Chapter 1367: The Essence of Advancement
The Project Nüwa meetings ran for several days and left Roland astonished at the professionals’ stamina and their capacity to sustain an argument.
From nine in the morning to seven at night, disputes and debates ran without interruption. When a difficult question resisted resolution, sessions pushed past midnight without complaint. These people arrived in pressed suits and formal attire, but once technical questions were on the table, none of them relented — and age offered no exceptions. Younger specialists shouted across the room; older ones with white hair and deliberate speech patterns outlasted them, their arguments sharpening rather than softening as the hours mounted. The intensity of some exchanges was indistinguishable from combat.
It confirmed something Roland had always suspected: the brain was an organ that grew stronger the more it was used.
In the Dream World he had his Awakened ability to sustain concentration, but waking up in reality meant feeling the full weight of the hours he’d spent. He had to extend his sleep to recover enough to keep pace with the meetings.
The atmosphere, it should be said, did not open warmly.
At first, there was little investment from most of the room, and the majority of resistance clustered around Roland’s foundational assertions — that humans killed by Fallen Evils would rise as a new enemy, that the Force of Nature and Blackfire violated scientific principles as anyone in the room understood them. No one openly called Roland a fraud while the Association and government were sponsoring the project, but their skepticism surfaced elsewhere: in prolonged silences, in questions shaped like traps, in the peculiar energy of people who had been asked to take something seriously that they considered ridiculous.
Roland nearly let the Taquila Witches handle it. He caught himself in time and signaled Ling to hold.
The conflict peaked on the first evening.
A master in mechanics stood up and said, bluntly, that there was no point continuing. A single day of decisions would take the martial artists weeks to process and understand. Better to end early. He would be doing everyone a favor.
Scroll had been silent all day. She was silent a moment longer, and then she put her hand flat on the table with a sound like the word no made physical.
The room became her stage.
What followed was not a summary. It was a reconstruction — complete and exact — of every discussion that had taken place from the meeting’s beginning: every proposal, every objection, every tangential argument and counter-argument, organized by topic and by speaker, with the contributions of every individual accounted for. The chief master who had tried to end the meeting found himself unable to speak. Around the table, specialists in their sixties and seventies sat with the expressions of students confronting a teacher they had not expected to encounter. Scroll’s ability was not merely an impressive trick. It was evidence — tangible, undeniable — that the possibilities she represented were real.
That, combined with her evident expertise and bearing, changed the remainder of the meetings.
Arguments still happened. But the questions shifted. They were no longer about whether the project was legitimate. They were about how to make it work.
With unlimited funding and manpower no longer obstacles, any disputed point was immediately forwarded to a research team for empirical testing. Theory could be argued indefinitely. Physical results were harder to dismiss.
For Roland, these were the most productive days he had ever spent in the Dream World.
President Wu directed their initial focus toward instrumentation.
“We have state-of-the-art material science and precision manufacturing capability,” he said, “but you’re using machines that are simple to the point of waste. Even without electronic control systems, machine-based automation can achieve precision and consistency that your current methods cannot. If you had mentioned this earlier, we would have refused to accept those defective products.”
Roland didn’t know whether to laugh. The “defective products” in question were the best his lifetime of work had produced. But he agreed with the President’s assessment completely.
Before electronics made everything else obsolete, pure mechanical engineering had reached a kind of perfection. Mechanical calculators. The difference engine — theoretical, never fully built, but the dream of it was breathtaking: layers of gears and interlocking shafts, a machine of pure logic. Looking at the schematics for such devices, one felt something that wasn’t quite aesthetic pleasure but was closely related. Then electronic technology arrived like a flood and swept every one of those elaborate mechanisms into obsolescence. You couldn’t find the design specifications for many of them in modern textbooks, because there was no longer any practical reason to preserve them.
Now he had a specialized team to improve his existing tools and recover that lost body of knowledge. He couldn’t have wished for more.
Better tools meant higher production efficiency with no increase in labor — which, for a kingdom with Neverwinter’s limited human resources, had enormous implications. The new Design Bureau’s contributions extended beyond machines: simpler mechanical calculators, typewriters, automatic printing presses — none of them requiring electronic components, but each capable of dramatically accelerating administrative work with only a few units deployed.
These were the foundations on which Project Nüwa would be built.
From the foundations, the scope expanded significantly.
The assembled specialists reached a shared conclusion: strengthening humanity’s combat capacity against Fallen Evil degeneration was the immediate priority. Nothing could be developed further without first having the ability to resist. Weapons, therefore, came first.
Rather than a single comprehensive proposal, the specialists organized their recommendations into three tiers — a quarterly plan, an annual plan, and a five-year plan.
Historical warfare in the Dream World offered useful answers for certain tactical problems, but the targeted population the planners had to account for — the number of survivors Neverwinter could realistically field — made traditional industrial models unworkable. The specialists leaned instead toward focused development: what specifically was needed to fight this specific enemy, and how could it be achieved with the available resources.
The goal, they determined, was achievable within three to twelve months.
The first item addressed — and the easiest immediate gain — was high-energy explosives and propellants.
This happened to be Neverwinter’s most significant technical deficit.
Nitro-compound synthesis could be approximated from chemistry references, but simpler modern explosives — TNT, RDX — had sparse documentation, and the formulation of advanced propellants almost none at all. With government backing, that gap was finally closed.
Chapter 1367 - The Essence to Upgrade
Translator: Henyee Translations Editor: Henyee Translations
The meeting on the ‘Project Nüwa’ lasted for a few days and the professionalism displayed by the participants left Roland gasping in amazement. What made him even more surprised was their abundance of energy.
The entire meeting consisted of disputes and debates that went on in unbroken succession from nine in the morning till seven at night. When they encountered issues that were difficult to come to a decision, it was not rare for the debates to last till midnight. Although the participants were dressed to the nines, none of these professionals relented when it came to a technicalities. The intensity of the arguments were in no way less than outright war. They were not limited to only the middle-aged backbones of their respective industries, but even the white-haired seniors acted in the same manner.
An average person that hit such an age would usually be inarticulate and have slower train of thoughts, but aside from their looks, none of these common factors were present in them. Their voices were loud and clear, their eyes bright and full of expression. They were still capable of suppressing their successors in debates. This scene convinced Roland that the brain was truly an organ that developed the more one used it.
In the Dream World, he was able to rely on the Awakened ability to maintain his heightened concentration, but after waking up in reality, he would feel the exhaustion clearly. To accommodate the content of the meeting, he had no choice but to increase the hours of sleep and use the time in reality to replenish his energy.
Of course, the atmosphere within the projects department did not kick start from the get go. In the beginning, no one showed much interest, and the majority of disagreements were concentrated on Roland’s ‘plans.’
For example, the idea that after the destruction of the world, the humans killed by the Fallen Evils would turn into another ‘competitor’, as well as the mutation of the pure Force of Nature and Blackfire that went against science… Although no one publicly called into question Roland’s words seeing that the Martialist Association and the government were in spearheading the entire project, signs of disagreements and conflict appeared, either through their silence or on the pretense that it was ‘for the job’. Roland knew that their mentality and the process of repeated questions and beating about the bush led to nowhere.
If not for Roland’s signals towards Ling, the Taquila Witches might had taken action.
Only until they reached the conclusion at the end of the first night did the conflicting views of both parties reach its peak.
A chief master in mechanics stood up and spoke bluntly that regardless of how much they discussed, it was useless if no one remembered the content. Just a single day worth of decisions required the Martial Artists a few weeks to digest; thus, they decided to end the meeting earlier. Roland clearly remembered that Scroll, having maintained her silence for the entire day, had suddenly slammed the table with her hand.
The meeting room immediately became her stage.
Scroll not only listed the content discussed in the meet, but even the questions and doubts raised by every single individual, and all the valuable contributions made on each topic from the beginning to end—everything were listed out to the smallest detail. Her fascinating memory shocked everyone present, leaving even the chief master that challenged Roland speechless. At that moment, it was as though all the professionals had turned into students, and Scroll was the only teacher.
It was most probably her verification regarding the unlimited possibilities existed within the Force of Nature—that not only could limbs be strengthened, or have the intellect of engineering elites heightened—along with her outstanding temperament and features which resulted in the reversal of the subsequent situation.
In the following days, despite arguments still happening, the focus shifted from the setup to ‘Project Nüwa’.
Not only that, under the situation where money and manpower were no longer an issue, any ‘contentions’ were immediately conveyed to the research and development team, where experiments were immediately carried out to test on their feasibility.
To Roland, it was no doubt the best days in which he reaped the most in the Dream World.
Under the suggestion of President Wu, their focus on improvements moved onto instruments.
In his words: “We clearly have cutting-edge technology and high quality materials, but our usage of such simple and crude machines and instruments is truly a waste. Even if we lack electric control technology, we can use machines to automate and regulate precise control. If you had raised it up earlier, we would have stopped accepting such defective products.”
Roland did not know whether to laugh or cry to this. The ‘defective products’ mentioned by the President were the best designs he had spent his lifetime working on. But Roland completely agreed with the President’s assessment.
Before the proliferation of electronic technology, pure machinery and equipment had once developed to what could be deemed ‘a work of art.’ Examples included the mechanical calculator, as well as its subsequent development which eventually ended as the theoretical difference engine. Anyone who laid their eyes on the overlapping gears and interconnected screws would feel a sense of pure beauty. However, the advancements of electronic technology in history was simply a powerful current that instantly swept all of these large and complicated machines into the gutters of history.
Even if he flipped through textbooks, it was impossible for him to find any design information on the corresponding equipment.
With a specialized team to improve the tools he had and reproduce all the technological materials that had long disappeared, he naturally couldn’t wish for more.
The improvement of the tools brought about an increase in production efficiency and decrease in manpower demands, signifying that Neverwinter would be able to use the same number of people to accomplish even more work. This was extremely significant for his Kingdom that had limited manpower.
Aside from producing machines, the new Design Bureau supplied many things that included simpler calculators, typewriters, automatic printing press, etc… All these did not require electronic components and only required a few units to greatly enhance the rate of administrative work.
These details constituted the foundations of ‘Project Nüwa.’
Building on top of this establishment, the content expanded tremendously.
The majority of the professionals acknowledged that strengthening themselves to protect the human race from extinction was the main priority. They required the ability to resist the Fallen Evil’s power of degeneration before having the capacity to develop the next step, which was mainly focused on weapons.
After considering the conditions laid out by Roland, none of the participants produced any proposals that had an answer to everything. Instead, they divided the proposal into three steps—quarterly plans, yearly plans, and five-year plans.
The past wars in the Dream World provided optimal answers for certain problems, but the targeted approach in terms of the number of ‘survivors’ made it difficult to establish a concrete industry system. With historical numbers no longer practical, the specialists leaned towards focusing on fighting the enemies and developed further into the specific projects targeting
this goal. This was also their original intention—to be able to bring about a metamorphic change in humanity’s ability to battle within three to twelve months.
The very first thing mentioned, something which was also the easiest at enhancing, involved the various high-energy explosives and propellants.
This was coincidentally Neverwinter’s largest shortcoming.
Reproducing nitro-explosives could be learned from chemistry books, but simple explosives such as TNT and RDX had very few references, much less to say the composition of modern gunpowder. But with the government spearheading the project, this gap had finally been filled.