — at its core, some form of unconscious collective response from humanity itself, though why such a mechanism existed at all remained a genuine mystery to him. Was magic truly something close to a shared illusion? If so, why did it work the way it did? He still couldn't puzzle that out.
"I was going to ask Emma, actually," Jessica said.
"As it happens, I need to speak with Emma myself. She's with the Magic Items Department, and I want to discuss the airship project with her — get some students building a prototype. She's well suited for it. I'll bring her the blueprints. If this turns profitable enough, I'd like to negotiate with the school — trade the whole enterprise for passage through the Gate of Legend," Evan said.
"You're already at the threshold of legendary rank?" Jessica asked, startled.
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"Not quite. I've reached the upper-middle range of Arcanist rank at most. But better to prepare now than scramble once the storm actually breaks," Evan said.
"I suppose I should start preparing too, then. Senior mage as I am, Arcanist rank feels like it's only a year or two off now — though the array for advancing to legendary rank demands a whole set of conditions no single person could ever gather alone, especially needing a legendary mage's direct help," Jessica said.
"You're a woman blessed by fortune. I have every confidence you'll manage it," Evan said, encouraging.
Evan laid out preparations for the gas thermodynamics experiments, and Jessica offered her own thoughts as they worked through the plan together. Once settled, Jessica went to request lab space from the school — her own quarters had already been converted for her genetics work, and Evan didn't offer his own either, needing the space for his own research. So she went through proper channels instead.
Evan headed to the Magic Items Department to discuss the airship project with Emma, handing over the blueprints. Airships weren't especially novel in themselves — the technical challenge of a levitation array was well understood — but there'd never been much demand for one before, so mages rarely bothered building them.
This time, though, Evan had found his opening, pitching the project against the backdrop of the floating city itself, giving it real promise. Emma studied the plans and smiled. "This isn't difficult at all. I'll get students organized on it — aim to finish three vessels before the floating city launches, so when it rises, our ships rise right alongside it. Free advertising."
Evan nodded. "The luxury model just needs to fly for now — the interior fittings can follow customer requests. I'd like to fit some magical items inside for defense as well."
"Leave that to me. Good excuse to clear out some of our surplus stock," Emma said with a laugh, and Evan laughed along with her — the woman had a genuine talent for commerce.
With those matters settled, Evan's own paper was nearly finished. He'd worked through the electrolysis of water, established water's composition as a two-to-one ratio of hydrogen to oxygen, identified several new alchemical elements, summarized the properties of hydrogen and oxygen, and laid out a standard definition of electrolysis, along with a body of related findings. The paper, titled Water Under the Influence of Electrical Current, went off to the editors at Magic. At the same time, his work with Jessica on gas expansion had begun — running immediately into its first obstacle.
What was heat, exactly? The question sat tangled up with old phlogiston theory, which held heat as some independent, self-existing substance, and the classical elemental doctrine's four inherent qualities — hot, cold, dry, wet — had left Jessica strongly inclined to treat heat as a genuine, separate entity in its own right. Evan pushed back against this, arguing that temperature and heat were simply the outward expression of particles' motion, with no such thing as a discrete quantity of "heat" at the microscopic level at all.
The two of them argued back and forth without resolution, Jenny caught in the middle, unsure what to make of either position — both arguments seemed reasonable to her. Jessica pointed to standing near a hearth, feeling the wave of warmth against your skin — surely heat was something real and tangible. Evan countered that this was simply the motion of air molecules, and demonstrated by using magic to thin out the air in a small region, where the wave of heat proved noticeably weaker. Similar disputes kept surfacing, until the two of them finally settled on a compromise: whatever the ultimate nature of heat, they'd fix a working definition of temperature first and proceed from there.
Then another disagreement followed. One proposed defining zero degrees as the freezing point of a water-ice mixture, with boiling water set at a hundred. Evan, characteristically thorough, wanted to define zero as the point where particle motion stopped entirely, with particles otherwise in perpetual motion — still purely hypothetical at this point, though plenty of evidence already pointed toward it. Jessica felt building a whole system on an unproven hypothesis lacked proper scientific rigor.
Fortunately, Evan managed to prove the two temperature systems were mathematically equivalent, calling his own framework absolute temperature and Jessica's relative temperature, and from there the work proceeded more smoothly.
Midway through their experiments, the new term began, and Evan and Jessica set the work aside temporarily. The entire faculty and student body gathered in the great hall for a feast, long tables laden with turkey, steak, sausages, and all manner of dishes. Ortlando raised a glass — filled not with wine but a non-alcoholic drink — and offered a toast of good fortune to the new year.
Once the meal began, the sound of cutlery filled the hall. Evan rarely dined here himself, and watched the endless procession of dishes flow across the tables, unseen fantasy-born creatures moving among them, ferrying course after course. Most of the students, especially the new arrivals, saw nothing of this at all — only plates appearing out of thin air, marveling at magic's wonders. Evan alone could see the creatures themselves.
After the feast, Evan returned to his quarters. Xiaoshuang hadn't come to the meal at all — the dishes there never suited her taste — and he found her sitting alone at his own table, lost in thought. "What's wrong? Something bothering you?" he asked.
She shook her head. "A little homesick for the Black Forest, I think."
Evan had always been curious about Xiaoshuang's origins, without ever quite learning where she'd truly come from. Hearing this, he smiled. "If you're missing the Black Forest, go pay it a visit. Use that same projection method as before — it's a good thousand miles from here, after all. Strange, though — I wonder why Nobi's people haven't gained much more divine power lately."
"Wang, that's actually what I wanted to tell you. I've been sensing a huge amount of divine power lately, and something like a sense of duty as well. I've found myself casting divine arts without even meaning to. Someone's been praying to you," Xiaoshuang said.
Evan froze at that, and turned his attention inward at once, examining himself and Xiaoshuang through the lens of his own soul-sense. He found that his own faith-power had shifted overwhelmingly toward Xiaoshuang, only the barest trickle passing through him at all.
What in the world was going on here?