“This time, let’s change the model layout to a diagonal pattern and increase the water volume to twenty liters. Are you ready?”

“I’ve noted everything down,” Harriet replied, her quill scratching against the parchment. “Proceed.”

“Understood.”

We were currently in the middle of an experiment.

A large, inclined water tank stood before us. At one end, men poured a torrent of water; at the other, we had placed dozens of palm-sized tetrapod models. We were testing how well the breakwater held up against varying wave intensities and angles of impact.

At Harriet’s nod, the laborers waiting at the edge of the tank pulled the partition.

Whoosh!

The artificial wave crashed down, but the breakwater…

“As I suspected,” Harriet noted, peering into the tank. “By receiving the impact diagonally, the structural resistance is significantly higher. However, the load on the front section is quite severe.”

It held firm.

The reason we were huddled around a toy-sized water tank was simple: I wasn’t a civil engineer. I possessed no detailed future knowledge regarding the intricacies of breakwater construction. I couldn’t afford a catastrophe where we built a full-scale wall only to realize we had to tear it down and start over.

The sea is a fickle mistress with too many variables. Plug a hole here, and a leak springs there; shift the current, and you’ve suddenly ruined a vital shipping lane. Messing around with models was far cheaper than ruining an entire coastline and several islands.

Harriet continued to mutter to herself, calculating the ideal density and placement for the tetrapods. Having a STEM expert on the team made everything so much easier.

After two hours of hydraulic testing, we concluded the breakwater session and moved on to the vessel models. We placed miniature sailing ships and a tiny steamboat—powered by a clockwork spring, as we had no way to miniaturize a steam engine yet—into the tank to see how they handled debris and rough water.

The results, however, were discouraging.

“The efficiency,” Harriet said, her expression darkening as she looked at me, “is likely to be much worse than we anticipated.”

“What do you mean, Harriet?” I asked. Why the sudden serious face?

“Exactly what I said. This ‘steamboat’ faces entirely different stresses and mechanical hurdles than a traditional vessel.”

“…”

“Look at that model over there—the one with the broken mast. In a sailing ship, the load is distributed across the sails and masts, which translate that force into propulsion for the entire hull. But a steamboat—specifically this ‘paddle wheeler’—is a different beast entirely! Did you see how its speed plummeted the moment a wave hit it? The wheels become too deeply submerged, and the efficiency vanishes. This means the entire hull design must be…”

She launched into a barrage of scientific jargon—the kind of complex technical talk that usually flew right over my head. But I managed to extract the core conclusion.

“So, you’re saying we have to redesign the entire steamboat from the ground up?”

“Precisely.”

“…”

“Do you have any idea how we should change it?” I asked hopefully.

“For now… we need more experiments.”

That was code for ‘I have no idea.’

Ugh. I take it back. Future knowledge isn’t a magic shortcut. Knowing the “answer” doesn’t mean you know the steps to get there.

There was a reason Edison tested thousands of materials for his lightbulb filament. In the end, technological development is just a high-stakes combination of manual labor and educated guessing.

It was time to use the ‘Edison Method’: keep at it until something works.

Of course, I couldn’t do it all myself. I needed people to do the heavy lifting for me. Fortunately, I had just the source for such labor.

The ‘Knight School’ and the ‘Mechanic School.’

It had been three years since the signing of the Covenant. The schools I had established to meet the Union’s growing demand for knights and mechanics were finally beginning to yield results. I had hundreds of educated individuals at my disposal—people who could read, understand basic mechanical operations, and had studied the elementary physics I had managed to recall.

I filtered through the graduates who hadn’t yet committed to a career path, selecting the ones with the best academic records—the sharpest, most flexible minds available. I gathered them all and gave them a blunt order: design a steamboat.

Naturally, they were bewildered. But who else was there? In this entire world, they were the only ones who truly understood the structure of a steam engine.

As I worked with them to sketch out the rough outlines of the vessel’s design, Raleigh arrived.

“Lord Nemo?”

“Ah, Raleigh. You’ve come at a good time. The students were just starting to demonstrate their miniature steamboat models.”

“I’m afraid,” Raleigh said, his tone grave, “that something more pressing has come up.”

“What is it?”

“A group of English exiles has arrived,” he reported. “And our students have returned.”

Ah.

Finally.

***

Based on the information gathered from various sources, the current state of the British Isles could be summed up in one word: a clusterfuck.

Since the death of Elizabeth I, England had become a power vacuum. Even James couldn’t seem to get a grip on the chaos. Anti-James sentiment was boiling over, and influential figures gathered in Liverpool had formed their own parliament to defy him. London remained in the hands of rebels, isolated and dying.

To put it simply, it was a mess. The exiles were people whose safety was no longer guaranteed after the Queen’s death.

“Lord Nemo! It has been far too long!”

There were familiar faces, like Shakespeare, and even figures I recognized from history textbooks that made my eyes go wide. But it wasn’t the famous names I was most excited to see. It was the ‘study abroad’ students.

Literally, they were the people I had sent to England to study. To explain them, I have to go back to when I first started thinking about our educational infrastructure.

One day, I wanted everyone in the ‘Covenant’ to be educated. But obviously, I couldn’t design a perfect curriculum and teach everyone myself. I needed scholars to help me, and I needed people who had experienced a systematic education firsthand.

When Elizabeth first learned the truth about my origins, I had proposed an idea: to foster mutual exchange, we should send students from Virginia to England’s renowned universities. Raleigh’s colleagues had helped the idea along by whispering about the beauty and academic grandeur of Oxford and Cambridge.

The Queen had agreed, and now, those students were back.

My bright, hand-picked scholars.

I spotted a young man from Croatoan whose face I remembered well. “Ambrose, how was your homeland? No, how was the university? Was it everything you hoped for?”

Ambrose hesitated, shifting uncomfortably. Then, he looked me straight in the eye.

“England,” he said, “is truly hell.”

***

Ambrose Vicars was one of the children who had set out in 1587 as part of Sir Walter Raleigh’s attempt to colonize Virginia. Specifically, he was one of the nine children among the group.

After the Roanoke colony failed, he had somehow survived as part of Eleanor Dare’s group. He had been on the verge of starvation on Croatoan Island, slipping into unconsciousness, when he woke up to find… Him.

By the grace of the ‘Angel,’ Ambrose became a resident of Croatoan. Since then, he had lived with a deep sense of pride. He was a man chosen by the Messenger of the Lord, brought back from the threshold of death. He felt he had a duty—and a privilege—to follow Nemo’s words and devote himself to his will.

When Nemo assigned him to tend the vineyards, he worked his hardest. When Nemo taught him to read and write, he studied with everything he had. And then…

“Ambrose, how would you feel about studying in England?”

He thought his opportunity had finally come.

“Ambrose, you are a brilliant young man. I think you might adapt well to Oxford.”

He had seized the chance with joy. In truth, he hadn’t expected much from the actual academics.

“Blood created in the heart is consumed at the extremities. This is because…”

Nemo had warned him not to expect much in the way of scientific accuracy or interest from their curricula. Because of that warning, he hadn’t been disappointed, spending his time studying theology and rhetoric—subjects Nemo hadn’t taught him—to make the most of his stay.

But that was where the satisfaction ended.

“I’ll kill you!”

“Wooooooo!”

The university students were less like scholars and more like something caught between man and beast. Their days were a never-ending cycle of dueling, drinking, and gambling. They fought among themselves, they brawled with townsfolk, and then they went back to fighting each other.

The professors weren’t much better, and the city itself was a filthy, offensive place surrounded by waste and rot. It was not an environment where one could study anything systematically. It was a world away from the way Nemo taught others on Croatoan.

At the same time, the high-born students were insufferably arrogant, using their status as ‘scholars’ as an excuse to harass everyone else. Ambrose’s daily routine often involved apologizing to shopkeepers for the friends who had just trashed their taverns.

Why on earth did a ‘right to beg’ even exist for these people?

In short…

“I… I never want to go back to England.”

***

“…”

Well, that was unexpected.

If Elizabeth had hoped to create pro-English sentiment and solidify the alliance through these students, she would have been sorely disappointed.

I was too. I mean… was that really a ‘university’?

I hadn’t expected much, but I had at least hoped for a process that turned people into useful, systematic thinkers. But from what I was hearing, it sounded more like a rowdy social club. A club formed by people who just called themselves professors and students.

Wait, now that I think about it, the Latin word for a community or corporation is universitas.

Universitas… university…

It really was just a club.

I turned to the other returnees, hoping for a different perspective. “How was Cambridge?”

“Oh! it was a wonderful place!” one young man replied enthusiastically.

Thank God. At least one of them was satisfied. “I suppose it depends on the person—”

“I learned true brotherhood and courage while punishing those who dared to insult our university’s honor with my sword and musket!”

Never mind. He had just “adapted” too well to the rowdiness.

Looking closer, the difference was between those who had received some form of education from me and had actually worked in a professional capacity, like tending the vineyards, and those who hadn’t. The perspective of those who had experienced a different kind of education was more revealing.

Wondering if this was just an English problem, I sought out the former Spanish commanders. “The University of Bologna was a magnificent place! I learned pride and honor there…”

“And what did you major in?”

“Medicine! I spent my days putting those arrogant fools in their place with my blade…”

I sighed. Something was fundamentally wrong.

Perhaps… perhaps I needed to redefine what a university actually was. If I wanted to establish a proper educational institution, I had to start from scratch.

I needed a space that would allow me to move beyond the current situation, where I hoarded future knowledge and dispensed it in fragments whenever I felt the time was right. I needed a space where people could research, exchange ideas, and teach the next generation—a true academic world and a systematic educational field.

And who would build it?

…I would.

I had to.