The Country of Eruchea:-

Once the mess with the hot air balloons was done, which took hours since people from everywhere kept swarming him with questions, Harry finally proceeded to his room to get a few hours of rest.

But there was another reason why Harry was so desperate to take his leave.

And that was because his system notifications tab was flashing.

Usually, this just meant that the system had some important message for him. It might be a warning, an alert, or maybe even a message from the gods. (The gods hadn’t personally contacted him in such a way yet but he figured that it would probably show up there if they did.)

But this time, he was pretty sure of exactly what the contents of the tab should be.

[The system is quite proud to announce that the host has won yet another reward for making technology without the system’s help or any other divine form of help!

The host has managed to create a hot air balloon without receiving the appropriate instructions or quests from the system but used whatever knowledge was already present in the host’s mind to create one.

And with this invention, the host has also unlocked the milestone of taking the humanity of Eruchea to the skies.

Due to the achievement of this historical feat, the gods have decided to help make the host’s life easier by rewarding the host with the following:

>>| Increased knowledge about aerodynamics, aeronautics and the creation of airships and zeppelins. This will allow the host to expand the field of air travel at a much faster rate and the host can even attempt to create space travel vehicles much faster and easier.

>>| Increase in charm and charisma to allow the host to introduce new technologies more easily. This will allow the host to use methods like creating fake historical documents without arousing suspicions more often. However, the system advises the host to ensure that these documents don’t end up becoming actual historical museum showpieces since they do not belong there and will cause the host to receive divine punishments.

>>| Increased development speed to allow for a much faster rate of development in the next couple of years. This will allow the host to modernise the country at a much faster speed than normally possible. The citizens will have slow and minor improvements in overall health to ensure that they can keep up with the development speed. However, the rate and duration of this reward are subject to change depending upon the host’s actions in the future.

All of this is to ensure that the host can keep the practice of independent creation going. The heavens greatly appreciate any efforts done to reduce the dependence of humanity on divine intervention and ensure to hand out appropriate awards whenever required.]

Wow.

These rewards felt great to Harry.

Since he had not taken any direct help or missions from the system and used his own brain to make this stuff, it meant that if he ever did similar stuff in the future, he would gain similar great rewards!

In fact, he was more than overjoyed when he thought about the implications the system’s words had.

The fact that he had all that flight-related knowledge injected into his brain meant that he could create not only flights and rockets but also satellites and other equipment for information transfer and even spying.

Because the thing was, the Malonians were pretty sensitive to both magical and non-magical entities. They just couldn’t differentiate between qi-users and non-magical entities.

However, the qi-users or the so-called “Wangxiuren” only cared about qi-infused artefacts. Or as they used to call them, “spiritual treasures”.

Unless it caused them any harm, they didn’t bother too much if Godzilla were to spawn and destroy half the world.

So, if Harry were to launch a completely qi-less satellite into orbit, they would notice it if his luck was really, really bad. But even then, they wouldn’t pay any attention to it.

It was like if one were to see a couple of rocks on the side of the road.

A person might notice it but they wouldn’t bother with it unless someone threw those rocks at them.

Because for cultivators, unless something could use qi, it was worthless trash.

After a certain point in their cultivation journeys, they didn’t even bother eating food and sustained themselves just by absorbing qi from their surroundings.

This is why Harry had planned on trying to be friendly with the Malonians while maintaining distance from Wangxiu in the future.

Those mages and sorcerers seemed to be very open-minded as could be seen by their level of development. So, it would be very easy for Harry to form good relations with them.

They would surely have a lot of prejudices against mortals too. Otherwise, so many Malonians wouldn’t have fled to the Wastelands.

But when compared to Wangxiu, Harry’s chances of success felt higher.

Because for those Wangxiu guys, the mere existence of any other type of being was like an attack on their overinflated egos.

Everything from demons to beastkin to magic users and especially the mortals. Everything was wrong and bad in their eyes.

Sure there might be exceptions who would be way more open-minded, but the opinion of the majority was that qi was the only true energy and cultivation was the only way in life.

If someone didn’t use qi or cultivate or even if they used some other thing that cultivators couldn’t use (like mana or the abilities of the beastkin), they were all demonic entities that were inferior to them and needed to be removed from the face of planet Etheldor.

And Harry planned on using this thinking against them.

Because as the saying went, “The bigger they are, the harder they fall”!

He had defeated cultivators in the past. And he could do it again if the situation called for it.

“Wait…

Now that I think about it…

So, is this the reason why we never got gods back on Earth?”

[That is correct, host.

The gods have a non-intervention policy about all developed planets.

So, as long as nothing too major happens, they do not take any action. As long as it is something that can be solved by the inhabitants of the planet, they will ensure that their involvement in the incident remains at just watching everything unfold from a distance.

They do ensure that things remain orderly in general but you won’t find any of the heavenly beings descending to personally assist anyone.

Those sorts of cases only happen before proper technological and scientific development take place among the inhabitants.

Once that occurs, it is like a signal for the divine beings to start pulling out.

And once they pull out of a world, the level of freedom to use their powers in that world decreases.

So, although they can visit the world even after moving away, they can use only a very negligible amount of divine abilities at best while being in direct contact with the world.]

“Ah, so that means that even if they see disasters occur in front of them, they can’t do much to prevent them…

But what if their own lives are threatened? Isn’t it dumb that if a so-called god visits, say, Earth and end up in a terrorist infested area or have their plane crash, they just die? All their immortality goes down the drain…”

[The host is wrong here.

The “visits” the gods do are either by entering another inhabitant’s body, either partially or fully controlling them, or they create new puppet-like figures to inhabit when visiting.

So, if an accident does happen, they can ever so easily pull out with negligible harm at best. It’s like if one were to use a VR headset to play a game.

But naturally, gods usually like to create their own bodies if they want to visit. Or if that isn’t feasible at the moment, they usually choose a person who is going to pass away within the required time frame so that they can have more freedom without affecting other people too much.]

“Really?

That’s pretty convenient! Just do whatever you want and then the guy is going to die anyway.

But you know…”

And just like this, Harry spent the rest of his resting time chatting with the system before taking a half an hour nap near the end.

Though the system had a pretty formal and robotic sort of feel to it when it talked, Harry had a great degree of freedom when talking with the system.

If he were to chat with someone else, even his fiancée, he still needed to hold back a little to hide his identity as a transmigrator. A corner of his mind was always set on ensuring that no one gets to know that he is from another world.

Even if someone were to dig into his past, they would find that he was a prince in Wangxiu who was supposed to be dead and was thrown in the Great Demon Law forest. But he managed to improve over the years he spent in that place and gained lots of profound knowledge while he stayed there.

And even if they visited that place, the best they could possibly find was a collapsed cave.

But if they knew that he was from some other dimension altogether, it would be a different story altogether.

They might try to capture him to do research on his body or his soul or something. Or those space-time manipulation experts might even try to open a door to Earth and destroy his homeworld!

It’s like if you see a tapir and think that it’s related to pigs and elephants but then find out that the closest living relatives they got are horses, donkeys and rhinos instead.

Or if you find out that the headache you were having for the past week was actually a parasitic worm that decided to make its home right by your brain.

You don’t go around eating Asprin once you find this out. You try to get a surgeon or someone who can maybe crack open your skull and take that godforsaken thing out!

Same way, if people found out that he wasn’t from this world, most people won’t even bother roaming around on Etheldor. They would rather find ways to get to Earth before too long.

And Earth had too many things that Harry liked to be destroyed by fantasy elements!

Everyone thinks that earth becoming fantasy would be fun. But if one were to look at it, many people would lose their lives and jobs.

So many of the things considered normal would end even if one kept aside the fact that fantasy elements became real.

All those cool TV shows, or comics or music. A whole lot of them would stop.

The people in charge of that stuff might die in some freak accident, or they would go into loss and decide to close down. Or they might even receive some sort of superpowers and decide that it’s much better to be a superhero or something than sitting in a room drawing comics or making YouTube videos!

Anyway, coming back to a few weeks after the hot air balloon launch, it was a big day for James Shen.

He worked under the Ministry of Technology.

And today was the day when they had finally started the assembly or construction of the new ships and boats that were designed by their king.

One could say that it was both the assembly as well as the construction at the same time because these marine vehicles were meant to be built using concrete.

Yes, they were going to build ships out of literal rock!

‘According to the notes and research papers I was given, this should work in theory…

But rocks floating on the water just sounds so wrong to me!

Argh!’

James was quite tensed.

Even though he wasn’t too much of a veteran at this stuff, yet he had been assigned to overlook the assembly of such a big project.

The main reason was the shortness of staff.

Most of the experienced or high ranking members were busy with the balloon project from a few weeks back.

And the remaining few high rankers were put onto the boat project along with many newbies.

However, James seemed to have heaven-defying horrible luck since he ended up being chosen as the supervisor for the day’s events even with the presence of members who were much better and much more suited for the task than him.

It looked like the high ranking members were sitting in reserve for when something critical was involved or just to give guidance to the low ranking members.

It sounded good on paper but was actually a complete nightmare for a newbie like James who wasn’t the most self-confident of people.

James came running out to the site of assembly, with both his outfit and the set of papers he carried looking like he had stepped out of an F5 tornado.

The poor guy was so stressed out of his mind that even though he reached on time, he ended up getting a bit late early on and forgot to keep the conditions of his belongings in check. Hence the haphazard look.

“You okay there, buddy? I think you should sit before you pass out.”, said one of the nearby construction workers.

“Y-yeah, y-yeah, I’m fine!”, replied back James as he gasped for air while he sat on a nearby bench.

He had ended up running all the way instead of using his new bike.

Once he managed to catch his breath and fixed his clothes and stuff, he quickly began his inspection work.

The entire workspace was this huge concrete warehouse that was built near the seaport of the country.

The water was basically right on the other side of the building.

This was to ensure that ships could be easily pushed in and out of the building without dragging it across land too much.

The entire so-called “ship” was currently a huge wooden structure with metal rods and supports inside.

The wooden part of it was actually a mould to pour the concrete in while the metal frame was going to act like a skeleton for the boat.

This was because metal was strong but was both difficult to use and would also end up being corroded with water.

But concrete was easier for the workers to work with and any damages could be fixed just as easily.

The ship was also much bigger than the wooden ships that James had seen.

Unfortunately, the hull was quite thick and the internal space was much less than what one might expect.

The mould was currently in place and the concrete was slowly being poured inside. That’s why James couldn’t go too close to the actual ship.

Just then, one chatty looking worker walked up to him.

“Hey man, you from the technology or whatever ministry, right?”, asked the man.

“Y-yeah…

My name is J-James Shen.

Is there any problem, sir?”, James replied a bit nervously. He was worried that if some major issue popped up, he probably would have a horrible time trying to solve it.

“Ah, I’m Robert.

And don’t be so nervous dude!

I just wanted to ask you a question!”, said the man.

“Okay…

I’ll try my best to answer it, I guess…”

“So, dude, is it true that we will be building metal ships in the future?”, asked Robert.

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Ah, ya know, some rumours were going around that His Majesty mentioned the creation of metal ships and stuff when he told your ministry to research and build concrete ships.”

“Oh, that?

Since I’m not exactly one of the top-level people in the ministry, I can’t tell you any details. But yes, such a thing was mentioned by His Majesty.”, said James.

Harry had casually mentioned metal ships when he had a meeting with the Tech Ministry. He didn’t really go into much detail about it.

Currently, the Eruchean metal industry wasn’t so great that proper metal ships could be built. That’s why Harry was forced to go for the less cost-efficient concrete ships.

Concrete was easier to come by in Eruchea than all that high-quality steel and stuff.

And when asked, James had decided to play a bit smart and pretended like they had more information than what they actually possessed.

“Wow! A metal boat!

That would be quite the sight to see, no?”

“Yeah, that it indeed would be.”

Just like that, the day eventually came to an end.

And a few days later, the construction was done!

The boat was built, the steam engine was attached to power it (since it would be dumb to use human rowers) and it was ready to be put into the water.

Harry had naturally come along to the test run.

It was going to be the first non-human powered boat.

Naturally, mana and qi powered ships existed. Heck, those things could even fly in the sky if needed. But this was a non-mystical ship. No fantasy. Just plain Earth science.

The entire group of ministers stepped onto the boat along with Harry.

This time, the ministers from all the ministries had freed up their schedules and had shown up along with their secretaries.

They had missed the opportunity to fly. There was no way they were going to miss this one.

Just as the ship was about to start moving, elder Lao asked Harry, “Your Majesty, I do have one thing that I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

Harry felt his Spidey-sense tingle as he gestured elder Lao to ask.

“What was that big tank thing that Your Majesty had told us to make inside the ship? I have had it built but we left it empty since we didn’t know what exactly to do with it.”

‘Ah, f***! I knew something was bound to go wrong.’, thought Harry as the ship started swaying and shaking violently with the waves, causing everyone on board to fall.

Harry quickly order the boat to stop as smaller rescue boats rushed towards them from the shore.

Thankfully, no one had fallen in the water and could easily be taken back to shore as the big ship follow them.

These people had completely forgotten about one of the most crucial parts of any big ship.

The ballast tanks!

Modern ships all had these.

They ensured that the ship didn’t end up swaying with the waves too much. Otherwise, all the people fall off and the equipment on board would be destroyed.

Wooden ships never really needed ballast tanks since they had used stones or other heavy objects. But the concrete and metal ones definitely did.

Otherwise, all those cruise ships back on Earth would be impossible to build.

The modern ships had some fancy computer-controlled ballast tanks but Harry had gone for the most basic design.

Namely, a big tank at the lowermost level, below sea level, that they were going to manually fill with water.

It sounded a bit weird to keep a big tank of seawater on board. But the swaying of the water inside the ballast tank greatly reduced the swaying motion of the entire ship and helped to keep it from flipping over and capsizing.

Plus, water was easier to manage than rocks and stuff. Especially when high-tech ships get built.

Harry had to apologise to everyone for the disaster of a maiden voyage that they experienced.

Then Harry proceeded to explain to elder Lao about the ballast tanks.

It turned out that even though elder Lao already knew about ballasts and stuff since it was the basics of shipbuilding, he thought that the ships being designed by Harry were supposed to be special and didn’t need ballasting.

And that the tank was for luggage storage or something.

It was just Harry’s bad luck that the entirety of elder Lao’s ministry and everyone else had their heads shut off at the wrong moment when they decided to not even throw some rocks inside the ship for stability.

The only thing that wasn’t going against Harry was the fact that the ballast tanks didn’t need any special fluid to do their jobs.

So, he just instructed the construction team that was on standby near them to fill the ballast tank with plain old seawater.

Once that was done, Harry ordered another round of security checks to be performed on the ship, in case someone had made some other mistakes.

And once that was done, the passengers finally climbed on board, albeit a bit nervously since their previous experience.

The people on board were less this time around since some of the original ones ended up seasick due to all the shaking and were too unfit to travel on the water for the time being.

Thankfully, this time around, the ship’s shaking dropped exponentially in comparison to the last time.

And after taking a round of about a few nautical miles and performing some other testing while in water, the ship finally returned back to shore.

The test turned out to be pretty successful if one were to disregard the initial trouble they had experienced.

Since a steam engine was used to power the ship, it did cause a lot of smoke.

But since Harry knew that nature on Etheldor was much stronger than back on Earth, it was obvious that it would take way more than a few ships to cause a significant level of pollution.

This meant that he had much greater freedom to experiment with things as he did a speedrun on development for his country.

But even if one were to keep this aside, since this was yet another independent project, Harry was just desperately waiting for the time when he’d be alone.

Because independent projects meant juicy rewards from the system. And there probably wouldn’t be many things that Harry liked more that the system rewards.

And while stuff was going good for Harry, stuff was also going for his (somewhat long forgotten) younger sister. But was that stuff going good or bad, is something that is yet to be seen…

{A/N: Yes, it’s because this is the first time since the last time that I’ve had enough time to finish up with Harry’s stories and move over Ximing’s story.

Unfortunately, unless you guys have some ideas, I don’t think that I can do too much of her stories…}