Celestial Hymn 34 (Patreon)

Celestial Hymn
Chapter 34

-VB-

Construction began within the week with the spare iron I had squirreled away in between all of the experimentations, resourcing, and arming myself, my acolytes, and then the people.

I would have surely focused on improving the lives of the people when I first took power, and I did, but the people have shown me that to be a mistake. I wouldn’t make that kind of mistake again.

As for what the construction was about, it was not about building another iron tower, unlike what I told Wilhelm, my steward. Yes, it would be used to construct something but that something was much more sublime than a mere iron tower meant to extend the barrier around my tower.

When I made the plan, I thought about making a floating fortress. It would have been a pretty good gig, too. In this world where dragons provided the best air superiority because they were the only air troop possible, a flying fortress would dominate everything and anything. The problem, I quickly realized, was the cost involved.

I was rich.

But I wasn’t rich enough to build a flying fortress. From what my powers told me, building a flying fortress will require at minimum one million gold dragon’s worth of materials. It would be like building an actual fortress on top of all of the magical and advanced technologies!

Unfortunately, I did not have that much money. Even if I saved up, I wouldn’t have the time to build it before the next big crisis struck Westeros (Ironborn Rebellions never count).

On the other hand, building myself a pseudo-Mass Effect frigate would cost me only 100,000 gold dragons!

Yeah, that was still a lot, but it was a tenth of the cost of the flying fortress. On top of that, a flying frigate would be much more maneuverable, and its mass effect-powered spinal cannon would obliterate nearly everything up to and including the flying fortress I would have built.

Mass Effect was bullshit like that. 40 kilotons of TNT per shot!

I could almost see the meme in my head.

‘Everyone in Westeros: No, you can’t just make a weapon that can obliterate everything! It goes the rules of chivalry!
‘Me: Ha ha. Mass Effect go Brrrrrr.’

… Yeah, overwhelming firepower was always nice. Just imagine how quickly and irrelevant I could make all “evil” magical things with each shot from the frigate!

Iron Islands? Boom!

True North? Boom!

Asshai? Boom!

And if all else failed, then I could just nab a thousand or so people, grab all of the materials that could fit into my frigate, fly out to space, and make a colony on a nearby planet or something. Once I got the power to make a portal to some other dimension, because it was going to happen at this rate, then I would just do just that and leave.

Of course, all of this was far away. I just started on the construction.

The construction itself required a lot of input from me. Sure, the Mass Effect Andromeda database had made designing the ship easy. However, all of those designs were made with the proliferation of Mass Effect universe’s technology in mind. I did not have a zero-G shipyard nor the tools and equipment of that verse.

But I did have something close to it.

The One-Stop Workbench. It could make anything I wanted, though the size was limited. I needed to put everything together, so that’s what I had the servitors do while I unloaded the materials onto the workbench.

It was an all-hands-on kind of work for me because only I could use the Workbench, and only my servitors had the necessary tools inside their grotesque bodies.

I also needed to alter how the ship was shaped because there was no way in hell I could make SS Normandy or something like that with how it was shaped. I didn’t want to have to make the infrastructure to keep the pieces in place.

… I was actually very tempted to just make a rectangular box and call it over, but I wasn’t that lazy.

And that was exactly what I was doing, working in my workshop at Brownspear Barony, when the Celestial Forge made for another reach. And … got nothing.

I shrugged and went back to work.

This time, I was making the element zero drive that would enable the ship to reduce its mass. Of course, the drive itself was too big for me to make it on the workbench in one-go and as such I needed to manufacture its components one by one.

I paused and looked at the ME R&D database before sighing.

I needed to make at least eighty parts, ten of which were the casing.

“Okay. Bring in the iron and the exotic rocks, boys!”

One of the funny things I found out about the Workbench was that, yes, it used the materials it needed (it didn’t have to be processed, I learned before) but it didn't even touch the materials that it didn’t need.

So if I needed uranium or the like…?

Well, I just told the Workbench’s computer to substitute it with Thorium and poured a bunch of sand on top of it until the material requirement was met. I would have clean the unused sand afterward, but the entire process was entertaining enough at times.

Besides, I had acolytes. They did the cleaning.

Element Zero was something I couldn’t make.

So.

I did my best to substitute it with magic.

Boom!

I winced.

“I guess something in the matrix was off,” I mumbled as I stopped the current manufacturing process and went outside to see what had blown up this time.