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Chapter 1368: Going Hand in Hand

Next came the ammunition production line.

Roland had considered his production line efficient. The specialists’ assessment was blunter: the framework was primitive, with ninety-five percent of the process automatable by machine. Their exact phrasing was something close to terrible. “With proper machinery, this can run twenty-four hours a day without human intervention,” one of them said — not unkindly, but without softening it either.

The new military proposal required modest upfront investment but would slash labor requirements while multiplying bullet output more than tenfold. With the same number of workers at the line, projections showed production would continue to improve over time.

Once Project Cornerstone — the foundational layer of Project Nüwa — was in place, the equipment feeding the new production lines would face no remaining theoretical obstacles. And once the propellant was upgraded, accuracy and lethality of every firearm in Neverwinter’s arsenal would rise automatically.

Roland read that section of the report and felt genuine admiration for the team’s grasp of cause and effect.

Ammunition had always been the First Army’s most stubborn problem.

The number of workers at the Fertile Plains production sites had been increasing steadily, yet it never quite kept pace with consumption. The Aerial Knights alone burned through ammunition in training at a rate that would have alarmed anyone counting reserves — and training was not optional. Iron Axe had raised the complaint from the front lines more than once.

With ammunition supply no longer the constraint, the likelihood of a demon breakthrough based on sheer numbers would fall sharply. Or in other words: the stalemate on the front lines would end. The question was which side it ended in favor of.

On the subject of infantry weapons, the specialists offered little comment — not because there was no room for improvement, but because the cost-to-benefit ratio didn’t justify it. General-purpose machine guns combined with bolt-action and semi-automatic rifles were adequate for handling lesser Fallen Evils. For offensive battlefield power, the consensus was artillery and heavy weapons. If you could flatten the enemy first, the infantry could take ground with ease. Every shell fired from a cannon — advancing, retreating, reinforcing, holding — was considered the safest solution. Pour resources into more cannons rather than better rifles.

Light weapons would become a major project in the Five-Year Plan. For the quarterly plan, the focus was on what could deliver fast, decisive results.

What interested Roland most was the Annual Plan.

Its benefits were less immediate than gunpowder and ammunition upgrades, and the required investment was significantly higher — but it was the tier that would determine the war’s outcome.

The plan contained four projects. Two improvements to existing weapons, two new developments. The Army and the Aerial Knights each received half the attention.

First among the Army’s projects was Graycastle’s long-discussed armored vehicles — caterpillar tractors and the tanks developed from them. Master Xie Keling’s moment on the stage. Unexpectedly, the specialists reviewed the design sheets without criticism. Their consensus was that given the technology available, the designs showed genuine merit. But what captured their attention was not the vehicle itself. It was the power source.

When Roland produced the Magic Cube, the meeting room changed.

Even the government officials who had been briefed on the situation went still.

The reaction at first was what Roland expected: the practiced composure of people trying to respect Scroll’s credibility without actually believing they were about to see anything remarkable. They were senior experts. Someone presenting a rock and calling it a nuclear power unit was, implicitly, calling everyone in the room a fool. Rock exchanged a quiet signal with Head Liu. Head Liu called for a brief adjournment to prevent the collaborative atmosphere they’d built from collapsing under the weight of the awkwardness.

But Roland pressed for the demonstration anyway.

A professor of dynamics took the cube with unconcealed reluctance and sent it to the test lab via his assistant, whose expression as he left the room could only be described as contemptuous. The assistant returned half an hour later unable to form a sentence.

What followed was mania.

The kind of mania that comes from one’s model of the world being broken in an instant and then proving impossible to reconstruct. Roland noticed that every set of eyes in the room had developed a quality he could only call burning — including President Wu’s, who pulled Head Liu bodily out of the room. Whatever conversation happened in the corridor, its effects were visible the following morning: the factory’s security was upgraded from armed police to regular army troops, the gates replaced with hardened sentry positions and military walls. If Roland’s status as a martial artist hadn’t rendered conventional security measures largely irrelevant, he suspected he would have had a private lane, personal bodyguards, and a tail wherever he went.

The demonstration had been Anna’s idea, not his. After he’d told her about the meeting, she had frowned, worked out what she called a revenge plan for the specialists’ early skepticism, and suggested he show them what magic could do to a world view. The results had exceeded her projections. Not only did everyone treat Scroll with complete respect going forward, but Roland’s requests were now granted without debate and the researchers pleaded for a fragment of the Magic Cube to run tests on. The meeting extended by another day, and then another.

Tangible research objects, it turned out, produced feasible plans with remarkable speed.

The tri-tank Magic Cube was retired. Its replacement was a higher-pressure, better-optimized design: theoretical output doubled, volume and vibration down by nearly a third. One week of testing in trucks and tractors, then confirmation as the final product.

Alongside the Magic Cube improvements, the team produced a design for a small-scale diesel truck — twenty to thirty horsepower, running on oil refined as a byproduct from the biplane fuel process, with a loading capacity of one to two tons. No operator cabin. It looked like a square-headed four-wheeled tractor. The engineers clearly considered it a modest entry; Roland recognized immediately what it could do for Neverwinter.

Steam trucks were difficult to manufacture. These were not. They could be produced quickly and in volume. For short-range transport, they were less efficient than the steam alternatives — but for the irregular terrain and varying elevations of actual supply routes, they were exactly right. Better than any animal-drawn vehicle, and far cheaper to produce than anything self-propelled Neverwinter currently operated.

The final section of the Annual Plan was the true center of everything.

Two parts: first, improvements to the existing Fire of Heaven biplanes — increase their advantage over Devilbeasts in speed and firepower, then develop specialized variants suited to different combat roles. Second, design and manufacture a new class of long-distance bomber.

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