This is the current research Perfikot is conducting: a flying device that achieves flight by providing lift through air-filled balloons—put simply, an airship.
After all, in her era, the steam engine had been invented less than a hundred years ago. The whole world was still in the first phase of the Industrial Revolution, and creating a small internal combustion engine to invent an airplane was indeed challenging for the industrial production level of this time.
While using alchemy might allow the creation of a practical small internal combustion engine, doing so would send manufacturing costs soaring to an unacceptable level.
Even with the Philosopher's Stone as support, such an enormous expense would be hard to accept.
So Perfikot ultimately chose as her reference the large flying device that existed in human history before she crossed over—the air-filled airship—and combined it with some flight carriers she had seen in fantasy works to design this Flying Airship.
"Rigid Balloon Type Flying Airship (Model)"
"Production Material: Excellent"
"Craftsmanship: Outstanding"
"Effect: Achieves flight by inflating the balloon with a gas lighter than air to generate lift and uses a small steam engine for propulsion"
"Evaluation: Although it's just a model, it can truly fly! Congratulations, this research is feasible both theoretically and practically. You only need to scale it up appropriately and solve the propulsion issue, and it can truly carry you into the sky."
Seeing the evaluation from her golden finger, Perfikot had a trace of relaxation on her originally serious expression.
Besides, it's one of the few works praised by her golden finger, it's also the fruit of a year of effort. Earning such an evaluation is enough to fill her with a sense of accomplishment.
Yet, although the Flying Airship's design was successful, it couldn't make Perfikot feel any relaxed, because the impending disaster made her always feel a delusion of being chased by a beast, causing her to maintain her nerves in constant tension.
The world is facing a disaster, a doomsday calamity sufficient to destroy the entire world.
A catastrophe so destructive that even before crossing over, with humans achieving the third phase of the Industrial Revolution and reaching the stars, it was difficult to resist.
Initially, Perfikot was merely curious because her butler told her that the heating expenses that year were 7% higher than previous years.
This wasn't a normal variation. Although the change wasn't significant, after diligently inquiring of her loyal old butler and confirming no rise in coal prices, nor any embezzlement or wastage, she developed a strong interest in how these expenses increased.
With idleness as her excuse, Perfikot built a small meteorological station in the yard to start recording temperature and weather changes daily.
The reason for doing this was that, after excluding human factors and social environmental impacts, the only possibility left was natural climate changes.
While collecting data through her makeshift meteorological station, Perfikot also managed to acquire the past decade's meteorological data from the Empire's highest educational institution, Royal Langton University. After sorting and comparing, she found that starting roughly seven years ago, Langton...no, the entire Victor Empire's temperature had been continuously declining.
At first, it was merely an annual average temperature decline of about less than one degree, which was light and within the normal fluctuation range of annual average temperature and didn't draw any attention.
Even Perfikot didn't notice the cooling trend until she performed precise calculations.
The subsequent records showed snow events in winter gradually increased year by year, spring arrived later, and the duration of summer shortened...
Until last year, compared to before the cooling trend, the annual average temperature had dropped by four degrees, and the cooling rate was still increasing.
This wasn't a normal natural phenomenon; such a cooling rate was akin to compressing the climate change that would normally complete in a hundred years into a mere decade.
Perfikot was shocked upon drawing this conclusion and once doubted whether there was an error in her calculations.
To verify if this conclusion was correct, she found the Empire's Astronomical Society through Langton University, asking those astrologers to help with a session of divination. The conclusion was that the world was about to enter a wintery cold era; within the next three years, temperatures would plunge downward, and the entire world would be frozen.
By then, even during the warmest part of summer, Langton's temperature would be below twenty degrees below zero.
Perfikot thought she might have made a mistake, or perhaps those astrologers who toy with divination made an error.
However, as she performed calculations using a hand-crafted difference engine via alchemy for accuracy, those astrologers also borrowed the Philosopher's Stone from her to perform a larger-scale divination ritual seeking a more precise result.
In the end, Perfikot confirmed her calculations hadn't erred, while the astrologers verified their divination was correct and even suggested they might have underestimated the disaster's scale.
Because their group effort ultimately concluded that the most optimistic prediction suggested that ten years later, Langton's annual mean temperature would be below forty degrees Celsius.
Such low temperatures could freeze the water vapor unseen by the naked eye in the air, steel would become as brittle as glass under such conditions, the land would be covered by thick layers of ice and snow, and would freeze harder than steel...
The extreme cold's impact is catastrophic; imagine if the whole world turned into an environment similar to the Antarctic, how could humanity survive?
Even in the era before Perfikot crossed, facing such calamity could at most ensure only a small portion of humanity survived in such harsh conditions, let alone the world that just entered its first Industrial Revolution.
Compared to the cold numbers Perfikot gathered, the result of the astrologers' divination was more specific, but equally brutal.
Sub-zero temperatures of several dozen degrees Celsius, snowstorms with winds reaching twelve on the Beaufort scale, a world utterly frozen, chaos upon the advent of doomsday...
It was a white apocalypse where everything froze in ice and snow; regardless of powerful mages, alchemists capable of transmuting gold, or astrologers predicting the future, none could withstand this icy doomsday.
The astrologers foresaw that within a decade, the whole world would revert to an Ice Age; even the equatorial oceans would freeze, and if no changes were made, in three hundred years, the world would completely freeze over, turning entirely desolate.