Editing City Series:Volume1 Chapter 3 (section)

===Part 1===

'''12/23/1935

It was the day before Weihnachtsabend.

The flow of happy people could be seen even in the shopping district along Mehring Street which continued south from Mehringplatz, a famous plaza in Berlin. Many of them were preparing to take time off of work and celebrate Weihnachts with their families. It was a crowded area.

A bicycle raced along the roads while avoiding those crowded areas. It was moving quite quickly.

Walter wore his lab coat as he controlled the bicycle and Else stood on the back luggage area.

They were on their way back from the national library in the University of Berlin.

They had tried to check out an encyclopedia of ancient emblems, but the receptionist had said encyclopedias could not be checked out. Else had been forced to secretly throw the book out the window to Walter who waited outside.

In other words, they had stolen it.

Incidentally, Else had been the one to suggest it and Walter had agreed.

The encyclopedia was necessary to fix the Kaiserburg’s malfunction.

They had spent the entire previous day working out the cause.

Simply put, the engine’s output was too high and the emergency shutoff had activated.

If they continued running it like that, the engine would burn out and never work again. This malfunction was the result of giving the ship an unfinished and powerful engine, so they needed to carve in the proper output control emblem.

Else had stuck with Walter and Paul for the day it took them to realize that and she had gotten to see the inside of the Kaiserburg and even its engines.

The first surprise had been that the three cylindrical engines on the back and wings were sealed. That meant the ship flew without emitting any kind of jet.

“To put it simply, it manipulates gravity to fly. Unlike the previous engine designs, it provides a massive amount of energy and doesn’t need to create fire or wind using simple emblems. It instead uses the gravity techniques of the powerful divine spell users in ancient times.”

As he explained that, Walter had opened the engine’s outer paneling.

Inside were the guts made of metal pipes and gauges.

Else had seen something truly unexpected in the center.

“A spirit stone!”

The spirit stone had been large enough to wrap ones arms around and it had emitted a faint light in its place as a component.

Spirit stones were normally used as fuel, not as a component. A fighter craft could fly for six hundred hours using a standard fingertip-sized spirit stone mined from a vein of spirit stones. The average yearly flight time for military fighter craft was only five hundred hours.

What Else had seen was absurdly large and it had detailed emblems carved into its surface.

“What is this?”

“It’s a new type of engine that has developed beyond the standard spirit engine. We call it an emblem engine.”

“Where did you find such a huge spirit stone? …It isn’t a fake, is it?”

“Of course not. It was inside a crater in the southern mountains. On earth, a spirit stone’s field is discharged into the air, so we searched for a fresh stone that had come from outside. And since it was so big, we could carve emblems into it like a normal component.”

Wood could be burned more efficiently if it was first turned to charcoal instead of being burned as is. Similarly, ether produced greater power as a crystallized spirit stone than when it simply floated through empty space.

So what if an engine was created from that crystal?

“The engine itself absorbs ether from the surrounding space to produce its great power. That’s why the Kaiserburg doesn’t include a spirit stone for fuel.”

“You mean it can keep moving forever without refueling?”

“That’s right.”

He had readily affirmed that ridiculous idea.

The ultra-high power aerial ship could fly indefinitely without refueling. Of course it had been a military secret.

“Well? Surprised?”

The young man had smiled as he asked that.

That had been yesterday.