Chapter Sixty-Six: Distant Yearning (Part Two)

The wind began to shift, and the sails billowed to their fullest as the vessel surged forward at high speed.

Wei Wuji and Crow stood side by side at the bow of a heavily modified ship. It was classed as modified because it had originally been a carrack. Ever since the clash between Plantagenet and the Fishmen in Victoria Harbor shook the entire continent, all nations—especially the southern ones—had acutely realized that successfully mounting heavy cannons onto ships would forever change the history of naval warfare. Long-range attacks were destined to replace the traditional exchange of ballista fire and boarding actions, becoming the new paradigm of combat at sea.

Plantagenet was the first to adopt this tactic, which enabled them to withstand a massive offensive by the Fishmen. Granted, according to reports, those Fishmen were far from their primary forces, serving merely as a detachment aided by the advantages of the harbor. Yet, once the precedent was set, the Plantagenets would inevitably pursue such modifications at any cost.

This did not mean, however, that Plantagenet alone was capable of this feat, nor did it guarantee they would execute it best. Landia possessed an identical capacity for casting cannons. Previously, due to their immense size and weight, cannons were largely fixed upon fortifications or city walls—undoubtedly formidable instruments for defense, yet never successfully deployed in actual combat. Nevertheless, any nation capable of casting artillery had continuously pursued its mobility. Taking Landia as an example, their research and application in artillery lagged not a whit behind Plantagenet, utilizing them extensively for urban defense.

Only certain northern nations persisted in their traditional paths, particularly those heavily influenced by the Church. Naturally, they possessed their own reliance; such realms typically enjoyed the Church's patronage, occasionally receiving divine favor in times of war, such as battle-priests dispatched alongside their armies, or even the deployment of Paladins and Radiant Knights. Moreover, their native military might was often so formidable that they felt no need to depend on gunpowder weapons chained immovably to stone ramparts, such as the Dragon Knights of Sekens.

The southern realms presented a different picture. Lacking the formidable land forces of the northern powers and having dedicated the past century to maritime trade, most possessed sprawling coastlines requiring constant defense. Consequently, they had prized firearms from the very day of their invention. As an island nation pursuing an isolationist policy, Plantagenet cared little for continental territorial disputes; instead, much like the southern nations, they placed paramount importance on the sea.

Thus, when Plantagenet successfully mounted cannons on ships, fired the opening salvo, and reaped undeniable results, Landia rapidly initiated its own conversion program. Originally, they had planned to construct a brand-new warship from the keel up, designed from the outset with heavy artillery as its primary offensive armament. Due to time constraints, however, that vessel was still resting in the dockyards of Herdasin and remained unseaworthy.

Simultaneously, despite having the Fishmen as allies, the Prime Minister was reluctant to pin all hopes entirely on others. Therefore, alongside the full-scale construction of the new warships, an armed conversion project was launched. This initiative involved acquiring a vast number of carrack-class sailing ships and modifying them into armed vessels by cutting ports into their decks and broadsides for artillery.

Compared to the earliest carracks, nearly two decades of development had rendered these ships increasingly massive. The *Cessulus*, upon which Wei Wuji had once sailed, could only be considered a modest vessel among them, with a displacement of a mere three hundred and eighty tons. The lucrative profits of seafaring stimulated merchants; in their pursuit of maximum financial gain during perilous voyages, ship displacements had surged dramatically in recent years, accompanied by an accelerating pace of vessel refinement. Three years prior, when the young man boarded the *Cessulus* to set sail, a displacement of three hundred and eighty tons carried no shame among ocean-going vessels, as the largest ships of that era had only just touched five hundred tons. Yet upon the return of the *Cessulus*, ships of five hundred tons were no longer noteworthy, and vessels displacing seven hundred tons had already been born. Yet the insatiable ambition of merchants continually chased greater displacement, higher speeds, and superior performance. Before long, ships exceeding a thousand tons in displacement might well emerge. Rumor had it that even the structural limits of the traditional carrack were being reached; driven by adventure, wealth, and glory, navigators and merchants were pressing shipwrights for even more advanced designs, giving rise to a novel hull structure currently under development that designers called the galleon.

The vessels acquired by the Landian government were entirely second-hand carracks, and their conversions were far from guaranteed successes. Due to the varied construction of used ships, some proved severely unsuited after the installation of heavy cannons: others suffered from a dangerous list to one side, while the overall performance of a few degraded drastically. Although the blueprints had accounted for no such eventualities, it was hardly surprising that hidden vulnerabilities lingered in the lifespan and performance of hulls that had already endured long trade routes and countless relentless ocean waves.

Even so, a portion of these merchant vessels was successfully transformed into armed gunships. Born from merchant stock, aside from their formidable long-range artillery, their close-quarters boarding combat capabilities were utterly dismal. On one hand, constrained by circumstances, the conversions could only favor a single focus; having chosen artillery, both spatial utilization and sailor allocation had to be slanted exclusively toward that end. On the other hand, no matter how heavily modified a merchant vessel might be, it could never rival the warship currently taking shape in the dry docks—a vessel conceived and constructed from its very inception to serve the singular demands of warfare, with every performance metric engineered for combat. A profound distinction separated them from these hastily converted armed gunships.

Consequently, these converted gunships relied solely on their cannons to deliver a devastating long-range punch; beyond that, little else could be expected. Admittedly, deploying such ships against the Fishmen carried inherent flaws, as the Fishmen could approach via underwater swimming, and once dragged into a melee, the crew would face dire peril, forced to defend themselves with mere handheld weapons. Yet engaging the Plantagenets with these ships did not necessarily spell certain defeat. While they might fall short of the Plantagenets in the sophistication of their retrofitting—given that Plantagenet had stolen a march in naval artillery and perhaps already produced dedicated sailing warships—Landia, seeking to rapidly bolster its combat strength in the short term, had supplemented its own modified naval vessels with a vast acquisition of second-hand merchantmen. Though these merchant-turned-gunships were crude, their strength lay in sheer numbers. Years later, such vessels would pale into utter insignificance against purpose-built modern warships of foreign nations. But at this precise moment, with Plantagenet's new-style warships still few in number, facing only Plantagenet's own modified old-style gunships, these vessels could still fight a desperate contest, serving effectively to bridge the gap in naval power for the immediate future.