"Move it a bit higher, the position isn't right, good, now hold it right there, fix it in place and don't move."
Inside Ghost Ridge Palace, on an open piece of land, a group of Disciples from Puppet Hall were bustling about.
Zhu Zhangqi, the senior brother of Puppet Hall, directed everyone as they erected a huge cylinder on the ground.
"Project B3, test number 39, ignite!"
Under Zhu Zhangqi's command, flames shot up into the sky as the cylinder soared up, piercing through the blue heavens above.
"Hall Master, the rocket has taken off smoothly."
Zhu Zhangqi jogged over and reported to Su Jie, who was watching.
Su Jie sat on his chair with one leg crossed over the other, caressing the thousand-hand centipede in his arms and raising his head to watch the rocket ascending higher and higher, spreading his Divine Sense to observe its flight.
Not until the rocket exceeded the range of his Divine Sense did Su Jie switch to the Insect Control Technique of poisonous insect surveillance, observing the rocket's flying posture through the insects he had previously placed inside it.
"Hall Master, the flying posture is perfect, it hasn't deviated from the direction we set," Zhu Zhangqi said, regarding the rocket.
This project didn't have a high priority in Puppet Hall's development plans, but due to recent breakthroughs in other projects, they had gathered manpower and material resources to conduct numerous tests, during which the rocket's posture became increasingly stable.
At the beginning, they couldn't even find the landing point once the rocket had flown, but such incidents no longer occurred.
"Let's see how high it can fly."
Su Jie stroked his chin; despite also being called a rocket, this one was quite different from the traditional ones from Blue Star.
Typically, a rocket consists of three main parts: the body, propulsion system, and control system.
However, the rocket developed by Puppet Hall, apart from its appearance, had all of its important core parts—propellant tanks, instrument modules, interstages, connecting tubes, and fins—constructed out of all kinds of spiritual materials.
For example, the parts of the rocket that needed to withstand high temperatures were made using Earth Treasures Black Iron melted into ordinary steel, then forged with a unique technique.
This made its weight only a fifth of that of normal steel, but its strength and high-temperature resistance were far greater than the conventional rocket materials on Blue Star.
Including the crucial rocket engine, its materials were made from a mix of spiritual materials from Tianyuan World, resulting in an engine with immensely powerful thrust.
In Blue Star, often when human technology became stagnant, it wasn't because scientists couldn't design all sorts of bold and crazy inventions, but rather the materials weren't suitable and the costs were too high to sustain those wild concepts, so they had to be constrained within a reasonable range.
But in Tianyuan World, there is an abundance of spiritual materials with extravagant effects, and as long as you're willing to spend the money, you can have anything designed for you.
Take this rocket before us, for example; its design blueprint comes from a model of rocket bought by the Jieke Group from Russia last century. Its original design was already far behind the world's advanced level.
However, once in Puppet Hall's hands, this design saw drastic changes, with harsh and strict modifications sketched in. Now, compared to the original blueprint, one could hardly say that the two were related at all.
The rocket, nicknamed "B3" by Puppet Hall, with a combination of various advanced materials, saw a ridiculous boost in performance, relying solely on the power of high-quality materials to increase its performance.
The rocket continued to ascend, piercing through the clouds.
Fifty thousand meters!
One hundred thousand meters!
As the rocket flew higher, divine winds began to manifest in the sky, the kind of strong air currents far exceeding ordinary gales.
Even a rocket with such capability was blown off course; it had to rely on its self-control system for correction.
In Tianyuan World, the sky above was divided into the Thirty-three Heavens, with the winds growing fiercer as one ascended, and Heavenly Fire and Divine Thunder spontaneously forming, capable of turning flesh to dust, internal organs to ash, and obliterating the soul.
Not just a rocket but even a Purple Mansion Cultivator could not traverse these Thirty-three Heavens.
As the rocket entered the first layer of heaven, it separated, ejecting several spherical objects, which then unfolded.
These were satellites that Su Jie was attempting to deploy, but the satellites proved too fragile; once exposed, they were blown chaotically by the winds, and with frequent Heavenly Fires and Divine Thunders emerging from the void, they couldn't transmit any signals.
And when the rocket continued to rise, reaching the Second Layer Heaven, Triple Heaven, and all the way to the Fourth Layer Heaven, a black divine wind blew towards it.
The body of the rocket rippled like wrinkled water, with countless pieces of metal twisting and components bursting apart, turning into a myriad of fragments scattered with the wind.
Su Jie shook his head in disappointment, realizing that deploying satellites in Tianyuan World seemed to be a prohibitively difficult challenge.
To solve this problem, unless Su Jie was willing to invest heavily to craft the satellites in the same way as Magical Treasures, the cost-effectiveness just didn't make sense.
Satellites aren't useful individually; they need to be deployed in sets, with dozens necessary to provide large-scale surveillance.
"But I don't have the money; maybe the Sect does," Su Jie muttered to himself, contemplating whether Ghost Ridge Palace would be willing to foot the bill for constructing a surveillance Heavenly Eye.
If he could secure funding from Ghost Ridge Palace, the problem would be easily solved.
However, Su Jie thought it would be tough, as Zhang Junwei wasn't so easily persuaded.
Speaking of it, the idea of deploying satellites in Tianyuan World was Su Jie's preparation for the upcoming war against Guan Chao Pavilion.