Behind the factory on the banks of the Rene River, on the outskirts of Pellua.
Just before Valerius’s capital bombardment choked the life out of the factory, we had no luxury of building a new ship from the keel up.
“Cut down every last one of those cumbersome masts! I said clear the deck!”
With the immense funds Ayla had scraped together, we bought an old large galleon wholesale at Pellua Harbor and dragged it to the riverside.
Dozens of carpenters swarmed it with axes and saws, tearing down every last bit of the galleon’s once-splendid superstructure and masts.
“Damn it, nobody said it’d be this brutal. You buying us some beer, boss?”
“If this succeeds, I’ll give you beer by the gallon. Enough to fill that giant ship!”
“Now that’s what I call a big man!”
Ayla, who had come over after finishing the fundraising with hollow eyes, looked up at the grotesque hull stripped down to its bones and swallowed dryly.
“You’re telling me that mastless cargo hulk can really break through Valerius’s trade route? And what are those waterwheels hanging on both sides of the ship?”
“Of course.”
I wiped my oil-stained hands on a towel and grinned.
Ultimately, it would have to become a modern ship equipped with a modern diesel engine, and at the very least, I would have to build something like an iron ship with a steel hull.
‘For now, attaching a steam engine to a sailing ship is enough.’
Because we didn’t have that kind of financial leeway.
Money would pile up as time passed, so we could improve and develop it then.
“It would be nice to install a modern screw propeller with a shaft running under the water, but that requires advanced shaft-sealing technology to keep water from leaking through the hole where the shaft passes through the hull. It’s too early for this world’s level of technology.”
“So that’s why you attached those ridiculously huge waterwheels to both sides of the ship?”
“Exactly. It’s a paddle steamer structure. When the steam emitted from the black boiler I’m going to make strikes the piston, the crankshaft converts that linear motion into rotational motion and turns the paddle wheels on both sides of the ship. A classic yet intuitive method.”
“I—I don’t really understand what you’re saying.”
“Hahaha, it’s fine. You’ll understand as soon as you see it in action.”
“But it doesn’t need sails or rowers? Truly?”
There was no need for wind-catching sails or seats where sailors rowed oars.
Because the true monster heart that would move this ship was not out there, but inside the workshop behind me, being forged with furious intensity.
“Follow me. I’ll show you the real heart that we’ll transplant into that empty shell.”
I led Ayla into the workshop.
There sat an enormous cylindrical boiler over ten meters long, hammered out by dozens of dwarven blacksmiths and Pellua’s finest craftsmen as they sweated profusely amid crimson flames.
Seeing that bizarre mass of metal, its thick pistons and crankshaft intertwined like a giant’s muscles, Ayla sucked in a breath.
“Before we load it onto the ship, we need to test-run it by itself first. Now, light the furnace! Boil the water!”
Fwoooooosh!
At my signal, fierce flames roared up over the highest-grade coal that had been poured into the furnace.
Soon, the massive water tank inside the boiler began to boil, and I climbed into the temporary control seat, keeping a close eye on the needle of the “pressure gauge” I had personally machined with precision.
“Watch closely, Ayla. When the explosive force of that boiling water pushes the piston…”
Clack. Clack. Clackclackclack!
I hadn’t even finished speaking.
The needle of the pressure gauge, which should have risen gradually, began to jerk wildly and shot toward the limit in an instant.
“Huh…?”
Something was wrong.
It was an explosive reaction that far exceeded the calculations I had learned as Kang Woojin according to the laws of thermodynamics—that is, the calorific value of coal and the vaporization rate of water.
Rumble, rumble, rumble!
The enormous boiler beneath my feet began to throb violently like the pulse of a beast.
The entire control seat shook madly as if an earthquake had struck.
‘The calculations are wrong! No, they’re different!’
Cold sweat ran down my spine.
This place was not one where the laws of physics matched Earth’s perfectly.
‘Could it be?’
If there was a variable…
It was the interference of mana scattered through the atmosphere.
The abnormal heat contained in coal mined from a fantasy world, and the pressure of the steam generated as the river water boiled, were inflating the results of my modern formulas by dozens of times over!
“Chief Factor! The needle! It’s crossed the red line!”
The dwarven foreman shouted in utter panic.
“You’ve got to be kidding me!”
I urgently grabbed the main valve and tried to turn it.
We had to vent the overflowing steam through the exhaust pipe and lower the pressure.
However.
Screeeeech!
With a hair-raising grinding sound, the valve refused to budge.
The pieces of metal, unable to withstand the excessive thermal expansion, had fused together.
“It won’t turn! Damn it, the valve’s seized!”
At that moment.
Craaaaaack!
A chilling rupture, like a massive glacier splitting apart, echoed throughout the workshop.
“Ch-Chief Factor! The boiler wall! The iron plate is tearing!”
Ayla screamed.
The sight unfolding before my eyes was horrific.
A two-inch-thick cast iron plate I had commissioned from Pellua’s finest dwarven blacksmiths.
But that medieval-level iron, full of impurities and utterly devoid of modern alloy technology, could not possibly withstand such ignorant and destructive high-pressure steam.
The iron plate, lacking sufficient strength, bulged like pulled taffy, and the riveted seams began popping loose with sharp rat-a-tat bangs.
Hissssssss!
The leather and animal-grease packing sealing the seams melted away, and superheated steam at several hundred degrees Celsius shot out like blades.
“Everyone evacuate! It’s going to explode! Get down!”
I screamed and clung to the control seat.
If we couldn’t put out the fire or release the pressure, this house-sized boiler would become a bomb that scattered thousands of cast iron fragments in every direction, tearing the workshop, Ayla, and me to shreds beyond recognition.
“Turn! Please!”
Even as the pain of burns seared my skin, I frantically hung onto the valve and threw my weight into it.
But the damned hunk of metal didn’t move an inch.
Despair slammed into my mind.
‘What good is the principle if the materials are trash?’
The flower of mechanical engineering was not design, but materials engineering.
Metallurgy capable of refining perfect steel that could withstand pressure.
That modern knowledge that could control the carbon ratio and mix in molybdenum and chromium to create ultra-high-strength alloys!
Heat-resistant gasket technology capable of perfectly sealing high temperature and high pressure!
‘I need to know. Those figures! I have to know the alloy formula to create perfect steel if I’m going to break through this limit!’
Atop the swelling boiler that looked ready to burst, I desperately, almost weepingly, craved the knowledge of modern Earth.
Only the words steel, pressure, and alloy whirled madly through my mind.
‘I need knowledge! Give me knowledge!’
Craaaaaaang!
At last, the central cover of the boiler, having surpassed its limit, was completely ripped away, and just as the flash of the explosion was about to engulf the control seat—
Vrrrrrrrr!
“Huh…?”
Inside my chest.
The old mechanical keepsake hidden beneath my shirt, the pendant of the Carnoble family, began vibrating madly as its gears meshed and turned.
Like a starving beast, it was sucking in the tremendous thermal energy bursting from the boiler and the overloaded steam pressure like a black hole.
[Activation conditions met.]
The familiar mechanical sound struck my mind.
The threshold of the vast physical energy required to cross dimensions.
And the user’s explosive “desire” for knowledge.
‘So this was it?’
The moment those two conditions meshed perfectly, an intense blue light exploded like the sun from the center of the pendant, so bright I could not open my eyes.
“Elpansooooo!”
Ayla’s scream as she reached out toward me faded into the distance.
The roar of the explosion, the acrid smoke, and the heat that tore at my flesh all evaporated in an instant into the vortex of blue light.
My consciousness was plummeting vertically into an endless abyss.
“Gasp!”
My breath broke free, and my chest heaved violently.
Like someone who had sunk deep underwater and then burst back above the surface, I sucked in air as if my lungs were about to tear and snapped my eyes open.
Thud!
What wrapped around my body as I rolled onto the floor was not a hot iron plate, but cold, smooth linoleum.
“Cough, hack! Haa, haa…”
Coughing harshly, I looked around.
It was not the fantasy world’s outdoor workshop filled with crimson molten iron and coal smoke.
Blinding white fluorescent lights.
Standardized 3D printers and ultra-precision CNC lathes lined up in rows.
That familiar yet sterile air, mixed with the smell of plastic, ozone, and lubricating oil.
It was the machine shop for mechanical engineering students at Hanguk University in the Republic of Korea.
“I’m alive… I came back.”
I looked down at my trembling hands.
The burn marks from gripping the hot valve as my skin charred were nowhere to be found, and in their place were the clean hands of the university student Kang Woojin.
With the strength gone from my legs, I sank to the floor and let out a hollow laugh.
The desperate crisis I had been in just moments ago felt like a lie.
But the law of the pendant was carved very clearly into my mind.
The conditions for the artifact to open a dimensional gate.
It activated when, at the moment immense physical energy was applied to the pendant, the user intensely desired the “knowledge” or “existence” of another world.
The reason it had activated when I first completed the pendant at Hanguk University and wound the spring must have been because Kang Woojin’s immersion in perfectly understanding mechanical engineering had meshed with the pendant’s own power.
“Haha… what a crazy artifact.”
I steadied my ragged breathing and staggered to my feet.
I had no idea how time flowed in that fantasy world while I remained here.
Time might have stopped, or the instant of the explosion might still be passing.
And if it was the latter?
The factory Ayla and I had struggled so hard to build would be blown away without a trace in that massive explosion.
“There’s no time.”
This was no moment to relax.
I snatched up Kang Woojin’s old bag lying in a corner of the machine shop and ran outside.
Late afternoon sunlight shone languidly over the broad campus of Hanguk University, but my steps were as urgent and fierce as a soldier marching onto a battlefield.
Valerius’s immense capital bombardment, the arrogant blockade of trade routes strangling Pellua.
The only weapon that could shatter the walls of all that vested power.
The heart of a steel beast that would not explode and could withstand limitless pressure.
I sprinted full speed toward the central library and clenched my molars.
“Wait for me, Ayla. I’ll be back soon.”
Not with some crude hunk of iron from a fantasy world.
“I’m going to steal every last formula for perfect steel alloys from this modern storehouse of knowledge!”
My second knowledge hunt was beginning.