After laying in bed for a little under five hours and sleep still eluding me, I let out a loud groan before shouting "fuck it" and threw the covers off as I got out of bed. A few moments later, I was dressed and heading out the door. The wall map once again helped me find my way down to the hangars of the ship and when I managed to walk into the large area that housed all sorts of ships. From the small skiffs all the way up to a single Carrier Class Ship, I was amazed with the amount of ships I could see. I must have stood there staring at the sight for longer than I should because I was snapped back to reality by a rough shove and someone yelling at me.

"get out of the way, noob, and stop blocking the door!"

I stumbled to the side as I glanced at some guy walking off to the left, towards a sort of housing complex, with about 100 house looking structures. I slowly turned and began to follow him, hoping he was leading me to the blueprint tables so I could get to trying to build my race ship and playing with the blueprints. The boy ahead of me glanced over his shoulder when we were about halfway to the housing complexes and stopped abruptly as he turned to glare at me.

"why are you following me noob, I'm not going to teach or give you anything"

I blinked for a few seconds before my eyes narrowed, and I glared at him, feeling offended that he was implying I wanted or needed his help with something.

"screw you and your higher than thou face, I just don't know where the blueprint tables are and figured they were inside those housing complexes." I snapped back at him.

I watched his face morph from the smug, confident look of someone used to being right and getting their way into one of pure shock before he glanced over his shoulders at the housing complex.

"uh, no, that is where the engineering core disciples live… The blueprint tables are on the far side from here, just in front of the dry docks that build the ships." He stammered at first, slowly growing in confidence.

"Alright, thank you for giving me your guidance," I said cheekily, waving my hand to him as I turned away and walked towards the indicated place.

I glanced over my shoulder slightly so I could see his face and tried not to smile when I saw it was red with embarrassment, and he had a slight scowl before he started to chuckle and laugh.

"Haha, you have some fire in you! I am, engineering core disciple, Liu Runchu. What name should I be looking out for in the up-and-coming engineers list?" He called out with a huge grin on his face.

I waved my hand over my head again, not turning back this time, but I did look over my shoulder as I replied.

"Everyone here seems to want to call me the Federation Dog, but if you want, you can call me Kenna Mackenzie."

I heard him scoff before he turned away. I did manage to barely pick up his reply and couldn't help the slight grin that crossed my face.

"Federation Dog would make an ironic call sign or a terrible one."

I quickened my pace and headed for the buildings that had been indicated to me. It didn't take me long to walk over to them, and I soon found a room that was unoccupied. I slipped inside, finding the exact same blueprint table that had been on my Frigate back when Clara was sort of teaching me how to use it. A faint smile crossed my face at the memory, and I felt the twinge in my heart as I hoped she was okay.

"Alright, enough of this memory lane stuff, let's build a fast ass ship" I declared trying to sike myself up.

I walked over to the table, placing my hands on the edges and using my mind to access the table. I watched it do a sort of booting up sequence before it asked for a login for a split second, then seemed to log itself in the next second. I was staring at a blank screen with a bunch of licences that I owned on the side. A few seconds later, a message appeared in the middle, it slowly scrolled as new words appeared and old ones vanished.

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New user detected.

Login details verified.

New Folder Created.

Welcome Federation Dog to the Void Walking Sect Engineering Department.

By command of Core Elder Zhang Mei of the Bridge Crew, you have been authorised to use the blueprint table for 72 hours. Despite Core Elder Wang Jun of the Engineering Department's ongoing reluctance.

Your task is to build a ship that can survive flying through space, entering the atmosphere, landing and taking off. It must also be able to perform manoeuvring tasks, all while at the high speeds of a racer!

Your time starts now!

The last message vanished fairly quickly, and a 72-hour timer appeared in the top left corner of the screen and instantly started counting down. I watched it for a few seconds before a smile slowly started to appear on my face.

"Alright, let's kick ass! Despite their obvious lean towards helping the other kid." I declared to myself as I began to look over the list of licenses I had.

I grabbed the licence that I had chosen as the frame of the ship and pulled it up. I was about to grab the next licence and start fitting them all together when I noticed something wrong with the frame. I mentally zoomed in on the issue and noticed the frame was just slightly bent near the section that the rear thruster would be. Frowning, I started to straighten it. However, as I did, one side became longer than the other, causing me to have to start compensating. After a few minutes of trying to fix the issue only for new problems to pop up as I fixed one, I decided to scrap the entire idea and turned back to looking at the frame as a whole.

"shit, this thing was never designed to actually work." I muttered to myself as my frown deepened.

After a few minutes of studying the design, I tossed it in the trash bin icon. However, I did keep a sample of the material it was made from and began to design my own frame that I could use to build the ship I had in mind. It took me an hour, but when I was done with the frame, it looked like the one I had initially wanted but could not afford. This had forced me to settle for what turned out to be a wreck of a frame. I smiled as I thought about how my design looked smug, sleek, and sexy, ready to take some serious levels of strain. I quickly saved the frame in a new folder, I named My Blueprints and stored it under my licences tab for quick access in the future.

Letting the smile slip from my face as I turned ready to get back to work, but the next licence I pulled to add to the frame caused me to frown again. I noticed it also had slight issues that would allow it to work in the short term and could be easily swapped out by a mechanic doing maintenance work. However, it would still present major issues with prolonged use and certainly wouldn't be able to handle the strain I needed it for. After letting out a loud sigh of annoyance, I quickly took samples to make sure I was building this bit out of the correct material for the job and got to work redesigning it.

I smugly smiled to myself almost an hour later when I was done designing it and saving a copy of the design to my blueprints folder, I added it to the frame. However, as I opened the next licence and quickly noticed that these damn things seemed to have a pattern of being broken, I resigned myself to having to design the entire ship from frame up. I abandoned the use of the licences almost completely. I could still use them as samples, after all.

It was hours later, and I was sitting on the floor exhausted and needing a break, but I had a huge grin on my face. I had managed to complete half the ship, all I needed was life support systems, that one was tricky, I wanted to use something new that came with features. Lastly, I needed to design a frame that would slice through the air instead of being buffeted by it.

I was just thinking about getting up, saving this and logging out so I could go find something to drink when a metal cylinder gently collided with the side of my head. I snapped my head around to stare at a metal cylinder with a small glass window in the side and a water bottle cap on top. A moment later, I looked up past the bottle to see Liu Runchu standing over me as he offered the bottle to me.

"Drink the water, you have been at this for almost half a day." He said gently.

I slowly reached up and took the water bottle as I frowned at him, trying to work out why he cared or why he was even here offering me water in the first place. It was a few moments later that the thought he was spying on my work occurred to me.

"Thank you for the water…" I said slowly as I watched his face for any sign of malice, but his eyes shifted from me to the design on the blueprint table.

"These are pretty good Licences you have here, I think they are Elder Wang Jun's designs." He said as he looked over the list then to the ship partially built in the centre of the table before he frowned. "But the ship looks wrong for these licences to have been used."

"That's because the licences are shit" I stated flatly, watching him spin around to stare at me wide-eyed, his cheeks slowly filling with a red tinge of anger.

"You better explain yourself carefully and plainly before I am forced to take offence at your statement!" He tried to say calmly, but I could hear the underlying fury in his voice.

I let out a sigh of resignation as I got to my feet. I took a swig of water from the bottle and carefully put it down on a section of the table that wasn't really used by the blueprints. I mentally saved my work, so I wouldn't accidentally lose it. Then I opened a new design table and pulled the frame from the licence and turned to look at him.

"What's wrong with it?" I asked simply.

I watched him slowly look over it and couldn't resist the slight smile of happiness that he was taking me seriously. But the smile vanished when he looked over the bend in the frame near the thrusters section and moved on past it. I waited patiently for him to finish his search, he turned to look at me with a small shrug.

"I don't see a problem." He said as he looked at me expectantly.

I mentally grabbed the frame and zoomed in on the bend again, showing it to him. "What happens when this hits the atmosphere using the thruster I have? I asked.

I watched him turn to look at it, at first he seemed to not get it, but after a few moments I could see on his face he was doing the math. A few moments later, his face drained of colour before he whispered, "oh, shit." Then he turned to me with a look of worry on his face.

"The frame would warp and bend if the ship did not enter at the specified angle inside the recommended speed limits… the added bend in the frame would cause the thruster to turn, and the ship would explode, killing the pilot and sending a ball of fire and shrapnel across the area… This is really bad!"

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