The structure of the world’s first automobile was extraordinarily simple: an engine, ignition system, cooling system, transmission, suspension, steering mechanism, brakes, and chassis.
Just those few components, each simple in design.
To Kyle, a floating city was still far off, but drafting a simplified concept was well within his reach.
For the city itself, the core component was naturally levitation—specifically, flight and flight control.
Kyle had two approaches in mind for levitation.
The first was drawing a sufficiently large magic circle on the ground.
Once activated and airborne, using the circle as a boundary, everything above it would float into the air while the land beneath remained behind.
This approach presented several major hurdles: First, it required Kyle to gain an extremely deep understanding of Runes to independently deduce a stable flight array capable of generating immense power.
Second, the materials used to draw the array were far from ordinary.
The materials themselves had to possess intrinsic magical power, transmit magic with near-zero loss, and remain resilient enough to resist decay even after a thousand years.
The only options Kyle could currently think of were the blood of various magical creatures, blended with rare magical ingredients.
This brought Dumbledore’s phoenix, Fawkes, to mind.
If he bled Fawkes, let Fawkes undergo rebirth, and then bled him again…
wouldn’t that create an infinite supply line?
It was just a shame that Dumbledore would never agree to such a thing.
Third, the workload.
The magic circle would be composed of countless individual runes, each no larger than a palm.
The sheer volume of work made Kyle shudder.
Fourth, and most importantly, array defense.
Since the magic circle would sit at the very bottom of the floating city, it would be directly exposed to external attacks.
Kyle’s current solution was to draw multiple layers of arrays deep beneath the city’s surface.
This would effectively lighten the load on any single array while spreading out the risks.
Then, he could encase the entire bottom of the city in a metal hull.
That would raise the safety of not just the arrays, but the entire floating city by several levels—though at the cost of skyrocketing expenses and labor.
The second levitation method relied on alchemy to create a Floating Core.
This was an idea Kyle had conceived after gaining a preliminary understanding of alchemy.
By setting the core’s radiation field to extend downward and horizontally, the result would be a bowl-shaped section of land floating into the sky, while the surface above remained unaffected.
This method also suffered from major drawbacks, the biggest being the astronomical cost.
“Alchemy leaves three generations destitute” was no mere saying.
The materials needed for a Floating Core would undoubtedly start at legendary grade.
Mithril wouldn’t even qualify to paint decorative scrollwork on the core!
Beyond flight, a floating city required adequate defensive capabilities, formidable offensive power, inter-module interference resistance, high-altitude oxygen supply, water resources for daily living, and, above all, energy!
Kyle couldn’t possibly rely on raising thousands of house-elves to pump out magic power for him.
Regarding energy, Kyle had a few ideas.
One was capturing Fawkes, making him discharge magic, undergo rebirth, and discharge magic again—another infinite supply line.
Thinking along those lines, Kyle suddenly realized he had already mapped out a complete industrial chain for the floating city: first, bleed Fawkes, then drain his magic, let him undergo rebirth, and sell whatever meat remained afterward.
Phoenix meat had to be worth a fortune!
Regrettably, upon checking, he learned that a phoenix rebirth leaves behind nothing but ash.
Still, no matter—phoenix ash could be used as fertilizer to grow crops!
Another industrial supply line born.
However, considering Dumbledore would be impossible to persuade, and Fawkes alone might be worked to death, Kyle had to abandon the idea for now.
Yet Fawkes sparked another thought: could biological modification be used to create a low-intelligence creature with simple survival needs that generated magic power as a living energy source?
For instance, cows used to eat grass and produce milk.
Could biological engineering modify a cow to eat grass and produce pure magic power instead?
Or, taking it a step further, could cloning and bio-engineering produce isolated, magic-generating organs?
That way, a sufficiently large nutrient tank could provide a continuous, endless stream of magic.
His second idea was harnessing power from nature.
Through magic arrays or alchemy, stray magic in the environment could be harvested and stored to power the floating city.
This wasn’t pie-in-the-sky speculation.
Whether Hogwarts or pureblood manors, all were protected by tight magical arrays powered by energy storage chambers.
These chambers absorbed ambient magic dissipated by humans, magical creatures, and nature itself, supplying power to arrays or charms to sustain them for centuries.
The drawback was low efficiency.
The methods of the wizarding world were still far too primitive.
Existing storage chambers reached their limit just sustaining Hogwarts; expanding the supply range was well beyond their power output.
His third idea targeted the most powerful energy facility in human history—nuclear power plants.
A large nuclear plant could supply electricity for an entire city’s industry and residential needs, making it more than qualified as a power core for a floating city.
However, converting electrical energy into magical energy—or nuclear energy directly into magic—presented a monumental hurdle.
Obtaining a nuclear power plant was another problem altogether; no country would build one for a private individual.
Furthermore, a nuclear plant’s operational lifespan fell far short of Kyle’s thousand-year expectation.
Modifying a nuclear plant would require combining technology with magic—a prospect that gave Kyle a massive headache just thinking about it.
After sorting through his concepts for the floating city and estimating the research and financial costs involved, Kyle established two main directions for his future endeavors: 1.
Magic Research.
The prerequisite for launching a floating city was a solid foundation of theoretical magic—not just existing magic, but innovating new magic of his own.
2.
Money.
There was no point in pretending to be above vulgar material wealth.
In any game from his past life, constructing a floating city required marshaling the wealth of an entire nation or draining centuries of savings from a legendary archmage.
Thinking of all this, Kyle *really* wanted a phoenix!