Rebuilding Science in a Magic World
Author: Tyranomaster
Date: 2025-01-06T05:46:54.039000+00:00

[Vol-2] Ch.1 Goblin Village

I'm just standing here taking in the fact that the remaining three goblins are groveling on the ground before me. Of course, that's thanks to the leader goblin pushing them down. Although it seems like they've stopped fighting it now. Oh, the leader is tilting his head up.

"Derin zerb-zernak." The goblin leader says.

"Uhhh. I don't understand." I reply. My voice has a deep gravelly tone to it now, and I'm slightly surprised by my own voice.

"Derin zaka." The goblin leader says while tilting his head further up.

I've got no clue what it's saying. I take a step forward. The goblin faces the ground again.

"Naka. Naka!" The goblin leader yells.

I still have absolutely no idea what's going on. Well, I've got two options here. First, just kill them. Second, try to work through what is going on, and spare them. The goblin leader seems pretty scared. Well, I did bring some dried imp meat up with me to eat later. I slowly back into my doorway, and grab the meat, and toss it over to the goblins.

"Goru den." The goblin says, looking up to me, then the food.

I step back a little and watch them. After a minute or so, the goblin gives it a taste, and after determining that it's edible, he splits it with the other goblins, and all three rapidly eat all of it. I don't want to drop my weapon or anything, but I'll sit down at least to appear less threatening. We both just sit and look at each other for a while. After a few minutes, the goblin leader goes to stand up, so I do as well.

He takes a hesitant step towards the inside of the cave, so I step back towards it as well. Eventually, I'm standing in the opening I made in my wall, and he's only a few steps ahead of me. I hold my spear towards him, and he stops moving again.

He points past me and says, "Naka doru."

Of course, I have no idea what that means, so I just shake my head no, and gesture with the spear towards him. He takes a few steps back, and I wait for a little bit. We both stand there, and then he eventually points at me, and then towards the outside.

"Deru den-unar gora." He says, pointing to me, then him, then outside.

I look at him for a while, before stepping forward a little. He and his goblins walk out of the cave, and then stand even further out from the entrance. I close the opening behind me before eventually following them out. I'm doubtful that they'd ambush me given their behavior, but just in case, I'm carefully treading forward. When I make it out of the cave, the goblin points again to me and him, and then down the mountainside.

The goblins lead the way down the mountainside. Initially the path we follow is similar to the way I've headed down in the past to where I harvested the Lion Root, but after a short while we start heading in a different direction. The whole process is kind of surreal considering a bit ago I intended to kill them if I could.

The trip is taking a long time. We keep heading further and further down the mountainside, and the biomes continue shifting. The alpine gives way to a more mild temperate forest, then even further down, we enter a rainforest. The slope of the terrain has been steadily decreasing this whole time, and now we're barely even headed down hill. I hope we're getting close to wherever we're headed.

Evidently, we weren't that close because we've been traveling for hours now. Although more than half of that was the initial descent to the lower altitudes. Now the majority of the time is actually navigating the rainforest, with its thick underbrush. I was initially a little worried about wildlife, but I haven't seen much. Maybe it's because we're making a lot of noise? Either way, I'm happy that for the most part, all I've heard have been either small animals or birds.

Soon, we come across a stream running through the forest, and the goblins begin following it, with me close behind. At this point, I'm quite a ways from home, and I don't think I'll be going back up by tonight considering how long we've been traveling. As I'm thinking that the goblins stop.

The head goblin yells out, "Goru dekata! Goru dekata derin!"

I still have no idea what he's saying, but he steps forward with the other goblins through the underbrush, so I follow him. We've entered a clearing in the forest. As I look around, from underneath piles of branches, some goblins scramble out. As I'm looking about, one of the goblins we travelled with goes over to one of the piles of branches and goes into it.

The rest of the goblins all come up to the head goblin, and keep nervously looking at me as they stand around. Once it seems like no more goblins are coming, the head goblin begins talking again. As he talks, I start counting the goblins. Twenty two in total, not counting the one that went into a brush pile. I pretty much tune out what the head goblin says at this point, as none of it makes much sense to me, but he gestures to me throughout his speech a few times, and the goblins look at me then back to him. It makes me a little nervous, so I re-adjust my grip on my spear, just in case.

After he stops his speech, the other goblins all kneel down before me, which at this point is making me feel very self conscious. After a few moments, they all get back up, and go back to their brush piles and crawl in. The head goblin leads me over to a slightly larger one, and puffs his chest out, and points into it before crawling in. I clearly won't fit in, but I can at least peek down in. I put my head down through where the goblin crawled in.

On the inside, it at least looks more well maintained than the outside appears. It's actually deeper than the brush pile would make you think, as he's dug down into the floor, and cleaned up the ceiling of any errant branches or leaves, so it somewhat resembles a small room. Although there isn't much other than a leaf pile that I presume is his bed.

After I pull my head back out, I stand for a bit before the head goblin comes out of his presumable home. A few goblins are nervously peeking out from their own homes while I stand there. I mean, they honestly have a good reason to be terrified of me, I did eviscerate a goblin only a few hours ago, and my mana is fully recharged, so I could do it again, but I'd probably fall to their numbers if they all tried to fight me. I don't intend to fight if I don't have to though.

When the head goblin comes back out, he yells out, "Peku denden!"

All the goblins come back out of their homes, and start getting into groups. Once they do, they all head out in different directions out into the rainforest. The head goblin gives me a toothy grin, and waves for me to follow him, and we head out into the forest.

As it turns out, we're hunting for food apparently. Meat food. I'm completely unfamiliar with the wildlife, so I'm basically useless when it comes to hunting down here. The head goblin shows off his fireball skill a few times, taking down birds from up on branches. I carry them as he continues about his hunting. At one point we actually come out onto a beach, and walk along the forest line. I'm intrigued by what I presume is the ocean nearby, but I follow the goblin close to the tree line instead of investigating. If he's avoiding the water, there might be a good reason for it.

After gathering a few birds, we start heading back the way we came, and I'm lucky enough that a somewhat large bird runs out from a bush as we move through it. I miss with my spear, but as it tries to run behind me, quick reflexes result in a successful earth spike impaling it. Of course, a lot of the body has been brutally destroyed by the spike, but some of it is salvageable at least. I gather what I can as we return to the clearing in the forest.

When we get back, I see around half the goblins from before are standing around a dark spot on the ground, and some have piled loose wood into the spot. On the ground nearby there are a few birds and a small lizard. The head goblin goes up to the pile and uses a fireball to start a fire on the wood, and the goblins begin skewering their kills, and some of ours, and start cooking. Well, at least I'll seemingly have something for dinner tonight.

[Vol-2] Ch.2 A Cold Muddy Night

After a little while, all the birds and the lizard are cooked, and all the goblins take a small share of the food. Between everyone, there honestly isn't much food. In fact, on closer inspection, it looks like most of the goblins are malnourished. Actually, considering how they've been getting a few goblins every time they went to the cave, I was honestly expecting more goblins here. I've got a bad feeling about the situation here.

As evening begins turning to night, the goblins all retire to their huts, and their leader gestures for me to join him in his hut, but I decline. I don't fit after all. Looks like I'll be roughing it tonight. I give a shot at stone shaping on the soil, but have pretty dismal results. I'm able to form small beads of stone from dirt, but it leaves a grimy sludge behind. Well, soil is less than half mineral, so I suppose pulling the minerals out would result in this.

As a result, I guess I'll just be sleeping on the ground. I toss and turn for a while before starting to finally feel tired enough to fall asleep, but then, just as I'm falling asleep, it starts to rain, waking me back up. Its not a heavy rain, but it upsets me nonetheless. If I'm going to be up anyway, I may as well take the opportunity to look around a little bit, even if it's fairly dark under the cloud cover.

The goblin village is all situated on one side of the stream running through the clearing here. The stream itself is fairly shallow, only a foot or so deep with a rocky bottom, and only about five feet wide. It also is already almost running over its normal channel. There is a gentle slope on either side of the stream, leading up about two feet over twenty or so feet. The goblin huts are scattered about in the clearing with between five and ten feet between each hut. All of the huts are built above the slope down to the stream as well. Gauging from the stream right now, I'm guessing that is on purpose. I have a feeling that between winter melt and rain, the stream runs over onto its slope quite often.

As I look at the goblin huts, I'm actually fairly surprised that they do seem to be doing a good job of keeping the water out of the hut. Of course, checking this scared a goblin half to death as I peeked in to see inside. From the outside they really do just look like brush piles, but it seems that more care went into how they're made than I initially gave them credit for.

It seems like they dig a pit down to the rock layer, about three feet down, and then build their roof over that. Well, its good to know that there are rocks fairly close here. Just for good measure, I ping a few times with tectonic sense, and sure enough, it seems like a fairly steady layer of rock throughout the area. I wouldn't mind digging a pit of my own just to get to the rock to work with, but considering the rain, it'll just fill with water and become useless to me.

Despite the rain, I'm finding myself tired enough that I can probably fall asleep under a tree on the edge of the clearing now. I curl up under the tree and close my eyes, and let sleep overtake me.

When I wake up, my body feels very cold and achy. Looking around at all the mud, it seems like it rained for quite a while yesterday. I check my stats for good measure.

<LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 5
HP: 852/911
MP: 303/303
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation
Magic: Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Earth Spike

I guess being excessively cold could actually kill if I'm not careful. I suppose I shouldn't be that surprised though, I've lost hp to mild poisons before as well. As I wake up and look around, it looks like a few of the goblins are out and about. A few are drinking from the stream, which is closer to a river right now, running a foot higher than before. The remaining goblins are gathering into groups.

The ground is fairly muddy as I walk about, and honestly, I'm in a pretty bad mood given my sleeping conditions last night. I'm not upset with the goblins though, I mean, I was offered to go into a hut, even if I couldn't really fit, and it's not like they knew I'd be coming to their village. Which means I guess I should build myself at least some form of cover for the night. Although again, I'd like to just go back to my cave, but I think I'll need to be guided back there, and right now, I can't really communicate effectively with the goblins.

Luckily, I have my Earth Manipulation trait, which gave me my shovel shaped claws, so I can easily shovel through the mud down to the rock layer. First though, I should actually decide where I want to dig. I decide on a location at the far edge of the village, towards the mountain. I don't want to intrude on anyone's potential claims they might have, so I give myself plenty of space, and begin shoveling mud.

Unsurprisingly, I dig through the mud quite quickly, and start building up a pile of mud a little ways away. As I dig, quite a few goblins come over and watch, and they seem impressed by my digging ability. Before long though, the leader goblin directs everyone to go out and hunt. He comes over to see what I'm doing after the crowd clears, and stands on the edge in silence for a bit before turning and heading off into the forest himself.

While I keep digging, I soon hear the sound of leaves and sticks being dragged, and look out from my hole to see the leader goblin dragging foliage over to my hole. I climb out of my hole, and attempt to stop him. The attempt at communication doesn't go all that well, and it takes a few minutes before he seems to get the gist of me not wanting help with this. Exasperated, he shrugs and leaves the foliage on the ground, and heads back out into the forest.

I shrug and head back into the hole to dig. After a few hours, I've cleared a decently large hole down to the stone layer, and have a large dirt pile nearby. Well, if there was one good thing about the foliage he brought, is at least some of it can probably be used to make a weight and string like what I used up on the mountain to make vertical walls. I quickly assemble my tool, and begin using stone shaping to slowly build up walls on the inside of my pit. As I take from the bottom to build up the edges, I realize that it is going to take a little while this time to accomplish this task. Normally I'd be able to get these walls built in a few hours, but that is only due to the help from all my mana crystals replenishing my mana reserves. So I'm going to have to get creative with the construction.

When I have infinite mana, I'd normally just use stone shaping to move everything while I craft. I think that it will be more efficient though, if I cut brick like blocks out with stone shape, then basically weld them together again where I want them, manually moving them in between.

I give it a go, and unsurprisingly, it does conserve quite a lot of mana. An additional benefit is that as I move and align the bricks, I'm regenerating mana, so I won't have to stop as often. Although I'm still operating at a mana deficit, so I will still have to take breaks as I work.

After an hour and a half, I've gotten about half of the pit surrounded with wall all the way up, and a crude stairwell beginning on one wall. I realized as I worked, that since I'm cutting into the ground for building material, I should start purposefully leaving material for stairs in the wall so that I don't trap myself. I've also just ran out of mana, so now is a good time to take a break from this.

I climb out from my pit, and decide that the first thing I should do is fill in the gaps on the two completed walls. Now that I have vertical walls there, the sloped nature of the pit has resulted in a gap that I want to refill.

As I refill the gap, some of the goblins come back carrying small game again. They set their catches near where the fire was yesterday, and turn back around and head out into the forest again immediately. I'm a little disappointed they didn't come check out my pit right away, but that's fine. As other goblins come back, they each turn around to head back out, so I decide to follow a trio of them for a little while. They seem pretty nervous with me following them, but there isn't really anything I can do about that. They keep whispering to each other, and sneaking glances back at me.

After a little bit, they find a downed tree, and begin breaking off bits of wood. Once they've gotten as much as they can carry, they turn to leave. I call out, "Hey wait a moment, I'll help."

All three drop their wood and turn to face me with terrified expressions on their faces. Not exactly what I was hoping for, but it did the job. As they watch me in fear, I break off some bigger pieces of wood, and then walk past them. Then turn to face them. They stand there for a little while, before one says something to the others, and they each pick up the wood they dropped, and we head back to the camp.

[Vol-2] Ch.3 Hunting Party

When we get back to the camp, it seems like the fire has already been started, so we put our wood down nearby as people cook. Quite a few goblins are also huddled around where I was working. I make my way over and the goblins near my pit make way for me to go through them. It doesn't look like they've done anything other than look, so I climb back down into the pit, and begin working again since my mana is refilled. As I cut blocks out of the stone, I hear the goblins start whispering to each other, and I look up as I see a few pointing at the blocks of stone.

I shrug and keep working, moving the blocks over, and melding them into the wall. After a little while, the goblins start leaving one by one to get food, and the leader goblin comes over and brings me some food. He watched for a little while as I worked before interrupting me to give me the food, which consisted of a very meager portion of meat. I'm really starting to miss my cave.

I keep working, and after another hour and a half, the pit has four walls and a stairwell, and I need more mana. Eventually, this will be a basement, but for now, it's just an open pit. If I had to guess, it measures about 10 feet by 10 feet. The size of a small room. Right now the basement floor is uneven, due to the blocks I'm cutting out of it, but it's about four feet deep. By the time I'm done cutting all the stone to build a building, it'll be at least 6 feet deep. For today though, I just want to close the ceiling off in the pit so that it doesn't fill with water when it rains next.

As I take my break, I observe that a lot of the goblins are just milling about and talking to each other. Ever since I've come here, I've been working almost nonstop, so it's surprising to see others just milling about and not working. Like, if they went and got wood now, they wouldn't need to go back out later. They also don't seem to use any weapons of any kind. Honestly, it's probably for the best I can't understand their language, otherwise I'd be trying to micromanage them like crazy.

With that in mind, I fully intend to keep working rather than just lazing around. I think I can probably find that downed tree again myself, so I might as well go get a load of wood to haul back.

As I make my way to that tree, another ground bird runs off from nearby. With my mana empty and my spear in the village, I barely even get a chance to swing my claws before it's long gone and running off into the underbrush. Too bad I suppose. I really would have liked some more food. I'll have to settle for hauling the wood I came here for initially.

When I make it back to the goblin village, a few goblins look over with some confused faces as I drop the wood off at the fire. I'm really starting to feel the hunger though, so I think tonight I'll be sure to go hunting as long as I can finish covering up the basement roof. I am getting a little frustrated that I'm even building this though. I'd much prefer to be back up in my cave, and I feel like maybe I should just head out and attempt to go back, but I also don't want to make a sudden enemy of the goblins. I'm not sure what they even think of me in this situation. If I can get them to guide me back to the cave, that would be good. They have had a habit of periodically returning to the cave, so hopefully at the point they return, I can just go with them.

I continue working on the basement, adding a central support pillar, then slowly extending supporting arch shaped beams to the walls, then filling in the spaces between the beams with thick stone. I definitely don't want any collapses to occur. I make sure to leave the space above the stairs open as well. At this point, I'm glad my natural posture has a hunch, because the ceiling in the basement is pretty low. Eventually it'll be higher as I continue harvesting stone from the floor to build though.

With the ceiling mostly completed, I'm again out of mana, and it's getting to the evening. It seems like a few of the goblin groups have already set out to hunt, so I might as well join them to hunt. The leader goblin comes over to try to get me to go hunting with him, but I think I'd rather join a different group if I can. Mostly, I'm interested in how the other goblins hunt. I've already seen the leader use fireballs to roast birds.

Initially he keeps trying to get me to go with him, but I persistently follow the group I followed for wood earlier in the day, and he eventually splits off on his own. I hope I didn't hurt his feelings or anything, but I am curious to see how the other goblins operate.

My initial impression is quite low. They basically just try to run down or sneak up on small animals. Which probably explains their low success rate. After watching them fail to catch a small bird for the third time, I stop them. They seem a little wary of me, but I guess my actions from earlier with the wood have at least made them less terrified of me.

I grab a few nearby pebbles on the ground, and use magic to etch a 1, 2, 3, and 4 on them. Then I point to the 1, and myself, and set it on the ground. Then I repeat for 2 through 4 to each of the goblins. I lift the pebble up, and put it down, then I deliberately do a light jump. I point to 2, and do the same, and go through each to ensure they get the idea that the pebble represents them. Then I spread their pebbles out a ways away in a fan, and move them in towards me.

I have no idea if they understand what I'm saying, but I'm basically trying to convince them to go out, and drive animals towards me.

Initially they just kind of go a short distance away and move towards me. Which, while I'm glad they get roughly what I meant, I guess I need to try harder with this. I move their pebbles all to one side, then move them out as far as I moved them before. Then I wait a moment, and grab all three again, and physically walk them a short distance away, then fan them back out. I wait again, then begin sliding them all in towards me.

I'm not quite sure that they got it, but after a moment, they group up, and walk off in a direction together. I stay where I'm at, and when they don't come back immediately, I decide the only thing I can do is wait a while to see if they understood or not. I grip my spear, and try my best to hide myself somewhat as I wait.

After a few minutes, I hear some rustling, and I ready myself. Out from the underbrush a little ways to my side, I catch sight of one of the ground birds running past. Dang. It's a little too far for me to do anything about. So I continue waiting and listening. More rustling. A second ground bird runs out near enough to me to attack. I stab into it with my spear. It cries out, and begins flapping it's wings while impaled on my spear. It doesn't get free, but I miss a third bird run past as I struggle to keep this bird pinned. After a few moments, one of the goblins comes out of the brush, followed shortly by the other two.

They see the ground bird pinned on my spear and look genuinely elated... and hungry. As am I for that matter. The ground bird, when not split by an earth spike is actually kind of large. Somewhere between a turkey and a chicken in size. Which means that hopefully, it's a good meal.

I let the goblins carry the bird back, and they seem even more excited than before. Before we go though, one of the goblins goes over to the pebbles from before and goes to pick one up before stopping and looking at me. It seems like it wants the pebble that I used to represent it from before. Well, honestly, I was just going to leave the pebbles here, and the other goblins don't seem interested. I pick up all four pebbles, and the goblin looks a little saddened. I then reach out and present them to it. It looks up at me, and back to my open hand, and grabs the number three, which I used to represent him. I nudge my hand forward to it looks up at me before grabbing the other stones.

As the goblins and I return to the village, the three goblins in my group all have very happy faces on. I'm glad for them. More than that though, I'm hungry, so I'm very happy when the leader goblin comes over to start the cooking fire. He seems impressed by the ground bird kill as well. He talks for a while with the three goblins I went out with, and then he watches as the goblin I gave the pebbles to shows him what I showed him. He seems genuinely interested and talks for a while. The goblin conversation is interrupted when the food is done. It's actually quite the haul this time, as the leader goblin also caught a ground bird, in addition to other very small game that some of the other goblins caught.

For the time being, everyone just sits down and enjoys the feast before them, myself included.

[Vol-2] Ch.4 Hieroglyphs

As we finish eating, I notice that there are dark looking clouds forming, and while the basement is mostly closed off, the stairwell down is exposed if it starts to rain. It seems like the leader goblin wants to talk with me, but I really need to work to get some temporary cover over my stairs. He follows me over to my pit but waits outside as I go down the stairs. For right now, I just want to get cover up, so I cut thin sheets of stone out to build a simple roof over the stairs, just enough to keep the water out.

When I come back up, the leader goblin is still waiting there patiently, so I set the sheets over the stairs to keep rain out and turn to the goblin. He looks at me before uncurling both of his hands. In one hand he has the pebbles that I gave to that other goblin. In the other hand he has a second set of pebbles that haven't been marked. He holds his hand out with the unlabeled pebbles and gestures for me to take them.

I do so, and look back at him. He pokes one of the labelled pebbles on an unlabeled pebble. I guess he wants me to duplicate it, so I do so. Then I make a duplicate of each of the pebbles. He then seemingly wants the pebbles back, so I give them to him. He looks them over, before giving me a nod, and going back to his hut. Whatever that was, I guess I'll find out. I do hope he gives back the original pebbles to the other goblin though.

Not long after, it starts raining again. All the goblins go into their huts, and I climb down into my basement and close it off. I'm missing my cave even more now, because it is pitch black in here. Without crystals lighting the walls, I'm almost as good as blind. At least that isn't the worst thing in the world, I do have tectonic sense to figure out where I am in the dark, and I'm out of the rain. I'm not quite ready to sleep yet, so I may as well use my mana up. I use tectonic sense to find where I was cutting from the floor before, and start using stone shaping to cut out blocks for construction tomorrow.

The next morning I'm glad to see that both my hp has refilled, and I'm not sleeping in water. I use tectonic sense to figure out where exactly in the room I am before slowly making my way up the stairs. I'm disappointed to see that it is still lightly raining as I leave the basement, so I place the cover back over the stairs as I leave. It's still early morning, and there are only a few goblins over at the stream drinking water. The stream is also quite full again today.

It doesn't seem like the goblins want to go and do much yet, so I head back to my basement, and haul the blocks I cut last night up and out from the basement. When I'm done, all the goblins seem to be taking shelter from the rain in their huts, so I go back down into my basement to use my mana cutting blocks out. Honestly, in a few days I should have the upstairs finished if I keep up at this pace. That said, a stone door is going to be quite heavy, but making a wood door is more of a hassle than it would be worth.

As I'm carrying the new set of blocks up, the leader goblin approaches me again. I finish hauling the blocks up, as he patiently waits in the rain. He waves me over towards his hut, so I follow him. Again, I can't really get in to the hut, but I can at least stick my head in to see what he wants to show me. When I do stick my head in, he seems to be fiddling around with some rocks he's piled up. He brings over a few flat rocks, and shows them to me. On them, it seems like he's scratched something on the surface.

One looks like a crude drawing of a man. He points to it, then himself, then says, "Ruddaka."

I'm not entirely sure if he means he's called Ruddaka, or if goblins are called ruddaka, but he looks at me expectantly, so I'm going to just guess he means the general form, and I say, "Goblin."

He looks somewhat delighted, and pulls the next one out, which looks like a long stick. He gestures for me to move back, so make room, and he goes over to my pit, and points down to the basement, so we go down, and he points at my spear, "Akkalah-rah."

"Spear," I reply.

He seems delighted that he's able to communicate to some degree, but I'm still not particularly interested in learning another language. He hurries me back to his hut where he shows me a third stone with a crude circle. "Mukuku," he says.

I stare for a while, and I can't figure out what it is. I shake my head, and don't say anything.

He looks at it and me, and seems a little disappointed as he puts that stone down. Then he picks up the spear stone again, and points to me. "Akkalah-rah, derin zoru."

Something with the spear. Ok. He shoos me outside, and then leads me over to the forest edge. We start walking along until he finds what he is looking for. He finds a long stick that is fairly straight. Then drags me back over to my basement, "Akkalah-rah, derin zoru." He repeats and hands me the stick.

Is he telling me to make a spear? I mean, I don't have everything I used to make one before, but I should have enough mana to make a knife to start working on it. I make a stone knife that I can use to work on the stick, and start working on the stick in the light rain. The leader goblin just sits there and watches me as I work on cleaning up the stick, carving a handle, and making a hole near the top of the stick to attach the spearhead on. When my mana is nearly full, I've completed enough of the spear to attach the spearhead using stone shape, so I go ahead an make the spearhead, and start whittling the wood some more.

The goblin gestures to hand him the spear, so I hand it to him. He holds it and moves it around in his hands, then he gestures for the knife I've been using, and tries his own hand at whittling... Which imminently results in him holding the spear and shaving wood towards his hand, and cutting himself. Well, I suppose he'll probably learn how to handle it better soon. I go over and try to show him how to properly hold the spear to work on it, while he nurses his wound on his hand. After a little while, I think I've shown him all I can, so I give him the spear and knife again. He takes both and goes back to his hut.

I'm honestly starting to feel quite hungry at this point, but it seems like no one wants to go hunt in the rain, and I don't really want to go hunting myself, considering I don't have anywhere to cook. Instead I'll just work on my house as best I can. I start laying the blocks around the edges to become inevitable walls, and then stone weld them to the floor. For good measure, I also extend the central pillar from the basement up further into the new room. Eventually, I'll need to support a roof, which invariably will be made of stone, so the support pillar should help with that.

When I'm out of mana, I look about in the light rain, and there doesn't seem like there is much to do, so I decide to go check on the leader goblin. When I peek in, it seems like he's mostly finished with the spear, and also looks like he's cut himself at least one additional time. I'm sure he'll get used to it eventually. He was facing away from the entrance to his hut, but turns to face me as he puts the spear down. He seems to be thinking about something, and then says in a slightly different tone than normal, "Akkalah-rah, derin zoru baan."

Well, it seems like the first bit means I should make a spear. What he means with the extra bit could be anything, but I have a feeling I'll find out soon enough, because he's standing up right now.

Sure enough he leads me back to the forest, and begins looking for sticks again. We look together for a while, and we find three sticks that are good enough to make a spear out of, and we head back to the camp. I have a feeling that he's asking me to make more spears, and although it will probably help the goblins with hunting, it takes quite a bit of time, and uses a bit of my limited supply of mana to do as well.

When we get back, he takes the sticks back to his hut, so I hope that means he only wants me to make the spearheads, but I guess time will tell. For now, a decent chunk of my mana has refreshed, so I start work on my house again.

[Vol-2] Ch.5 Predator or Prey

Not long after I resume working on my house, the rain subsides for a little bit. Almost as soon as it does, all the goblins come out from their huts and seem eager to go hunting. I myself am somewhat hungry, so I'm ready to go hunting as well. I still have a half full mana pool, but food comes first.

As I get my stuff ready to go hunting, the three goblins from before seem excited to go hunt with me again, and are making their way over to my house, when the leader goblin stops them. He gives the set of stones back to the goblin that he borrowed them from, and then also gives them the spear that he worked on. Before they leave, he also calls a fourth goblin over from a different group, and before long, the group of three now four goblins set out with a spear in hand. The leader goblin then goes over to the two goblins that are left alone without their compatriot, and after some communication, seems to convince them of something, before rushing off to another group of three goblins getting ready to go hunt. When he gets up to them, he points to me, hands them something, and then the new group starts walking towards me.

The leader goblin then rushes back over to the two lone goblins, and all three of them head off into the woods, leaving me with a new group of goblins. One of them opens their palm, revealing they've been handed the second set of numbered stones that I made. My guess is that the leader goblin wants me to try to teach them how we hunted yesterday. Which honestly, isn't a bad idea. If the goblins all get good at hunting, then I can probably just mooch food off them in exchange for making weapons.

I go through the whole explanation on how to drive game, like I did with the first set of goblins. These ones are a little slower on the uptake than the first group was, but eventually they figure out what I'm asking for, and we go out into the woods, and put it into practice. I wish I could say we were as successful as the first group was yesterday, but sadly, we didn't get any ground birds this time. I did get a few small lizards though as the first goblin returned, so we weren't entirely empty handed.

Thankfully when we return, the other group that was given a spear seems to have killed a ground bird, and the leader's group caught a bunch of small birds and lizards, so we have a decent meal tonight again. Not as much of a feast as the night before, but still a pretty good meal.

With a bit of sunlight left, I continue working on my house for a while, and honestly, it's coming along pretty well. I've gotten the walls up to the point where I've started to make windows in them. Which initially, I wasn't going to do, but I decided it would be good to let in natural light. They're basically just going to be an open hole with cross bars, and then I'll make some shutters that I can swing shut on the outside for when it rains. I'm also waiting until I have the roof and door done before I make any furniture for the place. Which means tonight I'm once again sleeping on the hard rock floor in the basement.

After I wake up, I cut some new blocks in the basement before I head outside, and when I actually leave my basement, I'm greeted by the chief with what seems to be a completed spear handle, just waiting for me to attach a spearhead to. I'm currently out of mana, so I'm not sure how exactly to let him know that I'm unable to make this right now, but I take it, and lean it against one of the walls, and after I start moving blocks from the basement, he seems satisfied to wait for a little bit for me to finish what I'm doing. Which hopefully will give me enough time to recharge the mana to make the spearhead.

I'm starting to get annoyed by how much rain there is here as well. Maybe it's because I was comfortable in the cave where I didn't have to deal with weather almost ever. In fact, this weather is making me look forward to returning to the cave even more. That said, I've grown fond of some of the goblins here, so I wouldn't want to cut ties completely either.

Either way, when I've finished hauling up the stone blocks from the basement, I use one of the blocks to make the spearhead out of. I just barely have enough mana to make it, but the goblin seems pleased and heads back to his hut. I'm left with no mana again though, and nothing to do while it rains, so I decide to go look for sticks to make spears with for a while. I imagine that the goblins probably want to arm everyone with spears, so using this down time to get the jump on that will probably help me long term.

After an hour or so of searching, I've gotten two more sticks that will make good spears, and I store them in my basement to dry out before making another woodworking knife. I still have quite a bit of mana left after making the knife, so I resume working on my house afterwards.

When my mana runs out this time, I'm almost at the point where I'll need to start considering how I want the roof to be shaped, which means I should start deciding how I want to cut the blocks for it. I'll also need to cut out some blocks to stand on while I work, since I'm already reaching just to slide the blocks into place. As I'm considering my options, the rain lets up again, and for once, it seems like the cloud cover is going to clear as well.

As I'm appreciating the weather, some goblins leave their huts and seem to be gathering into groups, most likely to go hunting again. It seems once again, I'm going to be shipped off with a new group of goblins as well, and the new spear goes with one of the two groups who have been taught so far how to drive game.

The new group has even more trouble communicating than the first two did when it comes to explaining how to drive game towards the person with a spear, so we're still in the village nearly thirty minutes after the first groups have left, and we're the only ones here right now. It is also getting unnaturally dark. I look up, and notice that from behind the clearing clouds, it looks like an eclipse is starting, with one sun completely obscured, and the larger one partially obscured. I don't even have very long notice the eclipse before a goblin wielding a spear dashes out from the forest in a frantic sprint.

Before I have time to fully process what I'm seeing, right behind him stampedes out a large lizard similar to the one I crushed in the cave. This one seems angry, and has blood smeared all around its mouth. I have a bad feeling about this one. The goblin turns towards us, and runs over in our direction, with the lizard in close pursuit. The other goblins near me turn tail and start running as well. I barely have any mana to work with as well, so I won't be able to use earth spike. At least not for a little while.

Considering the lizard hasn't actually caught the goblin yet, it seems like they actually aren't that fast, although all it takes is one wrong move, and it's game over. The goblin has almost arrived at me now, so I need to decide what to do. Do I run, or do I fight? I can at least try to fight I suppose. If the spear breaks, I'm confident that I can at outrun the lizard, because I'm confident I can outrun a goblin. The biggest concern will be initially seeing how easily it can maneuver itself, but I'm hoping that given its size, it won't be that dexterous.

As the goblin approaches, I begin to run sideways, gripping my spear. The goblin runs past, and I run towards the side of the lizard. Last minute it seems to take notice of me, and starts to turn, but its momentum carries it too far for its mouth to reach me as I stab into its side once. I draw some blood, and have to yank my spear out and dive to the left as it tries to side swipe me with its tail as it continues running past me.

The lizard slows to a stop and faces me, before letting out a low, rumbling hiss and goes to charge at me again, but runs slower this time. Considering that it is still bleeding, I run away from it, trying to get some space between it and me. I want it to know that I'm faster than it, so it will have to run all out if it wants to try to catch me. All the while letting blood loss continue to weaken it.

After I've put some distance between us, I turn to face it again. It's still charging towards me, which means I only have a few seconds to think. I need to get some more wounds in it, otherwise I very well might be the one to tire before it does. I have an idea to try, but it will probably only work once.

I dash over to one of the goblin huts. I can see over the top of the brush pile, and the lizard can see me over it as well. Honestly, this will be pretty useful. It's practically a premade pitfall trap. I'll have to apologize to whatever poor goblin's home is going to be crushed like this later. The lizard continues charging at me as I move behind the pile. As the lizard gets to the other side of the pile, it opens its mouth as if to go for a bite. Until its right leg goes straight through the "roof" of the goblin hut.

It's not enough to bury the lizard, but it's enough that the lizard falls in, and is momentarily stunned as its head rams partially into the dirt of the far wall of the hut. Not to let the opportunity go to waste, I make a few quick stabs in the lizards neck before retreating backwards again. The lizard lets out another hissing roar, but the tail end of the roar sounds a bit weaker than before. The lizard clambers out of the hole, and begins violently thrashing the nearby area, smashing all the foliage of the goblin's roof before charging me full speed.

It seems to know its time is limited now, and it's in its death throes. I hastily retreat again. A hero from old folklore would slay the beast at a time like this, but that is too dangerous for my liking. I can just as easily tire it out and let the wounds I've inflicted make it too weak to fight, and finish it. I kite it for a few minutes, resulting in a few goblin roofs being demolished, but the lizard finally seems to tire too much to fight, and stumbles and falls, unable to lift its own weight.

I approach it cautiously, and give it a hard stab in its torso to ensure it is dead.

<LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 12
HP: 981/981
MP: 55/334
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation
Magic: Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Earth Spike

[Vol-2] Ch.6 Search and Rescue

Not long after I'm certain the lizard is dead, the goblin that was being chased before makes its way over to me, along with the goblins I was supposed to go hunting with. It takes a little bit of convincing, but I manage to get the goblins to help me drag the lizard out of the pit that used to be a goblin hut. Unfortunately, the only knives I have on hand are the spear head and the wood whittling knife, and my mana is very low still, so dressing the lizard into edible bits is going to take some time. I'll also need skewers to put the meat on when its cut.

I go looking for some sticks in the forest that will work, and quickly return to the goblins and lizard. The goblins are poking the lizard, seemingly unsure if it is going to actually get back up and attack. I shave a few sticks down, and then do my best to convince the goblins to go find more sticks so that we can properly cook the meat. While they go looking, I start work at carving up the lizard as best I can using the spear and wood carving knife.

After working for a bit, I check my mana, only to see that it has charged up much less than I expected, and its getting quite dark now as the second sun now also falls behind the moon. Shortly there-after, all the other goblins start filtering back in groups, and are shocked to see not only the dead lizard, but also the destroyed goblin hut. They don't waste much time though, as the leader goblin starts up a fire, bigger than the usual. Goblins cook the small game they captured, and I provide skewers of lizard meat for the goblins to cook as I continue cutting it up.

Although I don't have much time to pay attention to what the goblins are up to, it seems that there seems to be a pretty sad mood overtaking everyone. As I finish up butchering one of the lizard's limbs, I take a breather, and try to see what's going on with the goblins. When I look about, it seems like we're missing a few goblins, so I do a head count. It seems like we're missing three. I then remember that the lizard had blood around its mouth when it charged into the goblin village.

I'm worried that all three of the goblins that were with the spear goblin might have been eaten. I suppose, I can attempt to verify that... The next section I start butchering is the abdomen, and when gut the lizard, removing the stomach and intestines, then cut into its large stomach away from the meat. Its quite gross, but as I go through the lizard's partially digested stomach, I only find enough parts to make up one goblin. I go and get the chief, and try my best to convey the situation. Thankfully, the numbered rocks from before allow me to get my point across much faster.

The goblin chief gathers all the goblins, and seems to be giving them some kind of speech. They don't leave though, so I presume that they're not going out in the darkness to look for the lost goblins. Not that I blame them, if these lizards are out and about, it has to be quite dangerous. I continue butchering the lizard, and a handful of goblins continue cooking. I'm not sure whose house I inadvertently destroyed, but it seems like the goblins have sorted something out, and I see a group of goblins digging a new pit. I suppose I wouldn't want to sleep in a place where blood coated the walls and floor either. Nice of them to help each other out with the pit building though. It would have been nice if I had that help when I was digging, but back then most of the goblins were afraid of me, and its not like they're as effective as I am at digging, so it's not a big loss.

After some time butchering, the lone moon which was blocking out the suns sets on the horizon, suns still behind it. Now it is officially night time, and I still have quite a bit of lizard to butcher. A lot of the goblins have gone to their huts by now, but it seems that a night shift of cooks have been assigned to help me. I've recovered a little bit of mana, but it is still a relatively small amount compared to what I'd normally be recovering. I decide to use what little mana I have to make a knife to help carve the rest of the lizard faster.

I don't know how much the knife actually speeds me up, but its definitely more comfortable to use than the spear and wood carving knife. As the night drags on, and I'm getting close to finishing butchering the lizard, a lone goblin stumbles out of the woods, and into the goblin village. The goblins that are still awake go and take care of him and give him some food. I'm guessing its one of the two missing goblins gauging from the reactions of the goblins that take care of him. Not long after the goblin returns, I finish butchering and finally get the opportunity to get some sleep. It seems like the excess food will be stored on leaves in some of the goblin's huts.

The next morning, it looks like my mana has finally restored to full. I decide to peek outside before doing any mana work today, just in case. I'm glad that I did, because it looks like the goblins are gathering into groups again. I'm not entirely sure what is going on, but when the goblin leader sees me, he makes his way over to me. Using the numbered pebbles and some gestures towards the lizard carcass, I get the gist of the situation. It seems like the goblins are going to split into large groups and go looking for the missing goblin, and I'm being requested to help. I'm given some of the lizard meat from the night before to eat, and it seems like it's been reheated at a fire recently. I'm not sure how long the meat will last for, but surely one night will be fine.

I suppose it's another way to get into the good graces of the goblins, so I agree to help. I also feel a little connected to the potential goblin that is missing. It was impossible to tell from the digested corpse which goblin it was in it's stomach, but the goblins that went missing were the group I hunted with from the first day, and one of the ones that are missing is the goblin that took interest in the numbered stones from before.

We split into three groups, and head off roughly in the direction that the group was attacked by the lizard. The goblins with me are all yelling something, which I presume is either the other goblin's name, or a generic call to get their attention. We continue on this way for a few hours until we eventually hear a response from a little ways away. I get ready to head over that way, but all the goblins around me seem to be scared for some reason. I've got a bad feeling now, but I lead the way towards where the yelling came from.

As we break through the underbrush, I see the reason why the other goblins were scared. There is another of the big lizards looking up a particularly large tree and hissing. I can't immediately spot the goblin, but my presumption is that it is likely up the tree. Which means we're going to have to kill this lizard to get him to safety. I doubt the other goblins are going to be much use in this fight, so I'll have to figure out how to defeat it myself.

Thankfully I've got enough mana to use an earth spike this time, so that should help immensely if I can use it at the right time. The big issue will be getting to that point without getting injured. I initially try to sneak up on the lizard, but when I'm within about ten feet of it, it turns its attention to me. Well, so much for that plan. I get into a low stance, ready to move as soon as the lizard does. It hisses in its deep tones and snaps its jaw at me a few times. After seeing that I'm not intimidated, it charges at me. I'm glad this one seems to try the same tactics that the first one did.

I deftly dive to the side as it charges and earth spike it right through the abdomen. It yells out in pain and smacks me with its tail directly in the chest, flinging me into a nearby tree. The air is knocked out of me and everything is spinning. After a few moments, I come to my senses, and the lizard is flailing on the spike impaling it, still trying to break free. I'm thankful it seems to have pinned it, although the sudden stop of its momentum seems to have made me misjudge where to dodge, and that's what let the lizard land the hit on me with its tail. My hp is below half now, and my joints ache as I stand up.

I don't know how long the spike is going to hold the lizard in place, so I need to deal as much damage as I can in the mean time. I hurry as best my body will take me to the lizard and pick up my spear that I dropped mid launch towards the tree. As I get closer, the lizard struggles more and begins thrashing about. I keep my distance as best I can, and begin using the spear to stab at the lizard's limbs. I'm trying to disable it further so that it can't break the spike currently holding it in place. It struggles and fights as I stab at it, but it seems to be rapidly weakening, so I keep stabbing at it until it finally gives in.

<LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 17
HP: 542/1031
MP: 156/356
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation
Magic: Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Earth Spike

[Vol-2] Ch.7 Plans for the Future

Shortly after killing the lizard, the goblin climbs down from the tree, and the other goblins cheer and run out from the surroundings. They seem more excited than I am that I beat the lizard, although my body is aching like crazy now, and I'm physically exhausted. The goblin I saved comes over to me with tears in its eyes. Seems the little thing thought it'd been left for dead. I wonder if I hadn't been here if it might have actually been left by the other goblins to die. It doesn't seem unreasonable considering their inability to actually fight the lizards in any real way. Either way, I give the goblin a pat on the head, and it seems happy. Looking closely at its face, it does seem to be the goblin that I gave the numbered rocks to from before.

Despite the excess food already back in the village, the goblins in the group seem intent on hauling the whole lizard back to the village. Well, whatever, I guess I'll try to make a few drying racks to show them how to preserve meat for longer. Although they'll need to smoke the meat out here for a long period of time. Actually, on second thought, given the persistent rain here, they'd need a proper building to smoke and dry meat in, which means we'll just have to eat what we can and hope for the best. If the water nearby is salty, maybe in the future they could evaporate the water to use salt as a curing method. All of that is unavailable for now though.

When we get back to the village, it seems that we're the first group back. I suppose that isn't a big surprise, since we found the goblin. It is mid-afternoon now, and it looks like some clouds are starting to gather on the horizon. The goblins leave the lizard on the ground and start going about to collect wood, and I sit down to start the butchering process. Thankfully most of the skewers from last night are still usable, so I start cutting the meat. While I'm working, the goblin we saved comes over and sits down next to me, and just watches me cut the meat. Not one to let an opportunity go to waste, I decide to go make a second carving knife, and try to teach the goblin how to butcher the lizard.

I decide to try to teach it how to butcher a leg, instructing it on one leg, then leaving the goblin to work on a leg next to me while I butcher other parts of the lizard. Even if the goblin fails to recover half the meat, it'll be fine because there is so much excess. When the goblin finishes one leg, I attempt to give it some pointers for the next leg. Considering we don't speak the same language, I honestly think it went alright. The downside of the ordeal is that it starts to rain on us again while we work.

Not long after the rain starts, the other two search parties make it back. Each comes back in a bad mood, but their spirits quickly lift when they see the missing goblin has returned. Many take turns coming over to the goblin as they help me butcher and celebrate with it, but the goblin quickly returns to working, which I find to be an admirable trait. It's good that it's choosing to finish a task it set out to do before celebrating, although given the circumstances, I think it'd be fine if it decided to celebrate.

Soon the goblin finishes the final leg, and I'm just finishing up the rest of the lizard at the same time. The goblin goes to hand me the knife back, but I gesture for it to keep the knife. After all, what good would two butchering knives do for me? It seems very grateful for the knife and takes it to put in its hut.

Actually, other than the goblin leader, I haven't noticed any other goblins using magic, which makes me wonder if any of the goblins are prestiged. I mean, if I wasn't killing those lizards, I'd be leveling much slower, but even then I'd still prestige occasionally. Although I've got zero idea of how to even describe what I'm talking about to the goblins, and their answer would likely be even more unintelligible to me. While I contemplate that issue, I go back to using my mana to work on my house. With plenty of food about, all the goblins are happily just relaxing and eating food.

Well, they were for a while at least. I came out of my basement with newly cut stone for my house, and I see the leader goblin showing them an unfinished spear, and shortly after, they all head out into the forest in groups, and the leader goblin comes over to me. Yup, seems he wants another spear made. I mean, I'm glad I can help give them some tools to survive, but I don't have a roof over my head yet... I mean, I guess if I sleep in my basement I do, but I'd much rather have my actual house that I can make a bed in.

The last few days I've fallen into a bit of a pattern, I get a little bit of work on my house done, and then the rest of the day I'm either making spears or teaching goblins to hunt. The rain hasn't really let up either, so all of this has been relatively miserable. All the goblins seem to appreciate me being around now though. Thankfully, there haven't been any more lizard incidents either. I'm actually relatively close to finishing my house now, with just part of the roof left, then the door, and the window shutters. I also had to put in some small holes in the wall to allow water to drain from the inside of the house due to the rain.

Most of the goblins have their own spears now, and I've ended up having to repair a few of them when a couple of the goblins got over enthusiastic and broke them. I don't know how exactly they broke the spear head, but I suspect it had to do with throwing the spears. I didn't want to encourage bad behavior, so I made them wait a day for me to repair them, and no one else has broken them yet. I'm sure damage will be done to them in the future through normal wear and tear, but I'd like to keep the amount of work I need to do on these to a minimum.

Today though, I'm going to dedicate my time to finishing the building part of my house. I'll still need to make a bed and shelves later, but I'm tired of sleeping in the basement. Goblins turn up throughout the day wanting things, but I turn them down to focus on finishing my house, and by the evening, I've gotten it done.

I wake up the next day finally sleeping in the upper part of the house, rather than the basement. I'll be honest, the basement has ended up a little deeper than I meant it to due to the other crafts I've been making for the goblins. The basement is going to end up even deeper as well because I need to make crafts for myself as well, unless I start a new project for the goblins here, which I do have one thing in mind. Mainly, they could use a warehouse of sorts with a roofed in pavilion above a storage basement, so they can cook within cover from the rain.

Of course, that whole project can't even get worked on without the goblin's help if this rain doesn't stop. The area I would want to make this would be so large that it'd end up filling with water. The only downside to the pavilion and storage area is that it'll take a long time to build. On the scale of months, and I'd like to be going back to my cave before then. On the other hand though, if I leave the goblins as they are now, they'll probably slowly be wiped out by the lizards, and any hazardous weather that might happen, and I'd rather not just let the goblin leader use my cave to just summon imps to make replacement goblins all the time.

Which means I guess I'll be starting construction on a pavilion and storage area for the goblins. The next most important question is, where will I build it? I doubt the goblins want me to disrupt their daily lives as they currently sit. I scan the area, and decide on one place to build, but it'll require me to build something else first. Namely, across the stream, which would require me to build a bridge. A lot of the time, the goblins can just walk through the stream, but right now, given the rain, the stream is actually a nuisance to cross, so having a bridge would probably be useful to the goblins. The stone will probably have to come from the eventual basement as well though, so I'll still have to dig the pit first, anyway...

[Vol-2] Ch.8 Pavilion Construction

I wish I could say that progress was going well on the bridge and pavilion, but actually, it's been slow and frequently interrupted. The rain has been pretty consistent, which means I've been digging in mud to get down to the stone level, and I'm having to remove water frequently as well. The bigger issue has been more lizards. In the past 15 days since I started this project, we've had three lizard attacks, which have resulted in another goblin death. By the last attack, some of the goblins actually joined in to help me fight once the lizard was injured. As a silver lining, at least we haven't been hungry thanks to the lizards, and I've gained a few levels.

<LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 33
HP: 1191/1191
MP: 426/426
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation
Magic: Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Earth Spike

A few good things have happened as well though, so it hasn't all been setbacks. The goblin that I saved from before has been helping me work on my projects, and has seemingly started trying to learn English. At some point the leader goblin must have shown them how we communicated before, and they've been asking all kinds of questions about how various things are said, usually by pointing or holding an object, and saying "how say." They also assisted in the most recent lizard fight, and that night they prestiged. They're a little bigger than before, but other than that, I can't see any noticeable differences, and they're nowhere near adept enough at English to properly communicate what they've gotten, if anything.

One other goblin prestiged as well, and considering they're quite a bit larger than before, I'm guessing they gained a trait that made them stronger, maybe something similar to when I had Mighty Imp. All things I'd like to look into at some point in the future. In fact, I have a lot of things I'd like to look into in the future. Instead of any of it though, I'm back to remedial construction tasks. However, this is all so I can properly dedicate time later, so I suppose it's fine.

Five more days have passed, and I've made a central pillar in the stream that I'll use to support the bridge crossing. A few of the goblins have been looking at the pillar in the stream, confused by it, but the leader seemed to explain something to them, and they haven't questioned it since. The more I work with the leader goblin, the more I'm perplexed by him. Hopefully, when my little goblin friend learns enough English, they can work as a translator for me.

I also finished digging the pit for the pavilion, a hole 30 feet x 30 feet and down to the stone a few feet. I haven't made the walls to the pit yet, because I want to have the bridge done first. Mostly because the mud actually slowly drains the water into the stream, and once I put stone walls in, I'll have to clear water even more every day I work when it rains.

As I work through today, the goblin leader comes over to talk near the end of the day. He says some things in the goblin language, and points out of the clearing, then to himself and me. I have no clue what exactly he's saying, thankfully my goblin friend actually can help a little here, providing me some help.

"Go mountain, tomorrow, you, me, goblins." He translates. Honestly, not bad for a few weeks work. It's at least enough that I think I understand what he's saying. I count back in my head, and it does seem like it would be about the right time that he would normally go to summon imps. I don't want that though, I'm not entirely opposed to him summoning more imps at some point, but I only want him to do it if I'm there, and I don't want to go back up there just yet, at least until I've finished getting the goblins some basic necessities made.

"You, me, goblins, no go mountain." I say, and then repeat it, while tapping my goblin friends shoulder when he doesn't realize I want him to translate.

The goblin leader holds up his hand with two fingers, then curls them each down, and says something.

My translator seemingly thinks for a bit, "Two no goblins."

I think for a bit what exactly he means by this, when my translator says, "Lizards, two no goblins."

Oh, he means he's had two goblins die, and he wants to replenish their numbers. I don't have a great response for him for this, I don't know how long he's lived here this way, but I don't want him to just replace goblins whenever they die, and not in the way he's been doing it.

"Two no goblins, no mountain. Five no goblins, mountain." I say, hoping that the translator gets it. Maybe if I can at least convince him the need isn't as high, then we can delay any trips.

The leader ponders for a little bit, before nodding, and saying something before leaving. My translator friend says, "Five no goblins, mountain."

I give him a pat on the head for his good work, and he seemingly appreciates it and smiles before helping remove more water from our pit that has started to collect from the ongoing light rain shower.

I finished the bridge after another eight days of work, in that time, I lost a half day of work thanks to another eclipse as well. It's nothing too fancy, just a stone bridge wide enough for a few goblins to walk across side by side, with a railing, and supported enough that even a flood shouldn't wash it away. The goblins seem to enjoy using it rather than walking through the water, so I'm glad that has worked out. Obviously I'm using it as well as I trek back and forth between my house and the pit that will eventually become the pavilion area. Tomorrow I'm going to make some furniture for my house out of the pit before I start building the pavilion itself.

Some of the goblins saw me carrying furniture into my home, and from what I can gather with the help of my goblin friend, seem to want me to make things for them as well. I'm not going to give them furniture for free, and I don't really have anything I want from them, so I have my goblin friend tell them I'm not making furniture for them. I just made them all spears already after all. I guess this is what income inequality is though. They want what I can make, but I don't have a reason to make it for them. I'll think for a while if I want anything, then I'll let them trade me for it.

That evening, I come up with something, namely, I'm hunting, as we all have been doing. I'd like to not have to hunt. That evening, I have my goblin friend tell them, I'll trade them a days food for a basic piece of furniture. If I don't have to hunt in the morning and evening, all the better. Not that it's that big of an issue, since I need time to regenerate my mana anyway, but this way they can actually trade for things with me. I try my best to let them know they should negotiate in advance, so that they don't all over hunt on the same day, although I'm not sure how well that translated to them.

For the past seven days, I've been able to focus on working on the pavilion basement walls, and made a piece of furniture each day for a different goblin. As of last night, the walls to the basement are done, and the next step is building supports for the basement. I was surprised as well by the fact that the chief participated in the food for furniture exchange for a chair. Other goblins wanted all sorts of things, ranging from shelves to large pots. I'm not entirely sure whether they are actually using these to store things, or if they're just considering it a novelty, but at least the chair I presume is being used.

Today I'll be laying out where I want supports in the pavilion basement, and since it's going to have storage, how I want it to be laid out. I'm thinking about having some built in shelving, buckets and pots, and bins for the goblins to use. I also want the stairs down to be close to the center, to help prevent rain from running down into the basement. I suppose I could also level the basement purposefully to have water run to one corner, where the goblins could easily scoop it out from a small pit. All it needs is a very gentle slope to accomplish that.

I actually should also consider supports for the pavilion roof, and run major supports all the way down to the basement level for that as well. So I should cut long stone pillars out of the basement, and stand them up before re-attaching them. The biggest issue with that is I'd need rope, and some labor. The good news is, I have some eager customers who seemingly want furniture and goods produced for them who have plenty of free time on their hands. I stop working in the basement, and start fiddling with nearby plants trying to figure out what works best to weave a rope with.

[Vol-2] Ch.9 A New Name

I'm lucky that there are some thin vine plants growing on some of the trees nearby. I'm cautious, recalling that a handful of vine plants on earth secrete irritants, so I rub some of their leaves and the vine itself against some of my skin. I should know in a few hours if it's dangerous or not. If not, they should be able to be braided into rope. I'll probably need to teach the goblins a grapevine knot to make longer cordage with, in case any vines snap or are too short to work.

Given I'm now waiting for any negative reaction from the vines, I probably can actually get started on cutting the eventual pillars out of the basement to stand them up. I also need to plan for the fact I want the goblins to cook under the roof, I should put a central vent so smoke doesn't build up under the roof. The pavilion isn't going to have walls though, so I don't have to worry too much about it being perfect.

As the day drags on, I've gotten a few of the main pillars cut, and ready to rise once we've got rope to leverage them into an upright position. Given that I have yet to notice any irritation or damage from the vines, I think they'll be relatively safe to work with. I stop working on the basement again, and start gathering vines.

At dinner that evening, with the help of my goblin friend, I explain to the goblins the basics of turning these vines into rope, and how I'll be trading rope for more furniture. I show them how they need to remove all the leaves carefully, how to tie a grapevine knot, and how to braid strands together to make a larger strand. Hopefully in a day or two the goblins will have some rope available for me.

I've also started to notice an awkward problem that I've been avoiding start to really become an issue. Namely, well, names. I... don't have a name, and as a consequence, I have avoided trying to ask anyone their names. Until recently, it would have been somewhat futile anyway, but with my goblin friend learning more and more English, I think I should name myself, and learn its name, and probably some of the other goblin's names as well, like the leader goblin. I'll sleep on it tonight, and hopefully I'll have a name picked out by tomorrow.

Well, I didn't come up with any names that sounded quite right. I think, honestly, it might be worth just asking about their names first. Honestly, it'd be awkward if my name sounded too different from the goblin's names to begin with. As I make my way over in the morning to begin work on the basement, I'm joined shortly by my goblin friend. The overnight rain has caused there to be quite a lot of water in the worksite, so we're both bucketing water into the stream when I build up the courage to ask the goblin its name.

What I hoped would be an easy question however, ends up taking a while to actually explain. I ended up having to wait until another goblin was visible to explain that I actually meant its individual name.

Gokura-Zeb, that's his name. I mean, I suppose I would expect it's named in the language the goblins all speak. It obviously wanted to know my name right after, but I need some more info before I can try to come up with a name. Plus it'll buy me more time to come up with a name. The info I want from it are other goblin's names. Starting with the chief.

Gokura-Zaka...

I start to see a pattern here, all of the goblins have Gokura as the first part of their name, then some individual short name. As it would turn out, the leader seems to name each of them shortly after they were collected from the cave. Something the leader seems to have neglected doing for me. In fact, why don't I just push this troublesome task onto it.

I explain to Zeb that Zaka hasn't named me yet, so I'm nameless. Zeb's eyes go wide. I'm a little worried because Zeb stops working and looks at me for a while.

Eventually Zeb says, "Why Zaka need to name? You from far, yes?"

I have no idea what Zeb even means by 'from far'. I'm from the cave. Just like the goblins here, or so I assumed.

"No, I'm from the cave." I say. Zeb jumps up and down, seemingly excited and darts out of the basement. A short time later, Zeb arrives with Zaka, and starts acting as a translator.

"You not from far?" Zeb translates Zaka's question.

"I'm from the cave. I was an imp not that long ago." I say, and have to draw some pictures on stone to explain some of the words to Zeb.

What ends up ensuing is a much longer conversation that I expected, and Zeb ends up with a lot of new tablets from Zaka that explain a lot of new concepts. What info I gain from all this is that Zaka actually is the only goblin not from here. He's from somewhere a long ways away across the 'big water'. He assumed I was some kind of minor noble from his homeland, but was beginning to suspect from my helpfulness and friendliness that I wasn't an active noble at the least. He had all the goblins avoid using their names because of what I can assume is banishment, so he didn't want all the other goblins to be punished due to the Gokura part of their name. He also didn't go into any extra detail as to why he was banished, and he also seemed quite surprised that I used to be an imp not that long ago. He's also troubled as to what to name me. He decided he'd have a name for me tonight at the group meal, which at least gets me off the hook for coming up with a name.

The rest of the day, other goblins seem more friendly than before. I suspect that maybe they were told to not offend me before because I was a noble, so a few were still afraid of me. Throughout the day I see a few goblins making rope, and decide to help them. I'm glad I did, because as it would turn out, it's not easy to memorize a knot from only seeing it once, so I help them practice the knot until they get it right.

That evening, at the meal, Zaka goes into a long speech in the goblin language, so I don't understand most of it, but I do catch the name that is passed on to me.

Gokura-Zakarus

After everyone cheers and starts eating, I ask Zeb to fill me in on the details of the speech. From what he's capable of explaining, it was basically a congratulatory speech and a talk of good fortune. As much as I'm happy to have a name, I'm probably just going to refer to myself as Zack. Zakarus is long, and I don't really care to use the full name each time, plus it seems like it's got some implied meaning behind it since it's so similar to Zaka. The goblins don't seem to mind so far anyway. I mean, in their language it seems like they don't use the names all that often to begin with, but they use the full thing when they do. I tell Zeb that in English we generally just refer to each other with part of our names, since the Gokura part seems to be similar to a family name anyway.

After the meal, Zaka approaches and has some questions about my history. When he assumed I was a noble, he assumed I was from far away in his homeland, since I spoke a different language and had all kinds of knowledge. Now however, he wants to know where I got that knowledge, and why I know a language as full as I do. The whole conversation takes a while as pictures are drawn for certain concepts and Zeb tries his best to learn what new words are being used by both sides.

I'm caught a little of guard. I didn't take Zaka for a fool, but I didn't expect him to be quite so quick as to my background not adding up. I'm not intending to hide anything though, so I tell him that I have memories of a past life from another world. I don't remember everything, but what I do remember has come in handy for everything going on so far. I purposefully leave out that I wasn't a demon though, since I wouldn't want to alarm him. Besides, I'm in this body now anyway, what difference does that make?

After I have Zeb translate everything, Zaka nods along, seemingly believing me. However, he says something before leaving that sounds vaguely familiar, and I look to Zeb to translate.

"Three no goblins, mountain." Zeb says.

Oh, yeah, I suppose he probably is going to re-evaluate deals like when he can return to the mountain if he doesn't think I'm a noble anymore, isn't he.

[Vol-2] Ch.10 Tree Experiments

Work on the pavilion has continued at a good pace for the last six days. A few of the goblins have gotten good at making rope, so I was actually able to get some goblins to help me heave the support pillars into upright positions in exchange for more crafted goods. With the major support pillars in place, I'm ready to start building the pavilion floor, which will also serve as the basement's ceiling. It's going to take quite a long time, but I've worked on quite a few projects that have taken a long time, so I don't mind. I suppose I'll need to look into an activity to spend my time on while I wait for mana to recharge.

One thing I wanted to spend time testing before, that I couldn't really risk at the time, was figuring out why the trees are difficult to cut down. I suppose I can try to fashion myself another axe and maybe a hand saw, and try my hand at cutting trees down again.

In the last six days, the pavilion floor has made decent progress. My tree experiments however, have not. My first test, if a saw blade could cut through the trees when they harden resulted in failure. I did learn a few new things, but none of it has resulted in a felled tree. First, the hardening seems to be localized on the tree. If I chop far enough away on the same tree, I can still get a single good chop in before that area hardens as well. Unfortunately that distance ends up being too far to be useful, being feet away in elevation. I did learn one thing that could eventually be useful. The hardening only seems to last for a day or so. By the next day, the already chopped area seems to lose its hardening property, at least until I chop into it again. I tried sawing into the soft area, but after the saw removes just a small amount of wood, it hardens, so I've given up on using a saw for now.

Which leads me to my current test. I've got ten trees that I'm chopping into once a day along a far edge of the clearing where the goblins stay. I'm trying to see just how feasible it will be to cut trees down. I think it's doable, but it'll probably be a little different than how it happened on Earth. Instead of going tree by tree, we're going to have to cut all the trees a little at a time, and then within a short period of time have a whole bunch of trees felled.

In the meantime, I've started trading the goblins for rope again. It's a good idea to have it stockpiled, but additionally, I'm thinking of teaching them how to make palisades once I've cut these trees down. If they can build some basic defenses for themselves, that would probably be beneficial for all parties. The less Zaka needs to replace his goblins, the less I'll be bothered moving forward.

It's now been eleven days, and the smallest tree has fallen in my wood cutting experiment. It was about 7" in diameter, so not very large. One thing that is interesting, which I sort of noticed before when I was gathering fallen branches, is that the wood is soft. I thought before it might just be the trees on the mountain, but even these trees seem soft. Mind you, it's not balsa wood levels of softness, but still fairly easy to work with, which is why I think I was able to fell this tree so fast. Each full power swing of the axe would gouge pretty deep into the wood.

The tree itself is about 20 feet tall, although most of the wood won't be useful. The downed part of the tree is actually all easy to cut now, which makes me think the hardening was definitely a defense mechanism. I cut an approximately 13 foot section of the main body of the tree, which I plan on sharpening the top of. This will be the first palisade piece when I'm done with it. Of course, there is plenty of branches and leaves which I'll need to remove, but I don't have much else on my schedule while I wait for mana to replenish, so I can remove all the branches while I wait. Most will probably be used to fuel fires, but if I find any good ones for tools or spears, I'll set them aside.

When I go to check my mana levels when I think they'll be full, I notice something a little off. Namely, before I cut the tree, I was level 37, and now I'm 38.

<LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 38
HP: 1241/1241
MP: 448/448
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation
Magic: Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Earth Spike

I'll have to check after my next tree to see if maybe I just happened to passively gain a level at that moment.

I finished stripping the tree in five days, and as luck would have it, I did find a few branches that would be useful for making tools, and the hand saw actually came in handy after I made multiple tweaks to it. Namely, it actually needed to be better supported, as the blade would crack in half whenever a snag would get hit. So the final saw blade is shorter, and is more like a serrated knife than a saw, but it works well for smaller bits of wood. I also ended up stripping the bark from the tree as well since it was becoming loose as I worked.

I finished stripping that tree just in time, because I felled the next tree just that morning. Slightly thicker, at 9 inches, and it's a little taller, but sadly not quite tall enough to cut multiple palisades out of. Honestly, I think most of the trees we cut down should probably be about this size or a little smaller, the bigger trees are going to take a long time to cut down, and I'm not sure that they'll even be useful for this. Honestly, I'll probably just halt the cutting process on the bigger trees for now. I'm not sure what we'd use them for anyway, and it currently seems like it'll take between fifteen and twenty days to cut down trees about this size, which means I'll have to find new trees that are about the right size to cut down in the area.

I gained another level as well, which is really leading me to believe I'm gaining levels from cutting these trees down. Maybe for good measure, I will cut one big tree down in addition to the other trees, just to check. I've been marking down what levels I can along the way as well on some new tablets in my house, for recordkeeping purposes, obviously.

<LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 39
HP: 1251/1251
MP: 453/453
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation
Magic: Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Earth Spike

Some other good news is the pavilion floor is almost done. I've ended up putting slits into the floor in places to let some natural light down into the basement, as it's starting to get dark in places underground there. The downside to this is obviously the extra cleaning that will need to occur thanks to extra dirt falling in. All things considered though, the extra lighting was very necessary. Many of the goblins are intrigued as to what it is I'm building here, as well as the why and how I'm cutting trees down. I'll be able to explain both soon enough. Especially if Zeb's language skills keep improving.

It took twenty more days, but I finally finished the outline of the pavilion. I've still got to build all the storage containers in the basement, but the firepit and roof are done, complete with cooking grills for the goblins. Most of the goblins are out hunting right now, so I get the wood piled in, in anticipation for them returning. I'm quite proud of my work here.

I have other work as well to do though. I've had a few new trees felled recently, and every day I'm getting a few more. Many of them are a little ways into the woods though, so I've basically left them where they lie. I also felled the one big tree that I was cutting down as a test, and sure enough, I gained three levels when that one went down. Between the small trees and the big one my level has grown quite a bit.

<LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 57
HP: 1431/1431
MP: 532/532
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation
Magic: Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Earth Spike

I'm only felling 20 small trees initially here, because I want to show the goblins how to make a palisade, then let them do the work themselves to protect their village. Although given the levels I've been getting, I might have to rethink that. I've also noticed that it seems to be raining less and less now, and the weather seems to be a bit warmer than it was. I wonder if it's a seasonal thing, or if this is how it's going to be from here on out. I just hope that with the changing weather there will be no more lizard attacks. We haven't lost any goblins recently, and I'd prefer to keep it that way.

[Vol-2] Ch.11 Palisade Plans

While the meal itself was mediocre, the mood was quite good as the goblins celebrated eating and cooking in a new place. Now they won't need to cook in the rain or under the harsh sun. The next few days are going to be filled with making storage containers in the basement, and getting trees ready to make palisades, but tonight, I can at least enjoy the food and relax.

It took seven days to get the basement finished with basic shelves and containers for the goblins to store things in. I also have felled the rest of the trees I was working on, and have a total of six ready to make palisades. Which means there are still sixteen that need to be worked on. I've also built up such a surplus of straight sticks, that I've started to separate some to make spikes with. If we're building palisades anyway, may as well put some sharp spikes pointed outwards from them to really discourage any of the lizards from trying anything.

With my first major project completed, I have another project I want to work on now, since I fear winter might cause the goblins some trouble. If the winter down here is anywhere near as harsh as on the mountain, then I wouldn't be surprised if many goblins starve at that time. As such, I feel as though a smokehouse will be useful. It probably won't be as effective as I'd like, given they don't have salt right now, but it should be able to keep meats for a period of time at least.

Since the smokehouse won't have a basement, I'll be using stone from the pavilion basement to build with, which means I'll probably be digging a sub-basement at some point for it. I think to do work in a sub-basement, I'll actually need a torch of some kind as well, since it's already pretty dark in the main basement. Either way, the smokehouse shouldn't need to be that big, just big enough to hang a bunch of meat to smoke with the surplus of wood that we'll soon have.

Before I start on any of that though, I have one small project to complete before I show the goblins how to make palisades. That small project should be done pretty quickly though, after all it's only a ladder. I've been able to use the top part of some of the tree trunks to make two 10 foot poles, and I'll just hand drill some joints and use stone shaping to fasten the cross bars in. I should have it done later today, and then I can show the goblins how to make palisades.

Now palisades aren't meant to last forever. The wood will eventually rot and need replaced, but as a form of defense until these goblins become more skilled I think it'll do just fine. So hopefully in a few years, they'll be well on their way to surviving on their own. What I'll need to show the goblins are the steps to assembling a palisade.

We'll need to mark where the palisade is going, and dig a trench three feet down to the bedrock layer. If I was doing this for myself, I'd stone shape around the bedrock to implant the wood into the stone, but since the goblins will be doing this themselves, they won't be doing that. Once they have a trench, we'll tie a few of the sharpened logs together with rope, and hoist them upright in the trench, then fill the dirt in around them. We'll then hoist more sections up a few logs at a time, and tie the sections together, which is why they'll need the ladder. With the ladder they can properly tie together both the top and bottom for stability. I'll ultimately leave it up to the goblins where they want the palisades built when they know how. The final step will be driving pointed stakes on the outside, pointed outwards, into the ground, but honestly, it's not even worth really thinking about that step that much, since it should be fairly straightforward.

Zaka and a handful of goblins picked up the palisade construction process pretty well, and got the first 20 pieces up in only 3 days. They've helped me process the trees I cut so far, and have driven stakes into the ground to mark where they want the palisades built. Honestly, I didn't expect them to want as much as they did, but they marked off a lot of the clearing, including both sides of the river. Maybe all my construction work has them dreaming big. I hope they don't expect me to build everything though.

Either way, with the measurements laid out, I got a rough estimate of the number of trees we needed to cut down, and it's quite high. I'll have to explain to the goblins the need for proper forest management at some point. I really don't want them just going wild cutting everything down. They'll literally need thousands of trees to make a palisade the size they want. A bit over 7,000. There are only about 10 or 15 trees per acre here of the size that will be useful, and only about half of them are actually straight enough to be useful.

Conservatively, they'll need to harvest almost two square miles of trees of this size to make what they need. It's not enough to depopulate the forest, since they're only going to take some of the trees from the area, but I think they'll find the forest notably more empty than before in the nearby area. Well, at the very least it should be a good teaching moment for them.

I'm also already starting a pile of wood scraps for fuel as a consequence of the trees we've already cut. Honestly, for an operation this size, I'm glad that they want as much extra space as they do. They'll have their wood needs taken care of for a very long time if they properly store it.

I've already made a bunch more stone axes for the goblins, and I'll guide them tomorrow to show them how they need to cut trees down so they can start the process themselves.

Only around a quarter of the goblins seemed interested in the tree cutting project when I gave them the initial pitch. With those goblins and Zeb acting as my translator, we went around to a few trees and I showed them what to look for in size and shape, then explained how you can only get one chop in a day. What I wasn't expecting was how much less they could chop into the trees than me. It'll take most of them almost twice as long to cut a tree down as I did. That is, except for a single goblin. The one that prestiged before and seemed much more physically strong. I ended up making it a much sturdier axe than my own axe.

That goblin goes by Kaga, and he can honestly get through those trees in less time than me. I'm reminded sometimes that I shouldn't expect everything here to be the same as each other. I'd hate to be on the receiving end of an angry goblin with strength like that. When the other goblins saw how much more Kaga was able to chop, most of them decided that Kaga should do all the chopping, and that they'd just help with the processing of the trees.

That in itself would be fine, but I'm a little worried about a power imbalance happening if Kaga were to suddenly prestige or evolve a bunch. They seem nice enough, but you know what they say about power. So I insist instead that at the very least, when the trees are close to falling, they split the cutting at that point. When I explain the reason, Kaga seems a little upset that they're not getting this apparent windfall, but acquiesces when the other goblins volunteer to trade him daily meals for this. It really is looking like I've started a barter economy among the goblins here. I guess I should just be glad that Kaga is either kind, or bad at long term planning to trade free levels for food.

I was initially a little worried that the goblins that were working on the tree cutting might be the same goblins who were making rope and giving me meals, but I was glad to see that it wasn't the case. Save for some outliers, I can't tell many of the goblins from each other. Once they've prestiged they usually look a little different from each other, but unless they have a scar, they all look almost identical to me. So I'm glad that it seems like more of the goblins are working on projects of their own now than I initially thought.

In the past three days, the goblins have really been quite productive. There is now a decent amount of rope stored in the pavilion basement, and I've made decent progress on the smokehouse. Honestly, thanks to the goblin's more productive hunting with spears and tactics, they all don't even need to hunt each day, and I've noticed a handful of the goblins have been doing their own trades among each other for food. It seems some of the goblins enjoy hunting more than others, so they trade others for goods of their own. A whole tiny economy seems to have formed without me noticing.

As for myself at this point, after cutting the remaining trees, and the extra days, I've gained some levels of my own. I've decided that I'll be taking a few of the trees in a few days when Kaga's first batch is done, just to distribute the levels more. He's cutting a hundred at a time (give or take since he can't count all that well), which means of the goblins cutting trees, each one will get about 15 trees. I'll probably need the goblins to also distribute tree cutting to those with the least prestiges when the time comes, so that a power disparity doesn't occur.

<LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 65
HP: 1511/1511
MP: 567/567
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation
Magic: Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Earth Spike

[Vol-2] Ch.12 Home Sweet Home

Everything had been going pretty well for the last 19 days, right up until two goblins got killed by another lizard. Just earlier today, two of the hunter goblins returned covered in blood. Apparently, while hunting, they found a nest with some large eggs in it, but when they went to steal the eggs, they were attacked by the lizard. Two of the four goblins perished while the others managed to bring it down. Honestly, I'm impressed that they were able to kill it themselves. That said, this means that Zaka is going to want to return to the cave to summon imps to make new goblins.

A large group of goblins was gathered to retrieve the dead lizard as food. I've yet to see how the goblins deal with their dead, but considering they haven't brought them back, I wonder if they've just been leaving them where they died. I'm almost finished with the smokehouse now, and given the second round of trees have been felled, I suppose now is probably going to be the best time to tell Zaka I want to move back up to the cave. I feel like I've provided the goblins plenty in terms of survival means. Plus, I myself will be prestiging soon, so I'd honestly prefer to be back in my home for that.

<LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 97
HP: 1831/1831
MP: 708/708
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation
Magic: Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Earth Spike

As I probably should have expected, Zaka was reluctant to let me just move away back to the cave. According to Zeb, I'm seen as something of a protector to most of the goblins, so Zaka is worried about morale if I leave, as well as what will happen to the weapons and tools I've made for them. I've countered with an offer to him. I'll make plenty of spare tools, and when the snow would settle on the mountain, I'll come join them again during that time. They're also welcome to come get me if they need me for something.

Zaka reluctantly agreed to this arrangement, until we suddenly needed to go through even more negotiations because Zeb wanted to join me up on the mountain. Zeb's English has been coming along quite well, to the point where I'm not sure if goblins are just naturally good with language, or Zeb is a natural genius. Zaka eventually agreed to let Zeb also stay on the mountain, but he's counting it as a loss of another goblin, so they're down five, and will probably need to re-visit the mountain twice to replace their numbers.

I asked him why they don't just summon a few imps down here, and raise them until they turn into goblins, but apparently, Zaka's mana pool isn't quite large enough to summon one independently, so he needs the crystals to have a large enough pool. How he got the ability to summon imps when he doesn't have the mana, I don't know, but I suppose it means I should keep my eyes out for magic or traits that sound too good to be true. Also, apparently, imps are naturally quite wild and hard to contain in an area, so it works out to summon them in the cave, and then just prevent them from leaving. Then, to prevent any random demons from basically becoming feral competition, he kills the remaining imps before they return down the mountain just before the eclipse.

With negotiations reaching completion, I get to work finishing the smokehouse and building plenty of spare spears and axes for the goblins. Word seems to have spread a little through the day, and it seems a lot of the goblins are disappointed that I won't be making them any new decorations and furniture. I hadn't been paying that close attention, but the goblins seem to have widened most of their huts to keep their new furnishings.

The weather has actually cooled off slightly from where it was a few weeks ago, but the near constant rain has subsided, which is nice. I've also noticed that the eclipses really are very regular, every thirty days, give or take a few hours. They've been inching closer and closer into the evening, so I presume we probably won't see many eclipses soon, since they'll take place at night on our part of the planet. I asked Zaka about this, and he said it gets warmer through the year once the eclipses happen at night. You can apparently tell they are happening still because you get significantly less mana when they're happening. During night, mana is already slower to recover, but during an eclipse, it slows to a crawl at day or night.

Having discussed all the matters at hand, we split up to go work on tasks that needed done before traveling up the mountain. For me, that means finishing the smokehouse and making plenty of tools for the goblins. Plus, I want to carry my tablets of information I've been writing in my house down here back up the mountain, so I'll probably make some crude crate that I can stuff plant matter between the tablets so they don't break.

The day of travel arrived pretty quickly. The smokehouse was finished a few days before, and I showed the goblins how to use it. It doesn't take a lot of effort, but one of them will need to know what meat inside is done, and what meat is still in the process of being preserved. It'll take a few weeks in the smoke house before any of the meat is done, so they're skeptical at first, but when I explain that it'll keep for a long time, they seem receptive to it. Plus they have plenty of excess wood from their palisade project.

Speaking of the palisade project, most of the goblins that were working on it have prestiged once now. A few became strong like Kaga, so I think that they're probably going to pick up the pace of logging soon. I've informed Zaka about the need for other goblins to assist in the tree cutting, so that a power imbalance doesn't occur. To which he seems excited that the goblins are becoming stronger faster than before. I suppose I could have told him that cutting the trees down was giving them levels sooner, but they're not that far into the project yet, so it shouldn't be too bad. It might even end up being a way to get some of the new goblins stronger fast.

I ended up making dozens, if not hundreds of spare spears and axes for the goblins as well. Surely it'll be enough to last them a few months. They go through a few a week currently, due to either chipping or breaking of the stone implements. I don't know how many months it is until winter, but I've been in the goblin village for almost six months now, so I honestly think it might be sooner than later, in which case, Zaka might be getting the better half of our arrangement. Although there isn't any reason I can't go back up the mountain after the snow melts next year.

With all our preparations made, Zeb, Zaka, myself, and a pair of other goblins set off back up towards the cave up on the mountain.

I honestly didn't recall this journey being this difficult before, but I suppose we were going downhill, and it has been months since anyone followed this trail up the mountain. Honestly, I should have been trying to figure out just how long this trail is. I imagine the time it would take to get up here would be much shorter if I could actually map it out and build a path. Although actually, as I think about it, the idea of building a path like this by myself is kind of outrageous. I'm quite a fast digger, and stone shaping would really help the process, but a good path through the jungle like this would require more than just me working, or at the very least, a near infinite source of mana at all times.

By the time we reach the cave, everyone is exhausted, so a small fire is made near the entryway to the cave, which I had renovated all those months ago. It seems scavengers came and ate what was left of the goblins that were killed last time, and there are just scattered bones in the area now. Even though I'm tired, I go to clean the bones out. This is my house after all, or at least, my first house that isn't just a hole in the wall of a cave.

Actually, despite the fact I'm exhausted, I want to go take care of some things before tomorrow when Zaka plans to summon imps. Namely, I want to go put the new tablets with my old ones, and close the sub-cave off, so imps don't go in and break things tomorrow.

After I've assured the goblins I'll be right back, I make my way back down the cave. It feels quite nostalgic if I'm honest. I mean, I lived here for a long time already, so I guess it's more like coming home than anything else. Looking about the familiar cave, I'm reminded of all my various projects I was working on before the whole goblin village situation. If I'm honest, I'm probably not going to get through many of them before the snow returns, but at the very least, I'll be able to get started on some of them, and who knows, with Zeb's help, I might be able to get through more of it than I think.

[Vol-2] Ch.13 Old Routines

When I return to my sub-cave that I once called home, I'm greeted by a putrid smell. It seems that one of the toilet pots I sealed broke. I'm not sure if it was pressure buildup or something else, but it reeks in here now. Well, I was planning on moving up to the surface house I was building soon anyway. There was also some leftover food that has been rotting. I suppose I should use some new buckets to clean up before I leave again, and dispose of all this waste outside the cave.

After a short while cleaning up, and then washing myself with the water that was left over in the room from before, I haul the first of the buckets of waste out of the sub-cave and towards the surface. The goblins seem interested initially, but when I have Zeb explain what I'm doing, they all quickly lose interest. I make a few more trips, and finish cleaning just before the sun sets. With that taken care of, I go back to get the bucket of lightstone before I join the goblins in the camp just outside the entrance for the night.

The next morning, I was expecting that I'd go down with the goblins to help with the imp summoning, but Zaka turns me away. Apparently, its a bit of a delicate process to get the imps to somewhat trust him when they first turn into goblins, and the fact that I not only look different, but look more powerful than him might cause some misunderstandings. I mean, I guess I get it, and I don't really want to be seen as a chief of any kind, so I let them go in to do their thing. I guess I'll use the free time I have to go check on the spud field that I had fertilized last year.

It takes a little while to get to, but when I do, there are lots of plants growing in the area. Not all of them are spuds sadly. Lots of other plants that don't seem particularly useful or dangerous are growing wildly in the area. I guess I did fertilize the whole area, so I shouldn't be surprised that when I neglected any gardening duties, the area became completely overgrown. Despite this, there are new spud plants in the area.

For today, I'll just harvest a few spuds to make food for the goblins and myself. Honestly, as I think about it, I could actually cut some of the trees down near the cave and define out a garden area. That could be pretty useful. There are honestly lots of little improvements I could make all over the place now that I'm not worried about getting spotted by the goblins.

One thing that would be pretty useful would be making a small room where I charge crystals, so I can actually just keep the trays in a charged location, rather than making a whole deal out of moving them. Another thing I'll need is a use for excess stone, since I'll have a lot of it. If I can shape it in a good way, I could probably have Zeb build a pathway/stairs from the cave at least some of the way down the mountain.

I continue pondering improvements and constructions until I've finished harvesting the spuds and return to the cave entrance. I know the goblins still won't be done for a little while, so I decide to look around the area for some new sticks for tools, since I could use a new axe if I'm going to be cutting trees in the area.

Before I know it, evening has arrived, and the goblins come out of the cave. I've already got some water boiling from the pots that I had nearby which are all filled to the brim with water from my absence. When they return, I start cooking the spuds for them. Apparently, they normally just do without food for the few days they're up here, so I suppose this will be a bit of a different experience for them, especially since it seems like they are only used to eating meat. I feel a little bad, because its likely they'll have an unfortunate time digesting plants if they aren't used to them, but it's better than nothing.

Well, the boiled spuds went over ok, but not great. They weren't seasoned, so it was basically just very bland mush, although the goblins at least seemed to appreciate having some food at least. Everyone, myself included seemed pretty tired, so after double checking the wall to the cave was sealed, we go to sleep.

The next day, I wake up early with the goblins, and they get ready to go deal with the remaining imps, and collect new goblins. I guess I'll try to stay around the entrance to the cave then, since they'll likely set off shortly after collecting the goblins, and that usually doesn't take long. While they head in, I fashion myself a woodworking knife and start the process of making a new stone axe. I think I'll make this one out of lightstone for myself.

As I finish making the axe, I hear noise coming from behind the wall at the cave entrance, so I turn to face the door in the wall. As I do, Zaka and the goblins he brought with him exit, along with three new goblins. Seems like everything was successful. When the new goblins notice me, they cower nervously behind the other goblins, but after Zaka and the other goblins calmly greet me, the new goblins seem less afraid. After a short while of cleaning up the area somewhat, Zaka and all the goblins except Zeb begin their trek down the mountain.

Well, unfortunately, I forgot about the fact that I have to clean up all the dead imps. I'll have to ask Zaka next time he comes up to please help with the disposal of the dead imps when they're done. On the bright side, I guess it helps with my food a little if I can butcher them while they're fresh. The bad news is my old butchery area still smells very bad, so I'll have to work somewhere else. The upside is that I basically have the whole cave available to work in instead, and I have Zeb to help with things. I fashion myself a few new knives for butchery, and go retrieve my old drying racks. I'll have to clean the drying racks with some water before I use them, but that's still faster than making new ones.

The work does end up going a little quicker with Zeb's help, and soon we have plenty of meat on the drying racks. After that was done, I started a fire in my old fireplace. Everything in there still smells, but hopefully the fire will help burn off some of the scent, and then I can go in and properly clean at some point. I'll probably end up letting Zeb use the room when I finish my place up by the cave entrance. I suppose for the next while, that is what I'll be working on. While I work on my house, I'll have Zeb haul all the dead imps into a pile so that I can burn them. I show him what needs done, and leave him to get to work while I work on the cave entrance house, and start the process of cutting trees near the entrance.

Its only been a day, but Zeb's piled up all the corpses, so its time to start the massive bonfire. I can't fit down into my storage area anymore, so I send Zeb down to start retrieving the wood from down there to pile on the corpses. Honestly, I was planning on expanding the way down so I could use it, but maybe I'll just slowly let Zeb get everything out as we need it, and abandon it at that point.

As the bonfire in the cave roars, and the smoke heads up to the entrance of the cave, we make our way outside to go to sleep. As I fall asleep, I feel a sensation that I haven't felt in quite a long time now. I've hit the level cap again.

<LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 100
HP: 1861/1861
MP: 721/721
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation
Magic: Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Earth Spike

Available Traits:
Improved Dexterity: Increases dexterity and manipulation beyond what your form would normally allow.
Carnivory: Specialize in eating meat.
Improved Stone Shaping: Spell. Manipulate one cubic foot of stone per second. Costs 10 mana per second. Replaces Stone Shaping.

I notice that I don't have any available species to turn into. Another mystery that I imagine will be hard to unravel. I have a few choices for traits though at least. The first one is one that I've seen so many times, but I keep passing over, improved dexterity. The next one is new, Carnivory. I think its fairly self explanatory, but I'm actually a little surprised I didn't get offered it before. Another mystery to look into potentially in the future. For now, I think I can easily pass on Carnivory. Up here in the mountains, my diet frequently consists of non-meat meals, so its a no go.

The last option sounds kind of nice though. Its just a straight upgrade on stone shaping. Four times the amount of stone with the same mana cost. How it can cost the same mana to achieve a greater result is something else that I'm interested in looking into at some point. What drives the mana cost of something? More and more questions all the time, and I'm stuck in the stone age, just trying to eke a living out for myself. I suppose, if building things faster would give me more time to actually research things, then the choice is obvious.

I pick Improved Stone Shaping, and quickly succumb to the darkness.

[Vol-2] Ch.14 Renovations

I wake up in the morning, ravenously hungry, and check my stats as I go to stuff my face with food.

<UNCOMMON LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 0
HP: 911/911
MP: 358/358
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Earth Spike

Well, I can stone shape four times as fast now, and my stats are looking pretty good, I mean compared to when I was an imp at least. After I eat, I record my stats in my records, and go to use a bucket of water to get a decent look at myself. I might have gotten a little larger, and it seems like my forearms are a little thicker, but other than that, I don't notice any changes. I feel like when I was an imp I had bigger changes when I prestiged, but maybe that was only in the later stages, it's hard to recall exactly how I looked as an uncommon and rare imp, especially since I didn't have any reflective surfaces to look at myself back then.

With all my record keeping taken care of, it's time to show Zeb how I clean the ashes from the fire for disposal. That'll be his task for the day while I get used to using the Improved Stone Shaping on my house. I'll have to reward Zeb's hard work with more English lessons soon though. I feel bad having him work away from me, considering the situation.

Over the next eight days, I did end up coming up with a good work pattern so that Zeb could work near me. I ended up working on two projects at once as part of this. First, I needed more stone for constructing the front of the house at the cave entrance and the roof features. So I decided to start digging out both the room that I'd like to use for crystal storage in the future, and a new storage area closer to the cave entrance. I went a little further down from where I normally charge the crystals to build the crystal storage room. Then just off the stairwell, I started cutting stone out of the wall. Then I had Zeb haul the stone up to the cave entrance. I would make a trip up with Zeb many times because I can cut blocks out so much faster than they could be carried. When that room was plenty large for storing crystal trays, we moved on to the storage area closer to the entrance.

All of this gave Zeb plenty of time to work on learning English. Tonight, however, I notice that we're already getting low on imp meat. I completely forgot that I have to get my own food again. I got pretty used to the goblins providing for me in the village, and with two of us up here, the imp meat only goes so far. I guess tomorrow I'll be taking Zeb on a trek to get spuds and lion roots. Then I can show him how I store and cook them. I think, if we keep the pace of work up that we've been going at, the entryway house will be done by the time Zaka returns.

It's been another twenty days. Later today is when Zaka and a few other goblins should arrive. I'm excited to show them not only the new entryway house, which is quite large, but I also carved out small living quarters for the goblins that visit. The area in front of the cave has been remodeled as well. I'll have Zeb help me give them a grand tour when they arrive. Zeb hasn't been neglected either. For now Zeb's staying in my old living quarters down in the cave, but we've started carving out a place right next to mine in the mountain face for Zeb to stay in.

Around half-way through the day, as Zeb and I are working on his house, we hear a booming voice suddenly from outside. I'm caught off guard, and am temporarily stunned by the sound. Zeb however, cautiously looks outside, then looks back to me and says, "Zaka is back. He looks different he says."

Zeb and I leave the area we're working in, and inside the new clearing of trees are three goblins... and one much larger, and more muscular, red skinned goblin.

Zeb points to the red skinned goblin and says, "That's Zaka."

I mean, if he did say he looks different, then yes, it's obvious that one is Zaka. The other ones all still look like goblins. I can't know for certain, but I'm presuming that Zaka turned into a hobgoblin. With his tall posture, he stands a little taller than I do now, and honestly is a little intimidating. I was going to give them a tour, but it seems like they want to rest first, and give us updates on the goblin village, so I invite them into my new house through the main door.

Inside, I've divided the house into three rooms, with the entry hall being the largest, taking up half the house. The room is a about 25 feet wide and 15 feet long, with a 12 foot ceiling. From one side of the room to about the halfway point, I've made a long table with 10 chairs around it. On wall opposite sits a large fireplace, which currently doesn't have a fire in it. In a corner is a makeshift kitchen area, and near the entryway is a rack I made for people to store any tools they might be carrying.

I let Zaka and the goblins know they can store their spears on the rack, and then show them to the table to sit, as Zaka begins giving us an update of happenings in the goblin village. He periodically pauses so Zeb can translate for me, which is considerate of him.

The gist of the situation is that they lost another goblin to a lizard attack. This time it was one of the woodcutters who was attacked after they felled a tree. When other goblins went to go look for their missing comrade, they found the lizard near the felled tree, and his body was nowhere to be found, but there was enough blood to indicate that he was probably killed. The palisade project is going well overall though, and they'll be finishing one of the four sides pretty soon. Almost all the goblins have prestiged at least once now, and quite a few have prestiged a second time. Zaka himself finally attained evolution as well, and says he can now summon an imp without using a crystal, but recharging his mana will be much faster with them.

In two more eclipse cycles, Zaka will return to bring us back to the village before the snowfall, that is, as long as many more goblins don't die before then. He says when he returns next time though, he plans on summoning imps again before returning, and I decide not to object.

After he finishes his update, I start a fire in the fireplace, and start cooking. I imagine the goblins will be hungry. I know they may not want any vegetables, but it's all we've got right now, so they'll have to live with boiled lion root and mashed spud. I've gotten more of the sweet rock flower, and used it to at least add some flavor to the food, which the goblins seem to enjoy more than the last time I fed them plants.

After everyone has eaten, I decide to lead them on the grand tour of the new and improved cave entrance, of which they've already seen the outside area, but I want to show it off to them anyway.

The front area has been cleared of the nearby trees, and although there are still some stumps around, some have been removed closer to the house. I've laid down sidewalks and made some terraces along the slope, with stairs between them. This way, we can properly farm the spuds. I've already transplanted some spud plants into one of the terrace fields, to see how well they grow as well. How did I accomplish this so fast you might wonder? Well, look no further than a little further down the mountainside to see a pile of rubble. I basically dug the dirt into a pile, then cut chunks out of the mountain and tossed them down the slope to a nearby landing, then redistributed the dirt. This area was quite rushed, as by this time, I only had a few days left until our guests arrived. The two terrace fields are each only 20 feet by 10 feet, and the rise on the back side is between three and five feet.

Returning to the cave entrance, I decide not to show them the place where Zeb's house will be, since it's under construction, but I will show them the other additions. First, there is a door leading to a hallway alongside my house which goes back to the old wall in the back of the cave entrance. This way they can go to and from the cave without going through the house. The hallway is about thirty feet long, on the right side of the hallway, there is one door, which leads to my workshop area in my house. On the left there are five doors spaced evenly from each other along the way to the back. Behind each of the left doors is a small 8 foot by 5 foot room with a bed in it. It's not much, but I figured the goblins might appreciate it, since they normally all stay in their own huts in their village.

The workshop area of my house is a 15 feet by 10 foot room, with shelves, a desk, buckets and bins, and some tools scattered about. There are two doors in here, one leads to the entry hall area, and the other to my bedroom. The bedroom is actually pretty bare right now, with just a bed, since I was busy building everything else.

Once you go back through the door into the cave, there is another door in the wall of the cave not far away. Inside is currently just a large empty space with support pillars, and a lot of loose wood. I plan on making shelves and extending it as needed, but for now, this is the new main storage area. Again, I was short on time to complete all the details of this area.

The last thing to show them is further down. I did complete this project, because it not only helped me, but I figured it would help Zaka as well. A little bit before we make it to the main cavern, I stop the goblins at a door in the wall. This door has a bit of a locking mechanism, and by that, I mean it just has a handle which can be rotated to raise or lower a piece of wood into a latch on the backside. I have a feeling I'll need to replace the rotating mechanism frequently, because it runs on stone bearings, but if it gets jammed at any point, I can always just cut directly into the room if I need to.

Inside the room, I've got lots of shelves with all my trays of crystals. With Zeb's help, I explain how to use the crystal and tray system, and have Zaka work through it once, to make sure he understands. I don't mind letting him use it while he's here, but I already have to clean up the imps when he's done, I don't want to be trying to re-sort crystal trays, or worse, remake trays from scratch, because he didn't use it correctly.

With all the tour ended, I have Zeb go back up with the goblins, while I head down into the cave to seal off the two sub-caves before tomorrow. When I return to the house, Zaka and the goblins are all relaxing around the fireplace in the entrance hall, so I join them for a while before we all turn in for the night.

[Vol-2] Ch.15 A Wild Storm

Zaka left later the next day with two new goblins in tow. There was an interesting commotion at one point in the night when an imp made its way up to the exit door, and started making noise and trying to break some of vent slits I had put in previously. Long story short, there was one less imp participating in the battle royale. Once Zaka left the next day, Zeb and I got to work on processing imp bodies and preparing to cremate the rest of them. For the next while, we're going to be finishing Zeb's house, and then properly cleaning up all the rubble I sent down the mountainside from when we were hurriedly building the terraces.

We've only been working for three days at finishing Zeb's house, but when we exited this most recent time to haul stone out, the wind started to pick up. It is also quite dark out despite being midday. I'm concerned we might be getting a bad storm. For the time being I think we'll pause on working on Zeb's house, since there is no back entrance to the cave. Instead, we'll work on the new warehouse area for a little while, and wait for the storm to pass.

I'm pretty sure that was a hurricane, or whatever this world's equivalent is. I asked Zeb if he's heard or seen a storm like this before, and he hasn't. The whole storm took almost 24 hours to pass. First, the wind picked up, then it started raining, and the rain and wind got progressively stronger, then progressively weaker after about the halfway point. Up here on the mountain we had torrential rains for quite a while, so I hope the goblin village is alright. Well, given the winds I'm sure there was some damage, but I hope the goblins themselves were alright. I wonder if the pavilion and my house down there survived as well.

As the storm finally seemed to clear, Zeb and I agreed that we'd need to go down the mountain, if we can, and help. We'll have some preparations to make though. We'll set out in two days. I want to make spare tools to bring down, and get the cave and house locked up so nothing moves in while we're gone.

The path down the mountain took twice as long as normal, and we had to take multiple detours due to mudslides. If there was one promising thing on our way, it was that once the slope of the mountain started to become more shallow, we stopped seeing mudslides, although there was still a lot of debris and damaged trees.

The goblin village itself was almost completely destroyed. The only things left standing are the things I made out of stone, and even among those, there is damage. The bridge is partially collapsed, as is a corner of the pavilion. The palisades have been completely uprooted, and are left splintered and scattered into the nearby tree line.

In the village area itself, I only see Zaka alongside one other goblin.

Zeb and I approach and ask "What happened?"

Zeb translates for Zaka, "The rain and wind kept going for so long, all the goblins were in their huts. Then the stream breached its banks, and those who were lucky fled into the nearby forest. I've only just come back, I'm going to go look for other survivors shortly."

I glance around the nearby area. The ground is all muddy, and what previously where goblin huts are now barely depressions in the ground. In some of those depressions there is still some of the furniture I made from before embedded in the mud. The whole area is very obviously a disaster zone. The first thing that needs done is trying to find survivors. I put the supplies we brought under the non-collapsed part of the pavilion building, and then have Zeb teach me a few phrases to call out to goblins that might be lost or trapped. Shortly after we split up, and the four of us go looking in different directions.

Nightfall came quickly, and each of us had little time to actually search, not to mention each of us were exhausted from the day so far. Zaka and Zeb both found a goblin that had taken shelter from the storm. I, unfortunately, had searched downstream, and hadn't found any living goblins, but I did find the remains of three goblins pressed into trees near the stream. As much as we'd like to have made a fire tonight, all the wood here was either washed away, or is soaking wet, and the same thing goes for the meat in the smokehouse. Worse still, the pavilion basement and my house basement are both completely flooded. Its another thing that will take time to fix after search and rescue completes.

The next morning we agree that we need food to continue searching. With six of us now, we split into two groups of three to hunt, thankfully we brought a few spears as part of the replacement tools. The wildlife is still pretty heavily disrupted from the storm, and the group of Zeb and I weren't very successful. Zaka however, returns with one of the large lizards. According to Zaka, they haven't had any lizard issues in a few months now, so he was a little surprised when they realized they were being followed by something, only to have the lizard aggressively attack them. This is obviously worse news, as it reduces our chances of finding more surviving goblins to even lower amounts.

Given the apparent danger, Zaka and I decide that, other than him and myself, no one should leave the village alone. Although the village itself isn't much safer, at least here there are a few stone buildings to hide in. I'm not certain that the buildings could actually hold up to a lizard attacking in full, it hopefully would deter them enough to give up. Zeb volunteers to stay back to butcher the lizard, and watch for any other goblins that might make it back on their own. Zaka and I will each go alone to search, and the remaining three goblins will search together. For good measure, they each are given a spear, and I make sure they at least recall the basics of how to use them.

By the evening, when we call off the search for the night, we've found a bit more than half of the village. Some found their own way back during the day, and others were found. Thankfully, there weren't any more lizard attacks today that we are aware of. I'm concerned about how many goblins are still missing, so I hope that we have better luck in the next few days.

Two more days of searching only resulted in finding two more goblins. Some goblins want to go out and search today even further away. Zaka has given them permission to do so, but he makes the call that its time to start also fixing the village, and getting it into working order. Among those staying around to help with repairs I see Kaga has survived. Although I suppose with a burly body like that, I shouldn't be surprised.

My initial repairs are going to be focused on the bridge, then pavilion. The pavilion basement needs to be drained of water, which is going to take a long time and a lot of bucket loads of water. I'm half tempted to try to make a screw pump, but that will need to wait for when it is already drained of liquid. I'm not confident in my ability to shape the whole thing while I'm also underwater.

While everyone starts getting to work clearing debris, I have Zeb ask Zaka "Have you ever experienced a storm like that before?"

Zeb translates for Zaka, "I have, but it was many many eclipses ago, when I first arrived in this land by boat. The other goblins I was traveling with had starved, or perished fighting each other when supplies dwindled. At first, the rain relieved my thirst. Then, the winds and waves became almost unbearable. Before I knew it, the boat I was in had crashed in the forest near here, and splintered against a tree. I grabbed the tree and held on for dear life, and after a while, the waters retreated and the skies calmed, so I climbed down."

Well, it seems like these storms do happen on occasion here. I'm even more intrigued to learn about Zaka's background now though. Something that I'll try to remember to ask after we've actually gotten the village in a better state. Which, given the apparent threat of severe weather, I think a new construction project might be in order. Between improved stone shaping, and the damage done to the village, it seems like I'll actually have surplus mana to work with, as a lot of the repairs are going to involve manual labor more than magic. The pavilion roof and bridge will take some time, but the amount of stone work needed isn't actually that high.

The new construction project I'm going to work on, if I can make it work, is a levee going through the village, and slightly up and downstream of them. That way, should another storm like this hit, hopefully, the stream won't breach its banks here during the rainstorm. My plan is to actually deepen the channel near the center where the bottom is rock, and use some of that excess rock to build the levee walls up. Now, I haven't done any studies on the height of the water when the flood came through, but I'll try to gather some info from the goblins who survived the flood to plan out the exact dimensions of the levee.

[Vol.2] Ch.16 Public Waterworks

For the past two days, I've been fixing the bridge, and finally completed it. The goblins have been fairly demoralized by the destruction of their village. Digging out damaged property and rebuilding their small huts has kept them preoccupied, but the destroyed huts that no longer have goblins in them leave a pretty depressing feeling over the town, and reminds the goblins of those they've lost.

At some point, I think we should probably build a monument to those who lost their lives here in the village, but first comes repairs. I think a simple stone monument will be pretty easy to build though, so I think I'll consider a location to build it before building the levees.

With the help of the goblins, we got the pavilion repaired, and basement drained in eight days. We also got the smokehouse operational again. Which was very well timed, because just yesterday, a lizard attacked, so a lot of its meat is being smoked now. Currently, I've turned my attention towards making a screw pump in the basement of the pavilion, then I'll build a monument to remember those goblins who have lost their lives.

When I asked Zaka for the names of the goblins who died, he seemed confused, but gave them to me. A short distance from the pavilion, I've erected a small stone wall, and etched their names in it. When Zaka saw it, he asked what the purpose was, and said it was a waste of space. I noticed before that the goblins didn't have any form of burial rights or rituals, so I asked Zaka about it.

To quote him, "The being of those who died live on in each of us. There is no need to mark their death, as they're part of us still."

While that is all well and good, I personally feel like a reminder of those who passed is probably a good way to make the goblins value their lives more. I personally don't exactly like the whole mindset of, "We can just replace them if they die." It doesn't value what contributions each individual could make. If we had just left Zeb to die, I'd likely be unable to communicate with the goblins well right now.

Either way, after some convincing, he let me leave the memorial up. With only half the day spent so far, I think I'll probably be able to finish the screw pump from the drainage location in the basement up to the stream area before nightfall.

While many of the goblins were impressed with the screw pump, Zaka wasn't that intrigued by it. After asking him about it, it sounds like where he was from had lots of simple machines including waterwheels. Which makes me think that building a waterwheel might be useful down the road. All good things to keep in mind.

Zaka also said in ten days he wants to go up the mountain to summon imps again. Given everything that has happened, I don't have any qualms with it. Until then, I'm going to start doing some testing for building a levee system here in the goblin village.

Tomorrow we'll set out to go summon imps on the mountain. My initial assumptions about how I could make the levee aren't quite going to work. I thought using the rock from the bottom of the stream would be enough to increase the height of the edges of the stream, but that doesn't look like it will be enough based on the reports from the goblins about how much water there was. Which means I'll need more stone. And not just a small amount either. I'll need a lot. I think I've come up with a solution though, although it expands the scope of the entire project drastically.

I'm thinking of digging a quarry up stream, and lowering the grade of the stream all the way to the quarry location, and finally turning the quarry into a dam and reservoir. I have an idea to try to make it somewhat self regulating, but the goblins will probably need to keep an eye on it, and do some maintenance or changes occasionally. Mainly just closing or opening certain flood gates.

All of this will be a long ways away though, because the size of the project is so large. An extra benefit of making a regulatory reservoir upstream is that it will allow water wheels to work at a semi-constant rate downstream.

As for the location, it won't actually be that far away. While the stream here in the clearing is a relatively low gradient, after you head only a few hundred yards upstream the slope drastically increases. Within the clearing, the slope of the stream is only a half inch over the quarter mile the clearing covers. The point that I want to dig the quarry upstream though is already approximately forty feet higher up, which would make for a pretty deep reservoir considering I'm planning on hand digging it. As for downstream from the clearing, the slope remains fairly shallow.

I was going to have the goblins help with logging, but actually, I think I'd like to get the levels myself from cutting the trees down, so I'll just do it myself while I work in the area. I'll need to dig a new channel that the stream will flow through once the quarry is done, then redirect the stream into it after.

The goblin summoning went fine, and we returned to the goblin village with three new goblins. At this rate, it'll take many trips to recoup the fourteen goblins who are presumed to have died during the storm. Despite the losses, the village is starting to return to normal again. The goblins have restarted palisade construction, and cleaned up the abandoned huts. I don't have much time for helping, though, as I've been incredibly busy.

This project has so much work, that I actually haven't had any downtime. I'm either cutting stone from the stream's bottom, digging soil from upstream for the new channel, or doing my daily rounds of chopping trees. I'm currently just piling the excess soil along where I'm working, but later it will need to be piled along the edges of the stream once I reinforce the sides with stone. As I was working on this, I realized that the project actually needs even further expansion. Namely storm drains.

In a basic form, it would just be grates that go through the sides of the levee into the stream. A downside to that is obviously backflow during a flood. However, without it, the water will be stagnant during any rain. I'll probably have to make the mains closeable along the levee, so that during a storm, the goblins can close it off if the stream gets too full.

This entire project is just getting larger and larger, which is becoming a real issue, that said, I'll have a few months to work on it, since the snow on the mountain will be setting in soon, and I'll just be chilling with the goblins for the duration.

Almost an entire month has passed again, and we'll be going up to summon imps for the last time before the snow sets in according to Zaka. All but the biggest trees in my way have been felled on the levee project, netting me a lot of levels.

<UNCOMMON LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 77
HP: 1874/1874
MP: 781/781
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Earth Spike

I've cut a lot of stone for the future path from the reservoir, but I'm not done yet. I've actually completed the village's levee walls from it, meaning the quarry section is actually going to produce excess stone rather than what I thought would be necessary stone. For now, I'm planning on using the new stone to make basic roads in the village, with a storm drain underneath leading to the levee.

I've already started the first road section, going from the bridge to along side the pavilion and smokehouse. I've dug a trench down to the stone layer, and then started using the new stone to make a hollow tube under a solid stone foundation, with occasional stone grates that funnel down to the tube. The tube then opens out into the stream a little above where the water level is. I've made a simple mechanism with gears to close off the outlet as well. All the goblins need to do is turn a valve wheel up by the bridge to close it.

I'm getting quite tired of hauling stone from where I'm working as well. Zeb is helping, but that is it. There is going to be so much excess stone that I think I'm going to ask that the goblins help haul stuff in their free time. I'd normally offer them a trade in exchange for their help, but quite frankly, I'm going to be using all my mana for so long to complete this project that I'm not going to have much to offer them.

[Vol.2] Ch.17 What Makes a Village?

The imp summoning went fine, although we only recruited two goblins this time. When we returned, I tried to recruit the goblins to help with stone hauling for these projects, but they didn't really want to participate even if I, or rather Zeb, explained the usefulness of the project to them. Which means I'll need to figure out a different way to get them to help.

I've spent the last four days working with Zeb hauling stone that I've cut, and I'm now certain that I'll need help to get this done. The reason being that I can easily cut way more stone free than Zeb and I can haul in a day. Which means I'm actually limited by labor rather than mana now, due to the distances we're hauling. As a result, I've decided on a solution to convince the goblins to help.

I will offer to help the goblins build stone houses similar to mine, if they haul the stone for their house, the road to their house, and a set amount of extra stone. It'll slow my cutting down somewhat, since I'll need to cut specific shapes out, like when I was cutting the stone for my house, but considering this will likely entice quite a few goblins, I think the speed gained in the hauling will be worth it. I'll pitch the idea with Zeb later at the group meal.

Most of the goblins seemed excited to get to live in houses like the one I built for myself. I informed them as well that they wouldn't have basements like mine does however, but that didn't seem to bother them too much. Plus it means later I can trade building basements for them for something if I need to. The houses are going to be a standard size and shape, which I feel a little bad about, but it's the only way for me to be able to cut the stone easily up at the quarry location.

Three days in with the goblins helping me haul stone, and I've already hit another snag. The goblins use the creek for both drinking and cleaning, and I've gotten complaints about how much more difficult it is to go down to the stream now that I've put the levee through the village. It still has dirt slopes going down, with stone reinforcing it on the inside, but the slope is steeper than it used to be. Thus I've had to halt road construction, house construction, and stone cutting to put stairwells down the levee. It should only take a day or so to put stairs at regular intervals down the slopes. Hopefully that will solve the problem for the goblins. They seemed to be understanding of the need of the levee at least.

Zaka came to me yesterday and said that since there isn't any snow up the mountain right now, he's thinking about going back up tomorrow to summon imps since it's that time of the month again. Of course, last night, it rained, and today as I look up the mountain, it's covered in snow. Zaka seems a bit disappointed, so I decided to offer to build him a house different than the other goblins. He is their de facto leader, so I think it'll be fine if his house is larger. As long as it's only one house, it shouldn't be too much of an issue to cut special stone for him. Of course, he'll still have to haul it to its final location. This definitely isn't also a way of getting him to help with the stone hauling, since he's been reluctant to join in.

Thankfully, he was persuaded by the idea of having the nicest house in the village. Which is great, because given his status as a hobgoblin, he'll be able to haul larger stone blocks. The only other goblin which could be of more use is Kaga, since he's much stronger than the other goblins after his prestige. For now he seems uninterested in helping with the stone hauling, but I suspect as more goblins start to live in houses, the others will want to follow suit. Then I can always bribe them with furniture to continue hauling stone until I'm done with the entire quarry project.

Of course, I'm also dragging out house construction along side this to keep the goblins hauling extra stone. I've only finished three houses so far, and the road to them. I've also put a small storm drain in their crawlspace that runs into the storm sewers under the road. Hopefully that will keep their houses from flooding when it rains. Obviously it also means if they fail to close the drains during a flood then they're houses will flood, so it should doubly incentivize them keeping those used properly.

The village itself currently has twenty-five goblins, and an anticipated nine more next year. I think to keep things somewhat future proof, I'll plan on forty houses, plus Zaka's house. I haven't seen the goblins ever living in each other's houses, so I'm starting to suspect that they only reproduce through imp summoning. It's very odd to me, being a previous human, that they never have more than one living in a house, but for the sake of construction, it's lightening my load, since each house can be smaller.

A second issue is that I'll actually need quite a bit of space for forty houses. I'm not exactly keen on just building them in a long row either, so I'll have to make multiple roads. Plus, to facilitate traffic, I've decided to put in two more bridges. The benefit to me of extra bridges is the use of extra stone as well, which is good, because I've actually started to collect quite the pile in the corner of the village with the goblin's help.

It's been a whole month, or just about, and it has gotten noticeably cooler. Not particularly cold, but definitely noticeable. Houses are slowly coming together. I've finished ten now, along with a second bridge. I'm less than a quarter of the total quarry I want to dig though. More of the goblins have joined in working after a few started living in the new houses. I think soon I'll need to start trading their labor for furniture for their houses, as I've already housed almost half of the goblins here so far. The area is really starting to shape up to looking like a civilized village.

The progress on the palisades have slowed down, due to the goblins helping me with the quarry project. Which honestly is probably a good thing. I'm going to have so much extra stone that I'm thinking about building village gates for them, and then maybe get the palisade crew to instead build walls, and I'll fuse them together. The palisades are nice, and it's great that the goblins can build them themselves, but they decay after a few years. Stone walls are both stronger and last much longer. I'll try to have a discussion with them tonight about the idea.

The stone wall idea didn't go over that well initially. Kaga and the woodcutters didn't like the idea of their work not being needed anymore, and the rope makers felt similarly. They seemed to have really come around to the work they were doing. I did manage to convince quite a few of them though that it would be better. I explained there would still be a need for some rope, and some tree cutting. Rope needs replaced every so often, and there is always a need for wood. Kaga wasn't convinced after all that however. So, similar to the situation with giving Zaka a bigger house, I figured I'd need to convince Kaga to assist in another way.

What I decided to offer, was building him his own workshop for woodworking and making him some stone tools that he can use for making things from wood. I explained that if he gets really good at it, then he can even make furniture and spare parts for various things like the spears. I basically convinced him to take up carpentry. He initially wanted the workshop next to his house, but I told him it would bother his neighbors too much. I've decided on utilizing an area on the opposite side of the pavilion from the housing area to build his workshop at.

Eventually, all the goblins might have their own jobs and specializations here in the village. Although that is a long ways away. For now, I'll just focus on working on digging the quarry and construction that I already have ahead of me. Now that the wood cutters and weavers are converting over to building stone walls, I'll have to cut blocks for them to use for that. I initially had this grand idea for hollow walls with passages in them, but I decided that just a solid wall that was wide enough for a hobgoblin to stand on up top would be plenty. So I'll basically just cut long blocks for them to lay down in parallel, and I'll fuse them back together. With all this, I'm back to operating at mana capacity, so I guess that's good.

[Vol.2] Ch.18 Dammed Plans

It's been another month, and the quarry and houses are coming along well enough. I've gotten about half the stone out of the quarry that I intend to remove. It's become quite sizeable now, and the goblins actually have to travel up and down stairs in the quarry to remove stone that I've cut. I'm actually a little concerned about the surplus of stone now. Realistically, we've already excavated more stone that I'll need to build all the houses, workshops, roads, and walls for the goblin village. It also seems like I'm not going to finish the quarry before the snow melts at this rate.

If my math is right, then the reservoir will hold about five days of regular water flow, which frankly is very little. Some very rudimentary tests for the stream flow over the last few months have given me an average flow rate of about 3/4 of a cubic foot per second. I honestly thought it would be higher, but the slope here is so low that the velocity of the stream is quite slow. I recall during the spring rains from before, that the stream was running at a greater depth and velocity, so my estimates for an average are probably quite low. The levee itself has a cross section of 16 square feet, compared to the ten it used to be. Even if flow rate stayed the same, it could handle fifteen times the flow, but the velocity should speed up during a flood, which would drastically increase capacity.

The quarry is being chiseled out of the hillside directly, deepening a small natural valley in the hillside. If it didn't have a natural valley here, the reservoir capacity would be significantly smaller than it will be. Soon I'll start using stone from the quarry to build the dam for the reservoir as well, which will be a good use for the remaining stone.

I wish I had the ability to stress test the stone to actually do the math on the reservoir dam, to make sure it'll hold up to the pressures it's going to be under, but instead, I'm just going to have to be sure that it's extra strong to handle the pressure of the water. It'll end up looking like a mix between a buttress and gravity dam most likely. I'll of course attach it entirely to the stone bedrock through the area as well, which should increase its strength drastically.

I recall the romans were able to make relatively watertight plug valves from stone, and they made them by hand, so I hope that I can make them with the help of magic. I'll probably want to use lightstone for them though, rather than any run of the mill stone from the area. The top of the dam will have a regular spillway to prevent topping of the dam. Then at various heights down the dam, I want to make walkways to valve handles so that the water in the dam can be lowered to any height by opening these valves. I'll have to size the valves accordingly so that the goblins don't accidentally flood their own village as well.

The equation for the volumetric flow of liquid draining through an outlet is approximately Volumetric flow = Area*(2*gravitational acceleration*height)^1/2. Which actually means I actually should determine what the acceleration of gravity is here. Which is a bit of a diversion, but a necessary one.

As long as I define my length of feet using a single ruler for sizing both the valves and the acceleration of gravity, the math will balance out. I think the saying goes, it'll be precise, but not accurate. I start by using a foot ruler that I made before, to use as the baseline. Thankfully, I have an area that I already leveled with a water level before, namely the pavilion floor. I use stone shaping on some stone from the stockpile to make a brick that is six inches tall. Then I make a seven foot long slightly curved ramp, and set everything up on the pavilion floor such that the top of the ramp is at six inches after modifying the brick somewhat to rest the ramp on.

By rolling a ball down the ramp, I can calculate the acceleration down the ramp, and by applying the ratio of the ramp's slope to that acceleration, get an approximation for gravity. Of course, at this point, my mana is already starting to recharge, so I'll just run trials when I get the chance, and average them out to get a close approximation for gravitational acceleration.

Well, after a few days of running trials in my free time, I think I've got a number that should be good enough to use. Approximately 29.2 feet per second per second. Slightly less than Earth had. I changed the ramp heights at times, and adjusted its length a few times, so I'm fairly confident in my number. Now by applying the depth of the reservoir at various heights, I can calculate how big the valves' cross sectional areas should be. I've also realized that the risk of the goblins flooding their village will have to be communicated with them, because there is no way to make one valve size fit all for various heights in the dam. They'll just have to progressively open the next valve in the line to prevent the valves from eroding due to high velocities if they open a valve too deep.

If I put the valves every five feet of depth, then the cross section would need to be about a half a square foot, or a circle with diameter of 0.8. Which would give a flow rate of between 8.5 cubic feet per second and 3.8 feet per second depending on how deep the water above each valve is. Which I think is completely doable, they might need some gears to turn them though. The deeper the valve is, the thicker the valve needs to be as well, which will make it heavier. Yeah, those bottom valves are definitely going to need gears to open.

Well, all of that will be something to deal with when I actually start building the dam. Which is a little ways away yet, since I've still got houses to build, along with roads and a workshop for Kaga. Thinking about it that way, I would really prefer to spend my time up at my mountain cave once I can, so the dam and reservoir might have to wait until next year. I'm pretty sure the snow will probably start melting soon, as it has started to feel a little warmer in the afternoons. So I think I'll focus my efforts on finishing construction in the village, and put the reservoir on halt.

Fifteen days have passed since I started focusing on just building the goblin village, and it's clear that the snow has started to melt on the mountain. The stream is now both deeper and faster flowing now. It's only running at about a foot deep compared to the three foot levee walls, and flowing at 6 cubic feet per second, with a velocity of nearly double what it used to be. The effect of this has been less than ideal. The dirt I had piled along the levee edges has started to slowly wash away. The previous soil had plants helping hold it in place, and was packed down. When I refilled the dirt by hand when I built the stone walls to form the levee, I didn't factor this in.

Which means if I get the opportunity, I need to do something about it. That something will likely be coating the dirt in a small layer of stone to waterproof it. It's not ideal, because it'll mean that there won't be plant life along the stream any longer, but it does mean that the stream will be more manageable.

Stone lining the levee has taken a lot longer than I thought it would. I've only fixed it through the length of the village, and halted all other construction to handle it. Tomorrow Zaka is going to go summon new imps. I'm going to go along again, but only to clean up and then come back to finish the pressing construction here. I haven't really checked to see how viable food is up on the mountain this time of year either, so giving it an extra month might be a good idea anyway.

We returned two days later with three more goblins. It seems like the buildings at the cave entrance held up fine to the snow as well, which is good. I'll need to work extra hard for this next month to get the houses, roads, wall, kaga's workshop, and the remainder of the levee finished.

Well, another month has passed, and we're supposed to go back up the mountain to summon goblins tomorrow. I haven't quite finished everything I wanted to finish, but I think it's in a good enough state that I can leave the remaining work for next winter. There is a little bit of everything that needs finished actually, except for the levee. The walls aren't quite at their full height yet, and I haven't put closable gates in yet. I've also only completed thirty-two of the forty houses, and I've only made basic tools for kaga to work with in his workshop. The roads also don't reach to the openings in the walls yet. I was maybe going to stay for an extra month to work on things, but two days ago I ticked over to level 99, so I'd like to be back up on the mountain when I max my level out.

<UNCOMMON LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 99
HP: 2149/2149
MP: 902/902
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Earth Spike

[Vol.2] Ch.19: Status Windows

The trip up the mountain was fairly uneventful. A lot of the areas that had mudslides have started to grow plants through the wreckage. It'll still be a long time before it's fully healed, but it's at least starting to recover. I noticed some small lion roots as we ascended in altitude, so I know there is at least a single food source available already.

The imp summoning went fine as well. Two more goblins for Zaka to return to the village with. Zeb and I then spent the next day butchering imps and cleaning up corpses. As for our plans moving forward, we want to finish Zeb's house up here that we were working on before the storm hit, plus I want to start refining more lightstone. That way I can hopefully send some lightstone back with Zaka and the other goblins when they come visit, so I won't have to make multiple trips when I want to make those valves in the future.

It took nine days to finish Zeb's house. In that time, it's started lightly raining almost every day, which will make working outside a bit of a pain. One task that was still left from when we left last time was to clean up the rubble from making the terrace farms. I'm thinking of just leaving it until the weather becomes nicer. Instead, I think I'll finally start working on looking into the points of interest from my cave survey from all that time ago, beginning with the ones that seemed like native metals.

Thankfully excavation down to the first of the points only took about half a day. I wish I could say it was something rare or exciting, but it seemed to just be copper. I say that, but finding a native metal at all is great. Although there are some sizeable chunks, it's generally in small bits intermixed with the rock, so getting the metal itself is actually still going to take some work.

As for uses for the metal itself, well, I honestly don't have anything right now. The benefit of many metals over stone is that they're easier to work with, but my magic has gotten rid of that downside. The next benefit of metals I suppose would be ductile strength and plasticity, so I'll need to keep in mind situations where that would be more useful than stone. Although I suppose a final application is that I can teach the goblins how to use and recycle the copper, so they wouldn't need to rely on me to make all their tools for them. That said, elemental copper is actually quite soft, so it'd be a large step down from stone shaped stone tools.

Either way, I want to check each of the deposits in case there are any other metals. I suppose if in a distant time I decided to do anything with electricity, then the copper would be useful at that point as well.

I checked all four of the points of interest that seemed like they were metal over the last four days, and each was copper. Unfortunate, but not that surprising. I only excavated a portion of the metal bearing rock in each spot, and then closed them back off so that any future imps don't go messing around in the holes. Incidentally, I've also reached level 100 today while I was working, so tonight I should expect to go through the prestige or evolution process again, with that in mind, I think I'll take the rest of the day easy, and go to bed early.

<UNCOMMON LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 100
HP: 2161/2161
MP: 908/908
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Earth Spike

Available Traits:
Improved Dexterity: Increases dexterity and manipulation beyond what your form would normally allow.

I'm a little disappointed that I only have one option available this time, but considering I've put off picking Improved Dexterity for quite a long time, I guess I should be glad that I at least can still pick it. I make my selection, and quickly lose consciousness.

When I wake up, I check my status.

<RARE LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 0
HP: 974/974
MP: 454/454
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Earth Spike

Next, I decide to try to figure out exactly what Improved Dexterity actually does for me. Some basic stretches reveal that I'm more limber than before, able to stretch and bend further at my joints than I used to be able to. This extends to my hands as well, where I feel like I'm capable of finer motion with them. In fact, as I test out all my muscles, it's like my motor controls have become sharper than they were before. While it isn't as impressive as being able to shape stone with magic, I think that the daily utility is going to pay dividends over time.

Zeb's English is near perfect now, so I think now is as good a time as any to discuss traits and magic with him, and see if he can give me extra insight into the status window.

"So, Zeb, I've been meaning to talk to you about this for a while, but what does your status window look like?" I ask.

"My what?" Zeb says confused.

"Status, like your HP, MP, Traits and Magic? All the things you get when you prestige or evolve, that thing." I reply.

"I mean, I don't quite get your question. A window? Like on the house?" He says.

I almost immediately say no, but actually, in a way that is kind of right, "Uh kind of, but like the numbers and things that represent how much magic you have available and how close you are to dying." I say.

"I'm not sure I get what you mean by window, but I have a general sense of both of those things, although I don't have any magic to use, so it's not like I use that one ever." He says.

"Okay, but what about your traits, like things you got when you prestiged. What are those?" I ask.

"Well, I remember what I took the one time I got offered one, Mimicry." He says.

I have an idea of what it does, but I ask to be sure, grabbing a tablet, and marking things down as he responds, "Mimicry lets me quickly copy the behaviors of others, which let me learn English so fast, I presume. Although most goblins learn language pretty fast anyway." He responds.

I mark down what he says, then decide to etch him an image of what my status window looks like, and explain each part, going through some of my records of each of my previous forms stats with him. He nods along the whole time, seemingly understanding. When I'm done, I ask him to try to visualize a status window like mine.

To my surprise, he says he can see it, and it's not just his imagination. If I had to put money on it, his Mimicry trait is probably assisting him in this. Either way, I take the opportunity to write Zeb's status window down as well in a new record.

<RARE GOBLIN>
Level: 82
HP: 845/845
MP: 129/129
Traits: Mimicry

This brings up another question for him though. "When did you get mimicry?" I ask.

"When I became a rare goblin." He says.

"Okay, but what did you get when you became an uncommon goblin?" I ask.

"I didn't get anything, I just became an uncommon goblin." He says.

"Is that a normal occurrence?" I ask.

"I mean, it kind of used to be until you started having all the goblins start doing particular jobs. I think a few goblins got Improved Dexterity, some received Heightened Perception, and Kaga got Improved Strength." He says.

"I have a bit of a hypothesis, but do you remember which goblins got what?" I ask.

"Not exactly, but I think the ones making rope got Dexterity, and the hunters got Perception." He says.

I jot all these notes down. Looking back on my own traits, and thinking back to when I got them, they seemed to show up after I was doing a lot of tasks related to each of them. That does leave a few holes though, such as why the goblins don't get offered Carnivory.

"Most of the goblins have only been eating meat all the time, right?" I ask.

"Yeah, I mean, I don't know for certain, but almost all our meals have been meat." Zeb responds.

Well, I've got a new question as to why they haven't been offered Carnivory as a trait. I scribble the question down in my notes, and put them away for now. As much as I'd like to immediately start researching all of this, even if I were to run down the mountain, I don't think I'd be able to get all that much info from the goblins, even with Zeb's help. So for the time being, I think we'll focus on working on more of the tasks up here. I'm interested in what Zeb might get offered next. Since he's got mimicry and been working with me on all these stone projects, I'm very intrigued if he'll get offered stone shaping or not.

[Vol.2] Ch.20 Survey Results

The last three days have been spent digging out the other major points of interest from the survey. Namely the two layer changes that I identified before. The large one near the entrance revealed a less dense stone which seemed to be composed of a larger percentage of lightstone that I was working with before. Initially I wasn't sure if it was lightstone or just a similar color, but after doing some manual separation, and doing some basic tests like density and hardness, it seems to just be lightstone. Of course there are other minerals mixed in as well that I did some basic tests on.

The other minerals that aren't lightstone in the mix sadly didn't seem to have any better properties than the lightstone itself for any of the purposes I currently have. The only bit that was of interest of the minerals mixed in that stone was some reddish-brown toned stone, although it was softer than lightstone, but the color could at least be used to expand the color of things I make with stone. There is a decent chance of that happening as well, since I'll probably be using this stone to make lightstone from now on.

The second layer change that I inspected was less immediately useful, but I suspect it might be valuable. The layer seems composed of a very dark, fine-grained rock. The bit that I picked up in the survey actually seems to continue for a while, and I just barely picked up a bulge in the layer with tectonic sense before. The rock itself is softer than lightstone, but what makes it unique is its density. It's very dense. So dense that I suspect it might be very metal rich. Now what metal it's rich in, I can't tell. I'd need an entire smeltery to figure that out. While it could be useful, it could also be a dud. I've put it on a list of things to look into in the future, but for now I won't work on it.

As for right now, I'm actually getting close to breaching the largest bubble I detected from the survey. The one that overlapped three of the survey points that has crystals in it. I'm only a foot or so from breaching the bubble itself now, and I'm being careful as I work to give myself plenty of room in case of any emergency. The small bubbles I've run into before haven't been an issue, but you never know.

As I get even closer to breaking into the bubble, suddenly, a bit of the rock between the bubble and me cracks, and starts hissing. My initial fear is that there is gas leaking from it. Before I leave I want to at least see how much pressure there is, so I move my hand in front of the crack. I'm surprised by the fact that I don't feel any gasses moving. I move my hand on top of the crack, and can feel a slight suction force. I guess there isn't escaping gas then, but instead there is a vacuum in the bubble. I open the hole more to help the bubble be filled with air.

After a bit, the air stops filling into the large bubble. I open the hole large enough to fit into the bubble. The bubble itself is quite massive. I picked it up on three different survey points, so I knew it would be big, but it's nearly 30 feet in diameter, and all along the edges, crystals are embedded in the walls. While most of them are small, some closer to the bottom are actually decently sized, including one that is probably 20% larger than the largest I've seen so far. All things considered, it was a somewhat fruitful endeavor excavating this bubble. I grab the extra large crystal, and leave the bubble and head back to my house, dropping the crystal off in the charging room. Given the crystal that I found in that bubble, I think I'll look through the other crystal bubbles from the survey as well.

Well, the other 28 bubbles with crystals took ten days to dig into, and while many had vacuums of varying degrees, it seems like the smaller the bubble, the less the vacuum. The size of the bubble also seemed to limit the crystal sizes as well, as none of the other bubbles had any giant crystals in them, which made it a bit of a disappointment. I did get some medium sized ones, and there are tons of small and tiny crystals in them, but I left them in place. Tomorrow, Zaka is going to return, so I've been busy cleaning up the cavern for most of today in preparation. I'll also need to finish making some lightstone bricks to send back with Zaka and the goblins.

Zaka's visit went by fairly fast, and he left with three new goblins. It seems like the village is doing fine, although apparently one of the new goblins was killed by a lizard again, so Zaka is a little frustrated by that. He's apparently debating going out with the hunters to try to deal with any nearby lizards he can find. I can't really blame him when the lizards keep killing goblins like they have been since I've known them. I wish him the best of luck as he leaves, and send them off, each carrying a lightstone brick to bring back to the village.

As for projects to work on, I've decided that I will build a furnace up here. Since I have copper anyway, it'll help with shaping that, and I can also try to find out if that rock is actually a viable metal ore or not. Of course, first Zeb and I will be dealing with the dead imps. I also need to expand the new storage area to hold more wood, extra stone, and ores.

I'll also need to make a charcoal kiln to convert the wood into charcoal, which will be necessary to actually heat a forge to high enough temperatures to melt metals down. All these constructions will actually take quite a while, and while I'm at it, I'll need more wood, so I'll start the process of cutting down some trees. I'll probably let Zeb cut some of them down as well so he can gain some levels.

The charcoal kiln didn't take long to make. If my memory serves me, it should work, otherwise I'll need to make some adjustments. A charcoal kiln is basically made by burning wood in an oxygen poor environment, so you just start the wood burning, then close off all the oxygen, and wait for the process to end. Thanks to stone shaping, the construction didn't actually take all that long for it, only two days. It's fairly large, with the inside being slightly taller than me, so I can easily pile the wood up inside it. It has a hole at the top, and a few holes along the side. I've made plugs that can be used to close the side holes, as well as a larger plug for the top hole, and a set of stairs up to the top hole. Unfortunately, I don't have quite enough wood yet without completely depleting my stores of wood, so it'll be a little while before I can start a batch in it. Plus, it has still been raining a lot, so I'll need to let the wood dry out in the cave for a little while before I can use it anyway.

It's been another six days, and I've fashioned a crude forge to use for basic metal heating and testing in an area just beside my house built into the mountainside. The forge isn't actually that large, since it's manpower operated. The feature I'm most proud of for it is a crank and gear operated impeller to drive extra air into the forge to drive the fire temperature up. Some basic testing without any fire though led to some modifications of the design, and the inclusion of a flywheel as part of the design. In practice, keeping a constant stream of air with just a crank was quite hard, so the flywheel helps to make the airflow more steady, albeit making it harder to initially get up to speed.

I'm still a ways from getting the storage area expanded to the level I want it at however. I've been neglecting working on it in favor of these more interesting projects, but now I really do need to get it finished, so I'll be focusing on that next. A big part of the problem with expanding the storage area is getting rid of the extra stone produced. I'm thinking that I might actually start building that stairway down the mountain back to the goblin village as a way to get rid of the excess stone. It won't make it very far, but it's better than adding to the rubble pile that I already have.

[Vol.2] Ch.21 Learning Process

Getting the storage area expanded has turned into quite the hassle because, compared to other projects, it's not nearly as fun. That said, some benefit of the past four days of expanding it have yielded good results between Zeb and I. We've felled a few of the trees we were cutting, and now we've begun chopping down trees along the path to the goblin village, with the intent to build out stairs with stone down that way. By no means will it be a fast process, but as I've realized, I'm going to always have way more stone than I know what to do with, so having a productive output for it seems like a good idea.

With the handful of trees we've felled I'll have enough wood to try making some charcoal after it dries out some. Until then, I've started cutting the wood into manageable sized pieces and laying it out to dry in the cave. In preparation for the charcoal, I think I'm also going to start making a large amount of buckets for both transport and storage.

After a week, the wood is finally dry enough to try making charcoal from it. The storage area has been appropriately expanded as well, although some of the stone has only been hauled outside, and not yet placed into the pathway we're making. The reason for this mostly has to do with the work necessary in felling trees and clearing plants that are in the way of the path. The frequent rains are finally starting to lighten up, so opportunities to work on all that outside will become more frequent, and I'm hoping that we'll start making good progress on that soon.

I start loading the charcoal kiln up, piling it full of wood. After a few hours of hauling wood to and from the cave, the kiln is nearly full, so I close off the front area, and go light a fire in the top hole. If I remember correctly, whenever I see the fire through any of the air holes around the kiln, I'm supposed to plug them at that point, but not before. The whole process is probably going to take multiple hours given the size of the kiln, but once the holes are plugged, I can just leave it for a while, and open it at my convenience later.

I'm having Zeb watch the holes while I work on getting the rubble that I've been neglecting cleaned up somewhat. I'm just breaking it into pieces that are easy to carry, and bringing it up with all the stone from the storage area to be used for making stairs moving forward.

Well, it's been almost two days since we closed all the holes in the kiln, so I figure it's as good a time as any to open the kiln to see how well it went.

Overall, it honestly went better than I thought it might for a first run. There is quite a lot of unburned wood left that can be saved to use in another trial run, and quite a bit seems to have been burned away, but we recovered a lot of charcoal from the process. Considering it started as multiple trees worth of wood, we've gotten a few hundred pounds of charcoal at least here. The boring part is now filling the buckets with charcoal and moving them into the storage area. Once we've done that I can try my hand at loading up the forge and do some basic testing with it.

By the time we got the kiln all cleaned up, it was close enough to the end of the day that we decided to wait until today to actually start experimenting with the furnace. The first thing I need to do is make myself a crucible and set of stone tongs for handling the crucible. For now I'll just make it from some of the excess stone for testing. Then I break some of the pieces of stone with embedded native copper and fill the crucible. Finally I load up the smelting furnace with plenty of charcoal, and ignite it, and Zeb and I trade off on turning the crank to power the impeller forcing the temperature higher.

Initial results were... bad. The crucible cracked as it started to heat up, so I had to quickly attempt to remove it from the furnace, but it ended up breaking entirely, and the copper and stone inside spilled out. Good news, it's hot enough to melt the copper. Bad news, it ran into the impeller and jammed the whole system up. It's probably going to take at least a day to clean the whole thing up to try again.

Cleaning and preparations for a second attempt ended up taking two days. Cleaning the forced air tubes and repairing the impeller took quite a while, and I wanted to try to make sure any future attempts wouldn't be as disastrous. I've decided to use some lightstone to make the crucible, and very carefully build the whole thing with stone shaping to hopefully eliminate any air or water within the stone that might cause cracking. I've also made new tongs from lightstone in the same way. While I've been working on this, Zeb has felled some new trees, so he's been prepping more wood for the charcoal process. His levels are getting up there, so it probably won't be that much longer until he prestiges again.

<RARE GOBLIN>
Level: 94
HP: 917/917
MP: 141/141
Traits: Mimicry

I've decided to leave all the tree cutting to him so that he can get his levels faster. However, everything else is on hold for now because we have another experiment with metal melting about to start. The charcoal is lit, and we've started driving the impeller.

I slowly load the crucible into the furnace, keeping a close eye on it this time to hopefully react quickly if it cracks to save us the issue of having to clean out the whole furnace again.

Thankfully, it doesn't crack, and after a while, it starts to glow with heat. Once the crucible is a warm yellow color, I remove it from the heat, and set it on a flat stone surface. Which turned out to be a mistake. The thermal shock of the cold stone against the crucible cracked it right in half, and liquid copper seeped out, and began sputtering as it did so. Zeb and I bolted for cover, and thankfully neither of us received any burns. However, it's obviously another learning experience that I'll need to think of a solution for.

Thankfully cleanup this time only took a day. We're making good progress, and I've made what I hope is a solution to the problem we've experienced. I've extended the vertical area of the furnace, and put a thick stone layer with holes sized for a crucible to rest in it. The hope is that it is high enough up that it will be at a cooler temperature, and then when the furnace is off entirely, the crucible will cool at a reasonable rate and not crack. Of course, then I'll just have a solid piece of copper at the bottom of a crucible, with a bunch of slag on top of it, but we're trying to solve one problem at a time.

As an additional bit of testing I want to do, I'll need to refine a lot more lightstone. The reason being I want to make two new things. First, a stone scoop for removing slag from the crucibles as I melt metal. Second, an ingot cast. The ingot cast I'm not sure if it will work, since we've been having trouble with thermal shock, but if it is decently sized, and pre-heated in the furnace, I'm hoping it will work. The ingots won't be too big though, since I want to be able to re-melt them down.

Since Zaka will be back in only three days, I'm going to just focus on lightstone refining until he visits next, so I can make sure that he can be sent back with extra. Thanks to my new source of lightstone, I'm hoping that I have all the lightstone I'll need for everything by the time he arrives.

When Zaka arrived today, I was just finishing up my experimental ingot mold. I was also surprised with a gift from Zaka. The goblins he came up with were all carrying lots of smoked meat. Apparently, shortly after they returned from their last trip up here, another goblin died to a lizard attack, so Zaka decided to wipe out all the nearby lizards he could. For almost the entire month, the most skilled hunters and him have been going around killing all the lizards in the nearby areas. He said they've killed eleven so far, and it's gotten to the point that the smokehouse was completely full, so they decided to bring us as much of the smoked lizard meat as they could, to make room for more in the smokehouse.

Well, I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, so I gladly accept all this extra food. We spend a little time showing the new things we've been working on to the goblins. Similar to some other projects, Zaka actually has heard of copper smelting from his homeland, although he's never seen any of it directly. When I asked him about other metals, it seems like there are some, like gold and some dull gray metals, although Zeb had a hard time with the translation of this, so the most I can gather is that they do at least have concepts of metalworking.

By the end of the imp summoning process, Zaka heads back with two new goblins and his escort goblins, so he says he'll be back again next month, and I send him off with more lightstone.

[Vol.2] Ch.22 Metallurgy

Only a day after Zaka left and we're at another attempt at smelting the copper. I've brought a bucket of water to drop slag into as well, since I'm hoping to scoop that out of the crucible if I can. I've actually got two crucibles to work with this time. One to put into the tray above to cool, and another to attempt to pour into the small ingot cast. I load the first crucible into the furnace, and then put the ingot cast in beside it. After both get up to a healthy yellow glow, I remove a bit of slag from the inside of the crucible with the stone ladle, and drop it into the bucket. Next, I move the crucible up onto the upper shelf, which itself almost looks like it is faintly glowing. I get the second crucible loaded up, and moved into the furnace, and wait for it to get up to a glow as well. While it's going, I end up having to shovel in some new charcoal into the furnace, which I hope doesn't contaminate the copper to badly, but if it does, this is all a test anyway.

After a while, the temperature of the new crucible rises to a hot enough level, and I try to scoop as much of the slag out as I can. Next comes the hard part though, which is pouring the copper into the ingot mold. I've made a small lip on one side of the crucible for pouring, but even with that, maneuvering a heavy crucible on the end of stone tongs near sweltering temperatures isn't easy. I do end up spilling some into the furnace while I attempt to pour it into the ingot cast unfortunately, but overall, the pouring went well. There was still some slag that I had initially missed, which I had to scoop from the surface of the ingot mold after I poured, but over all it went well. The ingot mold wasn't quite full after the one crucible was used, so I took the opportunity to reheat the first crucible and pour enough copper from that to complete the ingot. The only thing left is to stop operating the impeller, and wait for the whole setup to cool down to a reasonable temperature.

As one might expect, the process of cooling took many hours. As much as Zeb and I wanted to work on other projects while waiting for everything to cool down, we were too excited to see the results of the experiment, and would find ourselves checking on it every few minutes, which meant that we barely progressed on any of the other work that needed done, like clearing the plants in the way of the stair construction. By evening however, things had cooled enough that we could safely handle them.

The ingot easily came free from its cast, which I turned over into water to further cool. Thankfully, it wasn't hot enough to cause any boiling. As for the two crucibles, I ended up having to stone shape them in half to free the material inside. One had a copper puck at the bottom, with slag embedded in the top, and the other had some copper holding onto slag in it. I can probably process those again to get the remaining copper if it I want it. I then stone shape the crucibles back together afterwards.

Well, we now have an ingot of copper. It's not particularly big and weighs approximately five pounds. I also put a small little inverted Cu embossing in the cast, so the ingot now has a Cu label on it. I've obviously had a few things I want to try with the copper for a while now, but wanted to wait until I had a semi-pure sample to work with. First, I attempt to stone shape it. Nothing. I can't do it. I figured that might be the case, but still worth a shot. Next, a tectonic sense ping. While not quite the same as pinging a crystal, it does have a distinct lack of noisiness to the ping, and it is very easy for me to tell it is an ingot shape. With some immediate tests done, I decide to put the copper ingot in my workshop, rather than in the massive storage room. I'll probably store more there in the future, but for now, I like the idea of keeping it close.

This opens up all sorts of work that could be done now though. I could make a whole process out of smelting copper, and stockpile a bunch, but actually, as discussed, I don't have a use for it. Instead, I think what I want to try next is attempting to smelt that dark rock that I suspect is an ore of an unidentified metal. Of course, that will require an entirely new process to complete. Unlike the copper, which is in a natural state, this doesn't appear to be a natural metal, instead, it's chemically bound. To get the metal out will require extra work, if it is even in there.

First, I'll need to really pulverize the rock. For now, I can roughly do it by hand with stone shaping, but if it turns out to be worth it, I'll have to make a rock crusher moving forward. Second, I'll need a flux material to act as a reduction agent for the metal. Thankfully, charcoal actually can work for that, so I'll have to just mix charcoal in as a powder for this test. Sea shells, if they exist, or limestone are more ideal to use generally, but for just figuring out if this is even metal, the charcoal will work fine.

Which means I'll have to take the time to do all that for the test. Thankfully, tomorrow we should be ready for another batch of charcoal to be made, so I can sit and break up stone while I watch the charcoal kiln.

The charcoal production went well yesterday, and I made a few crucibles with mixes of powdered rock and some charcoal. Today, we'll be unloading the charcoal, and then trying our hand at melting the suspect ore.

Once we got the furnace going, I load the loaded crucibles into the furnace. The melting point of many metals is much higher than the melting point of copper, so once we get the furnace set up, we're going to have to really go hard on the crank for the impeller. Zeb and I will probably need to trade off with the hope of getting the temperature to a light yellow.

Once the crucibles get to an orange-yellow glow, and they don't seem to be heating more, Zeb and I have to start trading off on operating the crank as fast as we can. We only keep the frantic pace up for about twenty minutes before we are both so exhausted we can't keep turning the crank at that pace any longer. The crucibles are glowing a nice yellow, so I'm hoping they're hot enough to melt any potential metals out of the suspect ore. Although I won't know until tomorrow, since it's going to take a long while for the whole furnace to cool down so I can check the crucibles. After I rest for a short bit, I move the crucibles up into the cooling tray up above the furnace before leaving it to cool.

Well, results are mixed. On one hand, we did recover a bit of dull silvery metal in each of the crucibles. The downside is that, for the almost two pounds of rock in each crucible, we only recovered about a quarter of a pound of metal from each. Which means, of whatever this metal is, it will take a lot of ore to recover a useable amount of metal. Plus we nearly exhausted ourselves to make this small amount. On the other hand, depending on the properties of the material, there is a very large amount of the ore, so it could be worth coming up with a solution to these problems.

To determine that though, I'll actually need to do some testing on the metal to determine if it is even worth gathering. Since I have a few puck shaped pieces of the metal from the crucibles, I suppose that is what I'll work with.

The first property I notice through simply impacting the puck against my desk is that the metal is somewhat brittle, breaking along clear sheer lines. The next test reveals that it's harder than copper, since it is able to scratch copper, but it can't be scratched by it. It's less hard than stone still however. It also breaks when I try to bend it. From these tests, I'm suspecting that it's probably majority iron, or more specifically right now, a pig iron.

Pig irons are rich in carbon, which leads to them being very brittle and hard, and not very useful. Which means it isn't very useful in its current form. The unfortunate aspect of it being pig iron is that to make it useful, I'd need to remove carbon from the alloy. Which is a whole extra process. That is, if it even is pig iron. If it's something else, then all that work might not be worth it. On the other hand, if it is iron, then the value of having access to steel is almost immeasurable, although the process of actually getting to a reasonable amount of steel would be a whole endeavor of it's own.

For now, I'll just set the pucks of metal aside. As much as I would like to pursue the whole thing right now, I do have other things I can work on before that point which have a higher chance of being viable.

[Vol.2] Ch.23 Crystal Experiments

After all the metal work yesterday, I want to take it a little easier, and not do as much physical labor, and I'm sure Zeb feels similarly. Today, instead, I'm going to collect small crystals with Zeb. Sure, it's still work, but it's pretty relaxed. I already have quite a few of the smallest size in the warehouse, but I've decided to gather more of the smallest ones. The reason being, I want to do more experiments with them. I discovered some basic principles before, like how they seemingly combust when exposed to too much passive mana. Or, more usefully, they seemingly don't combust as easily when they're large. So what I want to try to figure out is how to grow the crystals themselves. The concern that I have with growing them is obviously whether or not I can actually replicate the conditions they grow under or not.

So for at least today and tomorrow I want to gather as many of the small crystals as I can. I'll also have Zeb get the old buckets of the smallest sized crystals from the old storage room, and we'll move them to my old house deep in the cave to work.

It's weird being back in the old house after all this time. The first thing I want to try is seeing if the crystals are water soluble. I try dissolving them in both cool and hot water, to no avail. Given where I found them and how they deteriorated before, I suspected that they may not be able to be dissolved by water, which is a bit of a disappointment, but it is what it is. The next test is actually fairly simple. I want to see what happens if I break a crystal.

The first attempt with a large hammer does the trick, and the crystal breaks. There is a small flash and a hiss when it breaks, and the pieces that that are left are oddly shaped, and have black soot along the edges where they broke. Actually, as I watch it for a little bit, the edges of the pieces slowly deteriorate until what is left are even smaller octahedrons instead of the oddly shaped initial pieces. This is a slightly odd behavior for a crystal, but I suppose I know that mana allows for behaviors I'm not familiar with, like my stone shaping. Since I know the crystals store mana, I'm going to assume for now that some unknown mechanism deteriorates the crystal until it's shaped in their familiar octahedron.

The next test I'd like to see is if I can melt them. However, I can't exactly just take them back up to the surface, since they'll deteriorate if I do that. I'll try to do it initially over the small fireplace in the room for now.

I sit with them in a small crucible over the fireplace for at least ten minutes with no changes. I mean, considering I'm finding them in volcanic rock, I shouldn't be surprised that they aren't breaking down at this temperature. That said, most crystals precipitate out of liquids because their solid phase is a higher point than the liquid. Which would mean that these only melt at temperatures higher than magma, and since my crucibles are made of the very rock I found the crystals in, I can't exactly just melt them.

I sit for a while, trying to think about what I can do to solve this issue. To Zeb, it probably looks like I'm just staring at the crystals recently pulled out of the fire. I decide to voice my concerns to Zeb.

"Not only can I not melt these crystals down, but I'm not even sure if I can reform a crystal afterwards. I mean, you saw the fact that the crystal bubbles were under a vacuum. I just, I lack the technology and machines to do a lot of that stuff." I say.

Zeb responds, "I'm not sure about melting them, but you can break them down right? Can you melt the broken stuff down, kind of like the other rock you were breaking down for the dull gray metal? As for the vacuum, is there another way to do it without machines? I mean, you were talking before about making a machine to crush the rock, but if you can crush the rock with magic, can you do make the vacuum with magic?"

I pause for a minute and think. He's right. I'm approaching all of this with ideas from Earth. I've got an entire third axis of freedom to work with. Namely, magic. Sure, I can't make an airtight operating part to pull a vacuum, I'm lacking precision machining, rubber, and all sorts of materials to accomplish that. What I can do though, is literally move solid stone like it's a liquid. Surely I can just expand a sealed container and reduce the pressure in it. That solves the vacuum issue.

I do wonder actually now that he says that as well. The crystals break down when there is too much mana in them. If I put the crystals in a near vacuum container, then take that to the surface and heat it up hot enough, will the insides liquify? Can I use that to make an artificial crystal? I think it's probably worth a shot.

I thank Zeb for his insight, and begin work on the idea. The basic idea is to make a sealed lightstone container with a bunch of the small crystals in it. Then, I basically am going to have to work with tectonic sense plus stone shaping to expand the container's volume. Once the container gets to a certain internal volume, I'll move internal stone to make two compartments, one with the crystals, and one without. I'll open the one without crystals, releasing what gas was in it, then recycle the stone back around the outside of the container. By doing so, I should be able to continually reduce the pressure inside the container. The biggest concern will be actually preventing the container from breaking, especially if I make it hot, which will probably reduce its structural integrity. I'll also need plenty of lightstone, which means I'm back on processing duty for a little while.

Three days and I think I'm ready for the first tests. Before I load the container with crystals, I want to try just reducing the pressure without the crystals inside.

Initial results are promising, but I'm glad that I tried without the crystals first. While I was able to reduce the pressure to very low values, as I worked, I learned that I do need quite a lot of stone in the walls to keep the vessel in one piece. It had a habit, when I got the pressure very low, to crack while I was in the process of reducing the pressure.

Considering the wall thickness of the vessel, it's going to take a long time to heat the whole vessel thoroughly enough. I also realized I'll need to have the vessel attached to a thick stone rod so that I can prevent thermal shock while still being able to transport it back down the cave while hot. After all, I can be almost certain that no crystal would form on the surface, since they already break down when up here.

So, today, I'm just going to make two test vessels, and then store them down in the cave overnight, and then tomorrow start heating a vessel early in the morning for testing, since it will take a while to get up to temperature. Thankfully we have plenty of charcoal stored up.

Well, it's bright and early, and Zeb and I are ready to get to work. Zeb is getting the furnace started, and I'm going to go down into the cave and grab the test vessel. The vessel itself is a little larger than a crucible, but its insides are slightly smaller. As I carry it up, I don't immediately notice any difference from the vessel, but one I make it high enough up, tectonic sense reveals that there aren't any crystals inside anymore, so I can only assume it's deteriorated.

For the initial test here, our plan is to get it as hot as we can, and then carry the whole thing back down into the cave to cool down. The vessel is on the end of a rod that is more than a yard long, so the hope will be that I can just stone shape the rod onto a wall, so that the vessel can cool naturally overnight.

The heating process went fine yesterday, and so did the process of setting it to cool in the cave. Unfortunately, upon cracking it open, there were no crystals inside. It wasn't a complete loss though, the blackish powder that forms when the crystals fall apart had coalesced into a single solid piece of material. Which tells me it did melt inside. That actually is a good sign for the process as a whole. I've got a few ideas of things to try before we give up.

[Vol.2] Ch.24 Artificial Growth

There are a few reasons crystals may not have formed. Some of the reasons won't be too bad to rectify, and some will be nearly impossible as things are right now to fix. Some of the bad reasons include having to boil the solid crystal material, or missing some fundamental component unknown to me that acts as a catalyst. Both of those would be nearly impossible to rectify as current things stand.

Thankfully, there are also things that I can try which aren't too bad. First, it might need to be agitated as it cools, making sure that the gas released by the broken crystal is re-dissolved into the liquid to allow crystal formation. Second, it might need imperfections, or a seed crystal inserted to grow off of. Thankfully, both of those are not too bad to test, so I'll give both of them a shot moving forward.

For testing agitation, I think for a single test, manual agitation should be fine. If it turns out to work, it'll be a hassle to make an apparatus for it, but not impossible. As for inserting a seed crystal, that is actually slightly easier thanks to stone shaping. All I need to do is embed a seed crystal into some solid lightstone such that I simply use stone shaping to merge and drop the crystal into the heated chamber back down in the cave. This might end up needing multiple tests though, because if the material is too hot, it might actually dismantle the existing crystal.

With a plan laid out, Zeb and I have a some work to do over the next few days to make plenty of testing apparatuses. I think we're getting close to having a third batch of wood ready too, which means Zeb might also prestige soon. Plenty of things to keep us busy.

Well, we spent five whole days getting various things ready for testing. In that time, Zeb did prestige after felling a few more trees, which we finished converting to charcoal yesterday. I quickly jotted down his new status when he awoke the next morning. He definitely grew a few inches during his prestige, and his arms gained some brown striping along them.

<Epic Goblin>
Level: 0
HP: 383/383
MP: 52/52
Traits: Mimicry
Magic: Stone Shaping

When I asked him about his options for prestige, he said he had Stone Shaping, Mana Affinity, and Improved Endurance. I'm not particularly surprised about the first two, considering I've been having him work along side me doing a lot of similar work to when I was an imp and gained those traits. After he explains Improved Endurance, which does exactly what it sounds like, I have to give him a slight talking to.

Basically, he's been pushing himself further than he should be while working for me. While he's getting larger, he's still only 2/3 my height, so I told him that if he's feeling exhausted, he should take breaks, unless he's really certain he wants to keep working. If I don't say that we absolutely need to push ourselves, like when we're operating the impeller, it's fine if he wants to take a break to just relax while he's working. I'm not sure that he's actually going to listen though, because he just waved my concerns off with a smile.

Well, a nice thing is he has stone shaping now. A downside of that of course is the fact that he only has 52 mana right now. Which means to do a large amount of work, he basically needs to be attached to a crystal charging tray. I'm still four times as fast with improved stone shaping, but it means that I no longer need to do all the stone work myself, as long as it is something small or in the cave.

If we weren't quite as close to the next tests with the crystals, I'd probably invite him to manage one of the tests, but considering he's so new to stone shaping, and there actually is some danger in working with very hot materials, I think he'll have to wait until he's a little more trained to run tests like these himself.

Well, either way, it's time to start the two tests today. We're going to heat two crystal containers up at a time, then bring them down into the cave, and one I'll drop a solid crystal into, and then we'll take turns agitating the other container until it cools.

Neither experiment yielded the result I wanted, but the seed crystal experiment did give a result that might be promising. The crystal didn't grow, but it shrank slightly, and part of the crystal looked like it had regrown from an even smaller size. I think there is a possibility that the temperature was a little too high when I dropped the crystal in and it partially dissolved before re-growing.

Tomorrow we'll try waiting a little while with two new containers and drop the crystal in at different temperatures. I'm hoping this starts yielding positive results soon because we're actively destroying the smallest crystals doing this. The smallest ones aren't very useful on their own, but it seems like a shame to be completely destroying them.

One of the two new tests yielded a small positive result, thankfully. Honestly, I was ecstatic that I found a way to artificially grow the crystals. The medium temperature drop had a small growth of new crystal along four of its eight facets, resulting in some new growth on it. Not a large amount by any means, maybe a few percent of mass growth, but it's growth!

However, this yields a new problem. The size of everything we've been doing won't let me work with as large of a crystal as I'd ultimately like. How large would I like? As large as I can obviously! If I can make it large enough, there is a chance I can take it outside without it breaking down. Then I can have one installed down in the goblin village. No more waiting around to work due to mana down there! I can put another one up by the cave entrance as well, then I don't have to travel half way down the cave to recharge when working outside up here. To me, it sounds like it's worth coming up with an entire process for making these if I can.

I'm going to think on the process for a little while and see if I can come up with a better way than what we are currently doing given we actually have a path forward now.

I've been tinkering for four days and I think I might have something to try, such that if it works, it should scale up to whatever size I want. There is only one downside, and that is space in the cave. Zaka will be back in a few days, so I think even initial testing is going to have to wait until he leaves, but I think I'll have to talk over the idea of closing off the deepest part of the cave to make into a place where I can work without this all being interrupted when he wants to summon imps.

Zaka brought more smoked meat when he visited, and he left with three new goblins, and again bricks of lightstone. He gave me the go ahead to close off part of the cave for working on my project, as long as it won't get in the way in the future for imp summoning. I felt a little bit upset at the way he phrased it, but I guess I sort of approached it from the position of asking for permission, so I'm a little at fault too. Although I suppose the other option is that I take charge, and really, I'd rather just let Zaka be in charge of most of the stuff. I get to work on whatever I want, and I haven't had him say I can't work on anything in particular, so I guess it's the trade off of responsibility for freedom.

With that figured out, it's the first large project that I'll have Zeb actually helping with stone shaping on. What we're going to do is create a false back to the cavern. The whole thing. We'll take material from the back most part to deepen the cavern, and with that material make a wall that will serve as a new artificial back to the cavern so that the imps don't interfere with anything behind it.

If we work hard, it should be done in a day or two. Once it's done, we'll have to work inside to level the floors, and then I'll have to build the apparatuses I have in mind for growing crystals. The basic idea will be to make multiple vacuum chambers, each increasing in size. Each one has a stand holding a crystal in the center, held so that it points directly up towards the top and center of the chamber. Then, instead of dropping the crystal into the liquid, we'll drop the liquid slowly onto the crystal. Then, have a small collection section at the bottom of the chamber where I can seal it off and re-melt the liquid once it hardens in the bottom to repeat the process. This way we'll also keep the chamber charged with all of the gas from the crystals, so hopefully when the gas gets to higher concentrations the crystal will grow better. Once the crystal gets to a certain size, the gas will be collected as best it can, and moved into a larger vacuum chamber along with the crystal. Rinse and repeat the process to hopefully grow the crystal as large as we want.

[Vol.2] Ch.25 The Growing Process

Between the work area and the initial two apparatuses, it took us seven days. A large part of which was actually rebuilding the apparatuses after doing some tests on them under vacuum. The apparatus chamber shape needed to be changed and thickened because one cracked when I tried to stone shape a new container onto it, which would normally be part of the attempt at growing crystals.

So we've reached the point of doing our first attempts at artificial crystal growth today. One thing that hopefully will be beneficial is that the melted crystals actually do need to cool somewhat before we can attempt to pour the crystal material onto the existing crystal. This gives us a window where I think we can actually heat up four of the crystal laden vacuum containers before we bring them down to the cave to use. The furnace can fit two of the chambers at a time, so once we heat those ones up to temperature, we'll set them up on the higher rack I made for crucibles before, and we'll start heating a second set to use.

After heating the four chambers, Zeb and I carry two down into the cave to attempt the crystal growing experiment. We have to wait a short while for the first chambers to reach the approximate temperature of success we had from before. Then I use stone shaping to merge the container onto the top of the growth apparatus. The first container isn't going to be that likely to have any success if I had to guess. The reason being that I have yet to add any of the mysterious gas into the apparatus. In fact, I wouldn't expect much growth at all today from all four of these. The hope however is that over time, the concentration of whatever the gas is will increase in the chamber, and allow better crystal growth.

For the first container, I allow the material to quickly empty into the chamber. I seal the top back off, and remove the first container, and we swiftly move the second container into position, and I stone shape it into position. This time however, I open a small hole to slowly drip the liquid material down onto the target crystal. By using tectonic sense, I can check when the fluid is finally emptied as well. After it is, we wait a while for the third and fourth container to reach the appropriate temperature before repeating the process for them as well.

As we're finishing the fourth container, I realize that there is a step that I actually should be doing at the end of each of these container completion steps. I don't know the exact level of vacuum the chamber should be at, but in theory, if the crystal is integrating the gas into its structure, then it actually shouldn't be too much of a problem to have the gas at a higher pressure, to a point. So I should be using stone shaping to make sure that I force all the gas from the initial containers into the crystal growth apparatus. I'll probably just do this by stone shaping along in a piston like fashion, reducing the volume of the container until there isn't any volume left, pushing the gas out. The only thing I'll need to be careful of with this is not pressurizing the general apparatus, because we haven't tested it at all for positive pressure, and we don't know if the crystals have a pressure above which they won't grow.

After we finish with the last container, I use tectonic sense to check the crystal in the apparatus. It has grown a bit. Not a lot by any means, and it will probably be a few days of this process before we need to move the crystal to the next size apparatus. For the current apparatus, a final crystal would be slightly smaller than the largest crystals I have from my collection of natural crystals. After a while, the material in the bottom collection container has solidified, and with tectonic sense, I can tell that the container is a nearly two third full. I could remove it as is, and prepare it to re-melt, but I think instead, tomorrow we'll just melt two containers of crystals, to fill the bottom collection container. Then, when it is full, we'll melt it the following day, and try to re-apply that material, to see if it will still grow the seed crystal.

Today, we're attempting the application of re-melted crystal material. Yesterday's two containers went fine, and almost filled the re-use collection container. It took some extra caution to remove the container while maintaining the airtight seal of the crystal growth apparatus, but I think I managed it fine. Then I put a new empty container where it used to be for collection.

This container is a decent bit heavier than the previous containers we were using, owing to the fact it is almost completely filled with material, rather than only partially filled. Which also means it is taking almost as long to heat as the four containers took together to heat. Once it reached the desired temperature though, we moved down to the apparatus for today's application of material. After giving it a little while to cool, I apply it to the top of the apparatus and open a small hole to drip material onto the growing seed crystal.

After the entire container emptied, it appears that around 10% of the re-melted material formed crystal on this pass. For the next few days, I want to just try re-applying this material over and over, to see just how much of it we can use, and maybe gain some insight into the crystal formation process.

After four days of repeating the process, two things became apparent. First, the amount of material that would form crystal was decreasing non-linearly each time. Now whether that was because of some unknown problem with heating and cooling the material each time, or reduction in gas pressure due to it being mixed into the crystal is unknown at this time. Second, the amount of charcoal we are going through is significant, and we'll need to keep logging and making charcoal occasionally. I've decided that we'll cut half the wood from the nearby area, expanding the controlled environment around the cave entrance, and the other half will be cut and hauled from the path down to the goblin village. This will obviously slow down progress of the crystal project, but I think neglecting infrastructure development is more likely to slow us down long-term.

As it stands, the crystal in the current apparatus is nearly large enough to move to the next chamber, so for today, we're going to melt down two new containers of small crystals to pour on, and then tomorrow, I'll begin the hard process of transferring the crystal and gasses in the current apparatus into the larger one. Those two new crystal melts will be enough to re-fill the re-use container to full. This time though, I'm just going to seal it off, and set it aside. On the new apparatus, I want to add even more raw crystal material, to increase the gas concentration in the larger chamber again. Thankfully, as of right now, we don't seem to have a shortage of the very small crystals. Moving forward though, I might want to consider spending some time using tectonic sense to try to find more buried bubbles of crystals. I haven't yet checked a lot of the side tunnels, nor have I tried using my larger mana pool to do even larger pings.

Moving the seed crystal to the new, larger apparatus and then moving the gas over to the new chamber was quite the painstaking process, but I completed it without too many issues. First, I stone shaped the crystal slowly out the bottom of the chamber encased in stone. On inspection, I could barely tell that the crystal was only growing on the top facets that were getting dripped on by the liquid material. For the new apparatus, I inserted the crystal upside down from its previous orientation, to grow the other four facets, in case there was any artificial instability caused by growing the crystal from only four of its eight facets.

The gas movement just required I fashion a thick tube from one apparatus to the other, then push the remaining gas from the old apparatus to a new one using stone shaping to piston it over through the tube. Once all this was done, there was less than half a day left, so I decided to get more lightstone prepped for containers so that we'll be ready for further applications of the process. Considering it is only 13 days until Zaka comes back, I'd like to be able to be far enough along to show him an artificially large crystal. Next time he comes back, he isn't expected to be summoning more imps unless they've had more losses in the village, so hopefully it can just be a tour of the facilities.

[Vol.2] Ch.26 A Crystal Test

Zaka arrives tomorrow, and we've been hard at work. Although the crystal isn't quite to the maximum capacity of the current apparatus it's in, I think it's large enough to move into an even larger apparatus if I want to make one. The current artificial crystal is a little less than twice the size of the largest natural crystal I've found. From top to bottom its about a foot tall.

To get to this point, we've used lots of small crystals. We've also have a working hypothesis for the re-use of melted crystal material. Some of the material becomes unusable after each melt, although this isn't actually a very large amount. I'm assuming that there is some degree of reaction with whatever small amount of air is left in the container or with the container itself, which is causing some material to be unusable for growing the crystals. The bigger half of the hypothesis is that the higher the concentration of mystery gas in the growth chamber, the more readily the crystal grows during each pour cycle.

We figured this out through multiple trials and testing of adding more crystal melt in, and cycling through the re-use of material. This hypothesis that we've been working with has greatly increased the amount of crystal growth per day in the last few days, but unfortunately, it also means we're storing a lot of the melted crystal material that we've only used once. It seems like a bit of a waste, but for now, we have plenty of excess. Since we frequently are waiting for crystal melt to cool before application, I've used that time to make a small offshoot room where we now store the spent containers of crystal melt. As of right now, there are eight containers full of the stuff in there.

Not that each container is particularly large. The internal volume is only about a third of a cubic foot. However, because the inside is likely under some degree of vacuum, it has walls that are a few inches thick. The container itself is a rounded cylinder that is a foot and a half tall, and about a foot wide. Seeing multiple of them lined up on the shelf in the room reminds me somewhat of industrial byproducts from Earth. While it is possible for us to use these containers of material to grow crystals, right now, it's not worth our time. When and if crystals become scarce, then we might need to come back to use it. Should that happen, I think I'll be glad that I've stored it in this ready to use form.

Now comes an initial test of the artificial crystal. I need to make sure that it can still hold mana like the regular crystals. One of the properties that I noticed in natural crystals was their ability to store higher amounts of mana based on their size, and their ability to tolerate being closer to the surface. Now, I don't want to destroy this crystal before Zaka arrives, but I do want to at least charge it. So I'm going to store it with the other crystals in the charging room overnight. After Zaka leaves we can do some more dangerous tests with this crystal.

Zaka arrives with just one other goblin in the afternoon. Thankfully, there is no news of any goblins dying to any events. He brings us even more lizard meat again as well, which is actually why he brought the extra goblin with him, to help carrying the extra meat up. I'm thankful for the free food, and for the laborer who will bring back some lightstone bricks back to the village with Zaka.

Without too much delay, I want to show Zaka the artificial crystal. I take him down to the crystal recharging room, and retrieve the artificially grown crystal. Since it is quite a bit bigger than the other crystals and special, I stored it in its own special storage spot. To me, it seems like it's fully charged, glowing a bit brighter than any of the other crystals.

When I show him the crystal, he seems intrigued, and makes a statement, and Zeb begins translating for us.

"I'd like to try to use this for a test." Zaka says.

I'm hesitant, depending on what kind of test he wants to try, but I'll at least hear out what he has in mind. "What kind of test?" I ask.

"I want to see just how long this can power my magic." He says.

Well, that should be fine. It's a natural question honestly, "Sure, how do you want to try it?" I ask. I'm a little nervous he might decide he wants to summon imps repeatedly, which would lead to cleanup needing done.

He doesn't say anything, but points his arm towards an empty section of wall, and shoots a fireball off, and then looks to me for approval.

I suppose that works. I give him a nod of approval, and hold the crystal out for him. What follows is a rapid fire of fireballs shooting towards the same section of wall. I'm sure I missed a few because he was firing them off pretty rapidly, but by the end, I count 33 fireballs. The wall where he was shooting is giving off some impressive heat as well. He seems impressed, and turns to give us his feedback.

"It let me use about triple what I could normally." He says, and pauses for a moment, "It also made my hand that was touching it feel warm."

Well, I guess that gives me some insight, not into the crystal, but Zaka. I have no idea what the mana cost of a fireball is, but at the very least, I know he can fire around ten in rapid succession with his mana pool. A slightly terrifying thought. Once it charges again, I should be able to use my own mana until emptying the crystal, and get a sense for what the value of his mana pool and cost of his fireball is. I'll also need to look into what he means by his hand feeling warm. I recall sleeping on piles of the crystals back when I was an imp, and that feeling warm, maybe he means akin to that? I guess I'll see.

Zaka makes one final comment, "Keep up the good work, I'll be looking forward to my next visit." Before heading back up out of the cave.

Normally, he stays the night, but apparently, he's eager to head back to the village because he's going on another hunt for lizards tomorrow. I suppose he's really on the warpath after the last few years of the lizards wiping out goblins. I send him and the other goblin off with some lightstone for the village. I have Zaka wait for a few minutes, and I fashion him a lightstone tipped spear for him to use as well. For the remainder of the day, Zeb and I take care of some of the neglected tasks outside, like building more of the stairs, since the weather is nice, and we were in such a rush to get this crystal grown before Zaka returned.

Today, I'm going to to figure out what the mana storage of this crystal is. My status hasn't actually grown all that much recently, despite the amount of time it has been, and the handful of trees I've cut down. As always, it seems each prestige gets harder to gain levels.

<RARE LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 7
HP: 1079/1079
MP: 501/501
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Earth Spike

Okay, so my mana pool is a little over 500. I could go about this slowly, using stone shaping to go through my mana, but I think instead, I'll use the majority of the mana by using Earth Spike, similar to how Zaka used his Fireball. I use the first Earth Spike, draining 200 mana in a near instant while I touch the crystal.

His hand felt warm my ass. While not burning, this is hot. Not so hot as to cause damage, but it is severely uncomfortable. Before I notice, my mana was refilled though. Crap, I was distracted and didn't quite get the chance to actually see how fast it refilled my mana. I cast earth spike again while focusing on my mana pool. Okay, well, it refills the missing mana in about a second and a half.

I decide on a new test now. I let go of the crystal, and use two earth spikes, depleting my mana pool even more before putting my palm against the crystal. The temperature doesn't increase, but the duration of the heat lasts nearly three seconds, making me even more uncomfortable than before. I'm also now about 800 mana in, and the crystal has lost quite a bit of its glow. I'm not sure how many more tests I'm going to get out of the crystal's mana, so I decide that I should make them count.

I have two in mind. First test, a single earth spike, and then I touch the crystal with two hands rather than one. Each hand heats up, but the duration is less than a second this time before I'm full of mana again. Next test, I earth spike, and then touch the crystal with just a finger. The finger feels the heat for almost fifteen seconds before I'm full. Which was very uncomfortable. I'd much rather have the brief heat than that very long duration heat. I decide that I want to try a third test, using my upper arm as the conduit for the crystal as well.

This time however, when I go to recharge after using earth spike, I only get a brief jolt of heat before it dissipates, and I'm not fully recharged. I only recharged 57 mana this time, and the crystal looks completely depleted. Darn. That brings the total mana in the crystal to approximately 1257 mana. Then Zaka's mana pool is probably around 600, and it would be about 55 mana per fireball. That isn't accounting for the fact that I'm pretty sure I miscounted while he was shooting, so it could be anywhere from 50 to 60 mana. That also assumes that he was pretty close with his triple estimate. Either way, this has left me with a lot to think about.

[Vol.2] Ch.27 A Hot Topic

I need to make a decision on the crystal project. First, it seems like it might be dangerous to make the crystals larger than they already are if someone uses them to regenerate mana. The existing artificial crystal clearly is already on the precipice of that being an issue. So, what I need to check is whether the existing crystal will deteriorate at the surface. In case it deteriorates, I'll embed it in a vacuum container, like the previous crystals were. It'll have to be a bit bigger than those containers to house this crystal though. It will be quite the labor loss if it deteriorates, but it will be very important to informing the project plans moving forward. As such, today, I'll get the special vacuum container made for it as well as getting the smallest crystal growth apparatus set up to start growing another crystal. If it deteriorates, I'll want to melt it down as quickly as possible, and start the re-growth process.

As I carry the container up to the surface, I periodically check it with tectonic sense. Initially, it seems to be holding stable, at least, it makes it further than previous tests did, but I'm still quite a ways from the cave exit when I no longer can detect the crystal in the container. Which means two things. One, this crystal obviously didn't make it, but it implies that, two, I'll need a much larger crystal for it to actually make it to the surface. Well, time is of the essence, so Zeb and I start the furnace up, and begin the process of melting this crystal material down. It'll probably be at least ten days before we get a crystal that size again.

While I actually overestimated how many days it would take to re-grow the crystal given the larger apparatus was still charged with a decent amount of the gas from last run, it still ended up taking ten days because we spent one day making more charcoal. While I'd like to say we can keep this pace up, we'll actually need more charcoal again soon enough, so we'll still have to keep up the periodic breaks where we make charcoal and build some stairs, or work on other areas that need it.

I've actually taken to doing various small tasks while waiting for crystal material to cool to a usable temperature. We tried a test this time where we only heated the crystal material to the temperature that we need it at, and it ended in failure, so we've been heating it to the high temperature and waiting for it to cool some before use, which takes a decent amount of time. Sometimes we spend the time extracting lightstone, and sometimes it's breaking down that metal ore into powder. I figured it was a good way to pass time, plus I'm helping Zeb get used to using his own stone shaping while we wait, since he helps me with these processes. It reminds me of back when I was healing from my near death experience, and just sat refining lightstone all day, which actually did help me get a more precise grip on the magic. As I can tell from his first works of lightstone refinement still having some patches of dark in it, which needs further refinement to remove.

I've made the executive decision to make a third, larger apparatus. A finished crystal from this will be almost two feet tall. This should octuple the crystal's volume, while only squaring its surface area. I've come to suspect that the ratio of surface area to volume is likely playing a role in how quickly the crystal deteriorates when it gets near the surface. As I recall, when I'm on the surface, I have an ambient mana regen rate, which is somewhat higher during the day than at night, and is severely limited during an eclipse. My guess is that the crystal's volume dissipates mana at some fixed rate, and when the ambient mana exceeds that rate, the crystal structure falls apart. Given that the crystals glow when charged, my guess is that it dissipates the mana as light. Which is why as I approach the surface, and my mana regen rate slowly increases, I'm actually just absorbing the higher amount of ambient mana. Then, by extension, there should exist some level where the crystals are capable of surviving on the surface, where their volume can dissipate all the mana they absorb when they reach a certain amount charged.

The biggest concern with a crystal of this size is the dangers in using it. Given the uncomfortable feeling that the large crystal gave us, I'm a little worried about what a crystal this large might do. I'll hope that a small test using only a few missing mana will be a short enough time that I won't have any lasting effects from whatever happens. All that will likely be after Zaka returns next time. I'll voice my concerns with him at that time, and see what he thinks.

Well, Zaka is supposed to return tomorrow, and the extra large crystal is only 75% done, so he won't be getting any demonstration this time of it. We're also through almost 25% of all the extra small crystals that we had on hand from all our known crystal deposits. If I lump in the small sized crystals as well, then we've probably only used 10% of the total volume rather than 25%, but its still a worrying amount, and I'm starting to consider looking for more crystal deposits. In theory there should still be quite a bit available if I survey the side tunnels and use an even larger tectonic sense ping using my larger mana pool. If push comes to shove, as long as we preserve the gas, I can start using the recycled material for slower gains, and that will last a significant amount longer.

The good news, is once the apparatus is charged with enough gas, the rate of crystal production increases to a decent pace, and we get significantly less leftovers than we were getting before. All that said, it took quite a while to charge the largest apparatus to that point, and we've increased our number of recycled crystal material containers by quite a lot. At this point last month, we had 8 containers. That has ballooned to 33 containers now. I even had to extend the room once now to make room for all of the new containers, and am considering another extension now.

Zaka returned with a goblin again, and the whole interaction went very similar to last time, save for any crystal testing. We had a brief discussion about the dangers of a larger crystal, and Zaka had an idea that I thought wasn't half bad. He asked if it would be worth trying to put hide between the crystal and the body part that touches it. So next time, he's going to bring some hide from one of the large lizards so that we'll have something we can test with. I wonder if leather would be useful, although we'll have to wait and see if the hide even works first. That said, actually, I should probably teach the goblins leather working when I'm back in the village. Especially if Zaka is killing all these large lizards anyway.

The two foot crystal was finished yesterday, and there are still 22 days until Zaka comes back with the hide. The weight of the crystal is actually incredibly heavy at this point. It is well over 150 pounds, and as such, to actually move it, we'll need multiple people's help. It's so heavy, that honestly, if we need to make a larger crystal, it's going to need a cart to be moved. Honestly, making a cart system to allow the transport of goods down to the goblin village wouldn't be a bad idea, but first, the stairs would need completed. That said, there isn't anything preventing me from making an inlaid rail in the cave here. Honestly, given how often I move rock in here, having a central cart line up to the house sounds like a pretty good idea. For the remainder of the month, I think that might just be what I work on.

Well, the cart system isn't quite ready and Zaka will be back tomorrow. I did some basic testing with a simple cart down in the cave to get the sizing of the rail right so that Zeb could push a lightstone cart with materials in it. It might take two people to get it uphill still, but if push comes to shove, we can always attach rope to the cart, and have multiple people help haul it.

The biggest hold up on the entire cart system was actually modifying the area near the entrance to the cave. I've had to widen the area behind my house, and make a receiving area next to the storage area. The receiving area is the hold up, since I've needed to dig the whole thing out, and get rid of the stone. The smoothing of the ground down into the cave and the inlaid rail embedded in it are actually already done. There isn't a finished end to the rail down in the cave either. However, the basics are in place.

[Vol.2] Ch.28 Feeling the Burn

Zaka arrived with two other goblins this time. One was carrying a rolled up lizard hide, with Zaka and the other carrying dried lizard meat. I asked him how lizard hunting has been going, and he said that they've actually started to have to travel for hours before they find any. This left me slightly concerned about the population of lizards as a whole. Although it also probably means that the goblins are much safer than they used to be.

After making sure that the everyone has full mana, I get everyone to help haul the crystal up to the charging room, where I've made a special indent in the wall for the crystal to sit. I ask Zaka if it is alright if he stays overnight tonight, since it will likely take that long for the crystal to charge up. Thankfully he agrees without any issue, as according to him, the frequency of lizard hunting has slowed down. They now actually have to plan out a long trip with multiple goblins to haul back all the meat, so they only go once or twice a month.

Zeb and I do our best to entertain our guests through the evening. Although Zaka has seen most of the stuff up here, the other goblins seem to enjoy a tour.

In the morning we go to check on the crystal. It is glowing quite brightly. In fact, compared to other crystals, I can actually tell there is a gradient to its glow. The center actually shines much more brightly than its edges. Everyone seems intrigued by the crystal, but before we move it, I double check that everyone has full mana. I'd hate for someone to get injured just moving it into the tunnel outside.

As we move it, we all notice ourselves getting a warm feeling throughout our whole bodies, like we're overheating. I check my status, and I notice that I'm actually overcharged slightly on mana. After we set the crystal down, the mana overcharge dissipates quickly, and I no longer feel overheated. After checking with everyone, apparently it wasn't just me, and everyone got overheated from that. Which isn't a good sign.

I decide that I should probably be the first one to do any kind of test. I have Zeb tell everyone that I'm going to use a very small amount of mana on stone shaping, and then touch the crystal. I use a mere five mana and then brace myself to touch the crystal. I hesitate a few times, getting my hand close, but not quite touching it, partially out of fear.

When I finally do touch it, it's excruciatingly painful. If I was on earth, I'd assume it's probably like touching an electrical outlet. I winced in pain when I felt it, and lost 25 hitpoints. Zeb, thankfully, was watching closely, and said when I touched it, the bright center of the crystal seemed to arc out towards my hand in a flash. It didn't just fill my mana either, but it overfilled it again. Well, we said we were going to try using hide as an intermediary, although I'm not exactly keen on electrocuting myself again. The hope is that the animal hide will still be able to transfer the mana, like how our own flesh can. I'm hoping it will dull the sensation at least somewhat.

I use five mana again, and this time put some of the hide between the crystal and myself when I touch it. It still hurts... a lot. Maybe a little less though than the first time. I check, and I'm missing an additional 20 hp. Well, it didn't help that much. Also, the hide itself was actually damaged somewhat. While not destroyed, the bit I was touching has changed color. When I go to touch that section, it easily tears. Not exactly a permanent solution to the problem, and especially not if I need to grow an even bigger crystal.

Knowing that at least the hide does something means I can try to look into other things that might act to transfer mana more safely. Until that point, I think I'll need to halt the rest of the crystal research. It just seems a little too dangerous to keep making the crystal larger when I have no way to use it properly. Without much else to do, Zaka and the other goblins get ready to head back to the village for the day, and I give them some lightstone to carry back again as well.

The past three days, I've been testing all sorts of things to act as an in between for mana transfer. So far none have been successful. I've tried copper, the unknown metal, various stone materials, and different plants and wood. The organic materials work to varying degrees, but they always deteriorate after some use. The inorganic materials that I've tried have all completely prevented mana transfer. I still want to try some more materials, but those will actually need even more prep work to make, so I haven't gotten to them yet.

Seven days, and I've hit a success, although not a very big one. I went through even more stone materials, all new ones that I made from other rocks from the nearby materials. All of them were failures. So then I moved on to even more difficult to craft tests. The first one yielded the first very minor success, which I then improved on. The first success required I build a large tank to fill with water and submerge the crystal in. When I tried touching the water, I very slowly regenerated mana. By submerging my entire arm into the tank, I regenerated mana slightly faster, although still at a very slow rate.

So I decided to try and improve on the water idea. I'm almost out of water to test with though, so I'm going to need to collect more water. For now, I'll drain the tank back into buckets, and start work on a larger rain collection system outside. I'll probably build another terrace, and hollow it out to the next layer underneath it to form a large water tank. It probably won't fill up until after it snows again up here though.

Considering how much of the area around the cave entrance has been developed, I should also make channels to direct the rain into the tank when I make it, and then overflow channels to safely direct it further down the mountain. While I work on this project, I'll put every bucket I can out to collect extra water in case it rains.

As luck would have it, five days into digging out this collection tank we got a decent rainstorm with heavy rains for a few hours. Not nearly as bad as the massive storm last year, but it filled up my buckets, and there is a decent amount of water in the partially completed collection tank. Enough that I'm going to halt construction and go back to crystal testing.

I have had some time to think on it, and I have a few different tests I want to run, which are going to require I do some setup. What I want to do, is try both soaking, and boiling organic materials in water, and try using those liquids alongside the crystal. These will require me to have tanks to hold the liquid, boil it, and then drain it to move to where I'm testing the crystal. Which means I'll need plenty of the materials as well.

Of the organic materials I want to try, most are plants. I want to try soaking wood, and boiling it. I also want to try the plants that burned my mana before. Both as a boiled, and non-boiled soak. For good measure, I also want to try some random plants from nearby as well. The last thing I also want to try, which might concern some people, is my own blood. I have a heightened capacity for mana thanks to Mana Affinity, so I'd like to see how that affects things. I'd like a control for that, but I won't ask Zeb to do it. If he volunteers I'll accept, but quite frankly, it's crossing a line to ask him to do this.

It took 3 days to build the boiling and soaking tanks, and to collect the materials for each use. Then we spent yesterday boiling the tanks that needed that. Throughout the process I've been bleeding myself a little at a time into one tank. When Zeb asked, I explained why I was doing it. He then proposed he should bleed himself into a tank as well. I'm thankful he volunteered, and I'm letting him do it, but I still feel quite bad that he's doing it.

Regardless, the only tanks ready for testing are the boiled ones. The other ones need to soak for longer, or have more blood, before I consider them ready to test. With that in mind, I'm going to start by testing the mana damaging plant's boiled water.

I pour the boiled water around the crystal, and the crystal seems to dim as I fill the tank. By the time the tank is filled, the crystal is noticeably dimmer, which I consider could be a good sign. When I try to refill some mana from the water though, I'm greeted by nothing. No mana gained or lost. I pause and evaluate this for a little bit.

I'm hypothesizing here, but I'm guessing there is something in the mana burning plant that really wants to absorb mana. However, it only has a certain capacity. So it readily absorbed it from the crystal, and then when it was full, it stopped. Well, it's a failure for this purpose, but I'll have to mark down this hypothesis for later. At the very least, if I concentrate it, it could be useful as a weapon. Now I unfortunately need to not only drain the tank, but wait for the crystal to recharge before I do any further testing.

[Vol.2] Ch.29 Magical Material Properties

After letting the crystal recharge overnight, it's time for more testing. This time, the first test is going to be with the boiled wood. For good measure, we actually have two separate sets of wood. One is the bark, and the other is the internal wood. Both were broken into small pieces before boiling as well. The boiled water of both have a nearly identical color, although the bark one seems slightly darker. We'll start with the bark, and move on from there.

As we fill the tank with liquid, I don't notice any immediate change in the crystal, but after the water has reached about the halfway point on the crystal, I notice that the internal glow seems to be more diffuse than before. The trend continues as the water envelops the crystal, and I notice that although the center of the crystal doesn't shine quite as bright, the outside shines a little brighter. After looking for any other irregularities, I spend some mana, and plunge my hand into the tank.

This time, it does regenerate. Better than the regular water did as well, by a significant amount. A short second test, and I'd estimate it is between ten and fifteen times as effective as regular water, which comes out to be about the same speed as surface regen rates for only a submerged arm. Given the initial successes, it's time for more detailed testing. For the next test, I'm going to spend a few hundred mana, and see how well it works for recovering that.

Initially, results were good. It was recovering my mana at the same rapid pace, but after fifty or so mana, I noticed the rate start to slow down somewhat, and continue reducing until it fell below the initial mana regen rate of even the water. After waiting for a little while, I was still missing about a hundred mana, and it was still proceeding at the reduced rate. Getting a little bored, I stirred the water with my hand. As I did so, I actually noticed the mana regeneration rate increase again. Not quite up to the full initial speed, but pretty close, probably about 80%. A repeated test of this process yielded promising results. This time, the water was kept well mixed, and it seemed to keep the 80% rate after the initial burst.

Considering this test a success, Zeb and I drained the tank around the crystal, and loaded it in with the non-bark wood water. The tests were successful, but not quite to the degree that the bark was. It was only around 70% the effectiveness of the bark water. It also experienced the same issue with stagnant water, and needed to be stirred to maintain its properties.

After draining this tank, we tested three more plant waters for their properties. Although a few showed some small benefit, none of them were nearly as effective as the boiled wood water for mana transfer from the crystal. For today, we'll call it a day. I still want the water to soak for a while longer with the plant material for the other tanks, so I think to pass the time, we'll boil more of the wood water, then boil more off to make it even more concentrated. I'm interested in seeing if concentration has an effect on its transfer rate.

Another three days, and I think that the soaking water tests should be about ready now. Alongside that, I've made varying concentrations of boiled wood bark water. One twice as concentrated, another four times, and a final ten times concentration. Although the ten times concentration mixture is actually closer to a sludge.

We already know the bark water will work to some degree, so we'll start testing by using the twice as concentrated mixture. After getting everything set up and draining my mana, we begin the test. First, I'll do it without the vigorous stirring.

Not only does the initial rate slightly more than double, but the minimum rate comes up by almost four times. Stirring the water also almost brings it back up to the initial rate. The results from this have me excited to test the four times concentrated water. We hurriedly drain the tank around the crystal, and load in the next batch for testing.

Results for this batch are even better. The initial rate is almost six times that of the first concentration we tested, and the unstirred mix was actually close to half the first concentration's maximum rate. Overall, very good. A constantly stirred tank of this would seemingly allow a pretty rapid regeneration of mana. Although there is a pretty strong scent of pine alongside it.

After draining the tank again, we load up the ten times concentration into the crystal tank. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately due to the consistency of the sludge, performance of this batch has fallen quite a bit. Although it initially charges me quite well, it actually falls to nearly a complete stop, and its consistency makes it almost impossible to mix. As we drain the sludge, we're also left with two new problems. First, I'll have to rinse the crystal and tank because the sludge doesn't drain nicely. Second, the crystal seems to have actually lost a decent amount of charge during this last test.

I'm making a guess, but there is probably something in the trees that stores mana and releases it, and boiling the wood has freed that substance into the water. When the water is heavily saturated with the stuff, it can actually hold quite a bit of mana and started draining the crystal.

There are other tests to do at some point down the road after I finish testing all these different liquids. One of the things I'd like to check is the shelf life of the boiled bark water. It'd be nice if it lasts forever, but I doubt that is the case. So, for now, We'll set aside the four times concentrated mix, and mark it to check it again a month from now. For today, that will be the extent of our tests though. Tomorrow we'll start the tests on the water that was soaking plant matter at room temperature.

We start the day off by hauling over the bark soaking water first. It's color isn't nearly as dark as the boiled water, which I suppose is to be expected. However, what we didn't expect is that while we poured it into the tank with the crystal, when the liquid hit the crystal, that water turned very viscous. We kept pouring and filled the tank, and then began the normal test. I spent some mana, and dipped my hand into the very viscous water. While I did regenerate mana, it wasn't nearly as fast as the boiled wood was. It also was nearly impossible to stir, and it acted like a non-newtonian fluid, becoming temporarily solid when I tried to move it with too much force suddenly.

We decide to end the test there, since it clearly doesn't seem to fulfill its task as a mana conduit. As we drain it back down though, it becomes obvious that the crystal is actually missing a small amount of mana more than I would have expected. On a hunch, I have us fill it back up with the water. Then we just wait.

After multiple hours, the water suddenly clarifies, right as the crystal runs out of mana. Now when I stir it, it behaves just like normal water. To confirm, I go an get a smaller crystal from the crystal charging room, and submerge it in the water. Again, the water around the crystal turns into a thick liquid briefly. However, this crystal drains quickly, and the water returns to normal.

Which makes me want to try something else. I go and get some loose wood we have sitting around, and touch a crystal to it, and try to snap the wood. It's incredibly hard, like when we try to cut it down. After a bit, the mana in the crystal drains, and I can snap the stick again easily.

Since the main crystal is drained completely again, we'll have to wait another day before we can do any further testing with the soaking plant liquids. It's also only a few days until Zaka returns, and after that, it's only a month until we return down to the village before this whole area gets snowed in. With that being the case, we'll finish testing the different soaked waters we have here, and then I'd like to work on finishing the various constructions up here before the snow sets in. I want to finish the water collection terrace for sure, and I'd also like to finish getting the cart system set up in the cave. Since we now have a somewhat viable in-between material to stop magic electrocution, it means we can resume crystal growth experiments. Given the other tasks though, that won't resume until after winter.

[Vol.2] Ch.30 A New Path

Today, Zaka should arrive. Other soaked liquid tests weren't as successful as the initial one. Non-bark wood behaved similarly to the bark wood, if a little less viscous. Other plants didn't seem to produce any meaningful results or interesting effects. So, for today, we've got some of the boiled bark water set up so that Zaka can experience that as well.

A little later in the afternoon, Zaka and one other goblin arrive. This time they didn't bring any extra meat with them. According to Zaka, they didn't have excess meat this time, so they didn't bring any. Not a big deal, but we've gotten a little used to having free meat up here, so its going to be a little weird going back to a completely vegetable diet for a little while. Not long after he arrives, we show him and the other goblin down to the crystal tank, and show him briefly how to use it. I myself am interested in just how much mana this crystal stores. I haven't tried fully draining it, having spent my time testing other aspects of the intermediary liquids instead.

So, today will be a bit of an introductory test of the full storage capacity. I have Zaka submerge his whole arm in the tank, and warn him not to actually touch the crystal inside. Afterwards, he can start casting. I also have since put a small propeller in the tank with some axles and gears to let us just turn a crank to keep the inside of the tank somewhat turbulent. Zeb will be in charge of turning that while I keep count of the fireballs.

Zaka gets through his first 15 fireballs in less than ten seconds. Then the pace slows down to a fireball every few seconds. Which is to be expected, since the regen rate isn't nearly as fast as actually touching a crystal, but it's still faster than surface passive regen. We keep going though, and the seconds turn to minutes. As the minutes drag on, it has gotten noticeably warm in the cave. We've long since passed 300 fireballs so far, and the resulting heat has spread throughout the area.

After what feels like forever, the crystal has finally depleted. 419 Fireballs. That is significantly more fireballs than last time. Its so warm in the area now that we all quickly agree to head back up to the surface right away. Zaka is impressed by our ability to find a way around the previous issue of injuring ourselves with the crystal, although he's slightly disappointed by the non-instantaneous recharging he enjoyed with previous crystals.

I suppose, in theory, if you submerged yourself in a well circulated bath with the crystal submerged nearby, you could probably get some pretty fast regen. Of course, you'd still have to return to the location of the bath, but it would probably beat waiting a long time to recharge a large amount of mana.

After a short rest, Zaka and the other goblin head back down the mountain, carrying more lightstone again. Next time we see each other, Zeb and I will be returning to the village for the winter.

We let the crystal recharge overnight, and today, we're giving it a repeat test of yesterday's full draining. This time, I'll be calculating the actual mana value of the crystal based on my own mana usage. Given the slower rate, there isn't a reason for me to just use earth spike, so instead, I'll be using mana to do various stone-shaping tasks. We've brought down plenty of buckets of material for making lightstone, as well as the metal ore to break down. If I happen to finish all of it before we run the crystal out, then I'll use earth spike to drain the rest out.

Yesterday's test resulted in lots of lightstone and crushed ore. I did end up using earth spike to drain quite a bit of mana as well. The total mana the crystal held was 20,215. Which puts it at more than 16 times the capacity of a crystal half the height. Which seems to indicate that the crystal's mana storage increases with the fourth power of its height. Since volume increases with the third power relative to height, there must be an extra factor involved in just how much mana a crystal can store. This crystal is a little over two feet tall. The next crystal size I wanted to check is three feet, after seeing if this one can survive making it's way to the surface. Of course, I'd still need to put it into a container, so if it breaks down, we don't lose all the material, and moving it while in a container means I'll need to finish the rail and cart system in the cave. Given all of that, I need to get finished with the projects I have that are waiting.

It's been just over two weeks of work, and the cart system is now finished up, complete with carts that use wooden block brakes. They aren't perfect, but it gives the whole system extra resistance to at least not runaway on the way down into the cave. The hard part is pushing the cart up from the cave. I'm not certain this will be useful for anyone without stone shaping, since when I get tired while pushing, I can use stone shape to completely stop the cart. At the very least, they should be useful for me.

For the mountain, there is a better solution that isn't possible in the cave. The cave has too many twists and turns, so we're limited to actually pushing. On the mountain though, we can make long straightaways such that winch systems could be set up with thick rope. Then even heavy carts could be winched up by anyone, and likewise lowered. I'm glad I'm thinking about this now, rather than after we build more of the stairway down the mountain. This way, we can keep it in mind, and plan the path more deliberately to keep the slope shallow.

While I'd like to see if the crystal survives the surface now, I still need to wait until the end of the month to check the efficacy of the aged boiled bark water. So, instead, I'll be finishing the terrace area outside for collecting water, along with the drainage from the nearby area. With any extra time, I'd also like to start to plan out the path down the mountain, so any future stair work is productive. We'll start with a landing near the cave entrance so that carts can easily be loaded and unloaded there. Which means our existing stair work is probably wasted, since it was following the old path that the goblins took up and down the mountain, which from my own experience is already too steep to run carts alongside.

Another 10 days, and I've got the outside finished up to collect water for future use as needed. All that excess stone has been piled up for now, since we have yet to start planning out the new path down the mountain. However, we're at the point right now where I'm ready to test the aged bark water.

As luck would have it, if there is a difference in its performance after a month, it's too small for me to notice without a precise clock. Which is a nice boon. It'd be unfortunate if it required new batches all the time.

After we clean this up, we'll start putting things away for winter. Then with the remaining time, we can start trying to plot a new path down the mountain, although I doubt we'll make it that far in the remaining four days before we head back down to the goblin village ourselves.

Well, we've done quite a bit of pathfinding. We try to keep roughly to the existing path, since we know that leads back down, but we've had to come up with a lot of alternative routes. Thankfully, if you want to reduce the slope along a mountainside, if you can just travel more laterally, that will reduce the vertical distance travelled. Since we're already planning on building stairs, what this is actually going to entail is cutting some of the mountainside out to make a flat path. Then, by zig-zagging along the mountain, we actually can keep to the original path to some degree. Then we can actually cut secondary stairs that have a higher slope up a more direct path between the zig-zagging cart path in places where it is possible to do so.

This whole thing is a huge endeavor though. We've started putting stone stakes into the ground at ends of zig-zags, so we can mark the future path, even if we can't see one from the other due to plants in the way. We've only marked the path down to about a third of the way down now. The hope is that this is below the snow line, so that we can keep working on this over the winter. I myself will be quite busy with building the dam, but while I'm waiting for my mana to regenerate, I'm hoping to keep the project going.

While I drive a stake into the mountainside, I hear some rustling from a little ways away. I cautiously approach, and run into Zaka and one other goblin. He's a little surprised to run into me this far down, and since Zeb is up at the top of the mountain, we're not able to easily communicate, but I draw a crude picture on a stone tablet to approximately show him we're trying to mark a new path down the mountain.

After we meet back up with Zeb, Zeb explains what we're working on in more detail before we gather our things, close our doors and windows up, and pack ourselves with as much lightstone as we can before starting the return path down to the village.

[Vol.2] Ch.31 Specializations

When we reach the village, I'm a little surprised. I had done so much setup and work on the village, that I sort of just expected the goblins to stagnantly just live their lives as before. Instead, I'm greeted by multiple changes that have taken place. When I left the goblins nine months ago, they had a fledgling carpenter in Kaga, and some goblins who were making rope by hand, and some hunters.

Now, Kaga seems to have really gotten into his work, as there are various wooden constructions throughout the town. Among those are signs in front of some goblin's houses. It seems like some goblins have started businesses of their own. All of them are pictures, so it seems like literacy is a problem, but not one I care to fix. Plus, it means I can easily understand what shops are what. It looks like one is a basketweaver, another has what looks like a helmet of some kind, and a third one has something that looks a little like a shell. As much as I'd like to look into everything right now, I'll save it for later. First, I should actually check the quality of my various engineering projects, and make sure the roads, buildings, levee and wall are all holding up well.

After doing a once over of the village, most things seemed to be in good maintenance. The walls need a bit more work to finish them, and all the houses are currently full, so building out the extra houses I had planned from before seems like a good idea. Also, if it would help them, I'd like to build workshops for the goblins that seem to be running their own businesses. Of course, this is all second to building the dam to help prevent flash flooding from being a problem in the future.

Once I've checked over everything in the village, I decide to go check out the buildings with signs, starting with the helmet looking one. I knock on the door, and enter, where I see a goblin lounging in a pretty basic wooden chair. That said, it's a wooden chair, which means it was probably built by Kaga! I make a mental note to see what other works he's been building after looking around here. I brought Zeb along to translate for me as always. Along one wall, there are some hats that seem to have been fashioned using sinew and lizard hide, although the hide seems to only have been cleaned and heated, so it's not leather yet.

The goblin seems a little nervous, having me looking around his stuff without saying anything. I give him a nod, and have Zeb tell him to keep up the good work before we leave. I was thinking before about trying to teach a goblin how to make leather, and honestly, if this one is already this far along in their abilities to craft with sinew and hide, then teaching them the leathermaking process will probably be pretty useful.

I decide to make my next stop at Kaga's carpentry workshop, given I've seen his handiwork around town. When I arrive, Kaga isn't anywhere nearby. Behind his workshop, there are a few large wood logs piled up, and then inside, he's got a bunch of planks in a corner, and what looks like a bunch of wooden pegs he's carved. I left him with a bunch of simple hand tools, and it seems like he's figured out some good ways to put them to use. There are chairs and a few signs to one side of the workshop, then on another side it looks like he's made a bunch of straight poles, likely for spears.

We'll have to check back in with Kaga when we see him next. I'm getting the feeling that I'm going to be making a lot of tools and other things in the near future for the goblins. With those two stops out of the way, the next place I'd like to check out is the basketweaving shop. When we enter, in a similar manner to before, it's clear they've traded with Kaga, since they have a chair, along with a few basic tables. On those tables are some baskets that they've woven from what looks like vine and wood. They look like they probably get some young saplings, and form that into the basic form, then weave the vines we were using to make rope through it to make the baskets. Upon picking them up, they're definitely lighter than the stone buckets I've been using. They obviously aren't watertight, but for a lot of things, I'm sure they'd be more useful. I myself am less familiar with basketweaving, so I'll have to ask them what they might want for a workshop if I do that for them.

The last shop has what looks like a shell picture on it. Inside, they also have some basic tables, and on those tables they've laid out a bunch of different shaped shells and rocks. Everything here seems decorative, and there are some basic necklaces as well. I'd feel bad leaving them out if I'm making workshops for goblins, but that doesn't mean they'll get it first. Of the places I've looked at, while I find curiosities like this interesting, it's the one that is least pressing to have its own work area set up. That said, depending on the shells themselves, I might end up having use for them as a flux material. I'd have to have a lot of them, but if I crush them, it might be helpful for processing the mystery metal. Shells on earth are rich in calcium carbonate, so if these are similar, it would be quite the find. Obviously, I'm also interested in the rocks I haven't seen before, but those would require a lot of research, and I'm already booked out on that for a long time.

For the last nine days, Zeb and I have spent the time plotting the rest of the path up the mountain. We decided that finishing that would be a good idea for any future path building that might occur. Of course, that wasn't the only thing we did. In the morning and evening, we'd use our mana on stone shaping in the quarry area of the future reservoir. It didn't add much to the area, but it felt like a waste to not use some of our mana each day.

I'm also going to start offering up workshops to the goblins that have shops already now. For each of them, I of course want to also trade them for something. For the hide armor goblin, I'll offer to teach it a form of leatherworking and give it a workshop to work in, but in exchange I'll want a set of armor for myself and Zeb, and if I need some basic crafts in the future, I'd ask they help me out. For the basketweaver, I want a basket backpack. That would help immensely with harvesting plants, and once they can make those, I'm sure it'll benefit other goblins. As for the shell and rock gatherer, I'll need to assess if the shells provide what I want or not before I decide to trade with them. Which means I'll have to trade for their shells to begin with.

For now then, I'll focus on the other two's workshops while I have the time. I still need to finish the handful of houses I'd planned out, and the city wall here as well. I'm thinking about asking Kaga to actually make the gates for the city wall. Wood is much lighter than stone, so it'd probably be a better idea for that. As always though, there is lots of work to do...

Finishing the city wall and gates with Kaga took a full 11 days to complete. In that time, it rained a few times, and snowed up on the mountain. The wall itself has regularly placed stairs so that it is easy to stand on top of them. The walls themself stand at about 12 feet tall, with arched gates in the four main directions from the town. The gates are just large double doors made from wood, with stone-shaped reinforcements and hinges. They also have a crossbar so that they can be locked from the inside. I don't know that they'd actually stop a lizard from breaking through if it tried hard, but it hopefully would discourage it from bothering to try.

Kaga didn't want to make the gates for free, even though Zaka told him he should do it anyway for everyone's protection, I caved and told him I'd build him a covered area behind his workshop where he stores his logs and tree trunks that he's cut so they won't get wet when it rains. I'm worried I might be spoiling the goblins a little too much by giving them free stuff all the time like this, but I'm sure it'll improve the quality of his work as well, so it's probably fine. That said, it'll probably take me another two days to finish that construction, in addition to the houses I already have to work on.

[Vol.2] Ch.32 Dam Construction

Another eleven days of hard work, and I've got the remaining houses finished, as well as Kaga's storage shed behind his workshop. Now that I've finished up all the outstanding works that needed finished in the village, I need to tinker with making a stone plug valve. Until I get plug valves figured out, I don't want to start working on the dam for the reservoir.

To test plug valve designs, I'm going to build a mini-dam in the stream and embed the test valves in it. I won't be able to fully test the pressure capacity of these though, so I'm going to have to build them extra thick. Right now, as much as I'd like to say I have enough lightstone to make plenty of valves, I actually probably only have enough here to build the two lowest valves for the dam. As preparation for designing these valves, I've done some napkin math on the flow rate through the valves at various heights.

Based on the math, I actually should be able to build the whole dam with just the bottom valve initially. When that valve is open, even if the entire reservoir is filled, it won't be releasing too much water and flood the village. So we can build the dam with just the bottom two valves for now, and the whole system will help smooth out any heavy rains or snow melt, and hopefully prevent any flash floods. Now, for the reservoir to also provide a more useful function of steady, regular flow, it'll need the various heights of valves, so the height inside can be easily regulated. Either way, the first step to this is to design the largest plug valve first.

Six days of experimenting and I think I've come up with a design that I'm comfortable with for the largest valve. Getting the valve to be relatively watertight was the hardest part, followed by the gears necessary to actually open the thing, since it's so large. The next issue is actually going to be hauling it up to the dam site. I know Kaga is pretty strong, so I might trade him some new lightstone tools in exchange for helping me haul this up to the dam, after I dismantle the small test dam in the levee. Then, the next step of work is going to be actually building the dam, which is going to take quite a while.

Well, after taking a half day to make the tools to trade to Kaga in exchange for him helping us haul this valve up to the dam, I spent the next three weeks just working on the dam most of the day. Mana really is the limiting factor in the work so far. Both Zeb and I run out, then haul the blocks we cut over to the area for the dam, then re-fuse them into the dam shape once we're re-charged. This leaves us with multiple break times each day, which I've taken to using the time to start cutting trees down along the path we've decided to mark for construction of the future path up the mountain. I've felled quite a few of the trees, which I've since handed off to Kaga "In exchange for a future favor."

Another thing I've instructed the goblins to do is store all their wood ash from their cooking fires. I don't know yet if the wood is exactly the same as back on earth, but if it is at least similar, then it makes a caustic solution in water, which is a necessary step to making leather. I used a bit of mana one evening to make a shovel for them, and then a few bins down in their storage area to store the ash.

As for Zeb, he's been spending his break times in the village talking with various goblins and working with them. According to him, the goblins that have the hide and basket shops showed some aptitude, and then Zaka approached them with things he described that he remembered from his home country. They basically had to rediscover the methods for them though, since he didn't know how they were made, only that they existed. In the evenings he's been helping some of the goblins by making things from stone for them. He doesn't have nearly as large of a mana pool as I do, but he's been making some small things each night for them.

As for the dam itself, we're almost at 5' tall across the length of it, so it's time for me to start designing the next valve. This time, it should be a much faster process since I have a working idea of what I need to do. The bottom of the dam is by far the thickest part as well, so construction should actually speed up a little as we get higher on the dam. The first valve is already installed, and set to open. The reservoir doesn't yet have the stream redirected into it, but water that rains on part of its side of the valley collects into it, and then runs out through the valve, so I've at least gotten to see that the valve seems to be functioning in the open state without clogging. After the dam is complete, I'll have to also redirect the stream into the reservoir, which will take a little work, but I don't want to do that until I've got the second valve installed at least, so I won't have to worry about topping of the dam happening while I'm working on it.

Another 18 days of working on the dam, and we're now up to 12 feet high in total. The second valve is installed, and I've put a temporary block in where the next valve will go, and I'll keep putting blocks in the rest of the way up to the top of the dam. I've started digging the dirt out of the way for the new path of the stream to eventually flow into the reservoir so we can redirect it when the time comes. Soon I'll have cut all the stone I want to from the bottom of the reservoir, so I'll redirect the stream at that point.

I've cut quite a few more trees now, and its actually becoming too many for the goblins to handle all of them. Its well beyond what Kaga himself can use for anything. So he's getting his pick of the best wood, and the rest is just being piled up outside of the village. If I get the time, I'll make a charcoal kiln down here, but if I don't get the chance, well, then I guess at some point it can all just be burned. Before that happens though, I'd like to strip the bark off and store it separate. There are a few more uses for the bark than the wood itself, so having extra would be nice. Between the water for crystal energy transfer, and eventual leather production, bark is pretty useful.

I doubt I'm going to build all the stairs this year anyway, so I suppose I can focus my downtime activities on processing all this wood from this point on.

Three more weeks, and we're now up to 20 feet on the dam. I've redirected the stream to now flow down into the dam. It took a little bit more effort than I thought it would, because I ended up needing to use stone to reinforce the embankment that redirects the stream. A somewhat heavy rainstorm revealed that the dirt I'd packed down to functionally redirect it wasn't enough. Now the whole thing is redirected the couple hundred yards through a reinforced embankment into the reservoir. For now, the bottom of the reservoir barely has any water in it, since it runs out through the bottom valve, which makes cleaning it out easy when any debris washes down into the dam.

I've also stripped the bark from most of the hundred or so trees that we had cut down that Kaga didn't want. That itself was a lot of work, and I've stored as much of it as I can in the storehouse. The storehouse is actually starting to get kind of full, so I can't store much of the bark down there. As much as I'd like to just build more storage space for things like this, right now it's counterproductive. Maybe at some point I'll dig out another big storage building, but right now, it just isn't worth it. The best thing I could do is just build a covered area outside the walls to pile up things like the trees and bark under. That'll eat a few more days off dam work, but it's better than the month or more an entire building and underground storage area would take, and will extend the life of the wood and bark piled up out there significantly.

Its also only a few weeks until the snow melts again, and Zeb and I can return back up to our workshop up on the mountain. While we could return after the snow melts, I think we'll wait a little bit just like last year, and give the plants that we eat up on the mountain some time to grow before we start picking them to eat. Thankfully, we haven't had any goblins die in the last few months, so Zaka doesn't feel the need to return immediately to summon more imps either. After we talked to him about it, he said he might summon some at some point this year, since the village has the space for them, although he probably won't summon many more, because they can only hunt so much food at once.

I hadn't thought much about it, but they really don't do any farming, or fishing. Maybe when the dam is done, I might look into either of those processes. I'm not pleased with the idea of Zaka summoning imps all the time, but if the goblins keep expanding out their industries, I'm sure they'll be even more useful. Hypothetically, I can already get wood crafts from them, hide clothing, and baskets. I also get food while I'm here from Zaka for working on the things I'm doing, plus he brings excess up while we're working on the mountain, which has been a big help.

[Vol.2] Ch.33 Ocean Observations

Another three weeks, and we're closing in on the top of the dam, at 34 feet tall now. With the snow melt coming down the mountain the past few days, the water level in the reservoir has been steadily emptying out at the 5 foot valve. The first valve didn't quite let enough out to keep up with the melt, but the second valve is keeping up. If I closed the top valve, the bottom valve would keep up eventually once the depth gets only a few feet higher, but right now, I'd like to not worry about the levels at all in the dam until the top is finished.

I also finished a large covered area to store all of the bark and stripped logs. I've been spending my downtime cutting those stripped logs into reasonable shapes and sizes to make it easier to use and store. There is still a lot of tree trunks to process despite my work though. I only process between one and three trees a day in my downtime depending on their size, so I haven't gotten through all that much actually compared to the pile of over one hundred I started with. That's fine though, since, more than anything, it's just something to do that doesn't use mana.

I'm hoping that I finish the dam before the next eclipse. Then I'll just have to tell Zaka to keep an eye on it and let me know how things are going with it when he visits. The biggest concern is either of the valves clogging with debris. So far, that hasn't been an issue, but it's one of those things that isn't an issue until it is.

Twenty-two days, and I've finished the dam. Getting to the forty feet was pretty quick, but the last two weeks and some change were spent building the spillway so that the dam doesn't randomly overflow and cause damage when that happens. Almost half the wood has been split or cut into manageable logs now as well. I've got six days left now before Zeb and I plan on going up the mountain again. In that time, I'd like to build at least one workshop for one of the goblins.

I don't have quite enough time to teach the goblin how to make leather from hide, since it is a long process. I'll save his workshop and teaching for next winter, and I'll make the basket weaver a shop if they want it this time.

When I asked if they wanted their own workshop, they seemed interested, although they were more interested in having special tools made for them. As a consequence, their workshop is actually pretty plain, with just lots of open space for storing materials and finished products. The time I saved on making the building has been spent making them a few tools that they requested. Although most of the tools weren't direct requests, instead they told us what they wanted a tool to do, and we had to come up with a tool.

The handful of tools we came up with were shears of a few sizes, a few small poles for pushing material, and some poles with an open hole at the end to push material through. That, and two sizes of standing bowls for them to work around. I'm sure they'll need more tools at some point, but for now, this is what they have. It reminds me of when we gave Kaga some basic tools, then came back and ended up making him some more specialized tools. I hope that when we return, they have requests for lots of specialty tools, because it means their work is improving.

In exchange for making all this for them, I presented them the idea for a basket backpack that I wanted made. I told them to send them up with Zaka when they're done, and to make an extra one for him as well in addition to the two for Zeb and I.

All this work brought us to one day before we return up the mountain, so I'm going to spend the one extra day looking into fishing as a resource. I haven't seen any fish in the stream, but the stream itself is pretty small most of the year, and higher up it's very rough terrain, and it runs directly into the ocean. I haven't checked the ocean for salinity yet, but I presume it has some degree of salt in it, as any standing body of water and active volcanism would likely dissolve salts over time.

This is easy enough to check though, so tomorrow, I'll go do just that.

I was ready for a lot of things when I came to check the ocean today, but not this. I returned to the place I first saw the ocean stretching out along the beach when Zaka first went hunting with me. I'm a few miles from the village right now. Before, the beach was a few dozen feet long, and seemed to curve in a semi-circle, like a natural bay area, with rocky hills extending down on either side. Further indicating the goblin village is inside a natural valley.

What I see now though, is that the water is hundreds of feet out. The beach steepens, and turns into a rockier basin running out into the ocean as a much thinner patch of water. Alarm bells are going off in my head. Is it a tsunami?

I turn and run back to the village as quickly as I can. I find Zeb as fast as I can, we have to get Zaka to evacuate the villagers.

We quickly find him, and explain the situation, but he just gives a hearty laugh.

"The big water does that every day. It goes up and down great distances. I've seen that area completely emptied down to the rock many times." He says, "When the moon is overhead, the water is high."

I mean, okay. Lets think about this for a minute. The moon here is much bigger, or closer, or both which probably drives the tides much stronger than they would on earth. I suppose that explains why they don't go fishing though. You could easily find yourself caught at sea without an easy way to return, plus any riptides would probably be very strong.

Well, knowing that it isn't a tsunami about to rip through the area means I can go back and observe the area a little more. I make my way back out to the clearing to look into the area more.

One interesting feature is the stream from the village. It runs down the beach, then the rocks, and finally into what is now a fairly small strip of water running out into the ocean over fifty feet down from my location. The whole area maintains its U-shape of a bay as it reduces down to the small area that the water drains out from.

Alright, well that means that storm surges from any future hurricanes are unlikely to be a threat unless it's pretty close to high tide already. I do still wonder if there are fish though, or at least some sea creatures that could be caught and eaten. I have a small idea of something to potentially be useful for this already, but without knowing anything about the ocean here, it's useless to consider.

One thing that probably isn't useless though is to trek around the edge of the bay and start cutting stairs down the rocky edge towards the bottom. I won't make it all the way down today, but considering I'll just be waiting for the tides to start to come back in anyway, I may as well be doing something.

After quite a few hours, I've made it about twenty feet, while being extra careful to make the stairs have a railing embedded in the rock, and a second very thick wall with another railing. I would hate to slip and fall, considering the distance and rocks here. The reason I'm halting here is that the tide has reached the level I'm at now. I don't notice anything too dangerous about the water itself. I decide to sit on the bottom step and submerge my feet into the water. When I do, I notice a very slight, but noticeable feeling, and when I check my mana, it seems like it is recharging very slightly faster than normal.

Well, I did figure out that water itself does work as a mana conduit, albeit a weak one, so I suppose I shouldn't be that surprised that it's giving me some recharging. Now, I've already estimated that mana is coming from either one or both of the suns in the sky, because mana regeneration heavily drops during eclipses, so I'm guessing the water is absorbing excess mana, and then I'm benefiting from that source right now.

Another quick test, or rather, a taste test, and sure enough, the ocean is salty here. I noticed occasional shells scattered on the beach and in the rocks while I was looking about, so at the very least some sea creatures make shells. I decide to pull my feet out of the water, and just observe the water in this area for a while. I'm mainly keeping a lookout for any sea life.

After a little over an hour, I've seen three creatures. The first, a small-ish eel like creature swimming along. It was only about a foot long, and maybe an inch wide or a little less. The second, is an interesting shape, a horizontally oriented fish shape. Almost like a flounder or a ray of some kind, but thicker. It was about three feet long, and a foot wide. The third one looked like a bit like a large shrimp mixed with a squid, and it is sticking out from a long cone shell. The shell itself was a little shorter than a foot long, and the creature sticking out from it reached another half foot out. The shell at its widest was only a few inches.

Overall, it seems like there is life in the ocean, the real question from what I've seen, is if any of it is even edible. Well, first you'd have to catch it. A problem for the future, not for now.

[Vol.2] Ch.34 Regrowth

Our return trip up the mountain actually did have a little excitement. Part of the way up, we ran into a lizard. Between me and Zaka, we killed it pretty quickly. Then he asked Zeb and I to wait there with it, while him and the other goblin went back to the village to get some people to harvest it and bring it back to the village. Thankfully, we were less than a third of the way up the mountain, so it only delayed our travel a few hours. The delay did cause Zaka and the other goblin to end up staying the night up on the mountain.

As far as things on the mountain are concerned, the water collection pool on the terrace seemed to work well, so we have plenty of water up here now. One thing I want to check is the efficacy of the concentrated bark water now that it's sat for a few months. We're also going to need a very large amount of charcoal in the coming months, so I'm inclined to start chopping a bunch of trees down along the path down the mountain we're planning on building. Outside of the melting and carrying of the crystal material down to the apparatuses down in the crystal lab, we actually both don't need to be down there while we wait for the crystals to cool or to apply them to the apparatus, so I have a few projects that Zeb can start working on in that time.

The first is the path and cart system outside. While I would like to use a double system of carts, the rope we have available to us made from natural fibers would decay too fast due to exposure to the elements. So instead, we'll just use a single system for carts, with the carts themselves resting at the lower position on the track. We'll still install a winch at the top of the track to help pull carts up and down if they're too heavy, but the rope will have to be brought along to use.

The second thing I'd like to do is start some exploratory mineshafts in the cavern. The main purpose of these will be to use tectonic sense to find new materials, and hopefully, more crystal bubbles. Depending on how big these crystals need to get to be brought out into the sun, it's going to take a lot of crystal material, and I don't like the idea of using the bigger crystals for it if I can avoid it. This will also give us yet another source of stone for the stair and cart system.

As for what I can do while I wait for the crystal material to cool, I can either separate lightstone, expand the crystal waste storage, or process more of the metal ore. I'm inclined to work on lightstone as much as possible though, since it isn't just visually lighter, but it is less dense, so building the carts out of it would be useful. I'll also need even more of it for the larger crystal apparatus. The one after that as well, and so on.

The test with the crystal in the aged bark water had mixed results. From my records, it seems to have lost about 25% of its mana conductivity, which for a few months isn't bad. If we can't replace the water in that amount of time, then at least it's not worthless. We also checked the crystal, and it seems to hold the same charge as before. The next step is making a container large enough and thick enough to attempt to move it to the surface. We're going to start having an issue with crystal waste soon though if they don't survive at this size. I'm not sure we can move a container large enough for crystals any larger than this one.

That said, the thing we're concerned about losing is the mystery gas, not as much the crystal material. We have plenty of solid crystal material stored down in the waste room. Thinking about it that way, we should actually move the crystal further down so that it doesn't charge much. The crystals don't seem to break until they're full, or maybe overcharged, so if we can actually get the crystal far enough, then we could make a large vacuum chamber on the surface. If we could maneuver the crystal into a large chamber on the surface before it breaks, then we can at least recover the gas. What a pain to work through. Hopefully it won't come to that.

I'll get this crystal's container prepared, and then we'll test this one to determine if we need to go through all that hassle.

After three days of work, I've got the container made around the crystal, alongside having run a trial with an empty container with extra weight in it to make sure that Zeb and I could haul it to the surface using the carts. Today, we're going to attempt to bring it to the surface.

Once all the checks are done and we've drained the crystal, Zeb and I start hauling the crystal up to the surface. Along the way I keep checking with tectonic sense to see if it has broken or not. We actually get the cart all the way to the point where the exit to the cave is a mere minute away before I can tell the crystal has broken, although it is taking a while to actually disintegrate. I decide we should take the cart back down to the apparatuses, and drain the gas into them, rather than melting the crystal material first.

As much as I'd like to build a large furnace down here to melt crystal down, I'm a little too worried about oxygen usage to burn a furnace for hours down here every day. With the carts though, we can probably heat and transport eight containers instead of four at a time. Then the crystals will almost be cool enough to use when we arrive. It'll speed up the crystal work, but give me less down time individually.

Since I'm going to be working on this for awhile, I'll spend a day or two getting Zeb set up with the plans for both the exploratory mineshafts and the stairs outside. I'll make him a stone level, like I used with water, except it'll have a line in it with a slope to make all the stairs and mineshafts at. I'm aiming for a seven an a half degree grade. I'll notch an approximate 30 and 60 degree, then halve the 30, and halve it again to get to that point. It won't be perfect, but approximate should be good enough here. That grade is plenty shallow to hopefully prevent accidents, but steep enough the cart will roll under its own weight. Then he can just use the tool to easily keep a regular slope.

Well, Zaka returns tomorrow, and I've just managed to regrow a crystal back to the size of the previous one. We've gone through a lot of charcoal in that time, so it was a good call in cutting trees down from the path down the mountain that we needed cleared anyway. The charcoal we had from before lasted until the first few trees started falling from our cutting process.

Zeb and I have been splitting these trees for levels between us. Between the trees I cut before while working on the dam, and these ones, I'm all the way up to level 36. It isn't that high considering the amount of time it's been compared to when I was an imp, but on the other hand, if it weren't for all the trees I've been cutting down, I probably wouldn't have gained this many levels either.

<RARE LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 36
HP: 1514/1514
MP: 626/626
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Earth Spike

As for Zeb, he's also been gaining some levels, but it isn't all that fast either. Plus he didn't cut all those trees down near the village either.

<EPIC GOBLIN>
Level: 58
HP: 760/760
MP: 139/139
Traits: Mimicry
Magic: Stone Shaping

I've been keeping up on taking intermediate notes on previous levels as well, and it's getting quite comprehensive. After Zeb prestiges once or twice more, I think I'll start to have a better understanding of the basis for how this whole system works out. Of course, I'd like to have even more goblins' values for things, but that sounds like quite the pain to try to find out for now, especially with the projects I'd rather be working on right in front of me.

The current maximum crystal apparatus size is for growing two foot tall crystals. The next size I'm going to try to build is for four foot crystals. It's quite the jump, but given how much time is lost regrowing a crystal from scratch when it breaks, I'd rather jump up quite a bit and trim it backwards rather than go through multiple intermediate steps. This apparatus alone is going to take quite a few days to build, and then I still need to build the extra large vacuum chamber on the surface to put the crystal in for recovering its gasses if it breaks.

[Vol.2] Ch.35 New Chambers

Zaka's visit yesterday brought with it the new basket backpacks we requested and one was filled with lizard meat. According to Zaka, it was meat from the lizard we killed on the trip up here last time. His visit itself was pretty uneventful, but I noticed something that I missed in the first month of being back. I hadn't looked closely at the mystery metal pucks we made since we came back here. I only noticed because I was moving things in my workshop to make a space for the new backpack.

At a cursory glance, they look very similar to when we left them, but if you look closely, they've darkened. Bringing them out into natural light makes it much easier to tell. Their surface seems to have formed an oxide layer of some kind, and the surface color has darkened from a silver gray metallic color into a dark brown bordering on black. The lack of natural light made it hard to tell the difference in color inside, and since it didn't seem to be noticeably flaking, there weren't any obvious texture changes.

There are a few metals that could form an oxide of this color, and I can't even be certain that it isn't some degree of alloy. It rules out quite a few metals however. For instance, it isn't likely chromium or titanium because it darkened in shade. There are only a handful of metals, like iron, manganese, and nickel that generally form oxides in this color range. That said, it doesn't have to be a normal oxide, and for all I know, its some form of magical property rather than an oxide.

It does set in motion some new experiments I can do with it however. I'd like to smash a few pucks down into very small pieces if I can, and expose them to water both outside and down in the cave, and see if the oxide color remains the same, or changes. It might give me more insight into what metal or metal alloy I have on hand. It'll add a day or so of processing to set that up, but then I can just check up on it occasionally.

After that, I'll start work on the large vacuum chamber on the surface. What I'm thinking about doing is carving half the chamber into the ground of the mountain just outside, so the whole chamber is underground. Then I'll put a large column in the center using stone shaping, so that I can hopefully lower the crystal down into the chamber, all while keeping it surrounded by rock. I'll probably need to do some test runs to get it right, but hopefully that will work. Then I can just run a cart track right next to the pedestal where I'll place the crystal, and that will provide Zeb and I a way to move the crystal.

Twelve days of work and I've finished the vacuum chamber on the surface and smashed the metal into small bits and put it in bowls in a few places to develop a new oxide layer. The surface vacuum chamber took longer than I hoped due to having two failed tests. During the first test, the top of the chamber collapsed as I reduced the pressure inside with stone shaping. So I had to clean out the rubble and then dig it deeper to give it a thicker roof.

The second time, I was using a stone meant to act as a fake crystal to lower into the chamber, and again, the top of the chamber collapsed down into it. So I thickened the chamber much more, and this time I finally successfully used stone shaping to lower the test stone down into the chamber without it breaking.

I wish that was the end of the work I have to do for this, but I still need to build the larger crystal growth apparatus down in the cave lab. Given the sheer size of the new apparatus, its going to need to be much larger, and I'm going to need to test it again for issues with being under a vacuum. After building the surface chamber though, I hope I have a better idea of just how thick the chamber walls actually need to be.

The whole process took fifteen days of work to complete. Initially I thought about just building the whole apparatus on the ground, but instead now, I've dug it into the ground like the one on the surface. The major difference though is that I've also carved out an underside to it, since I'll need access down there. The inside of the chamber is six feet tall, so that I can grow crystals in the four foot range with some extra space inside. The ceiling and floor are over two feet thick, to prevent any accidents from occurring. The chamber held up to my normal tests, which was a relief.

On another side of the lab there are the stairs down to the underside of the chamber, and a second pathway for a cart to run along. That pathway slowly rises up and eventually out some way ahead along the wall of the cavern. That way I can close it off if Zaka needs to summon imps in the cavern, but I can still use it to transport any finished 4 foot crystals out on carts. Quite a lot of the construction time actually was building these paths in the lab.

While I was working on this, Zeb has been working on the stairs outside and hauling the stone I've been removing to continue his construction. It's coming along alright, but somewhat slow. I presume it's because his mana pool is quite a bit smaller, and it's outside work, which means he has to go back to the crystal charging room just to recharge his own mana. Since that room is about halfway between the crystal growth lab and the surface, I've been piling the stone I cut out there, and then when he needs to come back in to charge, he hauls more stone out himself.

As for the actual distance he's gotten, its only about fifty feet in a month. Which might not seem that impressive, but considering the extra steps he's having to go through, it's pretty good. Where he's been working, the bedrock is about a foot down, under soil and some loose rock. The loose rock he can stone shape to attach to the bedrock, but the soil needs to be removed manually. Then he has to solidly attach the stone to the bedrock with as few gaps as possible.

In addition to this, he's been in charge of running the charcoal kiln. Which has built us up a nice stockpile of charcoal, which I hope we won't go through too fast.

I think we've collected enough of our blood mixed with water to attempt a usage of that as an intermediate for the crystal transfer as well. Rather than use the new two foot crystal, I'd like to just use our largest natural crystal on this test. Mainly because I'd rather not have to deal with as large of a blood mess when the tests are done. Not that they're completely submerged in blood, the mix is about 10 to 1 water to blood, but it'll still be gross.

For that, we'll wait until Zaka leaves to do that test. Depending on the results, I'd rather not give Zaka any weird ideas. Since he'll be returning tomorrow, it'll be two days at least before that test is done.

We got all set up to run the test after Zaka left, loading a small tank up with my blood water. When we submerged the crystal into the tank, it initially didn't seem to be doing anything, so I started to drain my mana. Before I submerged my hand in the blood water though, the tank sprang a leak. Which we initially thought we must have bumped the tank and accidentally cracked it somewhere.

After repairing the tank, we noticed the crystal had emptied. After letting it recharge, and got ready to test it again, and the tank again sprung a leak. We got a few more crystals and dumped them all in the tank on a hunch, and sure enough, the stone of the tank started to shift and move in unpredictable ways becoming irregular, and forming small holes and bumps.

The working hypothesis is the mana from the crystals is somehow using stone shaping, which must be related to my blood. We attempted with Zeb's blood, and although it was barely perceivable, the surface of the stone did start to deform. On one hand, this is exciting. Something lets us use stone shaping, and that something is at least partially found in our blood. There will be great difficulty in finding a use for something that just randomly shapes stone however. If we can find a way to control it, that is a different story, but as of right now, we have plenty of other tasks we're working on, so we'll file this one away to work on later. Of course, if inspiration strikes either of us on a way to utilize this, we may revisit it sooner.

[Vol.2] Ch.36 A New Face?

I've been hard at work for the last four weeks growing an even larger crystal in the new apparatus. I'd say I'm about a third of the way to getting it to four feet tall. Zeb doing other work alongside this process has been a big help as well. In the evenings when I finish with my set of crystal stuff for the day, I've been cutting stone from an exploratory tunnel we're mining out from in the cavern. It's already about 50 yards long, and at a slight decline in the mountain. The stone from this has been a little bit of a pain to haul out to the front of the cave, but we've been managing.

The path down the mountain is now about 100 feet long. I did some napkin math from when we laid out the path, and the total linear length of the path is about 30 thousand feet. Which means he's barely making a dent in the project himself working on it. It'd take him almost fifty years to complete the work himself. I don't plan on making him complete the work himself obviously though. Right now he's making progress. There will be sections where that progress speeds up, and others where it might slow down too.

Once the dam is fully complete, I'd like to transition to working on the path myself over the winter alongside building some buildings for the goblins in the town. All that is months away now though. Tomorrow, Zaka will be back again, so I want to have things cleaned up around here somewhat, so I'll be closing off the work tunnels, and hauling any loose stone out today, and then I'll help Zeb with the path for any remainder of the time.

Well, Zaka's visit was full of surprises. He was using the backpack that was made for him when he visited, which he hauled up plenty of meat for us inside of. Apparently he considered it payment for the backpack, since we had it made for him. He had two other goblins accompanying him on this trip, and then he decided to summon imps again. I was pretty glad that I decided to close off the inside tunnels the day before, so that I wouldn't have to hurry about doing that.

After he summoned imps and returned to the surface, he asked us about the piles of rocks outside the cave. Since the pace of the path construction is much slower than the rate we've been cutting stone from inside the cave, there's been a buildup of stone, which has formed quite the pile. When we told him what it was for, he offered to help us haul some of it down to where it's going to be used for work, which I was thankful for, and accepted his offer. While he was busy summoning I'd already been spending most of the day working on the path alongside Zeb, so it was very appreciated.

As a result, I also got a firsthand look at just how strong Zaka is. I had presumed that he was stronger than the average goblin by quite a lot since he was a hobgoblin, but I was surprised that he was easily hauling ten times the weight without breaking a sweat. After a few hours of hauling, the sun was setting, so we called it quits on work for the day, and honestly, the help Zaka and the two goblins gave is probably going to save us quite a bit of work.

When he left with three new goblins the next day, he told us he'd bring some extra goblins to haul more stone on the next visit. Apparently he considers the path up here to be a pretty worthwhile cause. Which, considering how often he traverses it, makes sense.

Another month of crystal growing, and I should get it to four feet tall before the end of next month. Zeb made extra progress this month on the path, getting to 175 feet in total done now. Zaka's returning tomorrow with extra labor to help hauling stone for the path, so I'm looking forward to having the extra help on that.

Well, I don't know what I was expecting, but all this wasn't it. Besides Zaka, there were three other goblins, and one monster. That Monster is apparently Kaga. He evolved. The goblins have some demon word for what he is, but I'm just calling him a Demon Gorilla. He doesn't have any magic apparently, but he's really strong. Which, given his muscle mass, isn't surprising. I mean, he looks like a nightmare version of a gorilla mixed with a man.

That said, he was incredibly helpful today. I'm not sure exactly what Zaka did to have him come help, but I'm glad he was here. They stuck around for an extra day working on the path. Zeb directed work on the surface, with him and the other goblins digging out down to bedrock while Zaka hauled stone on the surface down to periodic spots along the path. Kaga worked with me bringing more stone up to the surface from in the cavern, which actually was me cutting new stone out of the exploratory tunnel, and then Kaga running two carts full of stone all the way to the surface by himself. I mean, each cart weighed easily over a ton, and seeing him push the carts up the tunnel and then up the cavern was an incredible sight. He'd be back pretty quickly and I'd have two new carts ready. I was even more shocked when he kept that pace up all day.

The exploratory tunnel ended up with a landing after an additional 50 yards, and then turns 150 degrees and continued for another fifty yards by the time we were done working. The reason for the turn is we've hit a layer of the lightstone rich stone that I'd found before. I wouldn't mind continuing down into that later, but I didn't really want the stone for the stairs suddenly changing their color, and I'm not certain if I'll find anything valuable in that layer of stone. Preliminary tectonic sense in the existing tunnel tells me that there are crystal bubbles about, so I'll go back an open those up later when we don't have all this extra labor for just hauling stone for the path.

After a day and a half of hard labor, they set out back to the village. Before they go, I let Zaka know that when he's back next time, I'll have a new crystal to test, so he has expectations for what his next visit will involve.

Five days before Zaka returns, and the crystal is ready. I have Zeb help me load it into a cart and we push it up to the charging room level. There, I start assembling a special tank for it to rest in. Given its size, we're going to just keep it in the tank while we can. I'm also concerned about moving it once it's charged. The previous crystal made us feel a little warm, and overcharged our mana. I'm concerned one of this size might actually cause serious harm if we directly touch it, even when we're fully charged.

This reminds me of stories of early nuclear work, where people died of cancer or radiation sickness at some point in their lives afterwards. I'm just hoping we don't get some form of magic cancer from this, which in retrospect, I should have probably considered more heavily before starting this whole project. One thing I am certain of, is if I was missing mana and directly touched this crystal when it was charged, I'd die. Even if it was just a little mana, I'm fairly certain this would kill me, so we're going to need to be very careful while handling this once it's charged.

Well, the crystal doesn't seem to be fully charged yet, and Zaka is supposed to arrive tomorrow. I think we'll just operate without it fully charged while we show him it tomorrow. This does make me hopeful that it might be able to survive on the surface. That'll be the next test after Zaka leaves.

The test with Zaka was... not good. We loaded the tank up with the four times concentrated wood water, like we had with the other crystal, and when he used his fireball, the crystal arced through the water, and zapped him. According to Zaka, it wasn't that painful, but I could have maybe anticipated that being an issue if I thought about it a little more. We drained the fluid out, and replaced it with the unconcentrated wood water, and Zaka volunteered to keep going, so I let him.

Despite not being fully charged, the crystal sustained him casting for many hours. I'm honestly not entirely sure how much mana it holds, but at this point, its a lot. I already have pretty good data on how mana capacity of crystals seems to scale with the fourth power of their height, so I could get an approximation for its capacity already. What I'm interested in now is any emergent properties, like arcing through the water, or the ability to not break down on the surface.

Tomorrow, I'll drain any mana from it again, and we'll move it to the surface chamber to see if it breaks or not.

[Vol.2] Ch.37 What’s Another Year?

Draining the crystal took a bit of time, but once we were done, Zeb and I moved it up to the surface in a cart with a bit of effort. Thankfully, it didn't break right away, and actually made it to the surface. The bad news however, was after about two hours in the vacuum chamber on the surface, it broke. When it broke, I felt what I can only describe as strong magical pressure from the area for a short while. It reminded me somewhat of a sudden emptying of a pool of water, with a very strong flow initially, and over ten minutes or so, dwindling to nothing. During that time, I was using tectonic sense to check on the crystal as it disintegrated in the chamber. For the first while, my mana stayed topped off as the magical pressure flowed over me from the chamber. I suppose all that mana had to go somewhere.

The unfortunate effect of this discovery is that we're back to square one for making a more giant crystal. The next one is going to need to be even larger, so I'll have to build an even larger apparatus for growing it, and the process of growing the crystal itself will easily take more months than are left until winter, so it won't finish until next year. That's fine however, since we'll need a cart system to get a crystal that large down to the village anyway, so this winter I'll be quite busy finishing the dam's valves, and then working on the path up to the cave.

Zeb and I were awoken early this morning, the day after the crystal broke, by horrible hissing sounds and claw scraping noises. Not, one, but two giant lizards were just outside the cave, seemingly digging for something. I recalled the time the lizard made a home in my cave, and I wondered if they were looking for the cave, which is now sealed off. Either way, they were in the way, so Zeb and I had to kill them. He distracted one while I quickly killed the other, then came to help kill the other. With both dispatched, Zeb and I decided to spend the morning butchering all the meat we suddenly found ourselves with, and set up extra drying racks part way in the cave just for all this meat. All that was a nice change of pace considering the work ahead to make an even larger crystal.

Well, I've spent the whole month building the new crystal apparatus down in the lab. It goes even deeper, and then a cart rail connects up to the previous one. It was quite a hassle to make this one, since I wanted to build it going even deeper than the previous one, so that the four foot crystal could easily be moved into the next chamber size.

Zeb's been hard at work on the path down, and he passed the 300 feet mark a little over a week ago, which means it's probably about 1.5% done. There has been a surplus of stone piling up in the cave from the excavation for the new apparatus and tunnel for carts, so I'm hoping that Zaka will be able to help with that while he's here tomorrow. If not, well, that's fine too I suppose. Either way, I still have a bit of lightstone for him to take back down the mountain when he returns to the village. I'm hoping that what they've carried back this year is enough to finish all the valves for the dam so that I can check it off my list of things to do.

Zaka came and went with two other goblins yesterday. He didn't bring us any meat, which was fine, since we ended up sending some back with them instead in Zaka's backpack. Him and the other two goblins helped haul stone while they were here for the path. I've also realized that we should really make sure that the first complete stretch of path is done before winter. It's a little over two months until winter now, and the first turning point in the path is at about a thousand feet of length, so I'll probably end up dedicating some time to that project as well before we leave.

In the past, it's taken a little less than a month to grow a single two foot crystal. I'm thinking that instead of going straight for the four foot crystal, and leaving it partially completed, I'll just grow two crystals to the two foot size, and keep them stored down in the crystal growing area over winter. That way I'm leaving the area in what I'd consider a safe condition. The extra time that I have near the end of the month I can then use to help Zeb with the path.

The whole of last month pretty much went as planned. I finished growing the crystal to two feet just four days before Zaka came back, and I worked with Zeb in those four days on the path. As a result, we're now at 700 feet down. One of the big holdups for Zeb is actually his mana capacity. Sure, he can recharge it down in the cave, but that walk is now quite far to repeat multiple times a day. My mana by comparison, plus my stone shaping allows me to do in a day what takes Zeb well over a week. Which makes me feel bad considering just how much he's been working on this.

That said, he's also been doing this alongside other projects like using the charcoal kiln, so it's not like he's been completely wasting his effort on only this. Since we're now working on this project in unison, instead of going all the way back to recharge his mana, I've instead told him that he should probably work on any non-magic parts while he waits for his mana to naturally recharge. That way when I'm working, I can focus my effort more exclusively on draining my mana, then going back to the cave to recharge my much larger mana pool before returning to continue shaping the path.

Zaka's visit was also fairly uneventful. There wasn't much stone for them to haul this time to help with the project because I haven't been cutting extra stone out of anywhere, so they returned to the village on the same day they came up to visit.

Another month, another crystal, and another few hundred feet done on the path. We're only fifty feet from the first landing now, and the landing is going to take some extra space as well, since it'll be an interchange for carts going in different directions, and needs to be flat with winches installed. I'm also thinking about making a basic bus stop kind of bench and cover at the landings. It's not much, and wouldn't take much extra work, but it'd be nice in case anyone needs to rest, or it starts to rain.

Zaka's visit was the last one here before winter. In the past, we've returned with him at this point, but given how close we are to finishing the path section, we're going to stick around for a few days before going to the goblin village. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it doesn't snow and trap us here.

Six days, and we've finished the path section, complete with winches and a stone bench and cover over it. It's getting noticeably colder, so we're heading down to the goblin village tomorrow. Tonight, before we go, we need to make sure everything is locked up and closed so no wildlife moves in while we're gone, and I have something to check up on.

I ground up a bunch of the mystery metal and left it in various places and states to check the oxidation color. That color, for all the different bowls, was the same. A dark brown, bordering on black. I'd like to do some other tests on the metal, but it'll have to wait until after winter, and I've got a pretty busy docket when I get back if I want to finish a six foot crystal before next winter, so we'll have to see if I actually get around to it.

That said, I've actually made quite a decent pile of crushed ore for the mystery metal, since I can work on that while I grow the crystals. I slowed down on making lightstone because we have quite a lot of it up here on the mountain now, and I'm not using the orangish-red stone byproduct of that for anything as of right now.

As for Zeb and I, our stats have been steadily increasing thanks to the tree cutting we've been doing to keep up with our charcoal demands for the crystal project. Honestly, if Zeb cuts down a decent number of trees over winter while we work on the path in the village, then he'll probably reach level 100 before we return up the mountain. I, on the other hand, will be lucky if I reach 100 by next winter.

<RARE LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 56
HP: 1814/1814
MP: 824/824
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Earth Spike

<EPIC GOBLIN>
Level: 92
HP: 981/981
MP: 190/190
Traits: Mimicry
Magic: Stone Shaping

[Vol.2] Ch.38 New Shops

When we return to the goblin village, there are a few things that have changed, but not quite as drastically as the last time I was here. It seems the basket backpacks have become quite the popular item, and I see a few goblins out and about with backpacks carrying various items about, and a few are wearing plant fiber clothes. There are two new shops as well in town. One looks like there is a picture of a vase above their shop, the other has an offset square from the sign. I'm guessing the second one has the clothing, and I can imagine what the vase shop has, so I'll want to check both out soon.

A preliminary check of other facilities in the town reveals that most of the infrastructure is holding up fine, although I think we'll need to clear out the water runoff system soon, as there is a bit of debris built up in it, and I still want to check the dam for any clogs as well.

It's only been another day, but I looked over the dam. It seems to be functioning well, although I had to do some cleaning as sticks and mud had partially clogged the bottom valve. Mud has started to build up in the bottom of the reservoir as well, which was to be expected. It'll probably take about a week of work to remove the mud buildup. Other than that though, the reservoir is pretty much empty, which was to be expected given the very slow flow rate of the stream.

After clearing the clogged valve, I went and checked out the two new shops in the village, starting with the picture of a vase. What I found had me pretty impressed. There are varying quality of works, all made from clay. While I was looking around, I was surprised when Zeb entered. After a short discussion, he had apparently been helping this goblin while he was in the village last year after they wanted to make buckets like I'd made. Considering I made mine with magic, it wasn't possible for them to make my stone buckets, but they worked with some different kinds of dirt, and after testing, found clay to be useful after cooking it in a fire.

Apparently this has been quite a successful business, and they've started making bigger pots for storing things in. My stone buckets, while useful, aren't infinite, and the baskets can't hold all materials, so the clay pots have come to be a solution to the issue. Zeb had a brief conversation with the shop owner while we were there, and apparently, they've gotten earth manipulation as a trait, similar to myself.

After the pottery shop, I had Zeb join me to visit the other shop with the square on the sign. Inside there are various goblin sized tunics, all woven from plant fibers. To a side, they have a simple peg board made of wood, likely made by Kaga, that they have some plant fibers tied to. I'm impressed by their dedication to this, because making plant fiber materials with just that basic peg board must take forever, and I am a little afraid to think that they were doing this by hand before.

I have Zeb ask them what gave them the idea to make this stuff. The reason was that they were initially just copying the basket process with blades of grass, since they wanted to also make baskets, but didn't want to practice with the hard to work with wood and vines. After a bit of practice though, they had made a large square of the stuff, and as they carried it over to show the basket weaver, the wind picked up, so they wrapped it around themselves to carry. It was a cold day in spring, and it helped keep the wind out, so by the time they got to the basket weaver, they'd had the idea for these.

After explaining that, they'd said that I'd need to place a custom order for myself, since I'm too differently shaped to wear any standard clothes. That's fine though, I don't really think I need any, my body is way less exposed than a goblin's what with my fur and scales. However, now that there are more shops, I think a few more likely deserve their own workshops, rather than having them continue operating from their homes. How is it that every time I return to the village and I have a few goals to work on, I always find other projects in addition? For the next while though, I need to finish the dam, and get it cleaned out for next year.

Twenty days of work, and the dam and reservoir are complete for now. All the new valves are in place, and all the mud is cleaned out. The reason I say that it is done for now, is because I'm going to be expanding it. If we're building the new path up the mountain, we'll need more stone. So if we can cut it from the reservoir area, and expand it to hold even more water, that should help with not just flooding, but possibly making the stream have a slightly higher flowrate year round, rather than a few high flow times, and a small trickle the rest of the time.

With all this maintenance done, the plan initially was to start building the new path up the mountain, but I think alongside that, I want to build workshops for all the remaining goblins that have house shops. The goblin that I want to teach leather actually still has an issue before I can teach them to make leather. They need a lot of salt. The ocean is close, but not that close. I think it's possible to build a salt evaporation pond that the goblins could easily operate, but that will be a whole project in and of itself. While I work on the workshops though, I'll have time to do manual labor while I wait for my mana to regen, so I can start the process of clearing an area for a salt evaporation pond.

The shops I need to build first are the sea shell collector, the plant fiber clothing maker, and the potter. Then, I'll build a workshop for the hide worker, and make extra space for them to eventually make leather. I want to make sure to reward the goblins who are branching out into useful ideas with better working conditions after all. I'm also going to talk to Kaga about making a loom for the plant fiber weaver. A stone loom might be a bit too heavy for the amount of use it gets, otherwise I'd make it myself. I don't know how to make complicated looms, but I can at least make an improvement on how they are currently making clothes. The potter's workshop will want a firing kiln for the clay, and I personally want to make a space for the shell collector to keep all their broken shells, since I want those myself.

Another twenty days, and I've gotten those workshops and tools made. In the meantime, while I worked on that, I had Zeb start looking into plants that the goblins could eat. I wish I could say it had been very successful, but in actuality it's had some hiccups. Zeb got pretty sick trying out one of the plants after about ten days, and so we put it on hold while he recovered. He had diarrhea for about four days, and felt quite weak in that time, and only now has he started to feel better. I feel very lucky that didn't happen to me while I was testing plants to eat. There are some that could potentially be eaten, but none of them have had good agricultural prospects so far. If we can find a good plant for the goblins to grow, agriculture is something I'd like them to start, to have a more stable food source. I'm quite surprised that there aren't any fruits here, or at the least, that I haven't seen any.

As much as I'd prefer to be doing the food testing, my ability to work is a lot more valuable than Zeb's. It pains me to say it, but between my mana pool and better stone shaping, it's just a matter of fact. If we were on the mountain, I wouldn't mind doing it, but since we're only in the goblin village for a few months, every second counts. With that in mind, in my downtime while I waited for mana to regenerate, I cut down a bunch of trees in a direct path to the ocean bay from before, and have almost finished clearing an area near the ocean to dig the salt evaporation pond out.

Ultimately, it just needs to be wide and shallow, with stone walls, a channel to let ocean water in, and the ability to close the channel. The goblins can then harvest the leftover salt when all the water evaporates. Given how close I am to finishing it, I think I'll finish it first, then work on the path up the mountain. It should only take about a week until it's ready to operate now. The only part that might be a problem is rain. During certain times of year, it tends to rain more, so the pond won't be operational at that time.

[Vol.2] Ch.39 Road Work Ahead

One week and the salt evaporation pond and channel are done. Rather than show random goblins how to operate it, I show Zaka, and he can figure out who should know how to use it. Ultimately, salt can be used for a lot of things, but it can drastically increase the shelf life of smoked meat, and it improves the flavor of a lot of foods. I'm certain the goblins will put the pond to use. I did decide to make one additional change to my initial design. Namely, it has two gates for closing off water. The first is much closer to the ocean, and the second is at the pond itself. That way, in the future, if necessary, more ponds can be made to expand the salt production.

In the time it took me to finish that project, Zeb seems to have fully recovered, and he's back to testing plants as potential food sources. Apparently, some of the other goblins have started to think he's a little crazy because he's continuing to test plants. I don't fully disagree either, but sometimes you have to be a little crazy to make progress. Starting tomorrow, work begins in earnest on the path up the mountain.

I've been working for almost ten days, and progress has actually been happening much faster than I thought. The reason for that has been assistance from goblins and Zaka. Zaka seems to have convinced some that this is a project worth working on, and we've had teams of ten working with me at any given point. I suppose if you are making the long trek up the mountain once a month, it'd probably be nice to have a more comfortable and safe walkway up and down. As such, I've been operating at mana capacity every day, and the others are hauling and placing the cut bricks in the way I've described, so I can just fuse them together, which takes very little mana.

At the current pace, we've been building about fifty feet a day, and as of today, we're about halfway between the reservoir and the village. In another ten days or so, we'll be able to run carts from the quarry down to the village. Then we'll head from the stop near the quarry up the mountain towards the next stop point. Thankfully, during winter, the reservoir is basically empty, so cutting new stone from it has been relatively easy. Each foot of length in the road is taking about sixteen cubic feet of stone to build, which means that after ten days here, we've actually only expanded the reservoir by about 2%. If we keep working at a decent pace though, we'll probably expand it by over 10% this winter, which may not seem like much, but it'd account for about 18 hours of the stream's non-flood flow rate, which really is quite a lot for one guy cutting stone.

Three more days of work, and although there isn't anything new to report with the path, there has been a breakthrough in plants from Zeb's side of things. He found a different forest clearing where the ground was quite muddy despite the lack of recent rain. In that clearing, there were a lot of somewhat tall stalky plants. When he pulled some, he found that multiple in close proximity all shared the same larger bulb root. So he brought one full plant back, and it seems that not only is the root bulb edible, but the stalk seems to be as well.

I gave him some advice on how to make a floodable field, and told him to try to make one on the downstream side of the village within the city walls. I told him to make it pretty small, since this would be a testing field. If it turns out to be useful, then we can try to build a larger field outside the walls, but we need to have the goblins observe the plants for a longer period of time before we consider them to be useful for agriculture. Once he gets the field done, he'll transplant a handful of the plants into the garden for more observation.

Only six more days, and the leg of the path between the village and the dam is completed. With this, we're probably about 1/15th of the way done with the entire path up the mountain. Which is a pretty slow pace, of course, it'd be even slower if I didn't have a bunch of the goblins from the village helping me. Another nice bonus of the current work is that we now have a path from the village up to the dam, which means the trip to start the work here each day is going to be even easier than it was before.

Despite the easier trip to the dam and reservoir each day, over the past ten days, the pace of construction has slowed quite a bit, down to only thirty feet a day. The reason for this is that many of the goblins are working for less time than before, or have quit entirely. According to Zaka, it's because hauling the stone uphill is much harder than downhill. Zaka himself hauls a lot more stone than the other goblins, so the pace hasn't slowed that much, and having regular goblins still digging out the path down to the bedrock is still work that they easily do. Either way, we've only made it about 300 feet, and the next stop isn't for another 900 feet, so we'll see how everything shakes out for construction going forward.

The past eight days have seen a few different improvements that I've been happy about. First, Zeb finished up the test field, and after I double checked it, he transplanted a handful of the new plants into it. Since then, he's started helping on the path construction. Another major improvement came from a few goblins that had been helping prestiging into improved endurance. As path construction has been continuing, they've had to cut some trees down, and a few maxed out their levels recently.

With their improved endurance, and Zeb helping me with fusing and cutting stone, construction is back up to fifty feet a day. Although that was incremental improvements, so we're only at about six-hundred feet completed right now, or about halfway to the next landing.

Fifteen days, and we've gotten to, and completed, the next landing. As the distance got further away, the pace slowed down, because it took longer for the goblins to haul materials up the mountain. We've decided to take a short break for a few days now. That should give the goblins some time to rest, but also gives me some time to make a couple of carts. Since we now have a complete section of the path up the mountain, we may as well take advantage of the cart track on it to haul stone up the mountain. If possible, it'd help us even more if Kaga would contribute, since we know he can single handedly push two full carts up a track by himself. Of course, I'd also like to try the winch system for the carts, but we'd literally need thousands of feet of thick rope to attempt that right now.

I'm going to have to think on ideas for a mechanical braiding machine so that the goblins can actually complete that request. If I come up with one, I'll build a new workshop in town so that the goblins can make rope more effectively.

After three days of rest, I've made a few carts for construction purposes, and I also made a small working model for mechanical braiding. It involves three bobbins, two horn gears, and a figure eight track such that the bobbins trace a path for braiding material. In a full sized one, I'll have carriers on the bobbins, and a pair of wood drums that hold the finished braid taut while pulling it out of the machine.

So, despite the fact that I could begin path construction again, I'm going to take a few days here to build a rope making shop instead. I'll probably make a few of these machines, and they'll each be designed for different size threads, so that the goblins can have some flexibility in what they work with. The largest one I have in mind will almost certainly require that I gear it down significantly to be able to operate it for any realistic amount of time.

It took five days of work to get the machines made, the shop completed, and to show the goblins who were interested how to operate everything safely. The good news, is now the limit on rope is actually a problem of gathering raw materials, rather than manufacturing. The bad news is that they'll need a lot of raw materials.

Another problem on the horizon is that any day now, the mountain snow is going to start to melt, and we'll get the heavy spring rains again, which means I'll be limited in the areas I can cut stone from in the reservoir safely. In order to facilitate that, I actually need to build a bridge over the upper part of the stream now, so that when it's running full blast it doesn't halt work entirely.

[Vol.2] Ch.40 Finally, An Answer

Three days to build the bridge, which might seem like a lot, but I really wanted to make sure it'd be fine through floods, so I ended up building a bit of path on either side as well for good measure. We had a small bit of rain earlier today, so I imagine the snow will start melting any day, and we'll start getting a much larger amount of rain. I've decided to only open the bottom valve on the reservoir for while I'm here, just to see how it handles the water during the melt. I think we'll probably stay through the first month of spring, just like the last few years, for both food, and safety reasons.

For the last fifteen days, we've been steadily working on the road, but between the more frequent rain, and the further distance that the rocks have to go, the pace is a bit slower. I've been over cutting rock, and ended up spending a little bit of extra time making a stockpile next to the landing where cut stone bricks are slowly piling up. Even with the carts, the goblins and Zaka can't quite keep up with my pace for cutting stone out now, and what we're planning to do is get a whole bunch stockpiled, then convince Kaga to move them all in a day by himself, which I have no doubt in his ability to do.

As for the new stretch of path, it's only gone a little over 300 feet. These sections are exceptionally slow, and a large reason for that is the terrain. Down here in the valley that the village is in, I'm having to construct the entire path up, which is similar to the first stretch up on the mountain. However, for most of the middle of the path, we'll actually be cutting away at mountain in order to make the path, which means no stone hauling to the worksite. I'm fairly confident that those stretches will be much faster for both me and Zeb to make.

It's been five days, and today, we didn't work because of the heavy rain. It was fairly warm as well, so I decided to go and watch the reservoir during the rain. I can't say for sure, but I'm pretty sure it helped prevent a flash flood. Over the course of a few hours, the water level in the reservoir climbed to almost 3/4 capacity after starting at 1/4 before the stream finally calmed down somewhat, and the water level stopped rising. There was enough water that large branches have been floating into the reservoir, which I've been pulling out if they get close to the edge. I'll have to make sure that Zaka knows that it needs to be cleared out once the rains slow down, and also make sure he knows how to open the other valves. I don't want any jams to suddenly cause a catastrophe.

Also, yesterday, I traded Kaga some new tools in exchange for him helping haul a bunch of stone up to the next landing on the path. I said it once before, but he truly seems like a monster, pushing two carts full of stone up the path, and then returning and repeating it until he'd moved the whole stockpile. He easily moved another 200 feet of path's worth of stone up the mountain in one day, by himself. Well, I doubt we'll make it to the next landing before Zeb and I return up the mountain even with that help.

It's been ten more days, and we've only made it another 400 feet on that stretch, for a total of 700. Normally, Zeb and I would return up the mountain tomorrow, but I'm thinking it might be worth spending the twenty or so days to finish this stretch of path, since it needs another 400 feet or so. We'd basically be losing a month on the mountain, but I think I'd rather have this section finished in one construction cycle.

My estimate was pretty much spot on for needing twenty days to finish that stretch of the path. We also got a small added benefit that I wasn't expecting. Once the rain started to become less constant, those plants that Zeb had gathered all flowered, and seeded. Their seeds ended up being decently large nuts that float on water. Zeb sectioned off a part of the field and let the seeds float there, and we'll see what results it yields next year when we return. More exciting than that though, will be seeing how the goblins make use of their new workshops and if they come up with any new ideas while we're gone.

We made it back up the mountain easy enough in one day, but I'm a little upset, because I realized that I made a mistake in estimating how long the road up the mountain would be. While the path we laid out is about 30,000 feet, the path is going to be considerably longer than that. Probably at least 50% longer in fact. The reason for the miscalculation falls on me not properly estimating the zig-zags we're going to have to do in the middle section of the path given the slope. We decided on about 7.5 degrees for the slope, but when we made the path, we didn't do that, and instead just picked areas that it would be easy to make zig-zags in when the slope was steep. So all those areas are going to take quite a bit longer. The walking path will still be about 30,000 feet though, since we'll be able to put stairs between those zig zags for a more direct path.

Zeb should be prestiging any day now, as he hit 99 two days ago. I thought he'd be prestiging while we were in the village, but since he ended up working on other tasks for most of the time, he ended up gaining much fewer levels than I expected. I'm looking forward to him prestiging almost as much as when I myself prestige.

<EPIC GOBLIN>
Level: 99
HP: 1027/1027
MP: 201/201
Traits: Mimicry
Magic: Stone Shaping

Well, until then, he's at the highest mana capacity he'll be at for a while, so it's a good idea to have him work on as much stone shaping related tasks as he can until then.

Three days was all it took for Zeb to prestige. He added eight feet of path in those three days, which is pretty impressive considering he was working alone on it. I was spending that time getting everything opened back up, checked over, and set up for crystal work to resume. The water collection pool I made up here is full, which means we'll have plenty of water to work with for the foreseeable future.

Going back to Zeb, he didn't evolve, which I somewhat expected, but would have been gladly surprised if he did evolve. Instead, he gained the mana affinity trait, which I've been eagerly awaiting. First, it's just useful to have larger mana capacity. Second, I've had an intellectual itch to know exactly how it works, and I think I can finally start gathering a second set of data to really help me try to solve it.

<EPIC GOBLIN>
Level: 100
HP: 1033/1033
MP: 202/202
Traits: Mimicry
Magic: Stone Shaping

<LEGENDARY GOBLIN>
Level: 0
HP: 416/416
MP: 74/74
Traits: Mimicry, Mana Affinity
Magic: Stone Shaping

Although I can't say for certain just yet, but based on my previous data of both Zeb and my prestiges, I think Mana Affinity is granting us an extra 5% of carry over from when we prestige, and an additional 10% capacity overall. Further information as Zeb gains levels will either support or deny this theory though. If it's accurate, he should gain about 2.2 mana per level from here on out.

Also, given Zeb's weaker state right now, I'm going to have him just cut trees down in the nearby area for a few levels, and build up our charcoal supplies. Instead of clear cutting though, I'm going to have him only cut down the trees that make travel difficult, so it'll probably end up being around half the trees. That way we aren't clear cutting the nearby area, but he'll still be close enough he can run back to the cave if he needs to for safety.

I myself am going to continue with the crystal growing process. The goal this time is a six foot crystal, although I'm not certain that I'll get to that point before winter this year. If the pace I worked at last year is anything to go off of, then it'll be three months before I'm to the 4 foot crystal, and I can only guess how many months after that to get to a six foot crystal. In the downtime in the evenings, I'm going to start excavating those extra crystal bubbles that I found while I was digging the exploratory tunnel last year. Given the scale of the crystals I'm trying to grow, having the extra material sooner rather than later sounds like a good idea.

[Vol.2] Ch.41 One Whole Year

It's been a little less than forty days. Zaka didn't arrive last month because we left the village so recently, but he did visit yesterday. There wasn't much to report on, other than he hasn't particularly enjoyed cleaning out the branches that had settled into the reservoir once the stream had let up.

Progress has been steady for growing the extra large crystal, and I've started expanding the exploratory tunnel again. After the first ten days, I'd cleaned out all fourteen of the crystal bubbles I'd found during the initial tunnel dig, so I went back to expanding it. I try to haul a cart's worth of stone from the tunnel each evening. Zeb's built up quite a charcoal stockpile as well, and even more than that, has a massive wood stockpile to use for making charcoal. He seems comfortable enough with starting work on the path again now that he's gained a few levels, which means he'll start needing stone again for construction. I might end up doing a lot more stone cutting when Zaka returns next time just to have someone there who can actually haul more of the stone out.

Another month, and we've made pretty average progress. Zeb restarted construction on the path down this month, and at the end of the month, Zaka returned and helped haul stone alongside two other goblins. Zeb's pace was a little faster than I expected last month, thanks to him using the already constructed section of path with a cart. He himself can use the carts to bring rock down the mountain, and he can push an empty cart up the incline, so he's actually been able to move the rock he needs a lot faster than I anticipated. He's made it about a hundred feet on his own now. Which, considering his smaller mana pool is pretty impressive. Part of that has been sending standardized blocks to him. I've been attempting to make sure everything I cut is roughly a brick so that it's easy to fuse to each other. I'm hopeful that his pace next month will be slightly faster since the goblins helped haul stone to periodic points along the path while they were here.

Well, during the last month, I finally regrew the crystal to four feet, and moved it into the new apparatus for growing. If this doesn't work, I have no idea what I'm going to do. That said, it'll take a long time to grow the crystal to the size I want, so I'll just keep at it. As for the path, Zeb made it another 120 feet. Which I'd say is pretty impressive. The soil where he's working is more shallow than it was down by the village, so he doesn't have to dig as deep, or place as much stone to build it up to the right height, speeding up his work. I have a feeling it's going to be quite the boring rest of the year as we work on these large projects.

It was, in fact, a boring year. These last four months have been a lot of routine work. The crystal is a little more than a third of the way through this apparatus's growth. If I keep this rate up, it'll be done by the end of next year. In the last four months, Zeb's also built the path out quite significantly for working mostly alone. He's gotten this section to 800 feet, to which I've decided to help build a platform where he's at right now before we head back down to the goblin village for winter.

I was right to say I'd be lucky if I reached prestige by this next winter. I've been so holed up inside working that in the months I've been in the cave, I gained as many levels as I did during the winter occasionally cutting trees in the village last year, which is to say, barely any.

<RARE LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 74
HP: 2084/2084
MP: 943/943
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Earth Spike

Zeb, on the other hand, gained a decent amount thanks to his tree cutting for the path construction, and earlier cutting to make charcoal.

<LEGENDARY GOBLIN>
Level: 38
HP: 682/682
MP: 153/153
Traits: Mimicry, Mana Affinity
Magic: Stone Shaping

Based on Zeb's growth, I think my hypothesis on Mana Affinity is correct, which means I can, for now at least, lay that mystery to rest. Zeb's mana is already almost back up to where he was when he was level 100 as an Epic Goblin, so that's been very helpful for construction.

When we returned to the village today, Zaka had a surprise for us. One of the goblins in the village has gained stone shaping. Apparently, the individual in question was going to the reservoir, and manually breaking stone to use for the road, and after a month or so of doing that, they prestiged and got stone shaping, which meant they were able to cut nice, neat bricks, instead of poorly shaped ones after that point.

Zeb wasn't too happy to hear this news. He seems to be a little conflicted about another goblin having the ability. My guess is he felt special being the only one who also had that ability with me. I assured him that I didn't intend to take on another assistant. I will, however, gladly leave a bunch of the stone shaping tasks I'd normally do to this new goblin. Heck, I'll even work with them to build them a workshop in the now bustling industrial district. Mostly so that I never have to worry about making stone buckets for the goblins here, or fixing random broken stone objects. They can make all the random tools and spearheads, and I'll be free from that responsibility!

As a result of them gaining stone shaping, the goblins in the village also extended the path up the mountain by another five hundred feet over the course of the year. After hearing that, Zeb seemed more confident, since he'd made more path alone than the other goblin had with help.

As for other developments in the village, all the goblins are wearing clothes now, except Zeb and I. When Zaka visited, all the goblins had clothes, but I didn't know if they were wearing them specifically for travel or not. Now I know, they're always clothed. Well, I don't mind not wearing clothes myself, but we should make sure Zeb has some I suppose. The only new shop in town is seemingly a paint store. I guess the goblins have finally figured out a few dyes that they can use to paint with, although it all seems to be finger paints at this point. Since I'm already making one workshop, I'll make one for the paint shop as well.

As for the plant field, according to Zaka, during the summer, the stalks turned brown, and died off. During fall, when it rained a bit, they regrew the stalks, and are now back to what they looked like when Zeb found them before. The seeds that were floating also sank in the summer, and now there are a few short stalks poking up from that part of the flooded field. Later this winter, I think we'll be able to come up with a good agricultural route to grow these plants as an actual stable food source for the goblins. If that is the case, I think I should probably build another ten houses. I'm sure if Zaka thinks he can support them, he'd like to have more goblins about.

The goblins that have the mechanical rope braider have stockpiled a ton of rope, which is good, because we'll need it soon enough. I was worried about the local vine plant population when I saw just how much plant rope they'd made, but it seems that they've been responsibly harvesting it, leaving around half the vines. Which has led to them having to travel quite far to harvest the vines, but the backpacks have made that a much more doable task.

One month has passed, I've gotten the workshops done, and the new houses. Zeb and the other Stone Shaping goblin seem to be getting along fine. Their personalities are quite different, so I think Zeb doesn't feel threatened anymore. Zeb's quite inquisitive, and the other goblin, Gakus, is the kind of person who enjoys doing monotonous work, repeating the same task over and over. I'm pretty sure if I told Gakus to just cut bricks from stone until he died, he'd spend the rest of his natural life happily cutting them.

They've both been working on road construction while I've been building in the village. As such, they've actually made it to the next landing, which is just in time for me to get to work on it. After we finish the next section, we'll be hitting a bit of a higher slope area, so I think that it'll go a bit faster, since I should be cutting the path out partially from the mountain, rather than building it up from the ground.

Another month down, and we spent it pretty much path building the whole time. We made it to the next landing, and even finished two 600 foot stretches of zig-zag in addition to the 1100 feet of path before that. I think if we keep up this pace, we'll actually make it a considerable distance over this winter. One concern I have is that some of the middle sections are likely going to need extra stone, and those are going to be quite a distance from our normal stone cutting locations, which will certainly slow down production, unless we cut quarries out along the way, which I'm considering at this point. We'll see when we get to that point I suppose.

One more month, and we've cut quite a lot of stone out from this section of the mountain for the zig-zag path up here. While I've been cutting the main sections out, I've been having Zeb cut the stairs directly between the zig-zag, so that both are getting done at the same time. This month, we've cut an additional five 600 foot stretches before we finally reached an area of lower slope, so we started building another longer path section, which we're only about 200 feet into so far. For this section, we've been re-using stone we cut out to make the zig-zag, so we haven't had to designate a new quarry yet, but I think we'll probably need to dedicate a new quarry area soon.

Gakus actually stopped working with us on the zig-zag section, and instead he was still cutting stone from the reservoir area, and started building a huge flat stockpile area outside the village walls, where they've started stockpiling all the extra trees that we've been cutting in our way. Then they've transported them back along the path we've finished using carts and rope. At this rate, I'm not even sure what they could possibly use all the wood for. I might set them up with some charcoal kilns, so they can convert the wood to charcoal. Wood's fine, but charcoal has a near indefinite shelf life, where as the wood can eventually rot, making it useless for things like cooking.

Well, it's been another month, and the spring thaw and rains have finally joined us. We finished the remaining 1000 feet of construction on the current path section, and I set up a location for a quarry up the mountain, near where the next landing should approximately be, about 1100 feet up from the last landing.

On some of the particularly rainy days, I built a few large charcoal kilns outside the city walls near all the wood storage, and then showed Zaka and some goblins how to use them. They'll have to use clay to close off the air holes, rather than stone like Zeb or I would, but even so, I hope they keep up with using them. Gakus seems capable of building at least some basic structures for storage, so storage for charcoal shouldn't be an issue. As long as he mimics my construction, then I'm not too worried.

I'm actually glad he's not the creative type, because without a basic understanding of architecture, if he got too creative with construction, there is a good chance someone might get crushed to death. Since he's the type to just duplicate things though, I'm not as worried about that, but I am worried about coming back to a sea of identical covered buildings all filled with wood and charcoal.

The final month in the village has passed, and tomorrow Zeb and I will return up the mountain. We built out the path to the current intermediate quarry, and I gave Gakus and Zaka instructions on how to pick out a location for these intermediate quarries, so that they can continue construction throughout the year. If they make it 2000 feet or so, they'll reach another zig-zag section, and I told them to stop at that point if they make it there, since it'll be much harder for them to build at those sections compared to doing it myself.

I've also clear cut and designated a floodable field for the new plants to be grown. I showed Zaka, and some interested goblins, how we've decided to harvest and use them for cooking. They aren't really worth harvesting in their first year of growth, as the new seeds from before still have relatively small bulbs under them. However, at the end of the season, you can cut a third of the stalks or so without too badly harming the plant. We tried cutting more, but a few of those plants died, so we've set the limit at the safe point.

As for the bulbs, we don't know yet if they'll be worth harvesting at the second year or not yet either, since it's too early to tell, but I'm hoping they will be. I explained the basics of selective breeding also, where you don't harvest the plants that would be best for eating, and instead let them grow, and plant their seeds. All that information won't be useful this year though, and all the goblins need to do is keep an eye on all the seeds in the new flooded field.

[Vol.2] Ch.42 Bathhouse

The first four months back at the cave have been pretty standard work. I worked on growing the crystal after checking everything was intact from winter. Zeb worked on building the path out further, while keeping up with my charcoal demands. Zaka visited periodically, and left with 7 new goblins. The work has gotten so repetitive that if this crystal can't survive the surface, I'm done with it. I'm already regretting not being done with it at the 4 foot crystal. Even including the crystal bubbles that I've periodically been finding in the exploratory tunnel, I've had to start using a larger size of crystal for melting, because I've exhausted all my smallest sizes. With all the extra bubbles of crystals I've added though, I have so many of the larger sizes, it's less of a concern than it used to be.

Zeb's path building has gotten to a zig-zag area last month, so he won't be needing much stone from me for a while, and he can really get the path going. At the current rate of construction, I don't think the cart path down the mountain will be done for at least another year, but given how strong Kaga is, I'll have to ask Zaka to bring him along on the last visit of the year. I should have the crystal grown by then. If it can survive outside on it's own, I'll encase it in unreactive stone, and we'll have to have all of us try to assist Kaga in moving it down the hill through the sections that don't have path made.

It's been three and a half more months, and the crystal is about where I want it, and I want to make sure that I have enough time to properly test it on the surface, so I'm going to call it here. I can't imagine waiting another year to make it just a little bigger. If that ends up being the problem, then history can laugh on me for being so close and stopping.

The first observation I make is that it's, well, heavy. Very heavy. We'll need some kind of sled for it to go off-roading. Even Kaga can't carry something like this. Heck, it took both Zeb and I to get it up the cave on a cart, and we had to use stone shaping to take breaks frequently. That said, I made the executive decision to move it directly into the vacuum chamber right away, rather than attempting any testing on it beforehand.

The crystal has now survived ten days on the surface. I'm fairly confident that this one is stable. Zeb and I were awoken again tonight by a lizard making a fuss outside the cave. Considering winter is just around the corner, I'm not that surprised, and we quickly dealt with it. While I'm on the subject, the crystal seems to crackle at night time. It's fairly subtle, but I can hear a faint noise coming from the chamber, and I can feel the extra mana leaking into the air at that time. During the day, we get more mana than we do at night, which leads me to believe it's coming from the suns. I wonder if the crystal has such high capacitance for mana that at night it's literally discharging directly into the air?

Hopefully a few inches of stone encasing it will help prevent any of us from damage from touching such a heavily charged crystal. The alternative is death, I'm almost certain of that. Even at full mana I'm pretty sure touching this thing would instantly kill any living creature.

During the day, Zeb and I have been working on the path down, trying to get it as far as we can in the remaining days. The previous zig-zag section is now finished, and there is another straightaway that we've had to dig an intermediate quarry to allow us to work effectively. Overall, if the goblins have gotten to the zig-zag section I told them to stop at, then we're probably about halfway done with the path. The remaining half has three more zig-zag sections, which are going to be a concern when it comes to moving the crystal down the mountain, but I hope we can handle it.

Tomorrow is when Zaka, Kaga, and the other goblins will come to help us move the crystal down to the village. I've spent the last few days building carts and the sled we'll use, and getting them all to their necessary locations. We had another lizard guest last night, which we quickly dispatched. I'm glad in the last few years that we haven't had any of them break into the cave, although solid stone is a challenge for any beast to break through if it isn't determined enough to do so. After nightfall, I started remotely stone shaping a stone shell around the crystal until the crackling stopped, and then I doubled the thickness, for good measure. Tomorrow, I'll raise it out of the vacuum chamber for transport.

We decided to wait until the next morning to take the crystal down to the village, to give us as much daylight as possible, which ended up being a good idea, because by the time we made it back down to the village, the sun was setting. The carts were invaluable, and honestly, if the path was completed, we'd have made it in two hours or so. Unfortunately, moving the crystal on a sled, through a forest, in mountainous terrain, was very slow. Once we finally made it back, we moved the crystal to the pavilion area, and I stayed up until late putting a wall around it, so no one accidentally damaged it, or worse...

The past five days, I've been building a facility to properly house the crystal. In short, its a bathhouse. The idea will be a large central tank where the crystal will be lowered. That will have stone tubes with propellers to mix water through baths, which will be some degree of wood infused water. Then to recharge your mana, you can just go and soak in the baths for a while. The propellers will all be connected mechanically, and I'll hook that up to a waterwheel on the stream. I'll need Kaga's help to build the waterwheel and the initial shafts for transferring power, since wood is lighter than stone, it should reduce power loss within those segments. Ultimately, the water wheel will have a low power output due to the stream's overall flow rate, but it's better than nothing for automatic mixing of water in the baths.

There will be four baths in the design. Two small baths, which should have higher mana recharge rate due to mixing more quickly, a larger bath, which should be able to have a few people in it. The fourth bath will be for cleaning off before you get in the other baths, and won't actually mix with the crystal at all, to hopefully prevent needing to clean the crystal chamber often.

Once I get the mechanics all set up, and the wood infused water made, the facility should be ready to go.

Six more days, and we've gotten everything set up, the only thing left to do is lower the crystal into the chamber for it, and unsheathe it. For safety reasons, we're using diluted wood water. Even then, there is a concern about internal arcing, but I'll have to deal with that when it comes to it. The distance to the baths is far enough that I think it'll just arc within the water, and not all the way to the bath. I'll be the one to test it first though, just in case.

With some help, we got the crystal into position and, using stone shaping, I removed the sheath I had placed around it. The first thing that happened was a lot of arcing within the water. It reminded me a lot of a tesla coil, where it arcs out and dissipates after a certain distance. After a short while though, the arcing slowed down, although it didn't fully stop.

The next test was to use the bath, which I was a little nervous about, since I was missing mana. I was pleasantly surprised for two reasons. First, the water was warm, which I'm assuming was thanks to the arcing, but second, it warmed me up. How it warmed me reminded me of when I would sleep on the crystal pile as an imp, and I imagine that it's working on a similar principle. My mana also regenerated about twenty times faster than it would have in the air, but I did have most of my body submerged. If I was less submerged, I'm sure my mana wouldn't regenerate quite as fast.

After I showed it was safe, some of the other goblins gave it a shot, and they all seemed to enjoy it. Apparently a few of the other goblins in town have started to gain access to magic of their own, so it won't just be a handful of us who find it useful. That said, it'd be relaxing even if you didn't need to regenerate mana, so I'm sure it'll become quite the popular location in town; I mean, it's practically an artificial hot spring. It hopefully will help speed up any mana related work that needs done in the town as well.

[Vol.2] Ch.43 The Siege Part 1

It's only been a day, but it feels like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders after successfully making a large crystal that can survive down here in the goblin village. It even seems like things are more cheery. I heard a lot of birds chirping in the morning, and had time to just listen to them. I felt just bristling with energy to go start my day. While the path needs work done on it, today I just went to check on the various other things in the village that need potential maintenance, like the rain runoff system and the dam. I have a few other village improvements that I'd like to do as well before working on the path.

Namely, the salt evaporation pond and the potential leather workshop. The salt evaporation pond has been useful, and the goblins have gotten used to using it. The bad news is that they've been using all the salt for food, and as such, there isn't much excess to use for making leather, which needs to be remedied by making more salt evaporation ponds. Since they do have some salt on hand, I can teach the goblin how to make leather at least, and he can begin the process for some hides.

It's been just one more day, but I'm starting to wonder if there really were this many birds near the village in the past. All the goblins haven't paid much mind to it, so I'm not concerned. Maybe it's just that occasionally flocks move into the area, and so they're used to it happening occasionally. I had a second weird event happen though as well. It's been ages since I've seen a lizard around the goblin village, basically since Zaka went on a rampage killing them, but I ran into one on the way to go expand the salt evaporation ponds. After it noticed me, it tried to attack me, and I dealt with it fairly easily. I let Zaka know about it, so they could come and harvest it, and also keep their eyes peeled for any other lizards that might be about.

Fighting one near here reminds me of when I first came to the village, where all the goblins lived in glorified holes in the ground, and weren't even hunting with tools. A whole lot has changed in the area since then. The goblins were practically paleolithic, but it seems that Zaka had some relative knowledge that he didn't know what to do with until the village got it's feet under it. Now, it's some mix between stone age and medieval, and I'd like to move it forward even more. Having others who can contribute and provide valuable resources is way better than doing it yourself.

It's been two more days, and I'm almost certain something is up now. Zaka seems to also sense something is wrong. There is a lot more wildlife just outside the village than there was before, and the goblins have run into lizards twice now on trips outside the village. It's been quite a while, but one goblin died while collecting vines. Until we figure out what is going on, all the goblins who aren't explicitly hunting are to stay in the village. Zaka is already forming a group to try to go deal with the lizards that have moved back into the vicinity.

It's been three more days, and things have started to get a bit wild. We had a lizard attempting to break down one of the wooden gates this morning. Zaka's squad has been hunting lizards, and every day they've killed five. Which is more than they were killing back before they started the extermination. I'm almost done building a second smokehouse just so that there is a place for all the extra meat.

Something clicked in me when the lizard was hitting the gate this morning, and I'm starting to suspect the crystal is the cause of all this. On the mountain, we've had a few run-ins with the lizards when we hadn't seen them in some time up there. Once, back when the four foot crystal broke and there was the massive mana wave, and then more recently when we finished making the six foot crystal.

I'm starting to wonder if the reason I've been feeling so energetic in the mornings isn't because I've finally finished the crystal project I've worked on for so long, and is instead some property of the crystal itself. I'm not certain about this, and I'm also not about to smash the crystal. I'm afraid that would be like setting off a bomb. Also, it doesn't seem like it's making any of the wildlife behave differently, lizards were always aggressive.

I'll need more evidence before I make a move on this, but I'll keep an eye out for any other signs that the crystal is the cause...

It's only been two days, but we're experiencing what can only be described as a siege... of lizards. Lizards are outside the walls of the village, pounding on gates, and even fighting amongst themselves. At this point, I'm fairly certain it's the crystal's fault... which makes it also my fault. There isn't a way to undo this now though. We can't exactly take the crystal out of the town. I've said before too, that I'm pretty sure if I break the crystal, it'll explode with mana.

No, the only way out is to kill the lizards. At this point, none of us can leave the walls to the village. I've already reinforced the gates with leftover stone so that they don't get broken down. Zaka is full time on the wall shooting fireballs at the lizards, although a single fireball barely hurts them, but the range at least allows him to use it freely.

We talked it over, and tomorrow, I'm going to start working on closing off an area near one of the gates inside, so that we can let a few lizards in at a time to attempt to kill them all off. Zaka can't easily kill any from the walls, because when they get considerably hurt, they run away.

Today was a fucking disaster. I built a space behind one of the gates so that we could try to fight a handful of the lizards at once. What followed when we opened the outside gate was a nightmare.

Lizards flooded in, and there were so many that we couldn't close the gate behind them. Myself, Kaga, Zaka, and some of the hunting goblins were in the walled in area to kill lizards. Initially, things were going well. With the lizards having no way back, it was easy to kill them. A well placed Earth Spike could easily kill one lizard, and Kaga and Zaka were able to easily kill lizards when we started.

As the minutes dragged on though, we noticed a problem. The gates weren't closing, and the dead lizards had started to pile high enough that the alive lizards were using them to attempt to climb up the wall. Zaka and I were both practically exhausted of mana, and had resorted to old fighting tactics to kill lizards. We had only planned to kill a dozen or two lizards at a time, close the gates, recharge, and then repeat. What we didn't count on was the stone mechanism used to close the door from on top of the wall to break due to the lizards ramming into the doors while the goblins on top attempted to close them.

What followed that was a fight for not just our own lives, but for the lives of all the goblins in the village. We had to frantically fight through the lizards towards the door while exposing our backs to any lizards we might have missed in the carnage all in an attempt to manually close the gates. Being out of mana, I couldn't even use stone shaping to safely close the gate. When we eventually made it to the gates, we realized that as long as the lizards were trying to get in, we couldn't close them. At least one of us would have to be outside the gates, holding the lizards back while the gates were closed and reinforced.

I don't know if it was pride in the fact he made the gates himself, or if it was just something I'd failed to see before in Kaga, but he marched through the gates and in a feat of sheer strength he used a lizard's corpse as a plow and shoved back into the approaching horde, and as the gates closed, he was surrounded by the horde.

I'm still shaken by what happened. If we had been more prepared it could have been easy. If I'd been more careful with the crystal, we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with. If I'd checked that the mechanisms could hold up to this, no one would have had to been outside the gates. If I'd had spare rope on the walls maybe we could have gotten Kaga out.

...

[Vol.2] Ch.44: The Siege Part 2

The siege has been ongoing for two more days now. Myself, along with many of the goblins that participated in the fight with the lizards where Kaga made the ultimate sacrifice, have prestiged. I haven't asked any of the others about their stats, quite frankly, I feel to ashamed to talk to others right now. What I can say is all of us picked up combat related bonuses, and I got offered Improved Earth Spike.

My stats when I first prestiged were:

<EPIC LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 0
HP: 1049/1049
MP: 572/572
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike

Improved Earth Spike: Spell. Forcibly erupt up to three, three foot long spikes of earth or stone from the ground at up to three points within 10 feet of you. Costs 400 mana.

I've been using Improved Earth Spike take out multiple lizards in a single blow from the other side of the wall, and then go to recharge. A few of the goblins that prestiged while fighting with us have also been killing lizards from atop the walls. I can't say for certain what their magic is, since I haven't asked, but they're throwing spears that are being given to them with incredible force. They also need to recharge after a single spear is thrown though, so they also are constantly going back to the crystal baths to recharge.

After only a day, I'm already up a significant amount of levels considering that I'm an Epic tier creature now. It takes about eight lizard kills for me to gain a level.

<EPIC LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 14
HP: 1301/1301
MP: 680/680
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike

Although I can't say for certain, surely there are a finite number of these lizards in the area. If that is the case, we'll eventually get through all of them.

Five more days, and although we're clearly close to getting rid of most of the lizards, the smell has started to become unbearable. Initially, the lizards that died were devoured by their living comrades. Now, they're left to rot, and there are so many corpses piled up, that I can only imagine we'll have to use a significant amount of the stockpiled wood to burn all these rotting corpses.

The pace that we're killing the lizards has also slowed down due to the piles of lizard corpses about. Often times, the live lizards are on top of dead lizards, and I can't impale them. We ended up having to fight a sudden burst of lizards trying to scale the walls using the corpses earlier today, during the eclipse. I can only assume that due to the lack of natural mana in the air thanks to the eclipse, that however the crystal is drawing the lizards in, it was more pronounced, and they became even more agitated at the lack of ability to get to the source of the mana.

Soon, the number of lizards will probably deplete enough that we'll actually be able to exit the village and begin culling the remnants that are further out.

After four days, we've finally made our first excursion out of the village since all this began. While it is still too dangerous for the average goblin to make it out, our group, consisting of those of us who survived the failed initial culling trap, were able to handle ourselves as we ran into groups of lizards beyond the tree line.

With that proven, our plan moving forward is to start burning all the rotting bodies near the village, and while the bonfires burn, go hunt down additional lizards. We also need to haul in additional wood into the village from the outside stockpile to replenish supplies. It'll probably be a few weeks until we feel comfortable letting the goblins return to normal activities, but we're finally on the tail end of the siege.

While we've been going on the excursions for the past week, I've started to hear murmurings from goblins that quiet whenever I get close. I obviously don't speak their language, but it's bothering me that they go quiet when they see me. I'll have to ask Zeb if he's heard anything the next time I'm working with him. Since he's not combat oriented, he's been taking care of tasks in the village during the whole siege. He's continued my project to expand the floors under the pavilion, including a second screw pump to remove water from that floor. The siege has shown that having increased storage inside the town should be considered in case a future event like this were to unfold.

I got around to asking Zeb yesterday why the goblins have been whispering when they see me, and it worries me slightly. A handful of the goblins are apparently fed up with my presence in town. Initially, they were quite pleased with the increased safety and quality of life that I brought to them. As time has gone on though, a few of them have considered my projects to be disruptive at the least, and detrimental at the worst.

This group kept this opinion to themselves while most of the other goblins seemed to be appreciative of the new workshops and buildings that I brought to the village. Now however, two things have apparently tipped the balance into this disgruntled group's favor. The first thing being the siege. I'm not the only one who thinks I'm at fault for the lizards all swarming the area apparently. The reasons I'm at fault vary from goblin to goblin, most revolve around a curse that I brought on the village in some way or another, and few seem to have any basis in the likely actual cause, the artificial crystal. The second reason is the death of Kaga.

For the longest time, I've considered not speaking the goblin language to just be a bit of a nuisance, but I've likely missed quite a few intricacies of the goblin village as a consequence of working through Zeb rather than speaking to the goblins myself. Despite his demeanor, Kaga was apparently quite the positive force in support of me. A lot of the other craftsgoblins looked up to him, and he apparently took some degree of inspiration from how I was always coming up with new projects to make the goblin's lives better.

Hearing about all this, and the details about Kaga, has put me back into quite the depressed mood. I myself have been thinking that I made quite the blunder. After hearing that there is an increasing sentiment among the goblins that they'd be better off without my tinkering in their lives, I think that that they might be right. At the very least, I need to be much, much, much more careful in the future when I'm tinkering with things that I'm not certain of.

After another week of clearing out any remnants of the lizards in the nearby forest, Zaka has deemed that the goblins can leave the village again, as long as they travel in groups. The outside of the village is charred with burned remains from the massive bonfires that we set to burn all the corpses that had piled up from the siege. Unsurprisingly, Zaka isn't the only Hobgoblin in the village anymore. Two of the goblins that were in the group of us that dealt with all the lizards have evolved. Before this, they were hunters, and were some of the older goblins in the village, so them finally reaching this point isn't that much of a surprise. Among the other goblins that fought during the siege, it probably won't be long before three more evolve.

After the announcement, Zaka approached me. Long story short, he's also aware of the anti-me faction that has been gaining power in the village. He insisted that he's never doubted that I've had good intentions, and that he still believes that I do, but the other faction has started to consolidate it's power around one of the new hobgoblins. They seem to advocate for returning to a simpler time, free of all the complexities of trade and hard tasks. The majority of the goblins disagree with that sentiment, but many agree that if Zaka is going to continue to support me, that new leadership should be chosen. Despite this, Zaka would support me, which was touching.

However, I feel like this would be a bad direction for the goblins. Rather than cause the political death of someone who has supported me for so long, I've offered up an alternative. One that I hope will placate the opposition enough that they don't decide to overthrow Zaka. I'll leave the village after winter, and I won't return. I'll still have my residence in the cave, and do work up there, but I won't come down to the village any longer. During this winter, I won't work on any projects that goblins in the village as a group don't approve of. As for my own safety, I'm less concerned. I doubt a new hobgoblin is strong enough to fight me in my current state after killing all those lizards.

<EPIC LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 72
HP: 2345/2345
MP: 1126/1126
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike

[Vol.2] Ch.45 Goodbye Goblin Village

After we made the announcement to the village, there was a mixed response. The craftsgoblins were the most vocal about wanting me to stay. For the goblins that I have been making improved tools for, they see this as a double loss with Kaga also being gone. The other goblins however, were adamant that I don't work on any more projects in the town, and anything I make on the mountain be forbidden from being brought in. A small faction even said I should be expelled immediately, but the majority shot that down, pointing out that I did help fight all the lizards, and it'd be cruel to send me out immediately. After a lot of arguments, the faction that wanted to kick me out won, but with a few conditions.

The first condition is that every year, they'll re-evaluate if they still want me banished. The faction that wants me to stay insisted on this as a condition or else they'd leave alongside me. The second condition was that every month a member from both factions must come up the mountain to interact with me. Both factions seemed to think this was a good idea, with the pro-me faction wanting to keep in touch, and the anti-me faction wanting to keep an eye on me. The third condition was one that I imposed on the goblins. I insisted that if I find out there has been infighting or discrimination between goblins in the village as a consequence of this, I'd personally feel a need to step in. I don't feel that I'm free of responsibility in this, and I wanted to make sure that this doesn't cause more problems than it already is.

After all the conditions were set, I brought up a list of projects that I wanted to work on, but I wanted approval from most of the goblins to work on them before winter ended. In no particular order, I want to teach the hide crafting goblin how to make leather, I want to expand the salt evaporation ponds, I want to work on the path up the mountain, I want to expand storage in the village, I want to expand the fields for growing the new potential food crop, and I want to remove the crystal hot spring. I had previously wanted to attempt some projects at the ocean bay, but now I don't feel comfortable working on a project of that scale.

There was some resistance to the idea of making leather, but after I told the goblins the steps to making it, the issue was let go. There was also resistance to the idea of eating the plants that Zeb found, but the decision was made that those that don't want to eat them don't have to, and it would be alright for them to be grown. The goblins were very vehement about not wanting to get rid of the hot spring. I tried to insist to them that it was the reason that the lizards attacked, but they retorted with "Even if that is the case, the lizards are dead now, so the threat has passed." I don't agree with them, and I think that future threats might arise, but the superstition that I'm actually the reason the lizards attacked seems to be set among a group of the goblins, and to them, it's like I'm trying to take away something nice as a punitive measure.

Ultimately, that was the only thing that the goblins said I couldn't do, so I'll work on the other projects for the next few months. However, I will make sure that I'm kept informed on any strange events or happenings that might occur. If push comes to shove, I'll still come down to try to help the goblins if something happens. Even if some of them resent me for it afterwards.

For the last few months, I've been working on the projects that the goblins agreed that I could work on. I've expanded the salt evaporation pond area to be three times as large, which should provide plenty of excess salt. Then I went through the multi-step process for making leather with the hide craftsman goblin. It's a very long process though, so I won't be able to see the results of his labor. I finished an additional layer of storage under the pavilion as well. It's quite dark that far down, and torches are necessary to see, so hopefully things that are stored down there are things that won't be needed often, like extra charcoal. The fields for the new edible plant have been expanded quite a bit, which should give them an ample supply of it, if they manage it properly.

Then finally, after all that was done, I've begun work on the path up the mountain again. In the remaining time, I got past the next zig-zag section, which included seven 500 foot long jaunts up the mountain. For good measure, I checked over all the random tools that I had built for the goblins, and fixed any defects that had built up over time. Ultimately, I couldn't quite bring myself to fix Kaga's tools, so I hope that if a goblin takes up trying to fill Kaga's carpentry shop, that he kept his tools in good condition.

With all of that taken care of, I'm now just waiting for the snow on the mountain to melt, which should be any day now, before I return up the mountain to my home.

My last week in the village was bittersweet. I walked through many of the places that I spent time constructing, inspecting each for any flaws or concerns that would result in me needing to leave information for Gakus so he could repair them. Thankfully, almost everything seemed to be holding up well. I made sure that Gakus knew about needing to clean the storm sewer system, and what maintenance needs done on the dam every so often. I also told him he's free to cut extra stone from the far side of the reservoir, away from the dam, but he had to be careful never to cut from near the dam.

With everything in order, and the snow finally clear from the mountains, Zeb and I began the walk back up the mountain, and this time, with no intent to return.

[Vol.3] Ch.1 Moving Forward

The return trip up the mountain felt different than it had all the times I'd made it in the past. The sights were the same, and the path was familiar, but the emotions I felt along the way were sadness and regret. This is partially self-imposed, to remind me to be more careful. It might not just be myself that gets hurt if I do something reckless.

As such, I won't be growing any more large crystals for the foreseeable future. I have a few projects that should be more mundane that I can work on to keep developing new useful objects. I've got a lot of the unknown metal ore ready to smelt, the path down the mountain is only about half-way done, and I would like to properly grow spuds up here.

Given how much meat I was being given before, both Zeb and I were neglecting the spud terraces, but I can't say that we'll have a steady food supply from here on out, so adding that to our repertoire is a good idea. For now, we have plenty of smoked meat from all the excess from the lizard siege, but we'll need a steady food source moving forward.

It's been a day since Zeb and I returned to the mountain home, which is once again my only home. We got everything re-opened without any issues, and so we've decided on our course of action for the next few weeks. It's actually still a bit chilly up here on the mountain, although the snow has at least melted. Normally, we return up here a few weeks from now, after there has been more time for it to warm up. As such, there is very little plant life growing right now.

For the next few weeks, we'll make sure that the spud terraces are kept in good condition, and get them organized appropriately to ensure that spud plants grow well. One thing I'd like up here is a smokehouse of our own. Food on a drying rack isn't nearly as good as smoked meats, and the smoked meat keeps longer. I can't say I'll go hunting a lot, but I'd like to at least have the option up here, if the opportunity arises. As such, I won't make it particularly large either. I plan on carving it out of the mountain, like I did for Zeb's house. I'll connect the hallway from Zeb's house to it, so it has access from both inside and outside the cave complex.

It took five days to carve out the new smokehouse area up here. I sometimes forget how much faster I can work up here with access to the crystals to recharge my mana. Which was the whole reason I attempted to make the giant crystal for the village in the first place. With the smokehouse done so early, Zeb and I started to brainstorm projects to work on.

One option is to smelt all that mystery metal ore we've crushed up. It's quite labor intensive though, and unless we can find a good flux agent, I don't know that it's useful in it's current form. Maybe when the goblin envoy arrives, we can ask for some seashells to be brought up next month, and attempt to use them as a flux agent, although I'm hesitant to ask for anything right away. It'd probably be better to wait a little while before I ask for anything to be brought up to me.

A second option is to work on the path up the mountain. Finishing that would at least make the trip easier for the goblin envoys that come visit, and might help repair my image among at least a few of the goblins.

The third project has some potential, but is a project that rivals the reservoir in the village in scale. The idea is to build a new reservoir up here, well above the cave entrance, with the purpose of using it to harness free mechanical energy from rain and snow. By digging out a large reservoir a few hundred feet up the mountain, we could pipe the water down all that vertical distance before having it spin a turbine blade, utilizing all the gravitational potential energy. The difference between this and the reservoir in the village is that there isn't a continuous stream up here, so all the water would be collected from snow melt and rain.

A fourth idea that I didn't discuss with Zeb, but one I'm interested in, is leaving the cave for a while, and exploring. Since Zeb isn't as skilled in combat, this is something that I'd be doing alone. I wouldn't be doing this right away either, but potentially after we finish one of the other ideas I'd consider it. After all, I've only really been in my small local area here. I've explored a little years ago, but I really would like to have a better lay of the land here. It's only a few thousand feet to the summit of the mountain from here as far as I can tell, so that itself would only take a day or so to make the round trip.

Zeb and I decided to work on the path between the goblin village and here. We've been working on it for the past eleven days now. It'll make the goblin's trip up here better, and it's something the goblins are already alright with me working on. The other two projects are new to the goblins, so we decided it would be best to keep from potentially feeding any political motivations of the goblins opposed to new projects. As for the idea of exploring, I haven't brought it up yet with Zeb. I also want to let the goblin envoys know, so that if I'm missing, they aren't suddenly concerned.

The goblin envoys arrive tomorrow, and I'm actually thinking about at least going up to explore the peak first. As I've been working on the path, I've found myself craving the change of pace, and to do something new. As such, tonight, I'll bring it up with Zeb, and tomorrow I'll let the envoys know that's what I plan on doing. I doubt anyone will care about it, considering it's not that far. However, after that, I'll plan out what I want to explore moving forward based on what I can see from the peak.

The path itself is coming along well. I estimated last year that it'd take another year of work to complete, and I'm shortening my estimate now to about six months. I've got two reasons I'm shortening my estimate. The first is that both myself and Zeb have better mana capacities than I was expecting when I made the estimate, largely due to the events of the lizard siege. The second reason is that I wasn't planning on working on it full time before. I was planning for only working on it in off time, and while I had no other projects to work on.

The goblin envoys didn't seem to care if I went up the mountain to see the summit. Zeb said he wants to come along, and I almost said no, but I figure for a day trip, it'll be fine. We also got news that the goblins are still working on the path from their side as well, so I'm shortening the estimate to between four and five months, depending on how effectively their side works. I'm sure it'll be nice for those travelling up the mountain to not have to trudge through forests to make it up here. In some ways, it makes me feel a bit less like I'm exiled, and more like I'm just living outside city limits.

I'm not sure when exactly we'll go up to the summit of the mountain. I'm trying to wait for a cloudless day, so that I have as much of a view as possible. Until then, we'll just keep working on the path up. We've been felling more trees along the path as well, and at this point, they're getting too far to haul all up in one go, so they've started to pile up. When I'm waiting for my mana to recharge, I'll either haul some wood back up the mountain to use crystals to recharge, or process the trees to make logs that I can haul along the path. Once the entire path is done, it should only take a few days to haul all the remaining wood either up or down, since we'll be able to use carts to move it from one section to the next, until it reaches its destination.

Until that point though, I want the wood to be covered, so it doesn't rot from rain. As such, I'm considering building an intermediate depot along the path, where materials could be stored. I'm not sure if it'll get much use outside of this particular situation, but since I'd rather not waste a bunch of wood now, so I'm going to start on it at the next stop in the path.

[Vol.3] Ch.2 The Summit

It's been thirteen days since the envoys left. I finished up the depot at the next stop in the path down yesterday morning, and moved all the local wood we'd cut into it. This morning it was finally a completely clear sky. I'm actually surprised we have a clear sky this soon. It rains so much in the first months of the year here that it's rare that there are clear days like this. I fully expected to end up waiting another month before I had the chance to climb the mountain.

Zeb and I set out in the morning, bringing along a spear each, and some extra food. It was a little more than an hour after we set out on our hike that the trees started to thin, and then eventually stop growing, leaving us with a sparse landscape of low shrubs and grasses. At this point, we've ascended about six-hundred feet. Just before this point, we ran into some of the unknown animals that I hadn't seen in years. The plump animal with the long neck that could jump and glide seemingly with magic.

I got a closer look at them as they hopped away. Now, they're quite a bit smaller than me. Roughly the size of an imp, or about the same size as one of the ground birds that the goblins would hunt. When they're resting, they aren't nearly as plump, but once we startled them, they inflated somewhat, and began hopping away from us in massive, slow leaps. Honestly, if I'd thought they would make good food before, now I doubt it. Not only would it be a pain to hunt them, but if when they're resting is any hint, they won't have much meat on them.

In this clearing, I have a much better view of the landscape and ocean, and a suspicion I had is seeming more likely. The land below us curves towards the mountain, with water on three sides. We're either on a peninsula with a mountain, or, more likely, on an island which is likely volcanic in origin.

There have been a few hints along the way that this was the case. One hint was that, from the goblin village, there was only the one mountain visible. A second hint came from Zaka's story about how he arrived here, washed ashore on a boat. Either way, we continued on towards the peak to get a full grasp of our situation.

After ascending for another two hours, we reached the summit. As we reached higher altitudes, the shrubs even subsided, and we were left with rocky soil and grass under our feet. From the peak, I could see the whole island. Towards the goblin village the slope is more gentle, and away from it, the slope is steeper, although not so steep that one couldn't climb it. The peak seems to be a worn down caldera, from what now seems to be an inactive volcano.

The island itself is plenty large, but honestly, if you had roads to get around, you could walk from one side to the other in less than a day. There seems to be one other good valley area besides where the goblin village is, which could house a settlement, but the rest seems to be semi-rough terrain that would require terraforming to house more than a few people. Another interesting aspect seems to be that the island experiences rain shadow effects from the volcano. While the two valleys are roughly on the same side, and look like rainforests, the other side of the island looks drier, and has different plants growing on it.

Opposite the goblin village, across a long stretch of ocean, I can see another mountain, or likely, another volcanic island, peaking above the ocean. It is mostly green, so I can presume that it, like this island, is covered in trees. It also seems to have a second, smaller peak on the island, but from here, I can't say how large those peaks are. I can't even say for certain if that island is bigger or smaller than this one.

There are a few points of interest on this island that I want to look into, in addition to the second valley. There seems to be a more expansive beach on the far side of the island from the goblin village. The beach closest to the goblin village quickly descends into cliffs, but the one on the other side seems to descend less rapidly for a longer period, although it seems to be a rock beach rather than sand. That direction also seems to have a completely different climate due to rain shadow effects, so I'm interested to see if I can find new animals over there. An obvious second point of interest is the top of the volcano here, where the volcanic rock and soil are exposed, although now that I've been here, I'm not sure what else I'd do up here. On a cloudier day, I couldn't even look down and see much of the island, and I'm not planning to start any astronomical studies any time soon.

Well, it seems like hiking to the second valley, and around the other side of the island are the two points of interest that I'm interested in. Obviously, the other island in the distance also intrigues me, but I'm a long way from making a boat on these rough seas. If the tides are stronger, I'd also expect that ocean waves are quite rough, even for a short distance like this.

After we took in the views and took a break, Zeb and I descended back down the mountain, and arrived back at the cave by mid-afternoon. We both decided to take the rest of the day to relax, as we were exhausted. Zeb seemed surprised that he was as tired as he was, considered how much manual labor we've been doing on the road, but I explained to him how air gets thinner the higher up you go, so we were actually experiencing the early stages of altitude sickness, and that is why we were feeling so tired.

Zeb and I continued work on the path down the mountain for the remainder of the month until the goblin envoys arrived. I had Zeb explain what I saw, and told them at some point, I'd be going on a long journey to explore the island, and would probably miss a meeting, but that Zeb would either stay here or be down in the goblin village while I explored. Zeb protested initially, but after some convincing, he agreed that he probably shouldn't come exploring with me. Either way, I don't intend to go exploring again until after the path down the mountain is completed. Which is still a few months away.

We've been diligently managing the spud fields, and they're starting to grow at a decent pace. Since they're still a little ways from harvest, and our smoked meat is getting close to running out, we've made a habit of harvesting some lion root when we return up the mountain after working on the path.

It took another three and a half months, but the path to the goblin village is finally finished. Zeb did an inaugural trip along the whole path and made sure there weren't any places that got missed or changed, and it all seems good. While he was down in the goblin village, I asked him to see what it would take to get his hands on enough rope to operate the cart winches. I'd like to use them to move the wood up the mountain from the depot I'd built earlier this year.

Unfortunately, It's a lot harder to barter for goods when you can't just come in to the village to build new buildings for people, when that is what you used to trade. The rope maker was at a bit of a loss as to what we could trade for it. Ultimately, I had Zeb let them know we'd need a little over one thousand feet of rope, in a continuous rope, and we'd bring them things until they thought the trade was good enough.

I have a few things in mind that the rope maker might appreciate, so I'll start working on those. One thing is a set of various sized scissors made from lightstone. Another is a machete, again made of lightstone, so they can cut vines and tall grasses more effectively. A third item that I'm not as sure about, and I'm inclined to not interfere too much with the potter's business, is a set of bowls and plates, and potentially cutlery, again made from lightstone. I have excess lightstone up on the mountain, and I'm hoping the unique color of it impresses them enough to trade for the rope.

It'll take them quite a while, even with the machines I made for them to make a rope this long, so I've decided we'll check back in after the envoys visit at the end of the month, and see if what we've got is enough for them.

[Vol.3] Ch.3 Hiking Trip

There were two benefits in waiting for the goblin envoys. The first benefit was that we had the chance to have the trade items approved by all parties. I probably wouldn't need to for things like this, but building the goodwill back up is done in small steps like this. The second benefit is that they can help carry all the stuff back down the mountain with Zeb. Ultimately, Zeb will need help bringing all that rope back up the mountain though. We don't know yet if they'll accept everything as enough trade materials though.

I sent the envoys and Zeb back with all the items we thought of, the scissors set, machete, plates, and some basic cutlery. If it's enough, then Zeb should try to get some help to bring the rope to the depot about half way up the mountain tomorrow, and come get me, so we can use some carts to haul the wood up.

Well, Zeb came back pretty early, courtesy of the new path making the trip a lot faster, and he was pretty excited. He said we needed to get the two carts down to the depot as soon as possible. I was surprised by how enthused he was to go haul wood, and shortly after we set out.

When we got to the depot I saw why he was in a rush to haul things. There were a bunch of goblins standing about at the depot. I recognized most of them as either craftsgoblins from the village, or goblins who helped with the path's construction. They all apparently wanted to see the cart system in action, and helped haul the rope so that they could witness the maiden usage.

It took short while to run rope all the way up to the winch, and tie it off to a cart, but once it was attached, I was glad to see the rope hold up as the cart was allowed to roll slowly down the slope with the help of the winch. Then once it was loaded up with wood, I slowly winched the cart all the way up the section of the path. Once I saw that it worked once, and we unloaded the cart at this level, I invited the other goblins to each try it with some supervision.

We only made it about half way up the distance to the cave by the end of the day due to how many cartloads of wood we were hauling, but the goblins all seemed impressed when they left. A big benefit of having this is that it actually works just as well with two people as it did with all of us. They were all mostly there to just watch and give it a try themselves. In the long run, this should allow large amounts of materials to be moved up or down the mountain by relatively few people.

With the wood hauled, and the path done, I've decided to go explore the second valley on the island. Considering its proximity to the valley that the goblin village is in, I fully expect the biosphere to be similar. I'll probably be gone for a week or so. Getting there through forest and jungle will take a little while, and while I'm there I want to document any extra points of interest that I find while within it.

Given it's still the start of the month, I fully expect to return before the goblin envoys return up the mountain. I personally don't have any projects that seem so urgent that I need to have Zeb work on them, so I'm leaving him with no instructions on what to work on, and I've told him he's free to work on whatever he wants while I'm gone. I'm taking a spear, my backpack, some lightstone tablets for recording anything interesting I find, and a few days worth of food. I'm thankful at times like this that my species seems to need significantly less water than a human would, or else I'd need to bring water along as well.

Two days in, and I've found my first point of interest in the second valley that is worth recording. This valley has a larger stream than the other valley does. I found it thanks to the sound of a waterfall that falls around one hundred feet before continuing as a stream. Based on the fact that the island is volcanic in origin, I'm pretty sure that this sheer cliff, along with some of the ones in the other valley, were probably caused by massive landslides. It's probably the reason there is a whole valley here honestly.

Thankfully, this island seems to be volcanically dead, as the entire peak of the island is heavily eroded. In the years I've been here, I haven't noticed a single earthquake as well, so I'm guessing that the odds of a major landslide occurring are pretty slim. Mudslides on the other hand, well, I've seen a few of those, and they're a real threat. Without electronic systems, trying to develop seismology to get a better understanding of the actual risk is practically impossible. So for now, I'll just enjoy the beautiful view of this waterfall, and the small clearing underneath it. I think I'll follow the stream to the ocean, in case I find anything else interesting along it.

I didn't find anything particularly interesting along the entire path of the stream, despite it taking two days. It eventually flows into the ocean, and this valley doesn't have much of a bay. To the right, there are some cliffs, which I believe to be the cliffs that go around the left side of the bay at the end of the other valley. Unfortunately, despite the stream on this side having more water flow, there isn't a good clearing to build a village easily. Not that one couldn't be made, just that there would have to be a lot of terraforming to build buildings.

From what I can tell, this valley is very similar to the other one, and although I haven't seen any of the giant lizards here, I did catch myself one of the ground birds that the goblins eat, and it made a pretty good meal. The trees and other small wildlife are all pretty much the same.

Since this valley is a bit lopsided, with the stream and deepest point actually being closer to the side next to the other valley rather than the center, I'm going to take a long route home, and head up the other side some before returning.

Although it isn't an individual point of interest, I did realize one thing that may be beneficial. For the last two days, I've been walking back along the far edge of the valley, and I've noticed the slope is here is actually quite a bit more gentle than in a lot of other areas. While that initially may not be useful, if it continues for much longer, I'll be at an altitude where lion root grows. If that is the case, it might be possible to easily grow large amounts of it over here, even more so than the area intermediate between the cave and the goblin village.

Over here, I think the slope is gentle enough that you wouldn't even need to terraform in places, so just about anyone could do it. All this is to say, if Zaka were to keep expanding the goblin village, or wanted to make a second village, there are places that could work, especially if there is ground water that could be tapped into with a well.

The slope did continue to be gentle into the altitude where lion root started to grow, and I ended up harvesting quite a bit and putting it in my backpack for the remaining day of travel back to the cave. When I returned to the cave, I found Zeb harvesting some spuds, and started to give him a rundown on what I'd seen, although none of it was particularly important all things considered. Honestly, once I've finished exploring the island, I might consider making a map, and putting it in my house.

After telling Zeb about the things I'd seen, I asked him, "What've you been up to, other than tending the spuds?"

Zeb replied, "Oh, well, I actually went down to the depot you made and started cutting down some more trees in the area."

I raised an eyebrow at that and asked, "Any particular reason for that?"

Zeb responded, "Well, it feels like I'm not able to do enough, or at least as much as I'd like to given my levels and the fact I'm a goblin, so I wanted to level up."

I sat and thought about this for a little bit. It'd honestly be a big help if he was evolved again, but I also don't want to encourage clear cutting, I've already made that point in the village. After thinking I spoke up, "Alright, I'm fine with it on two conditions. First, I need to go down, and teach you a bit about forest management, so that you don't end up causing serious damage. The second condition is that you don't waste wood. If the storehouse up here needs expanded to store more of it, then you need to do that. In addition, charcoal lasts a lot longer than wood, so I'd encourage you to turn most of it into that. If you need my help with any of it, let me know."

Despite the conditions, Zeb seems pretty excited. I suspect seeing a few of the goblins in the village evolve after the siege has made him antsy to do so himself. Well, considering everything, having extra charcoal can't hurt, probably.

[Vol.3] Ch.4 Winter is Coming

Throughout the remainder of this last month, Zeb has been quite busy cutting trees, and I've been helping him to maintain the cave area, and helped him haul wood up when it was necessary. As such, any day now Zeb's going to cross the threshold to level 100. Right now, he's at level 99.

<LEGENDARY GOBLIN>
Level: 99
HP: 1109/1109
MP: 292/292
Traits: Mimicry, Mana Affinity
Magic: Stone Shaping

My own levels have barely moved since the siege, which makes sense considering how little killing of anything I've been doing. I only killed a few ground birds for food while I was in the second valley, and other than that, it's been mostly vegetarian meals of small plants. I cut a few trees down while we were finishing the path, but even trees don't give me all that much in terms of levels anymore.

<EPIC LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 82
HP: 2525/2525
MP: 1203/1203
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike

After seeing our stats side by side, I remember something, and go back to check my notes from when I was an imp. Compared to what I had at the time just before I turned into a Lesser Earth Demon, Zeb only has about half the traits and magic. He's missing Earth Manipulation, Tectonic Sense, and Mighty Imp, but otherwise, his stats are higher than mine were. I'm actually intrigued whether he gets the option to turn into a lesser earth demon or not. Knowing that might provide some valuable insight into how evolution and prestige works. I suppose I'll have my data point soon enough. Of course, I can't rule Mimicry out as influencing everything as well.

Well, Zeb became a Lesser Earth Demon two days after the envoys left, although he stands almost a head shorter than me currently. I obviously can't say for certain what played a role in this, but I'm starting to get an idea for how some of the evolution stuff might work. The basic premise that I have is that Imp based creatures seem to have the option to become more powerful creatures when certain criteria are met. For an imp, they seem to be able to become a goblin pretty much right away. However, if certain criteria are met, they can become something else, like how I became a Lesser Earth Demon directly.

Given that Zeb also became a Lesser Earth Demon, and he'd already became a Goblin, this means that the path of evolution here isn't necessarily linear, as Zeb re-converged on what I already had become. I also have seen Goblins turn into three different things now. The Demon Gorilla that Kaga was, the Lesser Earth Demon that Zeb is, and Hobgoblins like what Zaka and the other two goblins in the village became.

After talking to Zeb and marking down his two stat blocks I decide that, for clarity, I'll go ahead and write in a parenthetical name.

<LEGENDARY GOBLIN>
Level: 100
HP: 1116/1116
MP: 294/294
Traits: Mimicry, Mana Affinity
Magic: Stone Shaping

<LESSER EARTH DEMON> (Zeb)
Level: 0
HP: 1116/1116
MP: 294/294
Traits: Mimicry, Mana Affinity
Magic: Stone Shaping, Earth Spike

Zeb also got Earth Spike upon evolution, and his stats are in a pretty good place. After talking with Zeb for a little bit, he said he also had the option to become a hobgoblin, but decided to become a Lesser Earth Demon instead. Which, honestly, makes things easier for me. If he was a hobgoblin, we'd potentially need extra water up here, and I didn't pay much attention to whether the other hobgoblins ate a particularly large amount of food.

Another question has arisen in my head. What are the requirements to evolving into these various creatures. For Lesser Earth Demons, it seems to be at least Stone Shaping, and possibly Mana Affinity. I'm not sure exactly what it might take for hobgoblins, although I'd be willing to bet that all goblins can turn into them when they grow strong enough. As for the Demon Gorilla, one of the few things I could guess is either strength or endurance or both play some role in that.

For the next few weeks, I'll let Zeb gain some additional levels cutting more trees down, but I'd like him to put leveling on hold after he's gained around thirty.

We spent the remainder of the month focused mainly on Zeb. He cut trees, we hauled them, and then I made charcoal up at the cave, and expanded the storage area inside. The storage area has really grown quite a lot at this point. There are large bins full of charcoal, powdered ore, copper, and wood. Since we'll need it once we're snowed in over the winter, I've also made a new water tank indoors to store water in, and have started filling it with water.

<LESSER EARTH DEMON> (Zeb)
Level: 22
HP: 1336/1336
MP: 391/391
Traits: Mimicry, Mana Affinity
Magic: Stone Shaping, Earth Spike

When the goblin envoys saw Zeb had also turned into a Lesser Earth Demon, there was a mixed response. The goblin that represented the group that wanted me expelled because I represented a bad omen to them seemed upset that Zeb had also become a Lesser Earth Demon. The other goblin wasn't bothered by it however.

Next month will be the envoy's last visit of the year before the mountain is covered in snow, so I requested that we trade something for smoked meat. After some discussion, it seems I'll be making a bunch of lightstone bowls and plates to trade for food. It seems that the handful that I traded for rope impressed the other goblins that saw them, and many goblins have interest in them. I feel bad for the potter, but Zeb and I need to eat, so I'm afraid he has competition this year. They also requested a bunch of lightstone spearheads be made, to which I agreed as part of the trade.

When they return, they'll be bringing a few more goblins up with them to haul all the meat we've requested, and then they can carry all the goods we're sending back with them. The carts are useful for hauling a very large amount of stuff, but it'd take a few days to bring stuff up and down, and there isn't that much stuff this time.

There is apparently a new carpenter, or at least someone dabbling in it, which is good. Having someone who can work with wood is a necessity based on their lifestyle right now in the goblin village. They do a lot of hunting, and their gates and doors are mostly made from wood, so having someone who can work with wood is important.

Even though they'll be bringing us food for winter, I still want to make sure we'll have enough, so next month, I intend to do some hunting of my own with Zeb. Now that he has a bit of combat potential, it seems less likely something bad would happen, even if we ran into a giant lizard. That said, it seems that the village hasn't seen any giant lizards since the siege, so I'm starting to wonder if the crystal attracted all of them on the island, or at least most of them. I suppose only time will tell on that one.

I've been hunting with Zeb quite a lot in the past two weeks, and what we've found is that we have to go down closer to the goblin village to have much luck. I would normally expect that the areas closest to the village would be the least populous, but instead, it seems that the animals all prefer to be there. Which thinking back, before the siege, a lot of animals started to gather around the village before all the lizards showed up. They must have some instinctual drive to live in an area with abundant mana.

That said, it's not like it's the only place with animals to hunt, we did have some success in other areas as well. We even made a five day trip over to the other valley to hunt for a bit, and caught some ground birds. With more than half the month used up now though, we'll have to focus the remaining time on making the dishes, bowls, and spearheads for trading with the goblins when the envoys return.

Well, we made our trade for meat for the winter, and put all of it in our smokehouse with the meat we caught for ourselves. I think that as long as we don't gorge ourselves, it'll last us even through an exceptionally long winter. Spuds only last about fifteen days after harvest from what I remember, so we'll want to eat those for as long as they last. I'm wondering if I leave them out in winter if they'll freeze and last longer. I might try that, since we should have some extras that would spoil anyway otherwise.

With the trade taken care of, now it's just a matter of waiting for the snow to come. It usually doesn't come until close to the end of the month. As always though, the weather can be unpredictable, so we're making sure to not be more than an hour's trip away from the cave, in case the weather suddenly shifts.

Once we're trapped inside, it'll be months before we're able to leave, so getting everything we want done outdoors is important. It's been a few years since I stayed in the cave through winter, so I'm actually not sure what I want to work on, or for that matter, what Zeb will work on. I've told him he's free to work on whatever he wants, as long as he asks first. The last thing I want is a cave-in because of some new project that I'm unaware of. I trust him independently to not cause one, however, information sharing is important. I'll also tell him what I'm working on for that reason as well.

[Vol.3] Ch.5 Weathering the Winter

The snow ended up coming a little early this year, only about 10 days in to the month. We were well prepared though, so no problems arose from it. The first snow storm put about two feet of snow down, and two days later, we got another foot, and were pretty much snowed in at that point.

Zeb has decided that he wants to work on the exploratory mining tunnel, to see what he can find using stone shaping. He's strong enough to push a cart up and down the tunnel as long as it isn't too full, so he should be good to go. One thing I told him is to check in with me every few hundred feet or so to determine if the path should change directions, since he doesn't have tectonic sense like I do. That way I can do some pings along the path and see if there is anything interesting that he missed in the nearby area, and direct him towards any potential interesting finds.

As for myself, I've decided to start on an interesting project. Being stuck in the mountain all winter, while not a problem, isn't ideal. So what I've decided to do is start digging a stairwell down and out. This definitely will take a long time, but we have that time now anyway. A big downside to a stairwell vs the path we made outside is transport of materials through it. Anyone who travels it will be stuck hauling materials by hand, which includes myself while I dig.

The snow line generally begins about fifteen-hundred feet below the cave entrance. The snow there is generally fairly shallow, but just in case, I plan on digging the stairs down two-thousand feet before trying to breach the surface. I thought about starting the stairwell up by the cave entrance, but then decided it would be better to start digging it nearby the crystal charging room.

The first reason is that it lets me easily recharge my mana while I carry stone up and out of the stairwell. The second reason was something that I thought about as I walked down in the cave. From the entryway all the way until the crystal charging room, the path is almost completely dark, and you have to follow the stairs by using the railing. Even then, it's not super safe. As such, I thought it would be nice to periodically light the stairway with embedded crystals, letting their soft glow light the way.

Of course, anyone who touches them if they're missing mana might result in the path darkening for a considerable amount of time, but without something like glass to prevent that, it's just the way it'll have to be. Maybe I'll embed them in the roof of the stairwell for good measure.

Something else that I haven't worked on in quite a while that might be worth considering is the artificial crystals for lighting up further towards the cave entrance. I can't work on that until the snow melts, since our smelting area is currently buried by snow, but as long as I'm not making giant crystals, I think that could be a potential way to make the main stairway safer.

The first ten days of our winter work went well. A problem that we're both running into, however, is the distance we need to haul stone, and worse, we'll definitely run out of convenient space to store all of it by spring. We currently store them in nice piles, as we cut them into blocks already. Come spring, we'll be moving all the blocks outside and have to find things to build with them. Until then though, we'll keep piling them up.

The rate at which I'm cutting stairs is quickly falling due to having to haul the stone further which each step I cut out. I'm currently ninety steps in. Which means I've descended only about fifty feet. At this rate, this whole project will take years to complete, and the rate that I'll be cutting stone out will only decrease, making it take even longer. Of course, now that I've gotten deep enough, a lot of the time spent working on this is actually just spent carrying stone, so the pace could speed up with help.

As for Zeb's work, he's only extended his tunnel by fifteen feet. That tunnel is larger and has a cart track though, so that has slowed him down somewhat. Plus the distance he has to travel to recharge his mana is much greater. The cart track is a benefit somewhat though, since he can haul much more stone out in one trip than I can.

It's been forty days of work since my last update. Zeb and I have been just banging away at our respective projects. Every so often, we trade which we're working on for a day or two, just to mix things up. Sometimes we both work on one together as well. It's been nice to have someone to occasionally talk to while I work.

As for progress, Zeb's rate on expanding the tunnel has been fairly steady, so he's made it an additional sixty feet. I've done some tectonic sense checks, but the only new discoveries have been more pockets of crystal. I haven't bothered to harvest them, since we don't need it right now, but they're there.

As for the stairs, I've only made it one hundred and seventy steps, which is a little less than double what I had carved before, and it took me four times as long. The stairs are about one hundred and fifty feet of descent now from the start. Honestly, I've started to really feel exhausted with all the trips up and down this long staircase I make each day. I think I'll spend a few days helping Zeb with his tunneling to give my knees a break.

We've been keeping up the work for the last two months of winter. Any day now the snow should start melting and we can start working outside again. We've stockpiled a lot of stone, but we don't really have anything to use it on currently. Well, it's not like it will go bad. If we end up just stockpiling it outside, that's fine too.

As for progress, Zeb extended the tunnel another ninety feet, and I added another hundred feet to the stairwell. Unfortunately, Zeb's work didn't discover anything new. All we found were more crystal patches. The stairwell at this point is about an eighth of its total length completed, and about one fifteenth of the total work that will need done completed.

All the stone we've cut has started to really pile up in places, and made areas feel a bit claustrophobic. Once the snow melts, Zeb and I agreed we'd spend the first few days just hauling all the stone out of the cave, and getting an area outside set up to store it.

The snow eventually melted a bit later than normal this year. Twenty-two days into the month. In past years, it would usually melt within the first two weeks. Either way, we've gotten quite the stockpile of stone piled up, so we'll need to flatten some areas outside where we can store all of it, and then haul all the stone inside to the new outside storage location.

It's only eight days until the envoys from the goblin village should arrive this year. This will be the first year that the goblins will have held a vote as to whether I should remain expelled or not from the village. I'm honestly a little nervous about it. I've basically just be interacting with the envoys, and I haven't even talked to Zaka all year. It'd be nice to get the opportunity for things to return to what they were before, with some more safety measures, obviously.

We noticed something a little weird while we were hauling stone blocks out of the cave for the past few days. It's been eerily quiet outside. Normally you'd hear some birds chirping, at least when it isn't raining. This time of year it's prone to raining for days on end, so I'm not surprised we haven't heard much, but none-the-less it's been quieter than normal. It's a bit unnerving.

Something is definitely up. We were finishing up hauling all the stone from inside today, and despite the suns shining down, there still was almost no noise of animals. I've told Zeb to keep an eye out for anything out of the ordinary, and let him know to be on high alert, as something is wrong. We'll continue working, but we'll make sure we aren't ever resting outside, just in case. Hopefully it's either nothing, or the goblin envoys can inform us if something happened. They should be here in just two days now.

The goblin envoys are late, which is a bad sign. They should have arrived yesterday. As of right now, we're waiting for them to arrive. We've decided to wait inside, and limit our outside activity, for good measure. I've got the windows open, so that I can hear if anyone arrives, or hear if something else happens.

Just as the sun is about to set, I hear a goblin yell out. What's weird is that it doesn't sound like it's coming from below, or directly outside, but instead from the sky.

Then, much louder than the goblin yell, I hear a blood curdling screech that sounds almost like a bird. As I rush to the window to look outside, I see a massive shadow of wings move across the landscape and up the mountain. I rush outside, and look up. As I do, I can just barely make out the shape of a hawk or eagle like creature. Within one talon it holds an entire goblin.

I pause and stare in awe of its size. It heads up, and eventually over, a ridge and out of sight. I think that the goblin village might have a bigger problem than myself right now.

[Vol.3] Ch.6 Anti-Air

What on earth was that thing! I rush back inside, and tell Zeb about what I saw. He seems concerned, and tells me that he's never seen anything like that either.

We explored up on the mountain peak. Surely if it was there at that time, we'd have seen something that large, right? So many other questions begin to flood in to my head. Did we awaken something that had been slumbering? Surely not, we went up the peak early in the year. Why is this here now? What even is it, outside of a giant bird of some kind? Where did it come from? Are there more? What's the situation in the goblin village?

Zeb and I discuss with each other for a bit, and ultimately come to the conclusion that we should return to the village immediately. If we don't go down there now, then when? It just caught a goblin, so it's probably preoccupied. Additionally, it's already early nighttime, so we'll hopefully be harder to spot on our way down.

We made the two and a half hour trek down to the goblin village, but the exchange that occurred shocked me.

When we arrived at the gates, only to have a goblin on watch yell down to us, "Begone, the two of you have brought great misfortune once again! Begone before I attack!"

Zeb motioned me back, and after Zeb translated for me, I asked, "What do you mean we've brought great misfortune? Surely you don't blame this monster on us directly?"

The goblin replied, "It cannot be a coincidence that after Zeb became a second of your kind, that we were befallen with another great tragedy! While you were safe within your cave, for the past two months, we've lost someone every few days to that beast! Now go, begone before any further tragedy can occur!"

With that, Zeb and I turned and began the climb back up the mountain.

"Are we cursed?" Zeb asked suddenly while we were taking the path back up the mountain.

I paused and thought for a few moments before replying, "While it's not impossible that we're cursed, I don't think that's the case. The first attack with the lizards was most likely caused by the giant crystal, which is still in the village. There is a non-zero chance that is what attracted the giant eagle as well. In a sense, the crystal is a curse, and I made it, but I don't think we're directly cursed. I'd wanted to get rid of the crystal before, I should have done it anyway."

"What if we snuck into the village and broke the crystal then?" Zeb says.

"I think that even if we break the crystal now, the eagle will still be a problem, although that'd at least prevent another issue like this from occurring. Although, then again, it might not. If we just break the crystal, it'll probably release all that mana at once, like when the four foot crystal broke. If this crystal is like a campfire on a dark night attracting anything looking for that light, then breaking the crystal would be like a wildfire. I worry what effects that might have, and what it might attract." I reply.

"Then what are we supposed to do? It's clear that the village can't handle the situation on its own." Zeb says.

"Then I suppose we'll need to come up with a way to deal with that eagle." I reply.

We both walk silently back up the mountain for the rest of the trip, trying to think of ideas to deal with the eagle.

After thinking on the problem all night, I think I've come up with something to try. There are multiple problems with dealing with this eagle creature that we'll need to solve. The first is that both Zeb and I can't easily hit things in the air. Earth Spike, while powerful, has quite the limited range. The second issue that we have is that if we get caught ourselves, that's likely the end for us.

We do have some advantages though. First, based on where the eagle flew before, we know that it flies roughly overhead to reach it's nest. The second advantage is that we're relatively safe as long as we hide inside. The goblins, by virtue of their population, are likely unable to just hide indefinitely, so they're forced to go out and hunt or harvest crops for a long enough time that the eagle can attack. For us, with the spud crop growing so close to the mountain, we at least have until next winter until this becomes a serious problem.

I am also starting to wonder if the goblins are replacing their numbers within the village. With the crystal spring there, it's not impossible that Zaka is summoning more imps somewhere within the village, just to replenish their numbers. This is most likely the case, since they've apparently been under attack for a few months now.

While we could attempt to confront the beast up on the mountain itself, that seems very risky. If it takes to the air, then we're done for. As such, what I'd like to do is hit it out of the air. If I could make a ballista, that'd be my preferred way at attempting this. Unfortunately, the wood's properties here are too weak to be useful for that. Other medieval siege engines also fall flat when it comes to hitting something flying.

There is something that could do the trick, although it isn't medieval. A cannon loaded with scatter ammo. The issue with that is that we don't have gunpowder, and we don't really have the means to make it. We'd need a good source of saltpeter and sulfur, and right now, we don't have either. We could, however, attempt to make a steam cannon on a swivel, so that we can aim it.

What we'd need for a steam cannon is a little complex, but with the help of stone shaping, it can be simplified, as long as I'm the main operator. We need a boiler with an attached barrel, separated by a quick release valve that doesn't let gas escape, and an aiming mechanism. The issue with that would normally be the valve. However, if it is just a sealed stone section, I can stone shape it open to fire the cannon quickly.

The barrel can be smooth bore, since we're planning on firing scatter ammo anyway, so as long as we can make good packing material, then I can use the denser leftover darkstone to shape balls to fire out of it. The boiler and barrel should be made of lightstone, for both weight, and structural reasons. Then the base of the boiler can be made, crudely, from copper. The whole thing needs to be built on a double swivel, with the bottom being able to rotate left and right, and the whole thing being able to rotate up and down, so that the cannon can be aimed.

The idea would be to watch and wait for the eagle to leave its nest, and then start heating the boiler with charcoal. Then, if we can have a lookout tower, Zeb can be inside the tower, and give a signal and location for it flying back up the mountain, so we can roughly pre-aim, and hopefully knock it out of the sky.

Given its size, I fully expect it to survive a hit from this unless we get lucky. The more likely response however is that we can force the creature to the ground, where Zeb and I can attempt to fight it and kill it without the fear of it taking flight.

I'm thankful now that we have all that stockpiled charcoal, because we'll need it to not only melt all that copper, but also to heat the boiler. Throughout this process, Zeb can start building the watchtower while I engineer the actual cannon and boiler. Unfortunately for the goblin village, it'll probably be a few weeks before the project is done. Then who knows how long afterwards until we get an opportunity to use it.

Well, it's been two days since we started work on the steam cannon, and three days since we saw the eagle last. This morning, it flew down towards the village, and a little over an hour later returned up the mountain with a goblin in its talons. This time, unfortunately or possibly fortunately, the goblin appeared to be dead already.

I'm making steady progress on the initial design, and planning out how we'll attach the copper to the boiler base. I think it'll need to be shaped in roughly a half sphere shape, so that thermal expansion doesn't break the stone part of the boiler. Another benefit of this is that no matter how the whole system rotates vertically, some amount of the copper boiler will be directly over the charcoal fire.

While I've been working on the cannon design, Zeb has been building the watchtower from all the excess stone we had from winter. He's beginning by building it against the mountainside, but it'll climb higher than that eventually. This way it can also have a direct path into the mountain for safety, rather than only having access to it from the outside. One thing I advised him to consider doing is having a stone pole in the center of the watchtower, going from the bottom to the top of the building. That way, in an emergency, you could slide down the pole quickly, rather than running down stairs.

[Vol.3] Ch.7 First Shot

For the last week, we've been working on the steam cannon and watchtower. Zeb has mostly finished the tower, with it standing at about sixty feet tall, so that he has a decently clear view down the mountain. In that time, we've seen the eagle three more times. One time, it circled above our area for a while, and we ended up working inside for a few hours until it continued down the mountain.

The hardest part of the cannon is the only part that is left. The copper base for the boiler. The plan is to melt copper into a thick disc, and then heat and pound it to the right shape over a stone hemisphere. This cannon has its own risks as well. If any part of the pressure chamber breaks, then I'm likely to be blasted by shrapnel and killed. This is why I'm hoping that the two inbuilt failure points work.

The first is a section at the top of the chamber that is slightly thinner than the rest of the chamber, but slightly thicker than the second failure point, which is the cannon section that I'll stone shape out as the firing valve. In the case of failure, I'm hoping that one of those two places fail first, and spare me the worst of it exploding.

It took six days for us to shape the copper dome, and to attach it to the steam cannon. As much as I'd like to do a test firing of it, I'm concerned that if the sound is too loud, the eagle might choose not to fly over the area again for a long time, which would make the whole cannon useless.

The cannon boasts a ten foot barrel, and a seven inch internal diameter barrel. Inside that, we've put over fifty single inch diameter spheres of darkstone, all packed tightly with plant matter, to help them seal the barrel better when they're propelled out. The barrel has a basic aiming reticule aligned with the length of it, to help me aim. Attached to the barrel is the boiler chamber, which measures two feet across, and thirty inches tall inside, not counting the domed bottom and top. We've already loaded the chamber with a few gallons of water to boil. The boiler is mounted on a U-shaped bracket close to the barrel at the center of mass, and attached via stone bearings. The stone bearings won't last forever, but for a few uses, they'll get the job done. Then the whole thing is mounted again on a larger bearing system to allow it to rotate left and right, with the boiler chamber having a free hanging basket made of stone that charcoal can burn in no matter the orientation.

All we're waiting for now is the eagle to leave down the mountain, and we'll see how well this works.

We waited almost a whole day, and the eagle left a few hours before sunset. With that, I lit the charcoal fire under the boiler, and begin using a rudimentary fan to help make the fire burn hotter. Zeb climbed up the watchtower, and started to watch for the eagle. We built the cannon right next to the watchtower so that Zeb can point with a long stick to give me a good idea of the direction to aim, so that I'm close before I fire.

With that, we waited. I shoveled new charcoal into the boiler basket and kept it stoked as the minutes dragged into hours. Then, as night was getting ready to set, Zeb gave the signal that he could see the eagle, and I aimed the cannon. I'd been hearing the water boil for a while leading up to this, so I'm certain that there is at least some steam pressure within the vessel.

As I waited, ready to rotate the cannon to aim, I heard the eagle let out a loud screech, like I'd heard it make before. I also heard a deeper yelling than before accompanying it. Soon, I saw the eagle, and quickly rotated the cannon at it.

What I saw as I aimed I could barely process. The eagle, while not badly injured, had areas that were seemingly damaged and singed by fire. As I got lined up, tracking a little bit ahead of the eagle, from the eagle's talon, a fireball burst out, hitting the eagle on its chest, and the eagle screeched again as it flew.

Deep down, I probably processed what was happening, but I couldn't actively think about it. I have to fire this cannon. I only have a few seconds. I get the cannon into position, double check, and stone shape the opening.

The sound that follows is a loud blast, followed by a loud whoosh and burst of steam, as all the pressure escapes from the barrel. I can't see as the steam cloud completely covers my vision. It's unbearably hot now.

I dash out, and realize that I can only hear a ringing sound. I look up. I don't see the eagle in the sky. I also don't see Zeb in the watchtower. Disoriented, I look around for a few seconds as the ringing starts to subside, and I'm startled by something hitting my back.

It's Zeb. How did he get down here so fast? I look at him, and he's talking, but I can't really make out what he's saying. He seems to be able to tell I can't understand him, but he points along the side of the mountain, then begins pulling me along.

After we travel for a minute or so, the ringing fully subsides. I feel like I start to regain a bit of my composure. He's probably bringing me to where he saw the eagle fall, which means I probably hit it. I ask, just to check, "Did we hit it?"

"Yeah, we hit it. We're rushing to go help Zaka first though. The eagle dropped him before crashing further up." Zeb replies.

I think for a moment, what does he mean Zaka? Then I finally process the scene I saw before. The fireballs, and the eagle having singed sections. It'd grabbed Zaka, and he fought back. I mean, I can't say for certain it was Zaka, but it sure matches his description. I start to move faster as my balance is regained, and we begin running ahead.

Soon, we find Zaka, badly bloodied, on the ground. His body is covered in tiny lacerations that are bleeding, likely from falling through the trees as he fell. There are also two larger slashes across his torso, and his clothes are in tatters. The worst injury though by far appears to be his leg. The lower leg seems completely obliterated.

I hurriedly tear what I can from his clothes, and tie a tourniquet around the destroyed leg. He's breathing now, but unconcious, so I know he's alive, but I recall my fight with a goblin where I nearly died, and the blood loss nearly killed me afterward. The tourniquet may not be enough, he's bleeding a lot from the various lacerations as well.

We've got one real option here. We need to stop more bleeding, which means we need to cauterize the wounds. I heft Zaka over my back to carry him. He's quite large, but I think I can manage. I tell Zeb he needs to go and make a few flat stones of various widths matching Zaka's wounds, and get a fire going in the house, then get them hot. I'll be behind him carrying Zaka.

Zeb runs ahead as I carry Zaka back through the forest. In the distance, I hear the eagle cry out repeatedly. I have no idea if it'll die from what I did or not. It might recover if I leave it for too long, but Zaka is the priority right now. After a few minutes, I make it back to the cave and bring Zaka in my house, and place him on the dining table. The fire is going, and Zeb has a few of the stones sitting in it, while he's shaping more to place inside. I elevate Zaka's damaged leg, which thankfully, isn't bleeding nearly as much now.

I grab the cooler end of the largest stone, but it's still hot enough it damages me and I begin to slowly lose hitpoints as I hold it for a few moments, then stop losing the hitpoints. I bring it over to Zaka. For the largest wounds, I think this is absolutely necessary. Those two large gashes need to be dealt with, or he'll bleed out. They both don't seem to go deeper than the muscle thankfully. It'll damage him immediately when I do this, and the shock might kill him, but if we don't do this, he'll bleed out. Thankfully, the tourniquet seems to be working as well. That leg will almost certainly need amputated when he recovers enough to handle that happening.

I push the hot stone into the first wound, and hear his flesh sizzle as I move the stone through the wound. It smells awful, and by the time I've finished the first wound, the stone has cooled too much to use on the next wound. I go back to the fire, and grab the next largest stone rod, again ignoring my own pain. Zaka's breathing has gotten more shallow as well. I bring the stone through the wound, searing the flesh and preventing more blood loss. After the two major wounds were treated, I decided that cauterizing the smaller wounds would do more damage than good. Instead, I sent Zeb out to get a bucket with water, and needle leaves from the trees.

Inside, I craft a moderately sized mortar and pestle. The intent is to make a paste that I can use to seal the small wounds. All the while, in the distance I can hear the eagle screeching.

Once Zeb comes in, I show him what I plan to do with the paste. I then give him instructions on how to handle Zaka's leg once he's done. Keep it elevated, and loosen the tourniquet, and if it starts to bleed, apply pressure until the bleeding stops. Now that Zaka is as well treated as I can get him, that eagle needs to be taken care of before it recovers enough to fly. I grab my spear and buckler and set out towards the screeches in the night.

[Vol.3] Ch.8 Mercy Killing

As I follow the sounds of the eagle in the night, I check my status.

<EPIC LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 86
HP: 2335/2597
MP: 982/1234
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike

I'm still injured a little from the minor burns from cauterizing Zaka's wounds, and also likely from the steam cannon blast that temporarily deafened me. Plus I'm missing some mana still from when I activated the steam cannon, and from making the mortar and pestle while treating Zaka. I'm definitely not in perfect condition, but I'm also not particularly injured. I'm heading into this battle with the intent to kill this eagle, but failing that, I hope that in its injured state, I can at least run away.

As I get closer to the eagle, the sounds it is making are getting so loud that I can barely focus. I'm not losing any HP to the volume, but I'm starting to hear ringing in my ears when the eagle isn't screeching. Not long after having this issue, I arrive at the location of the eagle.

The moon is bright within the sky giving me a decent view of the whole scene. The eagle is lying on the ground surrounded by broken branches both large and small. The nearby trees clearly took quite a hit as the eagle fell through them. The eagle itself has multiple injuries across its body. Its breast, which normally appears to be white with small black triangles appears stained a blood red. The source of the blood is clearly multiple large holes peppered across its chest. One of the eagle's wings appears relatively fine, while its other wing is bent unnaturally, and is missing many feathers.

I'm still a good twenty yards away from the eagle, but even from here, I can see just how large it is. The trees here stand between sixty and one hundred feet tall, and the eagle on the ground is about ten feet tall. If it was standing up, I'd bet that it would easily stand at thirty feet from head to toe. As I try to sneak closer, the eagle tilts its head towards me, and after a few seconds, it forcibly stands up, revealing that the talon that held Zaka is badly damaged. Despite the injury, it forces itself up to face me.

I stay stationary, unsure as to what the eagle might do. I get into a low position, ready to move at a moments notice. With a single beat of its uninjured wing, the eagle sends a massive blast of air in my direction. I notice a second too late that this isn't a normal wingbeat though. The trees between the eagle and I groan and debris flies both into and past me as I'm suddenly thrown backwards. I drop my spear as I tumble on the ground a few times.

I check my hp and see I'm at 2044. No matter how many times I see new magic, I'm always caught off guard. One of these days, it very well might get me killed, in fact, I imagine if that eagle had both wings working I very well might have died just now. I get back to my feet, thankful for my scaly back. Only my front side has lacerations from all the branches and twigs that flew past me.

That wind blast is going to be a big issue for me. In order to deal with the eagle, I need to get close to it, and get it closer to the ground. There is no way spear wounds are going to be enough, so I'll have to use my improved earth spike. I think what I'll need to do is get in close enough to spike the eagle's good talon, so it falls to the ground, and I can finish it off. I'll only get one shot at spiking the talon, since I'll need a second use of earth spike to attempt to kill the eagle.

The first issue is getting to within ten feet of the eagle. It stands at almost three times that height, which means getting in close is going to be very difficult, however, I do have one advantage. We're in a forest, and there are trees all around. If the eagle had both wings functioning, it probably could uproot the trees with a wind blast, but since it can't, I think I'll need to literally hug the trees as I approach, and attempt to hold out through wind blasts until I can dash in to smash the eagle's good talon.

With a battle plan set out, I begin dashing towards the eagle. It sees me dashing towards it, and brings its wing up to perform another blast. I dive towards the largest nearby tree, and hold on behind it as a massive blast of air pressure and debris flies past me and I hear the tree groan. Just as soon as the wind blast passes by, I begin dashing towards the eagle again. It lets out a deafening screech, making my ears ring. If I hadn't been temporarily deafened earlier, this might have distracted me enough for it to send me flying with another wind blast, but thankfully, I focus up enough to hold on to another tree as the massive eagle's wing beats for a second time in the last few seconds.

I've closed about half the gap between the eagle and myself now. I continue my dash towards it, and it sends another wind blast at me. Only one or two more of those blasts and I'll be within range now. I weave between the trees towards the giant eagle, its imposing figure taking up more and more of my field of view. I'm almost there now.

I dive behind a tree as another wind blast flies my way. As I've gotten closer, the air pressure is getting even stronger from those blasts. The eagle screeches again just after the wind blast. I go to start running again, but as I do, I'm caught off guard. The eagle had been a good twenty five feet or so away when I dove behind the tree, but as I came back out from behind it, the eagle had closed the gap considerably, and was leaning forward to strike me with its beak as I came out from behind the tree.

My legs strain as I reverse my direction and dive back behind the tree. Where I was a moment ago, the eagle's beak snaps shut, and within a blink of my eyes, it has retracted from where my body was. If I had reacted faster, I might have been able to earth spike its head at that moment, but I had expected it to stay still with one of its legs already damaged.

Before I could run out from the tree again, the eagle blasts the area with wind again. I'm wondering if it has me trapped, rather than the other way around right now. I'm certain if I dive out to run again, it'll attempt to bite me with its massive beak. I peak around the corner, and as I do, its head comes down again, and this time, I'm forced to dive back around the tree and into the open. I scramble to my feet, and move behind a new tree nearby.

If this keeps up, I'm a goner. I get a flash of inspiration though. If this eagle has predatory instincts like animals from earth, then I might be able to pump fake it. If I flash my tail out from one side of the tree before sprinting around the other side, I might be able to dash towards the eagle in the brief moments between the wing blasts and pecks. The issue with that is I can't test it. I have to commit. If I test it once, the eagle might catch on, and it'll predict that I do it again.

Another blast of wind flies past the tree. It's now or never. I flash my tail out one side of the tree, and a half second later begin dashing around the other side, and towards the eagle. I can see confusion in the eagle's eyes as it's body is already moving towards where my tail was, but instead, I'm now more than five feet away from there. The eagle attempts to adjust for my change in position as I continue to dash towards it. Luckily for me, it attempts to move its injured wing as part of this maneuver, and instead of properly adjusting, it lets out a deafening screech, and retracts its head backwards.

I finally get within ten feet of the good talon, and cast improved earth spike. Three large spikes of stone come out of the ground at different angles, and pierce the eagle's good talon. It attempts to move the talon back due to the sudden pain, only for the earth spikes to tear through its flesh, and the eagle stumbles and falls onto its back. While on its back, it screeches again, and sends a wind blast harmlessly upwards. A few seconds later, leaves and twigs rain down in the area.

The eagle is clearly struggling to move properly now as I begin to run around it, attempting to get to its head. It continues to dangerously flail on the ground, so I move outward to keep myself safe from any sudden unexpected movements. It's a good thing I did too, because moments later, the eagle rolls onto its broken wing. It lets out another deafening screech, and throws out a wind blast away from me, sending its entire body rolling towards me. This thing really won't give up.

Thankfully, I was far enough away now that I could get behind a tree as the eagle's body broke a nearby tree and sent even more debris flying. Now however, the eagle's head is within range. It opens its mouth to let out another deafening screech, but never makes this final sound.

Three earth spikes pierce through it's skull and neck, and instantly, its body goes limp. It's beak is left ajar, and it's eyes remain focused on the spot where I am standing.

I let out a sigh of relief, and slump down behind the tree to catch my breath. The whole battle only took a few minutes at most, but it felt like hours passed. The eagle is dead. I'm exhausted.

I get up from behind the tree after a few minutes, and double check that the eagle is dead. After I'm sure, I go up to it and pluck a few massive wing feathers from its dirtied, but intact wing. Each feather is taller than I am. I'd love to sit and inspect the eagle more thoroughly, but I think Zaka is more important right now, and it's night time anyway, so I begin the trip back to the cave.

[Vol.3] Ch.9 Recovery

When I make it back to the cave, it looks like Zeb has finished treating Zaka's wounds. Zeb looks over at me with concern. I probably look pretty beat up myself, but thankfully, my wounds are much more superficial than Zaka's. I make my way over to get a closer look. He looks quite gruesome. Burns where we cauterized his wounds. Boiled plant paste smeared in various smaller cuts, which has taken on a darker color thanks to the blood. Worst of all is the leg.

I was in such a rush before that I didn't take a very hard look at it, as there were too many other problems to deal with. Now though, I can inspect him more closely. First, thankfully, Zaka is breathing, albeit very shallowly. He's also covered in sweat, and as much as I'd like to clean him, I'm currently worried we might reopen some of his wounds if we aren't careful. The leg is the worst injury he has by far though. From his lower shin and down is completely missing. There is exposed bone and flesh all meshed together, and thankfully, clotted.

We're no where near out of the woods yet for Zaka though. Ignoring infection risk, which is very high, he's also dealing with major blood loss, and risk of clots reaching his heart, and any internal bleeding causing him to bleed out. Unfortunately, with the tools we have available and my basic medical knowledge, this is the extent of the help I can provide.

I tell Zeb to go get three buckets of water, and to bring them to a boil. I intend to use one to sterilize what scraps of clothing Zaka has left, so that we can use them to clean his body. The second bucket is to then actually clean his body. The third bucket will be for us to use to make more plant paste, since there is a decent chance we'll have to reapply at least some of it while cleaning.

As I work on Zaka, I continue to feel more and more fatigued, and I continually am fighting off the urge to sleep. Zeb seems to be doing fine. It isn't actually all that late at night either. By the time I actually start cleaning Zaka's body, I can't keep it up any longer. I tell Zeb that I have to sleep, and I can't stay up any longer. He looks a little concerned, but nods, and takes over my work.

I head into my room, and quickly fall asleep.

<EPIC LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 100
HP: 2194/2849
MP: 225/1342
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike

I think I see why I was feeling so exhausted. I didn't check my level when I beat the eagle, as I was so focused on getting back to Zaka, but I guess it pushed me all the way up to 100. Which means I have some choices ahead of me before I actually sleep.

Available Traits:
Improved Endurance: Increases the amount of strenuous activity you can do at one time.
Heightened Strength: Greatly increases muscle mass and by extension, strength.
Heat Resistance: Improves ability to tolerate high temperatures.
High Altitude Adaptation: Improves performance at high altitudes.

Despite all my options, there isn't any evolution option yet. Which makes me wonder if there ever will be. That said, these options each give me quite different benefits. Improved Endurance would let me work hard for longer, but I really don't enjoy doing that labor to begin with, so I'd like to avoid specializing in it. Heightened Strength has a similar issue, while moving bigger blocks would be nice, I'd rather not be moving blocks myself. I like working on the projects, but I'd rather not be hauling all the stuff by hand. Which is why I made the rail system.

The next two options are more interesting, but I think one stands out as the better option. Although High Altitude Adaptation could be somewhat nice, I don't plan on spending a lot of time on the mountain peak, so Heat Resistance sounds better. I've done a lot of work around fires lately, and I don't think I'll be stopping any time soon. Thus, I make my selection and fade into unconsciousness.

When I wake up, I notice two things right away. One, I'm ravenously hungry, which has become the norm when I've prestiged, and two, I'm fully healed, which I've also noticed has been quite the healing treatment. So I hope that if we can keep Zaka alive, he'll eventually make a full recovery. The unfortunate part for him will be being disabled for an extended period of time. I was disabled for a relatively short period before, and that was a real pain, so we'll see how everything works for him. As for myself, I check my new stats.

<LEGENDARY LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 0
HP: 1139/1139
MP: 714/714
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike

Before I go check on Zeb and Zaka, I need to get some food in me. I quickly make my way to our smokehouse and eat an exorbitant amount of food. Looking around the room, I'm going to need to go get food soon. We ended up using more of our stockpile while we worked on the steam cannon, and since we haven't hunted or traded, the meat is dwindling. Thankfully, there should be some harvestable plants soon, so we aren't at a complete loss for food. If Zaka had been in better condition, I would have tried to harvest some of the eagle for food, but by now, I wouldn't consider the meat safe to eat.

Now that I'm full, I go in to check on Zaka and Zeb. Zaka is looking better in some ways, and worse in others. The good news is that it looks like Zeb did a good job cleaning his wounds, and taking care of him. The bad news is that his skin looks unhealthy, and his breathing is still shallow. He did lose a lot of blood before, so I'm not surprised by all this, but I'd feel better if he looked like he was quickly recovering.

Zeb is asleep in a chair next to Zaka. It looks like he stayed here all night, in case of some kind of emergency. For today, I'll go get some buckets, and clean him again. If he doesn't wake up by tomorrow morning, he's going to need fluids, and there is only one way I can rehydrate an unconscious person without proper medical equipment, and it isn't fun for either party involved, and that, namely, is an enema. That said, it might not work for a hobgoblin either, I don't actually know how similar or different their anatomy is from humans. Even if it isn't identical, I hope it'll help to rehydrate him a little if the situation calls for drastic measures.

By mid-afternoon, I had redressed Zaka's wounds, taking care to use sterile water to clean them. Zeb woke up shortly after I finished cleaning Zaka, and said that I looked a little different. Normally, I look myself over when I prestige, but given the situation, I had neglected to do so. When I used some water as a mirror, I noticed a few differences in my appearance. My brownish scales and coat from before have darkened considerably, and my hair has gained a reddish tinge. This reminds me somewhat of when I started to change color in my later stages as an imp. I decide to make some notes about both my color changes now and from when I was an imp, so that I can compare this to any changes Zeb gets later.

Since Zeb was awake and could watch over Zaka now, I decided I should take one of the backpacks and go collect more of the eagle's feathers. While I'm not sure of any use for the massive feathers, I haven't tried collecting any of the down from the beast, which could potentially be useful for pillows or blankets.

When I got back to where I had left the eagle, it was worse than I remembered it. This could have been due to fighting at night with it, or it could have potentially been disturbed by insects or other scavengers. Despite this, given the size of the eagle, there is still plenty of feathers that are relatively undamaged. The worst parts are that most of the feathers are quite bloody, but that can obviously be cleaned off.

After a little less than an hour, I've filled my backpack with quite large down feathers, and then grabbed a few more large feathers to bring back. We'll need a large wash basin to clean all these, so tonight close to the evening, I'll work on that if I have the time. Before that though, I'm going to make many more trips to harvest from the eagle. Given how large it is, I can easily get another four backpacks worth of down feathers, even if they are a bit oversized.

[Vol.3] Ch.10 Surgical Procedure

Zeb and I decided to stagger our sleep through the night so that we could always have someone awake while watching Zaka in case of emergency. My shift ended up being the later part of the night, since Zeb had already stayed up late the night before. When we traded off he let me know that he'd cleaned Zaka again. He also said that although he remained unconscious, Zaka's breathing seemed to become a little less shallow throughout the night.

As I watched over Zaka into the early morning hours, I noticed some movement in his arms briefly. I watched intensely for a few minutes, and eventually, Zaka's eyes started to move under their eyelids. I hurriedly grabbed a bucket of water and a spoon so that he could drink if he regained consciousness.

After another minute or so, his eyes opened up, and he blinked a few times. He seemingly tried to move, but was quite weakened in his condition, and failed to sit up. I positioned myself over him, and did my best to motion that he shouldn't move. I then brought the spoon full of water to my own mouth, and drank some, then motioned to him to drink after me.

Zaka weakly nodded, and I slowly gave him water to drink. After giving him multiple spoonsful, I stopped him from drinking more, even if he felt like he needed it. When someone is badly dehydrated, overdrinking can be dangerous after all. After drinking the water, he laid there for a minute or so before closing his eyes. Shortly after that, he was asleep.

Thinking back on my near death experience, I recall fading in and out of consciousness repeatedly, which hopefully is a good sign for Zaka's recovery. That said, just coming out of the state he was in was a big positive step. He continued sleeping well into the afternoon, and by that point Zeb was awake, so I informed him that Zaka had woken up.

With Zeb watching Zaka, I decided to boil some of the smoked meat to make a light broth, which should be relatively easy for Zaka to digest the next time he wakes up. He ended up waking up in the evening again, to which Zeb had a brief conversation with him in the demon language before giving him some spoonsful of broth, after which he fell asleep again.

Zeb said to me, "I explained how he was covered in cuts and scrapes, and that his leg was completely destroyed. So he needed to rest, after which I fed him."

To which I replied, "If he's feeling up for it next time, see if you can get him to explain roughly where his HP is compared to full. Given the condition of his lower leg, I hate to say it, but I think we'll need to amputate it. The wound on the bottom is starting to look worse, which means we'll likely need to amputate soon."

Zeb looked concerned, and sat for a moment before responding, "If we don't amputate, what happens?"

I thought on his question for a moment. This is a good question, on earth, the concern of infection from the mangled part of his leg is quite high, and given its shape, would likely cause problems down the road for him. Here however, that might not be the case. It may be better to just clean the wound up, or scald it with boiling water, rather than open an entirely new wound higher up.

After deliberating this to myself, I replied to Zeb, "You make a good point actually. I might be taking this a little too much like my previous world. Amputation might be an overreaction. Regardless of if we amputate the leg, he's going to struggle with it, and the wound will take a long time to heal. It might be better to clean the wound, and give it some more time on its own. The downside would be that he could potentially get a fatal infection. Unlike his chest and other wounds, which we were able to sterilize, this wound is quite gnarled, so it'll be hard to clean. We can clean it up some when he wakes next, and then keep an eye on it. If it starts to get worse, then we'll resort to amputation."

Zeb nodded along as I told him what I thought, and after I finished speaking, looked nervously back at Zaka. To which I also ended up looking over at his sleeping body on the table. Although he's getting better right now, he still has a long road to recovery ahead of him.

Early this morning, Zaka was awake again, and this time he stayed awake for a little longer. Long enough for me to get Zeb, and get an idea of his condition. He's apparently at about a third of his max hp right now, and quite hungry and thirsty. We fed him some solid food this time, and gave him more water to drink before informing him that next time he wakes up, we'll need to clean his leg wound, which would likely hurt a lot. He seemed a little concerned, but after sitting up and looking at the leg himself, he nodded in agreement before laying back down.

After Zaka fell asleep, I told Zeb about how injured I had been fighting a goblin once as an imp, and how after I prestiged, my broken bone fully healed. Afterwards, I told him to tell Zaka about this when he wakes up next. I personally feel it's important to give Zaka some hope before he experiences something painful, to give him the willpower to fight through the pain.

In the meantime during the day, I made some tools to help with the wound cleaning. Some small scissors for cutting away loose flesh, some more flat stones for cauterizing, a small knife, a pair of small pliers, and a small wooden rod for Zaka to bite down on. It's by no means perfect, but the tools should at least help make the process faster and less painful than it otherwise would be.

While I worked on that, Zeb went out to harvest lionroot down the mountain. We still have a decent amount of meat, but considering everything, I think that Zaka shouldn't eat lionroot while he's healing, and the spuds are still quite small. Thus, the lionroot is going to be Zeb and I's meal while Zaka gets meat broth and meat to eat.

By the evening, Zaka had awoken again, and seemed to be pretty concerned with how much pain he would likely be in soon. Thankfully, after Zeb shared my story of recovery as an imp, Zaka seemed much more determined, and nodded, ready to have the procedure done.

I braced his leg onto the table with stone straps, to prevent it from moving while I worked, and Zeb kept a close eye on Zaka's condition while I worked. As I cut away bits of loose and hanging flesh, Zaka would yell through the wooden dowel, and shortly after I'd have to cauterize the bits of freshly exposed flesh, leading to even more yelling. Eventually though, we'd cleaned the wound up considerably, and I'd extracted a lot of small pieces of rock and bone that had been embedded in the wound. Although it isn't pretty, it's looking much better than it was.

By the time I had stone shaped his leg free, Zaka was either asleep or unconscious again. Either way, Zeb and I decided we should again take turns keeping an eye on Zaka's condition overnight just in case.

Thankfully, it seems like Zaka's surgery was a success, and he awoke the next morning. We'll need to keep an eye on his condition though, as his HP is about where it was yesterday morning, which given his trauma yesterday could be either good or bad. Since all three of us seem to be optimistic, I decided to start working on making Zaka a pair of crutches, like when I had my leg in a brace. If things heal well, I might attempt to make him a peg leg to at least give him some added mobility.

It's a bit nostalgic making a pair of crutches from wood and lightstone here in the cave again. As I work on them, I recollect all the time I spent here, and how at the time, Zaka was the biggest threat to my existence. At that time, I was quite scared of the goblin that would show up and shoot fireballs at the imps in the cave after bringing them into existence. Now, years later, I'm medically treating that same being for a wound similar to what I experienced while in the very same cave. I let out a little chuckle to myself at the situation as I worked on his crutches.

[Vol.3] Ch.11 A Conversation with Zaka

After another day of close monitoring on Zaka, it seems like he's slowly recovering, which is good. He's starting to stay awake for longer periods of time, although he's still very exhausted. Since he's awake for longer, I asked Zeb to help me ask Zaka some questions about what happened in the goblin village over winter. After thinking for a little bit, I decided to start the conversation off by discussing the night we came down after we spotted the eagle.

I asked, "So, Zaka, when the snow first melted, Zeb and I saw the eagle carrying a goblin up the mountain, so we hurried down to the village in the middle of the night. We were surprised when we got there, because we were threatened, and the goblin on the wall claimed we were cursed, and that we caused all this. What happened over winter to bring about an even more bitter response in the village than before?"

Zaka listened as Zeb translated, then pondered for a moment before responding, "As you were aware from before, there are two factions in the village. Over the last year, before winter, the pro-you faction had been gaining more steam, with the completion of the path up the mountain, and the plant fields and salt that you've enabled us to get, more and more of the goblins were coming around to agreeing to let you back into the village. The leader of the opposition, one of the new hobgoblins, Kurg, seemed to be quite frustrated, and was convinced that letting you back in would cause us harm again."

Zaka paused to drink some water, and let Zeb translate for himself before he continued, "A few weeks after the snowfall on the mountain, we noticed the eagle. It wouldn't be a day later that we got a report of one of the goblins in a hunting party being carried away by it. Not long after that, another goblin was carried away, this time it was one that was working the salt pond. It became clear that this was going to be a major problem. I focused my efforts on keeping the village alive. I had Gakus make an underground area where I could safely summon imps in the village, as it became clear that we were going to need more goblins as the eagle continued to carry off goblins every few days. While I focused on maintaining the village, Kurg decided now was the time to convince the village of the danger you brought. As more and more existing villagers were carried off, many of the new goblins were convinced of the danger that you and Zeb posed to the village."

Zaka pauses for another moment, seemingly in thought as Zeb begins translating for him again. After Zeb finishes, Zaka starts talking again, "Attempts were made to kill the eagle, but each attempt was futile. Neither my fireballs, nor any spears could harm it enough to stop it from taking goblins. Before I knew it, sentiment in the village had turned quite harsh, and many of the goblins were talking about putting Kurg in charge. Eventually, a compromise was made that he would be in charge of the villages defensive planning. Which lead to the situation you saw in the village. He attempted to implement harsher measures, but more of the goblins resisted that idea."

Seemingly finished with his regaling of the events of this winter, Zaka nods to Zeb to translate for him. After listening, this actually leads to quite a few concerns. First, with Zaka likely being considered dead by the village, this other hobgoblin, Kurg, is probably the defacto leader. Second, with the goblins having had an event of high turnover again, I'm a little concerned for the infrastructure of the village. Another question pops into my head as well, so I ask it.

I look over Zaka's body before asking, "What exactly lead to the situation of you being caught by the eagle?"

"Kurg had the idea of attempting to bait the eagle to attack the village, where all of us who could attempt to hurt it would fight it at once. I was the unlucky one that the eagle decided to take away that day." Zaka replies.

I hesitate, but eventually ask, "Did the eagle hurt you as it picked you up?"

Zaka calmly replies, "Other than a lot of pressure, surprisingly no. That is until I heard that loud blast right as the eagle let me go and my leg was filled with pain. Of course, if it wasn't for that, I'd have died a minute later at the hands of the eagle anyway." Zaka looks somewhat knowingly at me as he says the final portion of his sentence, and after Zeb translates for him, the sinking feeling I had before is all but confirmed. The cannon is likely what blew off Zaka's leg.

I avert my gaze and say, "Sorry about that... The cannon we made is almost certainly what destroyed your leg."

Zaka lets out a laugh, which helps ease the tension before speaking again, "Well, I'm alive now, which is better than what I thought was going to happen. What happened to the eagle after that?"

I respond, "After we gave you emergency treatment, I went out and killed it. The cannon had broken one of its wings, and it was bleeding in a lot of places. It wasn't an easy fight, but I finished it off."

Zaka let out another laugh after hearing that and said, "Go figure, we spent all winter trying to kill that eagle, and you brought it down on your first attempt. This is exactly the sort of reason that we need to keep you around, not shun you."

I let out a little chuckle of my own after hearing that. I still think that I might, indirectly, be the cause of a lot of these problems, but I feel a little better knowing that Zaka, and at least some of the goblins, think that highly of me.

After that discussion, Zaka started to feel tired, and took another nap. As I pondered everything that was discussed, I talked with Zeb for a bit.

"What do you think about Kurg, and what's likely happening in the village now?" I ask.

"Well, Kurg was always a little hard headed, and he liked to be the one leading his hunting groups. I can't imagine him purposefully putting Zaka in danger, if that is what you're asking." Zeb replies.

"I'll take your word that he didn't put him directly in danger, but I'm more concerned about his position on things, and now that Zaka is currently considered dead by the village, what might be happening." I reply.

Zeb thinks for a minute before responding, "I think there are two options, they're opposites, and one is more likely than the other. The more likely option is that Kurg is going to strong arm the village into whatever the harsher measures were that he wanted to implement related to us, and he'll use Zaka's death as a rallying cry for it. The less likely option is that now that he's likely fully in charge of the village, he'll tone his rhetoric back because he feels like he needs to be more moderate for the sake of the village."

I ask, "Do you think one is more likely because of his personality?"

Zeb replies, "Yeah, like I said, he's hot headed, so if he thinks we're cursed, he's likely blaming Zaka's death on us as well, so he'll probably be wanting revenge."

"What would you recommend doing then?" I ask.

"Well, probably just keep our eyes peeled, and be careful. Ultimately, Zaka's alive and we killed the eagle, so as long as we can show the other goblins that, it shouldn't be an issue." He says.

While it's true that Zaka is alive, so we can always show the other goblins that. I'm not so sure that Kurg will let it go at that point. I don't know him very well, and Zeb seems to have at least had some interactions with him, but I'm concerned about a power struggle. I'm worried that even if the other goblins would stand down if Zaka turned out to be alive, that Kurg will still be an issue. That said, I'm not exactly planning on pre-emptively doing anything. Until Zaka is healed enough to return him to the village, the most we can hope for is that the goblins will leave us alone.

I decide I should at least tell Zeb what I'm concerned about, "Zeb, I don't know Kurg at all, so I can't say for certain, but power messes with people's personalities, so I wouldn't be so certain that he'll just stand down if Zaka is alive. Just keep that in mind as we act."

[Vol.3] Ch.12 Insurrection

After two more days, Zaka finally had enough energy that I started to help him get used to using crutches. He hasn't headed outside yet with them, but finally giving him some mobility should help him start to recuperate better. I took the opportunity to thoroughly clean the dining table, and resurface it for good measure. Zaka has steadily been gaining hp back as well, and he's at a little above half hp now.

Considering his condition has improved this much, he's going to start sleeping in one of the guest rooms, rather than on the table now, and Zeb and I are going to return to normal sleep schedules. We'll still be doing daily checkups with him to make sure he's still recovering though. We've also decided that we won't travel far alone, just in case any bad situations arise in the near future. As such, we're going to be slowly depleting our food supply for the next few weeks until Zaka is healthy enough to return to the goblin village.

On a positive note, all the eagle down is clean and dried now. I had intended to make a mattress or blanket, but I realized that I don't really have the materials to make a good binding material like cloth, so I set it aside for now. Later, I'd like to trade the goblins for it, but that'll have to wait until Zaka is ready to return to the village as well.

Since we've started to return to a semi-normal schedule, Zeb and I have started to do some work around the cave. Although Zeb used a decent amount of the stone from the winter building the watchtower, there is still a lot left. Without any projects to use it for though, we've decided to just put it in piles outside and leave it there until the need arises. Having what we had made building the watchtower go much faster, so it can't hurt to keep some good building materials around.

One thing we've thought about building, however, is some outdoor storage warehouses by the path. Just some basic covered buildings where we can store things. Right now, we have the very large storage area in the cave, which is great, but expanding it produces a lot of stone that we don't have a use for. As such, we could use some of that stone to build sturdy covered buildings outside, capable of withstanding the winter, where spare stone could be stored. With that decided, we started work on the first storage warehouse.

It's been another two days, and Zeb and I have been making decent progress on the warehouse. We were making good progress today, when suddenly, we heard shouts followed by a spear nearly hitting me. Zeb and I both looked out down the path, and coming up the path were more than a dozen goblins, and a hobgoblin.

I'd worried this might happen, and I'm surprised they acted this quickly. I guess with the eagle having been gone for more than a week, they've gotten bold. Zeb and I were prepared for this, so we hurriedly ran back to the cave where Zaka was minding his own business sitting in a chair. Zeb quickly explained the situation to Zaka. Zaka's face became stern, and he grabbed his crutches and made his way to the front door. As he did so, Zeb and I armed ourselves as well.

By this time, the goblins had started to enter into the cleared area around the cave entrance. Many had looks of confusion on their faces, others still looked towards Zeb and I with anger.

Zaka began to speak in a steady and strong voice, and as he did, Zeb translated for me quietly, "What brings all of you here today?"

The other hobgoblin spoke, and Zeb informed me that this was Kurg, "We've come to deal with the cursed beings up here!"

Zaka replied, "On who's authority was that decided?"

Kurg responds, and the goblins who were angrily looking at Zeb and I cheer, "On my authority as acting chief!"

Zaka replies to this with a stronger tone, "I didn't realize that I was no longer acting chief, although I'm sure my absence had left many of you worried." As he finishes this sentence, he looks over to the many goblins who were previously confused.

Kurg retorts, "A chief who goes missing can no longer be chief. Now stand aside, the village has made its decision as to what to do."

Despite being on his crutches, Zaka stays where he is and replies, "A poorly informed decision for the village will only lead to ruin. What would the village want if they knew that I was alive, and that these two killed the eagle and saved me?"

Kurg laughs to himself, "Letting these cursed beings live on once again? I think not. After they are gone, we can let the village decide what to do. If you will not move, then I'll make you move."

After Kurg finishes speaking, he picks his spear up, and aims it towards Zaka, Zeb, and myself. As he does so, about half of the goblins also pick their weapons up.

Zaka says one final thing, and unfortunately, Zeb doesn't have time to translate it for me, as right after, Zaka fires off a fireball towards Kurg. As he does so, many of the goblins who were confused before pick their weapons up and begin fighting their neighbors.

Kurg dodges out of the way, and begins closing the distance towards us. The rest of the area has become a frenzied melee as the goblins are fighting one another. It's quite unlucky that this happened right now. I'm freshly prestiged, and Zaka is wounded. As Kurg charges at us, I step in front of Zaka. He can't move well, so I'll have to act as a shield for him, so that he can continue to fight. I only have enough max mana for one earth spike, so if I go for one, it needs to hit.

As I step in front, Kurg does two things I didn't expect. First, he hurls his spear at me, and it flies with extraordinary speed. I move my buckler up to protect myself, and I get it up just in time. The buckler, made of lightstone, shatters along with the spear, causing me to flinch. In those brief seconds, Kurg charged in, and punched me center of mass, sending me flying backwards into Zaka. As he hits me, he yells something out in the demon language. A moment later, Zaka and I crash into the building behind us. With the wind knocked out of me, I watch the fight in front of me unfold.

*Zeb's POV starting moments prior*

I can't believe Kurg is going this far for this. He was hard headed, sure, but raising his spear against Zaka?

Zaka responds, "Then, to each goblin here, now. Choose your side. Do you choose us, or do you choose betrayal?" As he finishes speaking, Zaka shoots a fireball at Kurg.

I'm not surprised that Kurg dodged the fireball. He's always been quick. I watch, like a passenger, as he charges at Zaka.

Zack positions himself in between Kurg and Zaka. He'll stop him. He always wins.

I blink, and I see Zack and Zaka flying backwards. I didn't expect this, and I take a sharp breath. Many of the goblins in the melee surrounding drop their guard and look in at what just happened.

My instincts kick into high gear, and I release an earth spike on Kurg who is now within reaching distance of me. A stone spike flies out of the ground, and stabs into one of his legs.

Kurg yells out, "The runt wants some too, huh?!"

He shifts his weight, and throws a punch at me. I barely get my shield up to block it, and thankfully, it holds, but I'm pushed back a few feet.

As I lower the shield and look out from behind it, I see that Kurg's leg is pierced sideways by the spike, and he's having trouble removing it. He makes eye contact with me, and I see the hate he feels for me. He grabs a rock, and angles to throw it at me. I just saw what that did to Zack, so I lower my stance and wait.

He throws the rock, and just before he lets go, I jump to the side. The rock flies through where I was a moment before. I fall on the ground as a consequence of my jump. I can see Kurg already picking up a second rock.

As he brings it back to throw, I'm only about half way to standing up.

Suddenly, a fireball hits him from the side.

Kurg yells out, "Stay out of this, or I'll end you too!"

He's distracted just long enough for me to get close enough to unleash a second earth spike into his other leg. With him pinned in place, I run around his side, so he can't accurately throw his rock at me, not for lack of trying however. From over his shoulder the rock flies out at a ridiculous speed, but misses by a few feet.

From behind I dash up to him, and with my spear, I stab at him. Over and over and over.

The battle around me has gone quiet. I look around. Zaka and Zack have gotten back up. In front of me Kurg is limp and bent forward, with over a dozen stab wounds in his back from the spear...

[Vol.3] Ch.13 A New Village

I watch as Zeb fights Kurg as I regain my senses slowly. While we were flying backwards, it looks like Zeb managed to stab through one of Kurg's legs with an earth spike. Kurg winds up a throw with a rock that Zeb barely manages to dodge. Just as it's looking grim, from underneath me, Zaka manages to get a fireball off, distracting Kurg for just long enough for Zeb to get a second earth spike off.

I'm still struggling to catch my breath after that center of mass hit, but it looks like the fight is over. With both of his legs incapacitated, Kurg can't realistically fight back. Zeb doesn't stop though. He's breathing quickly, and seems like he's a little panicked as Kurg haphazardly throws a rock backwards at him. I still can't catch my breath enough to tell Zeb to stop as I watch him stab into Kurg's back over and over, well after he's clearly dead.

Finally, I start to regain my strength, and get up, freeing Zaka from under me. By now, all the fighting has stopped, and everyone is quietly watching Zeb, who is now staring at Kurg's lifeless body, partially supported by the two earth spikes going through his legs. Zaka clears his throat, and says something loudly in the demon language, to which the remaining goblins all drop their weapons.

Zeb is motionless just looking at Kurg's body as the goblins slowly head back towards the path. Zaka begins following the goblins on his crutches, and as he gets further away, he turns back towards us, and says something in demon language, and motions for us to follow him. This seems to break Zeb from his stupor, and we start following Zaka and the goblins down the path back towards the goblin village.

Along the way, we take breaks at every stop, and even sometimes less than that, so that Zaka can catch his breath. During the whole trip Zeb remains quite quiet and withdrawn. Considering everything, I think it should be fine to give him some space. Of course, that also means that I'm basically back at the stage where I can't understand anything that everyone else is saying.

When we finally make it back to the village quite a commotion is made at the gate, but after Zaka eventually raises his voice, the guards on the wall let us in. I can't help but notice that many of the goblins around still look quite angry the fact Zeb and I are walking around the village. A second thing I notice is just how many of the goblins appear to be new. Although I recognize around half of them, the other half all appear to be new.

By the time we make it to the pavilion, we've already gathered quite a crowd. Zaka takes the opportunity to yell out very loudly, to which a large number more of goblins join the crowd. I can see a lot of different emotions among the goblins. Some seem happy, others seem shocked, and around a third are clearly upset.

After Zaka looks over the crowd, he begins speaking loudly, projecting his voice. The goblins in the crowd all grow silent. As he speaks, many ranges of emotion are seen on the goblins, and each of the groups react differently to most of the news. At one point though, a cheer breaks out from all the goblins for a short while, followed by silence after Zaka resumes speaking. Finally, near the end of Zaka's speech, most of the crowd looks about at each other with concern before splitting up.

After this, Zaka slowly makes his way back to his house, and motions for Zeb and I to follow him. When we get to his house, he begins speaking, then looks at Zeb expectantly. After Zeb doesn't do anything for a moment, Zaka raises his arm and puts it on Zeb's shoulder, and says something briefly. After a pause, he repeats what he said a moment before, and Zeb translates it for me.

"Given everything that's happened, I've decided to rescind your expulsion from the village." Zaka said. He paused for a moment, waiting for Zeb to translate before continuing, "However, I want your input on something. I believe many of the new goblins will find it very difficult to adapt to this, and given what happened last time, I would like to try to come up with a way to prevent a repeat of what happened with Kurg. Do you have any ideas?"

I think for a little while. Part of the issue is likely the turnover rate of new goblins in the village. I say that because the older goblins seem to form a large part of the faction that supports Zeb and I. It's not exactly all of them, but most do. The newer goblins, though, form the other faction generally.

As I think on why that might be, I come to realize that the older goblins all probably remember how life in the village was before I arrived. They all used to live in dirt huts, and were hunting with their bare hands. Despite the lizard siege, before I arrived, the lizards were a menace to the goblins anyway, so the older goblins probably don't see the siege as that much of a disruption from how their lives were a few years prior. To the new goblins though, life was always in the protected village, with all the amenities and technology I built, and they didn't even realize it. To them, I brought the bad times only.

On earth, a good history education is usually how you would teach younger generations about the struggles and successes of older generations. In theory, I'd love to start a school for the goblins, but practically speaking, that isn't feasible given how primitive a lot of their society is, and how the village is structured. Instead, I really only have one option to offer to Zaka.

"What about letting some of the goblins form a second village? There is a second valley on this island that could easily support an entire second village. You could still trade and interact between your villages, but let them have some autonomy. If they want help building or doing anything in the village, they're free to ask for help. I think part of the issue is that many of the goblins don't have perspective on the differences between where this village is now, and where it was only a few years ago." I say.

Zaka nods along, seemingly in thought, and doesn't say anything for a little while. I interject with another comment while he's thinking, "Of course, a lot of that is on me. After building out the basics of the village, everything else I worked on didn't improve most of the goblin's lives, only a handful, so I can't say that I'm not also to blame somewhat."

Zaka finally replies, "To help a few, or to help many, both are still help. It's a shame that so many of the young ones don't recognize that. On the other hand, I'm concerned that forming a second village may be seen as banishment, which I don't want."

I respond, "Then let them know they're free to come and go from this village as they see fit, but they should know that Zeb and I could be here at any given time. I'm not trying to say they should be banished. I'm just recommending that they be aware that this is a settled matter in this village, so they need to make their choice moving forward."

Zaka sits in thought for a few minutes before giving his reply, "Then tomorrow morning I shall let the goblins know that a second village will be formed. I've stayed in your house for a while now, and I'm afraid you'll be staying in mine for a little while now. After this last winter, some goblins had moved into your houses in the village, and although it's a bit rude, I can't bring myself to evict them. So please, make yourselves at home here for the time being."

After our conversation ended, and the night began to drag on, some goblins that I recognized as the shop owners for the shell store and clothes weaver brought food for the three of us to Zaka's house. We each ate our fill, and Zeb was the first to fall asleep, leaning forward in his chair, his upper body resting on the table we were seated at. Zaka stood up and looked at Zeb's sleeping form for a little while before going to his own bed to sleep. After which I myself sat in the chair for a while before sprawling forward over the table to sleep. Honestly, it wasn't actually all that uncomfortable.

[Vol.3] Ch.14 Construction Standards

The next morning, Zaka made his announcement, which caused quite the shock in the village. There was a lot of hushed whispering, and even some outright yelling, but by the end of it, even the rowdy goblins had quieted down. He gave them a week to decide if they wanted to stay or go. At that point, they would set out towards the other valley to select where their new village would be. He also asked that even goblins that choose to remain help those who are leaving by going along with them to help carry supplies.

After the announcement, Gakus came up to the front, and said, "Although I don't have any ill will towards Zeb or Zaka, in fact, I quite respect them, I'll be moving to the new village. They'll need help building things, and despite everything, I feel that I should go and help there. I just wanted to let you know now." After his statement, he nodded his head and left. Well, he's always been quite straightforward, so I'm not surprised. Plus I know he likes to do repetitive tasks, so I'm sure he'll enjoy his time there.

Although, this might end up not really teaching the other goblins a lesson at all if he just duplicates this village over there. Well, he's good at replicating things, but for some of the constructions, he probably won't be able to replicate them. If the other village asks for help, I'd probably be willing to share info with Gakus if it doesn't take too long, but outside of that, I don't intend to build things over there for free. If I'm not welcome there, then I don't see what I would have to gain from giving them anything.

As for the village here, with Gakus gone, either myself or Zeb will start to be in charge of doing maintenance checkups again on all the various things within this village. As such, I should probably familiarize myself with any changes that happened in the last year.

First, I looked over the imp summoning chamber that Zaka had Gakus make in the village. It's a medium building with no windows and solid stone doors measuring about fifteen feet by fifteen feet. Once I entered inside, there is a wooden cellar door in a corner of the room, and a pillar in the center. Under the cellar door is a stairwell that opens into an underground chamber with the same dimensions as above. The basement has a bit of a bad odor, so I leave fairly quickly.

After asking Zaka about it, he would go in and summon one imp at a time in the basement and then go back to recharge in the bathhouse before repeating the process. In between each trip, he'd close the cellar door, and have two goblins guard it, to make sure no imps snuck past. Then when they finished, they'd close the heavy stone door, and keep watch for the night. By morning they'd usually have a goblin in the basement. The rest of the imps would get cleaned up, and then they could repeat the process the next day.

After he explained it, although it's a bit gruesome, it's not that different from when they were in the cave, so I'm not going to complain. It reminded me to check on the bathhouse though. I fully intended to remove the crystal and put it deep underground after everything that has happened so far, but given it actually is seeing use in the village, now I'm not so sure. If it lets Zaka stay here to summon imps rather that come up and use the cave, doesn't that just free me up to have full use of the whole cave all the time?

I don't want to jinx it, but as far as I can tell, the lizards have become extinct on the island now, and we've dealt with an eagle, although there was quite the suffering before it was dealt with. I can't even say for certain that the eagle was actually caused by the crystal, it could have just been a coincidence. Plus, as I understand it, since the crystal has been in place in the village, the wildlife and plants nearby have been thriving more than they did prior, which has made the harvests and hunts more successful.

Another construction that happened in the village was that Gakus built more houses. I'm going to wait until goblins leave to go to the new village before I inspect those houses, but I'm a little worried about drainage being set up properly, and whether the new road Gakus built have everything laid out as necessary for drainage.

Outside the village, some of the storage warehouses have become overgrown with vines due to neglect. I'm not sure if this is a problem or not, considering how they're built from solid stone, but ultimately, they should be cut down and kept clear. Although the vines are a bit more mangled than some that you'd find in the wild, they should still be useful for making rope, and considering the functioning path plus the fact Zeb and I can come to the village again, we probably will have quite a bit of use for heavy rope in the near future here.

The water level in the reservoir is currently sitting at about eight feet, which considering the time of year, is about right. None of the valves I can see are clogged, which is good. After a month or two, I should be able to tell if the reservoir needs mud removed, or if the bottom two valves need to be cleaned out.

A final thing that I found that does need some work is the pavilion basement. It looks like it has been expanded again at some point, as there is a third stairwell level going down now. However, it seems that it is only half constructed, and there is over a foot of standing water in it now. I can't say for certain why there is the water in the current state, but I'd like to remove it, and properly add another screw pump to remove the water, and finish the layer.

It could just be that the layer was never finished, but I'd guess that part of the problem is in the details of how I made the basement layers. I purposefully gave them an almost imperceptible slant towards the collection area where the screw pump would be operated from to bring the water to the next level. The second thing I did when building was to purposefully smooth the walls so that any water won't seep through the stone into the basement during heavy rains. If the walls aren't prepped, it's possible that all this water is just seeping in.

So first I'll need to smooth the walls, with the water present in case it is seeping in, then we'll have to remove the water manually, smooth the floor and slope it slightly, and finally add a screw pump to remove what water does fall in through the grates.

Overall however, the village seems to be more or less in working order, which is nice. I'm a little concerned about Zeb, as after Zaka made his announcement, he decided to just spend the rest of the day in Zaka's house. I'll keep watching him, but I think he's in shock after that fight with Kurg, and possibly shocked at the fact he killed him. I'll let him go at his own pace for a while, but eventually, if he doesn't start moving again on his own, I'll have to help him start living his life again.

The day has finally arrived. The goblins are setting out to form a new village. A little more than a third of the current village have decided to leave, and an additional third are going to help them initially get set up. As such, I've got my opportunity to check the new houses and road for construction issues. For the past week I've been fixing up the basement of the pavilion, and although it isn't finished yet, we've gotten the existing water out enough to start working on the finer details. That said, the fact that I have to bring burning wood down there to see has been a bit of a pain.

The road itself is in good condition, and constructed well, but when I open up the inside, I notice a few problems. There are some places with water puddles in the drainage pipe underneath where it is clear that it wasn't constructed in a continual downhill pattern to ensure that all the water flows out and doesn't stagnate. As such, I'll likely end up spending a few days working on that to make sure all the drainage occurs properly. Ultimately, it's something that Gakus will end up having to deal with in the new village if he builds it the same way over there, but again, I'm not planning on just volunteering information for that village.

As for the drainage under the houses, over here, there is a similar issue in a few of them, where care wasn't used to make sure that all areas were perfectly level and sloping away to drain the area. Which, given the fact I use levels to actually check the construction, and know that I need to do so, makes sense. If it wasn't raining when he built the drainage underneath the house, Gakus probably didn't fully understand why it was done to drain all of the water, and didn't understand the precision involved.

Thankfully, I shouldn't need to pull up the floors in each of the houses to fix this issue. If I just attach the level to the floor of the house, then I should be able to use tectonic sense to get a grasp of the situation, and fix it indirectly with stone shaping. Of course, I'll check back in after we've had a few rains to make sure I properly fixed all these issues.

All in all, I have at least a few more weeks of work ahead of me.

[Vol.3] Ch.15 Blood Magic

A few days after the goblins set out to found the second village, Zeb finally started to show some activity. He started to quietly work alongside me as I worked on the roads and houses that needed fixing. He'd ask short questions as to what I was doing, then assist me when he could. He still seemed a little withdrawn, but I was glad to see he was starting to get active again.

Another two days passed, and Zeb opened up and asked me, "Was what I did wrong? I didn't even realize what I was doing until I was already done... Kurg thought we were bad, and then I killed him, was he right?"

I think I'm starting to see what exactly is gnawing at Zeb. He's been pretty sheltered ever since he started following me around from way back when he was learning to hunt with the other goblins. So now he's starting to wonder, since he's been so isolated from them, if what we're doing is wrong, and if the other side had a point.

"I can't fully answer that for you. You have to ask yourself, what was your intent at the time, and are you intending to do bad things? Sometimes bad things happen despite good intentions. Just a few months ago, I was struggling with the same questions. I felt responsible for Kaga's death, and for various problems that happened in the village." I replied.

"So what did you decide?" Zeb asks me.

"Well, I decided that I could be more careful in the future, but that I had good intentions. I still feel responsible for what happened, but that just means I have to do more to right the wrongs I made in the past." I say.

Zeb stops working for a few minutes, but I continue leveling the pipe under the road that I'm working on. If he has more to open up with, I'll help him, but if he just wants to think, that's ok too.

After those minutes, Zeb starts working quietly with me again.

Over the last two weeks, Zeb has started to return to normal, which is good. He's more talkative, and is starting to work on things other than what I'm working on. In that time, we've finished fixing the drainage under the houses and the road, as well as fixed the third basement in the pavilion. It'll still probably be a little while until I can clean out the reservoir, so I've decided we should work on a new project in town here.

That project is building the village its own steam cannon. Now, the goblins won't be able to operate it, sadly, due to the lack of airtight valves, but having one here will allow us to have a second location to shoot from if the need arises. Unfortunately, unlike on the mountain, the village won't have as long to charge the cannon.

Hypothetically, they could just keep it charged for a few days, and wait for the eagle to potentially return, but that sounds like an accident waiting to happen. Instead, I have a little idea, but I'll need Zaka's assistance, and I'll only ask him after I do some preliminary tests.

Yesterday, I came up with a hypothetical solution to charging the steam cannon, but I needed to do some testing, so today, hidden away in the woods a little ways, I'm running one of said tests, alone.

I've cut myself quite deeply on my hand, and bled into a container about the size of a drinking glass until it was half full. I've since wrapped my hand in some plant cloth that I traded for to stem the bleeding, and filled the container the rest of the way with water, and closed it off. After my mana recharges, I'll move on to the next step.

The next step is quite a jump. When I used tectonic sense in the past on a crystal, it would absorb the mana from the tectonic sense, and weaken the signal from that area considerably. What I'm wondering is, if I use all my mana on tectonic sense on a container with blood, if it would work at least a little like when a crystal was submerged in the blood back on the mountain. For this test, I'm basically looking to see if this container springs any leaks, as if using stone shaping without any particular goal.

<LEGENDARY LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 3
HP: 1104/1202
MP: 740/740
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike

While it's nowhere near as large of a mana pool as I'd like, it'll have to do. I hold the container and use tectonic sense such that it consumes all my mana.

I get quite the mental echo first and foremost from the magic, as all the signal bounces around the container repeatedly as it returns to me. As it does so, I do notice that the container deforms, if only slightly.

I'd consider the test to be a marginal success. On the positive side, it does seem like it influenced the container. On the negative side, it did so only barely, which means I need to evaluate things I can attempt to improve the situation. Considering that, I'm actually glad the container didn't spring a hole, so I can reuse the blood water again.

I'll take the container back with me to the village, and attempt to make a new container tomorrow after I've had some time to think on it. For today, I'll just enjoy the bathhouse and relax for a little bit.

I've come up with a second container idea to try. The inside of this container has lots of thin poles pointed inwards towards where the blood mixture will be. The hope is that the increased surface area might increase the amount of mana converted into the mixture. It's just a hypothesis but it's worth a shot.

After everything is ready, I use tectonic sense at max power through the container again. This time, I receive much fewer echoes, and the stone almost seems to bubble, although it stops fairly quickly. All in all, a much better result. The stone has deformed much more heavily, although not to the level of springing a leak. On my way back to the village, I open the container with the small amount of mana I'd regenerated on the walk, and on the inside, pretty much all of the small poles had either fallen loose or been completely deformed within the container.

Given this result, I decided it was possible for the next step to be researched, and brought to Zaka. I had decided before not to inform Zaka about the effect crystals and blood had together, but now, it could be useful.

Today, I informed Zaka of my experiments with blood, along with my prior experiments in the cave. After a short demonstration, he was intrigued. I then explained to him how the steam cannon worked, and how I wanted to do a test with his blood, to see what effects it had. If it causes the water mixed in to instantly boil, or causes an explosion, then it could be useful for making a cannon that can fire almost instantly using a pre-charged canister of mix.

Although he's likely not yet fully recovered from the amount of blood he lost, we decided that a small amount should be enough for testing, and that we'd wait at least a month before we draw any more blood for use in a cannon if it is possible.

The new container for this test isn't completely closed like the previous one was. Instead, I've made it closer to what I would use in the steam cannon. A container with a small tube opening on one end. Unlike with my blood, I shouldn't need to worry about the stone deforming, although it may randomly explode.

I took it behind Zaka's house to run the test, after making sure no one else was in the area. I angled the opening towards the wall of his house, and used tectonic sense on it. Immediately after, there was a satisfying little pop sound, as steam evacuated the chamber. Followed shortly by the sound of tiny sticks hitting the wall of his house.

When I looked in the chamber, most of the blood and water mixture was now gone, along with a bunch of the small poles inside the chamber. My guess is that the sound I heard of sticks hitting the wall were those poles breaking off with the sudden evaporation of the water.

It's quite the success. With this, as long as my mana pool is big enough, we can build a new version of the steam cannon, one that needs a lot less time to get ready to use. Obviously though, it brings into question the morality of using blood to do this. If Zaka is fine with it though, then I'll choose to look at it like blood donations. You never know who it might benefit, but it's being done for the betterment of the rest of society.

[Vol.3] Ch.16 Village Upgrades

It's been over a week since I performed the test using Zaka's blood. With its success, I've started the construction of two steam cannons in the village. The first steam cannon will work just like the first one on the mountain. The second cannon is being designed to use a mix of water and Zaka's blood to power the cannon. Both of these are being built on an elevated platform behind one of the village walls. The reason being that I want them to have a relatively unobstructed view of the sky. Sitting between them is the beginnings of a watchtower like on the mountain.

Overall, the construction is going well, and a lot of the spare stone in the village is getting used up on the watchtower, and I took two days bringing a bunch of lightstone down the mountain for the steam cannons. Once some goblins return from helping get the new village started, I'd like to have some use the path to bring a bunch of the other spare stone from the mountain down to use for various constructions.

Zaka's recovery is coming along well, so I sat down with him and Zeb to get some more info so that we can make some longer term goals. Long story short, Zaka's a little more than half-way to his next prestige, and he's really hopeful that when it comes, he'll regain the lower part of his leg that he lost.

I'm hopeful for that outcome as well, but I'm not certain it'll all come back at once. However, with getting him recovered as soon as possible in mind, I've decided on two things that should help speed him along.

First, the area outside the walls of the village could be expanded out further in places. Right now, there is about fifty feet of distance from the village walls to the tree line. Given how large that eagle was, and with the addition of the two steam cannons, I think that getting some extra open field will be beneficial tactically.

Second, of the goblins that are remaining in this village, quite a few seem to enjoy eating the plant that Zeb found. I've decided to call it swamp beets, although the stems and root are much larger than a beet would normally have. With the increased demand for this food, the need to make more fields for it to grow in has arisen, so I figured we could clear even more space near the village in the direction of the salt ponds.

Both of those projects together encompass hundreds, if not thousands of trees, which should give Zaka an ample supply of levels to hopefully boost him up to the next prestige. The downside will be all the excess wood. Thankfully, the charcoal kilns I made before are still functional, although we'll probably need to make a new storage area just to store all the charcoal. Rather than just adding a fourth layer to the existing pavilion storage, I think I'd prefer to build a second storage area where the charcoal could be kept, although that comes with its own problems.

I've spent the last two weeks finishing the steam cannons, and as of today, they are done. The watchtower still has a bit of work before it is finished, and that's what I'll be working on next. I've also decided on a location to build the next storage facility for the village, so there will be a place for all the inevitable charcoal to be stored.

Because of the sheer amount of charcoal that will be available, I'm thinking about building a furnace down here for melting metal. If I do so, then I intend to build a waterwheel that can operate a fan to bring the temperature of the fire up, so that Zeb and I won't have to operate it manually, which would be a huge improvement over our furnace on the mountain. If I complete that, then I could actually utilize the reservoir and dam to provide extra power on days when I need it, rather than it simply being useful for preventing flooding.

It's been nine more days, and I've completed the construction of the watchtower, and excavated the majority of the basement for what will become the storage warehouse. The pavilion was nice, but it's sort of outgrown its initial design. It was meant to be both a general basic storage and meeting place for a goblin village that had a little over twenty goblins. Since that time, the population has more than doubled, and as a consequence, it's begun to store way more than it ever was intended to, it's even gone down three basement levels, which is a little excessive.

The new warehouse is closer to the shops in the village, and I intend for it to be used for bulk long term storage, rather than daily usage. Ultimately, I'd like to move most of the charcoal out of the pavilion basement and into this warehouse, along with various other bulk items, like rope, that have found their way into the pavilion basement.

The new warehouse is going to be 30 feet by 40 feet, and I'm going to design it with the intent of building a second story on it. Hopefully, with that much storage space, the storage outside the village will only need to be used as an intermediary for wood or stone. Secondarily, being built near all the shops should give the goblins who work there easy access to it, although I'm starting to worry about theft being an issue.

That said, it seems that they're pretty generous among themselves, all things considered. They don't seem to care about byproducts, and are willing to just give them away. In the future, I'll keep in mind that I should trade either a small storage area or a basement for things I want made by the goblins. I'm sure they'd like to have their own private area for storing things, and now that we have the bathhouse in town, mana is much less of a limiting factor as compared to before.

Speaking of the goblins, a large portion of them returned today from helping the other village get set up. Although the whole place isn't nearly as complete as here, they've got temporary housing, and a layout established, and now it's all up to Gakus to actually stone shape everything. With an area cleared, and most of the physical labor for construction completed, they decided it was time to return here.

Many of the goblins were quite surprised by the two large cannons and towering watchtower, and asked about it. When they found out that it was what we'd used to help kill the eagle, they started looking closer at it, and seemed to be impressed, although most of them probably had no idea how it worked.

It's been eleven more days, and I've finished building the first floor of the warehouse, alongside getting its basement set up. It houses multiple aisles of bins on each floor that can be filled with whatever. Right now, they're being filled with charcoal, as we've started to have many dozens of trees being felled each day.

Alongside cutting trees down, Zaka has also started to increase the number of goblins again. It's a bit of a slow trickle, but he averages about one new goblin every other day. Although it has been a while since there has been any dangerous activities around the village, these new goblins are still quite weak, and as such are kept in the village, working on mundane tasks until they gain some levels. Which means for these new goblins, they've been helping process all the wood from the trees that Zaka has been cutting.

It's not a matter of just cutting the trees down after all, it's also cutting those trees into smaller pieces to make charcoal, and removing the bark. It's quite labor intensive, so it's nice to have some extra hands helping with the ordeal. Since the new goblins are working on the wood that I'm then using in the charcoal kilns, they get to see me quite frequently, whether it's at the kilns, or in the warehouse. Hopefully, that gives them a more favorable attitude toward me as well, since they're seeing me hard at work as some of their first memories.

That being the case, I'm working harder than I normally would, just to try to leave a good impression on them. In the morning, I start up the charcoal kilns, then start working on the second floor of the warehouse, going back and forth between the two frequently enough to make sure that the kilns are running properly. Given just how much wood we're going to be processing, I'm probably going to dig out a second layer in the basement of the warehouse, to further increase its storage.

[Vol.3] Ch.17 Mixed Bag

In the past few years, I used to only spend the winters in the goblin village. Given that we now have the path between my cave home and here however, the trip between the two locations can easily be done in a few hours, so I'm rethinking how I want to spend my time. For the past two weeks, I've been working on finishing the new warehouse and making charcoal, which is starting to get a little boring. Zaka did his first blood draining session yesterday, and from here on out, I've made containers that should be the right volume for the amount of blood he's giving. It'll still take a while before we have enough blood to fire the steam cannon once, but having that available will be a big boon to the village's defensive capabilities.

Since I'm almost done with the new warehouse, I've decided to start work on some new projects. First, I've offered up a trade to the seashell collector in exchange for a large amount of broken seashells. I'll be building a basement storage area under their shop where they can store even more things. After that, I want to build the furnace and smelter down here that I was thinking about from before. Hopefully I can use crushed seashells as a flux material, and we can finally figure out if that mystery metal will have any usage or not.

Ultimately, there is another project looming on the horizon within the coming weeks, which is expanding the fields for swamp beets. Zaka's been felling quite a few trees a day at this point, so it shouldn't be too long until that work will need started. Of course, it'll still probably be next year before those fields are useful. Zeb's been helpful with a lot of the projects I've been working on, and honestly, I might let him take care of the field project himself, since he was the one who found the plant to begin with.

After thirty days, I've dug the basement out for the shell shop goblin, and I've completed the new stand alone furnace and smeltery. I've traded with the new carpenter goblin to have him build out a waterwheel for me, in exchange I'm going to build him a new basement as well. As I've started working on digging basements, a lot of the other shop goblins have taken interest in it, but I'm holding off on doing the work until I have something that I want from them, since it's actually a bit of work to add a basement to an already completed building.

Zeb has started the work to make the new fields for the swamp beets as well. The full area hasn't had all the trees cut down yet, but destroying the stumps and removing all the tree roots so that the swamp beets can grow is actually quite a lot of work, so he and some goblins have started that process.

Zaka is getting close to his level cap, so any day now he should either prestige or evolve, which we're happy to hear about. We've also done a second blood harvest with him, which went much smoother than the first one we did. He's been diligently summoning imps as well, so the village is almost back at population capacity.

The village also sent over someone to check on the other village, and see how they're doing. That village seems to have prioritized building houses, and of the 17 goblins who live there, about half have a stone house for now. Considering Gakus only has regular stone shaping, and they don't have a way to regenerate mana faster than normal, it's unfortunately going to be slow going for them for all their construction projects. That said, I'm glad they should all have houses before winter sets in, not that it gets particularly cold down here at the lower elevations on the island.

Its been two weeks, and Zaka prestiged, so he is now a Rare Hobgoblin. The result was a bit of a mixed bag. I wasn't sure if he'd fully heal given he was missing a large portion of his lower leg, and I was disappointed to see that he didn't heal all the way. He did heal quite a bit though. Around three inches of leg seemed to recover, and heal over to form a much less gruesome wound than what he had before. To fully heal, he'd probably need to prestige at least two more times, but probably more. I think it's probably much more likely that he'll evolve, and that will likely fully heal him.

A bit of a bonus that happened however, was that he picked up the trait Improved Regeneration, which may actually help him heal without needing to prestige again. Only time can say for sure, but the fact he should heal faster has me intrigued. I also had that option after I was badly injured and spent a lot of time healing, so I'm interested to see what sort of effect it has moving forward.

The field work is coming along well, and Zaka should be done cutting trees down soon. I've finished the carpenter's shop basement, and he's making good progress on the water wheel I need for my furnace. Something is becoming apparent within the village as I work on things though. We're running out of space within the walls. When we put the walls in before, the village population was less than half what it is now, and we've added a lot of specialty buildings that didn't exist before. For now, I don't want to really focus on growing the population, but moving forward, it may become useful if it helps the goblins further specialize.

After another 17 days, I've realized we've already almost reached winter again. With the furnace and it's water wheel completed, and the new large field completed, I find myself ready to start some new projects again. I'm going to get some of the new goblins to help me haul a bunch of things from the cave.

First, I want to haul the ore down here, to make an attempt at purifying the unknown metal from before, now that I have a substantial amount of seashells to use as a flux material. Second, I want to haul the excess stone from last winter down to the village. There are a few projects that could use extra stone, and although building basements gives us some stone, I'd rather not have to do that precise of work if I can avoid it. Third, I want to bring down some more lightstone, and extra copper. The cannons used up quite a bit of my reserves of both materials, so I want to have some of what little is left in the village, so that I don't have to worry about not having access to it over the winter.

As for projects that use stone, I have an idea for something I want to try in the bay area, and it's going to require a large amount of stone and effort to build, but if it works out, it'll pay some very large dividends moving forward. Since the bay is somewhat enclosed, making a c shape, I want to make a stone mesh with two inch gaps that covers where the water in the bay drains out. Obviously, I don't want to cover it all the way to the high tide level, but instead only up to about a third of the max water level.

The hope is that moderately sized sea life will get trapped as the water slowly drains, and then the goblins can just go and pick up a bunch of free food. Now, the area where they can actually pick it up is quite slick and dangerous to walk on, so if an initial test of the mesh works, I'll need to spend time trying to fix the area around the bay so that the goblins can somewhat safely walk once the water is drained.

In this time, we've also had the opportunity to get more blood from Zaka. He does seem to be healing faster from the bleeding, at about twice the rate, so that should increase our supply moving forward. I can't quite tell either, but it does look like his leg might be regenerating, albeit at a very slow rate. If that is the case, in another year or so, he might be fully mobile again.

After another five days, we've gotten all the materials hauled down the mountain, and I'm getting everything set up to make a batch of the mystery metal. The first step is going to be to make more of the brittle version of the metal that isn't very useful. Then I'll grind that down into a powder alongside the seashells, and re-smelt that material down. That should reduce the carbon content in the metal considerably, and hopefully yield a more pure metal that I can then do additional testing on.

I'm thankful that I've made a hand crank option for the furnace, because the stream right now isn't flowing with enough force to properly get the furnace up to the temperature I'll need. However, once winter sets in, I intend to go to the reservoir and set the valves to slowly fill the reservoir up a little at a time. That way I can just open a valve to let a bunch of water out over a day or so, and that'll give me enough water to really use the full potential of the furnace.

[Vol.3] Ch.18 Tide Pool

Five days of experimenting with the metal, and I think I've finally got a half-decent product. I did multiple different mixes of various amounts of flux and metal until the brittleness of the metal disappeared. I've made a few different shaped casts using the successful mixture to test the properties of the metal.

The first cast is a simple sheet of the metal, about a tenth of an inch thick and five inches on either side. The second cast is a solid cube measuring three inches on each side. The third, and final cast is a thin wire about an eighth of an inch in diameter. For each cast, I have a few tests I want to perform to see how the metal behaves, to get a better idea of its usefulness.

While testing the sheet, a few interesting results were revealed. While the metal could be bent with a bit of leverage, it was heavily resistant to being shaped via hammering. Tests with the cube gave further evidence that whatever this metal is, it's highly resistant to cold working, and in fact, even resistant to working while glowing yellow from heat. The wire revealed another interesting property to the metal. While many metals would pinch off while being stretched, and then eventually snap, the wire never pinched, and instead the whole wire evenly elongated until it was about 30% longer before it eventually snapped.

My heat resistance trait was pretty beneficial through the whole process. I didn't feel nearly as uncomfortable as I used to while working in front of the fire all day. Ultimately, the mystery metal seems like it will be very useful, the only downside to it is the amount of effort and seashells that I need to make any decent amount of the stuff. For a lot of uses, I'll stick to stone, but for certain tools and for things that I'm worried about wear and tear for, the new metal will be very useful, as long as I can make a good cast for whatever I'm trying to make.

The biggest potential benefit is allowing goblins to make their own durable tools if I teach some how to make the metal. All of that would be quite a ways in the future, of course. Until I come up with tools or machines I want to make though, I don't have any uses for the metal right now. As such, I've decided to move on to my next project, the sea life filter in the bay.

For the past fifteen days, I've been slowly building the stone grid at the edge of the bay where I made the stairs down previously. The area I'm attempting to cover is actually quite large, so progress is going somewhat slowly, mostly due to the fact it's a long trip from the bottom of the bay back to the village, so running out of mana is a bit of a problem, especially at my current level.

As such, today was the first day I've actually gotten any results. The mesh is only a little over a foot tall, extending across the bay, but I've got a few animals that are caught. It seems there are multiple different kinds of fish-like species. The one thing most of the these animals have in common is that their tail fin is horizontally oriented, instead of vertically. Other than that, they look like fish, although some are flatter than others. There are also a few of those cone shell squid shrimp hybrid creatures as well. I find it kind of odd that they've got two claws, but they're on the end of tentacles.

I've also figured out that the method I'm using will need some revision. Mostly because, well, all these have been dead for a little while. When the tide goes out from the bay, it still recedes further away for a while before returning, so it takes almost four hours before the water starts refilling the bay. Which means the creatures that get trapped die, and start rotting pretty quick.

What I've decided to do as a solution is to fill in the mesh that I've already made, so that about 18 inches of water remains in the bottom of the bay. Thankfully, the area that is at this height is actually a relatively thin strip compared to the bay as a whole. I'll then level a walkway around the outside of this area in the bay, and the goblins or whoever can just spear fish out what's left, or use a net or something. Mostly, this should help keep the sea life from suffocating, and they can then leave again once the water level rises. Of course, I intend to raise the mesh considerably so that even more sea life is trapped at once.

I've spent the last 25 days closing the filter, and making the path along the extent of the bottom of the bay walkable. I'm not quite done with the walkway yet, but the filter is completely closed, and now while I'm working I'll see different kinds of sea life swimming about in the shallow water. So I've basically made an artificial tide pool.

I've spotted a few new kinds of life in the water as well. There was something that kind of resembled a large isopod swimming with multiple legs, some more kinds of fish-like creatures, a weird shelled creature that resembled a clam, but walked along the water's floor on tentacles, and a kind of shelled lifeform that seemed akin to a snail. The snail creature made its way over the barrier as I was coming down to work, so I don't think I'll actually be catching any of them.

It'll probably still be quite a while before the area is complete, but I've come up with a faster way to work on the filter, so that should help. I was using local rock to shape into the filter while here, but I've decided that I can shape large chunks of filter at a time back in the village, and then carry a pile of them over in the morning or afternoon, which should about double the pace I was making it before.

A whole month of work, and I've started bringing a few of the new goblins along when I come to work at low tide, so they can hunt some of the fish creatures. The path around the bottom is completed, and I've gotten the barrier to about four feet tall. In the time I've been working, snow started falling on the mountain again, so it looks like it'll be a few months until I'm able to go back up there. We've also collected quite a decent amount of Zaka's blood, and in my estimation it's probably enough to fire that steam cannon twice, although I'll only be able to activate it once before I need a mana recharge.

We also caught a few new, interesting sea creatures. One large eel like creature, that seemed to have had it's fill of the fish that were trapped before getting trapped itself. It had a diameter of about a foot, and was almost ten feet long, so it was quite the surprise to find it, considering most of the things we had caught before that point were fairly small. In retrospect, it was probably because anything that was larger could easily just hop the small barrier.

Another interesting creature was a larger fish, that had more fins than some of the others, and when a goblin tried to stab it with a spear, the spear broke against it's skin. I ended up earth spiking it, and that killed it, but it used a lot of my mana, which left me a little frustrated. There was also a third fish that was moderately sized that seemed to electrocute other fishes if they got too close. It only seemed able to do this a few times before being incapable of performing this feat any further.

We've also learned our lesson that not all the fishes are edible, as we sadly lost one of the goblins that ate a brightly colored fish that he caught. As such, all the goblins that try fish now have to be given the lessons on how to check for toxins in food. Thankfully that seems to be the only fish so far that has poisons in it. The fisher goblins seem to be getting pretty decent at identifying what they're looking for, and since they can only carry back so much food, they've gotten a little choosy about which creatures seem to taste the best, not that I'm complaining.

Moving forward, I'm aiming to get the filter up to six feet in height, and then I'll attempt to determine if it needs to go any higher, or if this seems to work well enough for catching fish that I can leave it as is for a while.

[Vol.3] Ch.19 Destruction Part 1

Progress has been somewhat slow going on the sea life filter for the past eight days. I've added about six inches to the barrier in that time. The whole thing is honestly producing way more food than I expected, and a lot of the hunting goblins haven't been hunting as actively anymore since there is now an easier source of protein. I set my goal for the filter to be six feet tall, and given the depth of this whole bay is about 60 feet, it's barely capturing as much as it could at that depth. Of course, there still needs to be a way for the fish to get in, so that they're trapped, which means I can't cover the whole area in the filter.

Honestly, if I make the filter to six feet, it'll probably overfill the small amount of water that is left, and the fish will start to die again. If I want to make the filter taller, I think I'd need to tier the bay like the mountain terraces. That way I could still keep the water relatively shallow and thin so the goblins can easily spear fish. Of course, right now the whole thing is already producing more food than the goblin village needs. I'm honestly thankful that Zaka hasn't asked me to build more houses in the village for new goblins to keep up with the new food supply.

Just one day has passed, and we've got a problem. Rather, we have two problems. Eagles, again. This time, a pair of them. Both look bigger than the eagle I killed before. It's hard to say for sure, because we've only spotted them flying overhead once each. Both of the new eagles have darker feathers than the previous eagle, and one is slightly larger than the other, with a slightly different plumage pattern. None-the-less the village has gone into a lockdown mode.

We're having goblins keep watch 24/7 with the intention of using a steam cannon if we get the opportunity. I'm a little too nervous to keep the manually powered steam cannon powered at all times, in case it explodes, but I've loaded up the blood cannon with one of our two available blood cartridges that I've made with all the blood Zaka has donated. That said, once we see either eagle, I fully intend to start the process for getting the other steam cannon charged up as well. You never know when or if it might be necessary, especially with two eagles in the area.

It's been four days, and we finally had an opportunity arise. Yesterday, one of the eagles was seen flying up from the other valley with a goblin in its claw, which had us a little worried that both eagles might just be hunting in the other valley, but today, one eagle was directly overhead, circling the village. We started the fire under the other steam cannon about 20 minutes before it arrived, when the goblin on watch first saw the eagle coming down from the mountain. Then we just waited for the eagle to decide to come lower to the ground before I would attempt to shoot the steam cannon powered by Zaka's blood.

After an additional ten minutes, it seemed that the eagle was losing patience, as we all were within cover, so it was decided that someone would have to be bait. A handful of goblins who were on guard with Zeb, Zaka, and myself basically drew straws, and one of them had to make a mad dash from the watchtower out the nearby gate. Shortly after he was outside the village gate, the eagle started to dive towards him, which made him panic and start running back towards the village.

Thankfully, the eagle didn't give up, and kept diving, right into the crosshairs of cannon. I unleashed all my mana into tectonic sense into the chamber with the blood, and a mix of steam and fire propelled the large grapeshot towards the eagle.

Unlike last time, I didn't hit either of it's wings. Given the closer proximity, the grapeshot eviscerated a large portion of the eagle's upper torso and neck, and what was a practiced dive towards prey turned into a freefall towards the ground. As the eagle fell, it let out a terribly loud screech, before hitting the ground with a loud thud only a few feet from the goblin that was acting as bait.

When other goblins and Zeb went over to inspect the situation, they initially thought that the bait goblin had been killed, but they shortly determined he had merely fallen unconscious, likely from fear. The eagle, it seems died on impact, it's neck twisted in an unnatural direction. We later determined the grapeshot had shredded it's breast muscles to the point it couldn't control it's dive, and it crashed headfirst into the ground.

As the goblins were helping their fellow comrade, we heard a screech echoing the eagle coming from the mountain. The goblin from the watchtower shortly later sounded the alarm that the second eagle was coming down towards the village. Considering I only had what little mana I had regenerated since firing the first cannon, I wouldn't be able to fire either cannon. Plus, I'd either need to reload the blood powered cannon, or wait a while yet for the regular steam cannon to get charged up.

The goblins already know how hard it is to take one of these eagles on normally. With that in mind, I started making a mad dash towards the bathhouse as the other goblins all took cover. I would need to recharge pretty much all my mana before I can do anything, and that could take up to ten minutes, plus I'd need to make a dash back to the steam cannons at that point potentially exposing myself to the eagle. As such, I submerged myself as fully as I could within the water, with only some of my head peeking above the surface.

As the second eagle reached the village, it circled for a little while over the dead eagle, before making a descent down towards the body. After it landed next to the body of the other eagle, it let out a loud screech, similar to the one the previous eagle had made. It then flourished its wings, and sent a powerful wind gust towards the village. These winds were horribly powerful compared to the injured eagle I had fought in the forest. The winds were easily hurricane force if not faster. Many of the doors in the village, which were made of wood, were thrown from their hinges, window shudders were forcibly opened, two of the gates were ripped clear from their frames, both water wheels ripped free from their supports, and the pavilion's solid stone roof broke free from its few supports, shattering into pieces as it hit the ground.

The situation seemed dire as the eagle let out another screech, and another gust flew through the village. Another of the village gates was thrown free, and some of the goblins' personal items were blown out of their homes through the newly opened windows and doors. Throughout the village, shouts and yells could be heard from goblins in response to the gusts. I hunkered down in the bathhouse. Until I have full mana again, I don't think we stand any shot against this beast.

The eagle, seemingly full of rage, took flight briefly, only to now land in the village near where some goblins had screamed from inside their house. The eagle took a high posture, then drove it's beak toward the stone of the roof. A loud cracking noise was heard first, followed by a second, then screams from the goblin inside as the roof was destroyed by the eagle. Shortly after, the screams stopped, only to be replaced by the sound of another roof being pecked at. I peeked my head up a little higher from the water to get an angle at what was happening. From within this house, a goblin rushed out the front door with a spear. As he attempted to stab the eagle's talon, the only thing he could reach, he was swiftly kicked by the eagle into the wall. The force alone turning his body into viscera.

Things continued to escalate as the eagle let out another screech, and took to the skies above the village. As it flew overhead, it would flap its wings at close range overhead, and cause powerful downbursts of wind. The water within the bathhouse where I was located was thrown about, reducing the water level within the bath where I was submerged. The eagle seemed intent on destroying the whole village, along with everyone who was hiding within it.

I still needed a few more minutes before my mana would be full again, and the eagle began another strafing run through the village, attempting to flush out any more hidden goblins. The goblins, thankfully, seemed to catch on, and remained quiet as more destruction occurred around them. The eagle then landed back at the gate and wall where the other eagle had died. With a powerful kick of its talon, a section of the wall broke, then another, and another.

As the eagle broke down parts of the wall, it continued watching into the village, looking for any more targets to take its rage out on. As the minutes passed while the eagle wreaked destruction on the village walls, I eventually recharged my mana. The issue now was that there was no way I could make it over to the watchtower, let alone load up the steam cannon with the final blood round we had. Further, the only person in the village who understands English is Zeb, and I didn't know where he was taking shelter. I needed a distraction though before I could attempt to make it to the cannon.

I waited, patiently, hoping that something, anything, would distract the eagle as it dismantled more of the village while watching carefully over all the rest of the area. As the minutes dragged on, I realized I would have to attempt to yell out, and hope that Zeb would hear it, and relay the instructions before I get attacked. I positioned myself just inside the bathhouse entrance door, and braced myself to run as soon as I needed to.

"I'm going to attempt to shoot the eagle! I need a distraction!" I yelled out. The eagle immediately turned its head to face me as I started yelling. As it flapped its wings and took flight toward my direction, I could hear Zeb yell out in the demon language from somewhere in the village.

The eagle didn't change its target though, and landed not far from the bathhouse. I got ready to sprint out the door as the first strike of the beak hit the bathhouse roof. Cracks formed, and small pebbles fell down inside. I braced myself ready to run as soon as I needed to.

Suddenly, I heard the eagle screech, and I could see its talons move as the eagle changed direction just outside. I took the opportunity to begin the sprint toward the watchtower.

[Vol.3] Ch.20 Destruction Part 2

As I sprinted towards the watchtower, I counted myself quite lucky that I was heard by Zeb. Moving forward, I think I should probably actually dedicate myself to at least learning some of the demon language, even if it's only the basics. From behind, I could hear fireballs bursting against the eagle.

Entering the watchtower, I grabbed the prepared charge of Zaka's blood, and made my way up to the steam cannons. By the time I'd made it to the cannons, it seems that some of the other goblins are throwing their lives down to distract the eagle. In all likelihood, since Zaka shot fireballs at it, they've needed to further distract it to protect him as well.

I open the back chamber of the cannon, and start emptying the blood charge into it as I witness the goblins attempt to do anything to distract the eagle. Every second is precious as the eagle tears through one goblin after another in short succession.

Finally, after tens of seconds, the blood charge has been loaded into the steam cannon. I seal up the back chamber, and begin hurriedly loading the front of the cannon with a packed charge of large grapeshot and padding.

Each second things become more dangerous, with the eagle slowly advancing on Zaka's position, taking out various other goblins who are attempting to throw spears up towards its body.

I rotate the steam cannon, and take aim. Despite everything, I count myself lucky that the eagle hasn't taken to the skies again, seemingly hell bent on causing as much ground destruction as possible which, for the sake of aiming the cannon, makes things easier.

I take aim at its head and upper torso, and infuse all the remainder of my mana in order to fire the cannon. For the second time in about ten minutes this steam cannon fires, and for the second time in ten minutes, an eagle dies. The shot hit true, shattering parts of the rear of the eagle's skull, and shredded parts of its neck and spine.

The eagle's body collapsed forward into the village, breaking some houses, and collapsing parts of the road in the village. The destruction is widespread, far beyond just that however. About a quarter of the village wall has been destroyed, the pavilion roof has been sheered, major damage was done throughout various parts of the village, and reconstruction is likely going to take months. Beyond that, over a dozen goblins died to the second eagle's rampage.

As I went out into the village to more directly assess damage, I noticed a trend which may be useful for rebuilding. Goblins which were underground in one basement or another were all safe. They also, however, failed to hear or notice when any of their fellow goblins needed help. The goblins who rushed out to form a distraction were all goblins who were hiding within their houses when the eagle was making its way to Zaka.

I'll have to discuss the issue with Zaka once village reconstruction begins, but right now, the village is still in emergency mode. There are goblins who were injured by the wing blasts who aren't dead, and some who are trapped in debris. For as long as we can today, we'll be attempting to save as many goblins as we can within the village.

Yesterday, after we'd accounted for all the goblins, many of the goblins were quite tired, and fell asleep early. Today, I've found out why. The goblin who was nearby when the first eagle died prestiged, alongside 8 other goblins who were nearby the area where the second eagle died.

I had though previously that killing a creature is what levelled us up, but now I think it might just be the act of being in the immediate proximity of a dying creature that provides levels. Zaka was also nearby the final eagle's death, and he's now more than halfway to his next prestige. Meanwhile, I didn't gain any levels.

After having Zeb discuss with the goblins who prestiged, a few of them gained a new trait that I'm calling "Last Stand". The gist of what it does is it allows the possessor to overexert themselves beyond their normal limit. It apparently has some nasty downsides, like losing levels alongside extreme pain, so it isn't just a straight boost on its own. That said, it could obviously save their lives in a pinch, so it's not like it's a total loss.

Sadly, among the losses in the village were two of the craftsgoblins. The potter, and the main ropemaker were killed during the second eagle's rampage. There are a few goblins who can easily replace the ropemaker, but the potter, I fear, will probably not be replaced for the foreseeable future. This is partially my fault, given that I can easily make items that they spend a long time working on. It's still an unfortunate loss to the village though.

Today, repairs will kick off in earnest, and I'll be starting my repairs at the bathhouse, as it's arguably the most important damaged structure. I'm also thankful that we still have quite a bit of spare wood piled about, because so many wooden items were destroyed in town. I don't mind using stone doors myself, but I think the goblins much prefer the lighter wood for their daily activities.

After I repair the bathhouse, I plan on fixing the pavilion, then I'll discuss with Zaka what should be done about basements or safehouses within the village. We also need to discuss the idea of expanding out the village wall, given the eagle has already knocked down a considerable portion of it. We'll likely leave the wall for last, after fixing all the other existing buildings in the village, but knowing what we're planning on doing might influence our decisions on other construction matters moving forward.

It's now been two days since we killed the eagles and plans for reconstruction were discussed with Zaka today. We've decided that expanding the walls to the village is a good idea. As part of that initiative, it was also decided that the lower prestige goblins should be the ones to cut down the additional trees that are in the way of where we want the village to expand. Zaka had already cut quite a bit of the area down, but once we build into that area, we'll want clear visibility from the walls again. As for exactly how much more space will be in the village, it was decided that the smaller field that was built on the edge of the village will be enclosed in the wall, along with a mirroring area on the opposite side of the creek. Overall it should add about 50% more area within the wall. In the future, the field can also be cleared if necessary to make room for more buildings.

Before that though, we also decided on two changes to the existing village. First, all the houses are going to be retrofitted with basements. The stone from that should be helpful for building the new extent of wall. Second, on any particular week, a portion of the goblins will be on duty for protection purposes, and a few guard stations will be built near the existing gates of the village in addition to one central building as well. In the future, we might switch from this cycle system to having dedicated guards, but at the current population, it's not quite feasible to support as many guards as would be necessary.

For the next few weeks, Zeb and I will be busy with repairing and updating the village's houses and the pavilion. The goblins themselves have a lot of small repairs they can take care of alongside cleaning all the debris.

After a solid week of work, we've gotten the bathhouse and pavilion repaired, and gotten a lot of the rubble moved to places where it's useful. Everyone has been very busy working in their respective areas. The only person in as much demand as Zeb and I is the carpenter goblin, who seems to be experiencing quite the learning curve related to his profession. He is, after all, attempting to repair things in the village all at once, that previously took months to slowly be built by someone else. At least Zeb and I have the practice of having made all the things we're repairing at least once before.

The artificial tide pool has been quite handy, as the easy food has allowed more labor to be dedicated to repairing the village. It's gotten to the point where we're directing goblins to haul specific amounts of stone rubble to locations so it's already set up for us when we get there. During our brief respites while we work, I'm trying to have Zeb teach me the demon language, but, as I suspected, I'm really not cut out for learning a new language. I've got a few basic phrases down, but my pronunciation is apparently quite abysmal. I'm hoping that it'll get a little easier when I'm not also trying to repair buildings while I work.

[Vol.3] Ch.21 Village Plans

We've been doing repairs for another two weeks within the village itself. I would say that the roads are fully repaired, but as we've been adding basements, a small problem has arisen as a result of the retrofitting. The issue is that all the basements sit too low to have drainage like before, and I don't really want to make a screw pump in each. As such, I'm thinking we'll need a new, deeper drainage system. The issue with that is that it can't just flow into the creek like the current one does, due to the height difference. Instead, it'll have to run a ways away at a gentler slope than the creek until it can finally rejoin the basin.

As a result of this, the roads are needing retrofit as well. We're basically going to pull up and fill the old sewer system, and install a much larger one deeper down. Within the village, I intend to have a few places where we can get down to the sewer, in case we need to clean it out or fix it for some reason.

I've already done quite a bit of the measurements, and at a minimum we'll have to run the sewer about half way to the ocean to get the drop in height necessary. Which means we'll be busy working on this for a while. The good news is that there is an excess of goblin labor willing to help work on these projects right now, so we should be able to work at a good pace. Plus all the stone we carve out should allow us to complete the expanded city wall without needing to do any extra excavation.

For good measure, we plan on making this new sewer a bit bigger than the current needs of the village. We should be able to expand it down the road if necessary, but I'd rather that actually be down the road, and not within the next few months.

Another three weeks of work have passed, and the houses all have basements, and the sewer within the village is dug. The unfortunate bit is that the sewer going out of the town is longer in total length than all the sewers within, so that's going to be a project for a few weeks yet. Enough stone had started to pile up that I've built about a quarter of the new wall to help get rid of all the excess stone that was starting to pile up as well.

Zaka has also completely replenished the goblins numbers again to capacity. He asked us if we could build more houses after we finish all the other work in the village, and that led to a larger discussion. Ultimately, we discussed the issues of maintaining a larger village. First, we'd need dedicated guards who keep the peace, and we already have plans for that. The other thing we'd need related to that is a place to keep prisoners.

Zaka initially said that he could handle a situation like that if it arose, but I pointed out that there had already been one seditious uprising, and sometimes, you can't just reason someone out of their beliefs. If they want to do harm to others, sometimes they need to be punished, or worse. So it was decided that the central guard station would have a holding cell installed in the basement somewhere.

Further discussion on the matter made me realize that I can't just build the jail cell out of stone. At least one goblin has gotten their hands on stone shaping, and it would be silly if people could just escape. So ultimately, I decided that we should plate the whole thing in metal. Some form of metal shaping might be a magic that exists, so prisoners would need to be watched, but at the very least it's better than stone.

Another issue that I said would need addressed is the idea of basic education. Some things within the village are more complicated and dangerous than they appear at first glance, and leaving all the goblins to just figure things out might lead to problems. I'm not talking about a school, as there isn't that much to learn, but instead, a system set in place to help the goblins. First, new goblins should shadow a few jobs that need new people. They don't need to work, but just observe. Then, they can make a choice after a few weeks as to what they want to learn, essentially setting up an apprenticeship.

A third issue that needs addressed is handling waste. By that, I mean excrement and food waste both. At the current population of about fifty, this has already started to be an issue at times, so I want to make two modifications in the village. First, for handling excrement, I want to build a few locations where excrement can either be dumped or relieved into the new sewer. To help handle the excrement, I want to make a small drain in the stream that will run into the sewer. It won't be much water, but if the sewer can at least have some water flowing in it at all times, that should help slowly move waste out of the sewer and eventually to the ocean. As for food waste, some of it can and should be composted outside the town, but some of it will just need to be hauled and disposed of somewhere, likely into the ocean.

Only once these issues are fully resolved do I want to build any more houses in the village. Since we're going to build the guardhouses anyway, the holding cell will be the first thing we make. The education is just a matter of organization, and nothing that I have to build. Waste handling however is going to be something that requires work from both me, and some goblins to haul and handle food waste, along with some retraining on how to handle excrement.

It's been five days, and although the sewer and wall construction are coming along well, construction has slowed once again. The problem is that another eagle, similar to the first one from a year ago, has shown up. It's smaller than the last two, and has lightly colored plumage in places. We spotted it earlier today, and since then, the village is on high alert. We only have one charge of blood stored up from Zaka, so we'll need to make it count.

That said, some of the goblins in the village are much less afraid than before. I've been doing my best to learn the demon language, and I can occasionally pick up small bits of their conversations. Apparently, they really like the taste of the eagle meat. The smokehouse is already pretty full with eagle meat from the last two eagles, so I'm not sure what we'll do with this meat if we get it. The first step is to actually kill the beast.

It's been two days, and we killed the new eagle today. How we achieved this was actually quite interesting. The previous two eagles seemed cautious of the village itself, but this one was much less cautious. We decided one night to make a bait goblin just outside the village using a bunch of fish and other meat, and then contain it in clothes.

Sure enough, the eagle took the bait the next day, and when it swooped in, I shot it with the steam cannon. What followed was a bit of a one sided fight, as the eagle was severely injured, with both its wings in bad condition. Between some of the goblins, Zeb, and Zaka, they were able to finish the eagle off. I didn't participate much in the final killing, but I took care to at least be nearby when the eagle actually died, as I wanted some of the experience as well.

After we killed the eagle, the goblins got to work butchering it, and a bunch of the previously prepared meat was prepared to be delivered to the other village. Ultimately, the food would be wasted anyway, so we figured it would be a good gesture to bring them some of our excess.

Apparently, the first eagle was also much more aggressive than the second and third one, and would frequently be aggressive near the village. With the second and third one, it seemed that they would only do it if they had searched for a considerable time and not found anything available elsewhere. An important question is starting to arise. Why are we only seeing eagles now? Is it the crystal? If so, why only in winter? All questions to look into when I can.

All things considered, it seems like this eagle also gave quite a bit fewer levels than the last two. Zaka only gained a handful of levels, as did I, although a few goblins did prestige this time as well. I'm starting to wonder exactly how levels gained are determined. I might need to do some experimentation after we get the village under control.

As for my stats right now,

<LEGENDARY LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 9
HP: 1328/1328
MP: 793/793
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike

[Vol.3] Ch.22 Uninvited Guests

It's been another 10 days, I've learned more basic phrases in the demon language, and the sewer is at least partially complete now. We cut a smaller channel to the eventual exit point so there would be an outflow point. The reason being that the rains are starting up, and spring has arrived. Work will still need to be done on the sewer, but it needs an outflow point so that it doesn't clog with water.

The wall is almost complete as well, which is good. There have been quite a few incidents of ground birds running about within the village in the mornings since the wall was destroyed, so I think villagers will be happy to not be dealing with that anymore. That said, it might be worth looking into domestication of those birds as a more steady source of food in the future, not that we need it right now. In fact, part of the reason we had so many ground bird incidents was likely due to the fact very little hunting was happening, and most of our food was being harvested from the ocean.

It's been three days, and today we had a massive incident occur in the afternoon. I was finishing up the last section of city wall when a lone goblin came running into the village. His backpack torn, and an arrow embedded into his lower back. I immediately began treating him as Zeb gathered information as to what happened.

After treating the goblin, I immediately started some forensic investigation of the arrow. First, none of the goblins have bows or arrows. At least, not in this village. Second, the arrow was of a pretty decent quality, with a metal tip, and feather fletching. Whoever made this was someone we've never met before. Shortly after I finished my investigation, Zeb finished his conversation with the goblin.

According to the goblin, there were five creatures that attacked him. Two were short, about the height of a goblin, one was covered in shiny material, and the other in a robe. Then there were three taller ones, which stood a little shorter than Zaka. One had the bow and long ears, and was the one that shot at him, one had a sword and was also covered in shiny material, and the last one had a shiny knife.

This goblin was walking back with fish along with two others when they suddenly got ambushed by the group. The goblins were confused, and were suddenly attacked. The other two were cut down mercilessly, while the goblin in front of us ran as fast as he could to get here.

This is a lot to take in. First, I had an odd feeling about all of this. It's been many years since I came to this world, and all I've seen are the demonkind around me, but I still do remember what fantasy races look like. Dwarves. Humans. Elves. I mean, it would be quite the coincidence to run into these races now, wouldn't it? What would be the odds? I can't shake the idea of it though. If the tropes hold, then surely they see us as the bad guys right? That's why they would attack on sight, despite the fact those goblins were unarmed. Plus they have metal equipment by the sound of it, which will probably be a problem in and of itself.

Regardless, it will be a problem. I had no idea how powerful these individuals were, or what they wanted. Seemingly, they didn't mind killing us, so we'd need to be careful of that. God forbid there are more of them as well. Which left me with one choice. We needed to capture them before anything worse happened.

Zeb and I raised the alarm in the village, and despite the plan to only have a few goblins on duty, we went door to door and gathered literally everyone. The idea of bringing everyone is to present ourselves as such an overwhelming force that the other side agrees to surrender. Whether or not this will work, we'd have to wait to find out.

After about an hour since the goblin returned, we set out. Almost fifty of us in total. After following the path, we found the dead goblins, with their ears cut off. The frequent spring rains made tracking the group easy after that through the muddy underbrush. We followed their tracks until we were suddenly attacked.

The attack itself seemed more like a reaction rather than an ambush. A single arrow flew back in our direction, and I was able to intercept it with my stone buckler. From where the arrow came from, I heard something resembling a language, and had the goblins get into position. I had Zeb remind them that our goal is to take them alive. Since we have no way of knowing if they'll understand us, I'm having Zeb stay close to me to act as a translator in demon language, since I myself don't speak it fluently enough.

The goblins spread out, and eventually surrounded the group, although I only counted four. Two short, and two tall. The one with the knife was missing. They were talking amongst themselves as we slowly closed the circle in. When the circle got small enough, the one with a bow shot an arrow, killing another goblin. This is going to be a problem...

The goblins nearby started to charge in, but I'm thankful I know the word stop in the demon language, so I shouted it, and the goblins moved back into position. I hastily turned to Zeb, "Ask them why they attacked us."

Zeb asked the question in the demon language, and although the group didn't react initially, they seemed to react when the short, robed figure in the group moved slightly, and then talked among themselves in hushed tones.

I turned to Zeb, "Tell Zaka to shoot a fireball into the ground between us and them, then ask them again. Ask why they've killed three goblins now. Ask what have we done to them."

Moments later, Zaka shoots a fireball and Zeb asks them questions once again. Again, we have to wait for the robed figure to shift about before anything happens. This time, the robed figure replies, seemingly in the Demon Language, although the language sounds somewhat broken. I have to wait for Zeb to translate it to understand what they're saying.

Zeb says that the robed figure said, "Given chance, you would attack first, no?"

This is almost as annoying as when I was playing pictionary with Zaka years ago to communicate. If the situation wasn't so tense, I might have laughed.

I ask Zeb to translate, "Our village is a peaceful one. You've now killed two fishergoblins, and a laborer. I'm already at my patience end. I'll offer you two choices. One, lay down your weapons and surrender, and your life will be spared. Two, fight and likely die here. Although I'd rather you don't fight."

Zeb translated, and apparently, they weren't in the surrendering mood, because shortly after, another arrow flew out, this time towards Zeb. He ducked under the shot thankfully. As discussed before hand, the plan is to attempt to take them without killing them, regardless of if they want to be captured.

The circle tightened with spears pointed inward, and I looked over each of the individuals. Two individuals in metal armor, one with a spear, one with a hammer. One individual with a bow and leather armor. One individual wearing the robe. Honestly, I'm not sure any of the goblins are going to be super helpful here, especially for taking them alive. Our best bet is to break their will. If we can injure the two wearing armor badly enough, then we might be able to offer surrender again. In which case, I suppose I'll have to try to break some legs.

I move forward in the formation, with Zeb beside me and tell him the plan. My plan is to earth spike one leg of each of the armed individuals at the same time. Their formation is pretty tight, seemingly protecting the individual in the robe, so I might be able to earth spike three legs myself at once. If I can get at least two legs, I want him to offer surrender again.

I move in more, and all the adventurers eyes are on me. Once I get in range, I activate improved earth spike, puncturing one leg on each of the armored individuals. The archer jumps back quickly landing just outside the spears of the goblins, and although I don't break their leg, its clear that it was hit by the spike in a glancing blow.

Zeb calls out again, offering surrender. This time, after a brief discussion amongst themselves, the robed figure starts yelling at the others, and steps out from the group with their hands open and raised above their head. The other three seem exasperated and upset, but after a moment, drop their weapons as well.

After the standoff, I carefully kick their weapons away, and make my way to the group. I quickly dig a hole nearby to get to the stone layer, and fashion a few pairs of stone handcuffs. I remove the full armor from the two individuals who's legs are broken, revealing a male human and a dwarf. The archer is very clearly an elf, although I can't say which gender they are. For that matter, I can't tell with the dwarf either, although they do have quite the beard. The robed figure appears to be a dwarf as well, also with a beard.

With handcuffs made and attached, those who can walk are carefully escorted back to the village, while the two with broken legs are carried by multiple goblins, with myself close behind to keep an eye on them.

Once we finally made it back to the village, I regretted not making a jail sooner. After doing what treatment we could for the broken legs, Zeb and I had to spend hours building a functional cell to keep the prisoners in. Three solid stone walls and a set of stone bars. For tonight that'll have to do. We decided on a rotation of 5 goblins at a time all watching the cell ready to raise the alarm if the group attempts to do anything funny. Ultimately, we have no idea what they're capable of, although hopefully, we can get some answers out of them tomorrow.

[Vol.3] Ch.23 Prisoners

Overnight, a disturbance was reported. The missing fifth member of the group that we were looking for apparently was spotted on the village wall at one point. They shouted something to the group in the jail cell, and the group yelled something back. After which the person wasn't spotted again.

In the morning, before I went to the group in the jail, I prepared a few different fish options and multiple buckets of fresh water. The biggest concern I have moving forward is that wherever these people came from, there might be more. Even if we captured these few individuals, we have no idea about how dangerous others might be. With the lizards and eagles, they were just beasts, and although the eagles showed some intelligence, we were able to easily outsmart them.

With other intelligent beings though, there is a much higher chance that they just swarm us, much like how we swarmed these four. Given their armor and weapon composition, they likely come from a decently sized society. That means that if they get reinforcements and want to fight us, we're screwed. Even if we can take down a lot of them, there is no way we win any war, even if individually we're strong.

Which leaves us with one option, peace negotiations. The hope here is that we can bring them around to negotiate on our behalf, and prevent some form of eradication campaign. Of course, there are a lot of potential pitfalls involved with this. If they're religiously motivated, or have a deep seated hatred for us, then we're probably doomed. Which means we'll need to work on a backup plan as well.

Unfortunately, I'm still quite unskilled at the demon language, which means I'll need Zeb with me to translate things, since the one member of their group who seems to be able to speak some amount of demon does so only slightly better than myself. I really don't want to leave survival up to any misunderstandings at this point, as I've already learned that lesson once.

When we arrived at the jail cell, it appeared that the two that weren't injured were attempting to treat their injured compatriots' legs. Although it actually appeared that they were using some form of magic to do so. The legs both looked significantly better than they had yesterday. Healing magic. That would be convenient to have. We'll have to keep a better eye on the group moving forward though. If they can heal themselves up, there is no reason they couldn't forcibly attempt to escape, which would be a nightmare in and of itself.

Through Zeb, I attempted to open communications, "We've brought some food options and water. It's good to see that you're helping to treat each other's wounds. I would have preferred not to harm you at all if we could have helped it though."

The robed dwarf approaches the food trays that we've slid into the cell, along with the water. The others look at us with quite a bit of suspicion though. The dwarf speaks to us, in a voice a bit higher than I was expecting, and then begins tasting the food.

Zeb looks over to me and asks, "Do you want the direct translation, or what I think they meant to say?"

I think for a moment, and say, "Why don't you ask them which they would prefer. I'd personally prefer what you think they meant, but they might have a preference."

Zeb nods and asks the dwarf. The dwarf looks between Zeb and me with a confused look before saying a few things to Zeb.

"They want to know if their Demon is so bad that I'm having to translate it for you. They don't actually care which I choose." Zeb says.

I let out a chuckle, then say, "What you think they meant is fine. You can let them know that I don't speak demon very well, so that's why you're translating. I don't think hiding that fact is going to be particularly useful. Besides, they can clearly tell I'm speaking a different language between us anyway. They could probably piece it together on their own soon enough."

Zeb nods, and speaks to the dwarf again. At this point, the dwarf had brought the food and some of the water back to the other prisoners, who had each began eating. The dwarf says something back to Zeb.

"They want to know why you don't speak the demon language well." Zeb says.

"Just tell them my reason is probably the same as theirs. It's not my first language." I say.

Zeb nods, and relays the information to the dwarf. The dwarf looks over at me for a little while, seemingly thinking about something. They then shrug and return to eating.

I tell Zeb, "Ask them if they want any furniture or anything. Although they'll have to make do with things made of stone, I don't particularly want them just sitting on the floor here."

Zeb nods and asks them, to which the dwarf seemingly asks the rest of the group before replying to Zeb.

"They would like chairs, a table, and places to sleep, if you're offering." Zeb says.

I respond to Zeb, "Yeah, we can make those pretty easy, so I don't see why not."

Zeb then asks in English, "I know you said that we need to be cautious of bad relations with them, but they did kill a few goblins. Please keep that in mind. The other goblins in the village probably won't take too kindly if prisoners are treated better than themselves."

I reply, "It's good to keep that in mind. We don't need another Kurg incident. That said, we could deal with another Kurg. I suspect though, that we would be unable to deal with what's coming in the near future related to these four. So the balancing act is going to be difficult."

For the next hour or so, Zeb and I furnished their cell with the items the prisoners had requested while they ate. Although I was interested in continuing conversation, I think it's probably best to slowly build up trust. I don't want them to think we're easily exploitable. Instead, I want to earn their respect if possible. If that means waiting until we bring dinner to them to get more info, then so be it. I had a feeling if I asked them about their fifth member at that point, they wouldn't give me real information anyway.

So, for the rest of the day, I began work on the guardhouses, while Zeb continued widening the sewer tunnel. For the time being, trips to the ocean tide pool have been put on hold, and the village has been set to high alert. Thankfully, we have a lot of food stored up in the smokehouse. If we don't have any issues after a few days, we can send larger, escorted groups to the ocean to get fish to replenish our food supplies.

By evening, I'd gotten some work done on the first guardhouse. Thankfully, we didn't have any interruptions throughout the day. Unfortunately, the village had gone through most of the fish we had left, so the only meat on hand now is smoked eagle meat. So for the evening meal, that is what was brought to the prisoners.

After giving it a taste, the group began eating, so I figured it was a good time to ask, "So, who is the fifth member who was up on our village wall last night, and what did you tell them?"

After Zeb translated, the dwarf clearly had a reaction, but replied, "I don't know who you're talking about."

So, they're playing it that way huh. Fine. From their perspective, I'm basically asking them to rat out their ally. I move on with questioning, "Alright, so why did you kill the defenseless goblins who were merely fishing? Before, you said something about how we would have attacked first, but I don't fully understand why you would think that. We're a relatively peaceful group, unless we're attacked."

Zeb translates again, and the dwarf responds after a little bit, "Every interaction I know of between demons and non-demons has resulted in bloodshed. I don't see why this would be any different, although right now is a bit of an anomaly."

I ask, "What do you mean, every interaction?"

The dwarf looks about through the jail wall at the village for a little while, eating some food. They eventually reply, "This place is a bit weird. You really don't seem to know much about anywhere outside of here."

I'm a little bit frustrated by them dodging the question, so I ask again, "What interactions? Enlighten me on what your experience between demons and non-demons has been."

The dwarf lets out a chuckle and begins a long story, "Well, the most recent major event was the invasion of the Demon Lord, Gokura." At this point, during translation, Zeb gives me a worried look and continues, "That was over eight years ago now. Whenever a new demon lord invades, it's always the same story. They land somewhere in The Three Kingdoms, slaughter and devour everyone near where they land, and a united front is formed to eventually push them back. Then a new demon lord will show up eventually. Sometimes it's over a hundred years, sometimes its less than twenty. Every time though, it's devastation."'

After I finish listening to Zeb's translation, I think back. Gokura... Gokura... Where have I heard that before? Oh. I forgot because I don't use it often in English. Everyone here has that name. Gokura.

[Vol.3] Ch.24 Fo Paux

After having the realization about the name Gokura, I realized why Zeb made that worried look while translating. Before we continue diving into this issue, I think I need to talk to Zaka again, and try to get a better understanding of exactly what might have happened. Rather than try to dive more into this, I changed the subject slightly by asking, "If you keep having these 'demon lords' invade, why don't you try to find out where they come from, and take the fight to them? You've already shown up on this island after all."

The dwarf chuckled for the second time before talking, "You really don't understand much of this world do you? Searching for where the demons come from has been done many times in the past. Every time, the expeditions never return. It's not that big of a surprise though. The ocean is teeming with Leviathans. We were lucky to even make it to these islands honestly."

Again, I've got more questions than answers from the conversation, so I asked, "What are Leviathans then? Why do they make travel across the ocean difficult?"

The dwarf simply replied, "They're giant sea monsters. They don't all look the same, but they have one thing in common, they're plenty large enough to sink an entire ship in one go, and they sure do seem to enjoy doing that."

I asked further, "If they're such a threat, why did you bother coming to this island? What was worth such a risk?"

The dwarf shook their head, "You probably wouldn't understand, but a number of creatures we consider a guardian beast has recently been disappearing from one of it's two habitats, and two were spotted flying out to sea a few months ago. These beasts are considered quite important to the protection of our country, so an expedition was prepared to attempt to figure out where they were going, and as luck would have it, as we were setting out, another beast took flight in this direction. We've stopped at two islands before this one, but found no evidence of the beasts."

I started to get even more concerned at that point. The timelines are lining up that these guardian beasts were likely the eagles that we've been killing... For that matter, it's what they were given to eat for dinner. I had a second dilemma now. Do I tell them what I know immediately? They might be more angry with me if I do. If I don't though and they find out later, it'd probably be seen as disingenuous, and any hopes I have of gaining their trust will likely be shot.

After evaluating my options, I decide to tell them. If long term relations are going to succeed, they need to be built on trust.

"About those guardian beasts... We, most likely, killed them. They're really large birds right? They've been coming to this island since last winter, and started killing us demons, so we, or rather I, devised a way to kill them. It was either us or them. The meat we gave you to eat today was harvested from them. I'm sorry that you had to find out about it like this." I said.

I watched the dwarf carefully as Zeb translated for me. Their face went from disbelief, to shock, then disgust. They immediately said something to the rest of the group, and they all stopped eating, and returned the tray of food to us. I suppose that was probably to be expected.

"I'm sorry, if I'd known the circumstances, we wouldn't have given you that to eat." I said.

The dwarf only responded with a stare and no longer wanted to talk.

Things did not go well, clearly. To mend this bridge, even more effort is going to have to be put in place. I left their prison cell, and despite it being evening, I personally went out to hunt some of the ground birds nearby that had become rampant in recent months. I brought them back intact, and butchered them in front of the prison cell, so that the group could see I wasn't feeding them more of the eagle, then cooked and gave them the new meat. Hopefully that gesture will at least indicate that I really didn't mean any harm before.

After a day, the prisoners still weren't talkative. I've continued to spend my own time hunting other meat for them just outside the village. I'm not particularly pleased about that fact, as I've personally grown accustomed to not needing to hunt small game all the time anymore. On the bright side, it's probably keeping my skills with the spear sharper than they would be otherwise.

I took the opportunity today to talk with both Zeb and Zaka about all the information the prisoners revealed to us. There are a lot of questions that the conversation with the prisoner's presented me with.

"It sounds like Gokura isn't just a family name." I state bluntly before asking, "What is the full backstory behind that name?"

Zaka states, "That name belongs to everyone who can trace themselves back to the noble Gokura. The individual who was in charge of the territory I was born in. Famine struck our lands, so many of us fled."

"From what I understand, the seas are dangerous. Surely famine wasn't as bad of a threat?" I asked.

"The famine isn't what we fled. It was the other demons. There are two options when famine or disaster strikes, by rule of the emperor. The first option is to die, and be devoured by those stronger than you. The second option is to go and claim new lands for the emperor, and gain your right to live." Zaka said, "I chose to try to live, as did most of us."

"Just how many are we talking about here." I asked.

"I couldn't say exactly how many. We set out in longboats holding twenty individuals each, but they stretched further than I could see. Many, many individuals set out." Zaka replied.

"Wait, I thought you came here alone?" I asked, confused.

"No, when we left, there were many in my boat, and many more about on the waves. Not long before I landed on this island, there were only half of us left alive in the boat. Hunger had taken most of us, I do not wish to say more about it." Zaka said sternly before continuing, "Then the storm hit. Many were thrown overboard, and I was the last to cling to the boat before eventually crashing here."

"Did no one else crash here?" I asked.

"I searched for a long time. No one else seems to have landed here." Zaka said, "I earned my right to live, I've fulfilled the second option presented by the demon emperor."

"I ask all this, because our prisoners speak of the demon lord Gokura, who ravaged their lands, eating and killing all those they interacted with." I said.

"Well, they are liars then. Lord Gokura remained on the continent to face fate. Unless they refer to the viscount who did flee with us." Zaka says.

I had a sudden thought, and asked Zeb, "Just how certain are we about the translation you gave me? The prisoner's demon language seems pretty broken."

"I'd say it's more likely than not that the information has been lost due to their poor understanding of the language." Zeb replies.

So there is a chance it's not actually whatever noble Zaka served under, but just a lesser noble, or some other powerful demon that they are referring to, who shared the family name.

"Okay, assuming they aren't referring to the actual Gokura proper, why would they all attack and eat everyone indiscriminately?" I asked.

"It is the natural order to fight for land. As to why they ate them, I can give a bit of insight." Zaka said, "Within the demon tradition, to eat another demon is considered an honor to their memory, although I personally disagree. It is said that by consuming another, their essence will continue on within your core forever. By the end of the journey, those of us left were incredibly starved, so it likely was a natural result, honor the dead and serve as a meal."

That's... a bit messed up. I ask, "Why do you personally disagree with that?"

Zaka replies, "I already said I would rather not go into the final details of my what happened in my boat, but it was related to that. There was no honor there."

I think I might have an idea as to why he doesn't want to talk about it, so I won't press the issue. Given starvation and the long ship ride though, likely they resorted to cannibalism to live. More importantly, why did their longboats survive the trip? Aren't the Leviathans supposed to be incredibly deadly? The mysteries keep piling up. At least I have a bit more information as to why the demons keep invading our prisoner's homelands. If they'll talk to me again, maybe we can come to a closer understanding between us based on this new information.

[Vol.3] Ch.25 Silent Treatment

Unfortunately, the prisoners weren't willing to talk with us for this entire week. Given we haven't had any further issues externally, we're going to start sending guarded groups to gather sea food again. The first and largest guardhouse is coming along well, although I don't know that our prisoners will particularly like being relocated to it when it's complete.

Initially I had intended to make the jail cell in the basement out of metal, to help prevent escape, but given the current circumstance, I feel that it's more pressing that we get this completed sooner. As such, the basement of the main guardhouse is finally done, along with a lot of the first floor's walls.

The basement itself is quite large stretching 25 feet long by 15 feet wide. On one end there is a large holding cell spanning the full fifteen feet of width by ten feet long. The full width is spanned by thick stone bars, and I've devised a basic stone gate and locking mechanism for entrance into it. The holding cell itself has a toilet with a small privacy barrier to the rest of the cell. Individuals outside the cell can still see the toilet though, for security reasons. For the time being, I've also put some stone beds, a table, and chairs in the holding cell. In the future, I want to just have a bench or two, but considering I plan on moving our prisoners here soon, I may as well have it ready.

In front of the cell is a five foot wide hallway stretching from one wall to another. One side of the wall also has an embedded fireplace so that light and heat can be produced if needed. Above the hallway are the slatted floor sections I've become accustomed to creating to allow air and some natural light in from above.

The hallway then turns at one wall and continues to a stairway opposite the holding cell to return to first floor. Along this hallway there is a small closet measuring three feet by ten feet, and a single small cell measuring seven feet by ten feet. The general positions in the jail area allow a single guard to sit near the fireplace and see into both cells.

The first floor, when complete is intended to have a few rooms for storing guard gear, and a front desk area for handling any complaints that might need to be addressed. Since this is the central guardhouse, it isn't actually intended to have a lot of guards in it at any point in time, just those watching prisoners and handling administrative tasks. As such, it is only being built one story tall. The guard houses at the gates are intended to be built taller than the walls, and have lookout posts on top. They probably should also have a window facing the road behind the gate too.

Once the central guardhouse is complete, we'll move the prisoners there. Since they aren't being talkative anyway, I feel like it's fitting to put them in a cell underground. Use of the metaphorical carrot and stick.

I've been finishing up the central guardhouse for the last four days, and today, it is finally done. Before we moved the prisoners, I worked with some of the goblins to show them how the gate works in the holding cell. Ultimately, the prisoners would probably be able to break free pretty quickly, but that should make enough noise that we can stop them before they actually escape. The previous cell they were kept in was close to the wall of the village, but this guardhouse is right in the center of town, which should make escape even harder to attempt.

After I was sure that at least a handful of goblins knew how to operate the new jail cell, it was time to move the prisoners. Although their attitude was clearly bad, none of them attempted escape, and they were successfully moved from the outdoor cell to the underground one.

After that was completed, I spent the rest of the day demolishing the old cell and moving the stone to where one of the guardhouses is going to go. Ultimately, they should provide some benefit if we need to defend ourselves again, so it's still pretty high on my priority list to get those built.

After the guardhouses are complete, I need to build the bathroom locations in town. Then, it's on to more housing. Previously, I had intended to just build regular houses, like I had been for a while. That said, depending on if or when someone comes to rescue this group we have captured, we might need way more people than we currently have. As such, it might be time to introduce high density housing.

I personally am not a big fan of the idea of introducing wealth disparity by having apartment style buildings in the village, but when push comes to shove, I think I can build a building that can house eight goblins in the time it would normally take for me to build three houses, which means that it's a good investment time wise. In an ideal world, it's just temporary housing, and someone can build nicer housing that goblins can eventually move into. For recently created goblins, it's better than sleeping in the street, and gives them somewhere to keep any personal belongings, so it's not that bad.

Either way, it'll be some time before we actually reach that point. I had been hoping I could convince the group of prisoners before, but that seems like it's becoming less and less likely now, so being prepared for other scenarios is also important. As such, before I do any of this, I have one project that I want to do that shouldn't take more than a day.

Currently, the sewer is almost complete. Downstream, there is a grate made of stone that covers the exit to the sewer to prevent anything from going up the sewer to get to the village. Periodically in the sewer, I want to make more grates, just as extra defensive measures. Then, in the second level basement in the pavilion, I want to make a hidden entrance to the sewer. Ultimately, it'll just be a foot thick stone, marked slightly so that I can tell where to cut. If we need to secretly evacuate the village during a siege of some kind, I can open up that section of wall, and we can evacuate down the sewers.

From there, ideally we could then make our way out and around the village and up the mountain. On earth, taking over islands full of cave systems and hidden areas was notoriously difficult, so my intention is to start enabling those strategies here to help us if we need to fight any invading forces.

I've steadily been working on construction for the last eight days, the whole time the prisoners have refused to talk. Finally, today, I'd had enough of it, and let them know that if they aren't even going to communicate with us, then I intend to remove their beds and cut their food supply somewhat. Ultimately, if they're just going to be a burden, its not worth wasting the extra resources on them. I understand that a blunder was made feeding them eagle meat, but I've been careful to feed them other food, and I had no way of knowing before that conversation that it would be a problem.

Even if there has been a lack of progress from the prisoners, there has been plenty of progress with projects in the village. The first of the four gate guard stations is complete, and the sewer was fully completed two days ago. There has been no disturbances reported by anyone in the village either. Our guard is still up though, and the fishergoblins are always escorted to and from the artificial tide pool.

If things remain quiet after I've finished all the construction I have planned, I think I want to make a trip to the mountain peak again. I haven't been there since any of the eagles showed up, and I feel like it could be useful. Ultimately, from the peak I can also spend a few hours and look over the entire coastline of the island to look for any ships. If I don't see any, it doesn't mean we are safe, but it should at least give me some insight into the situation.

For another two weeks, the prisoners had remained silent, however, I noticed something today about them. Before, despite them not talking, they had seemed confident. Today, they seemed a little less so than before. Perhaps it was due to the decreased rations, the lack of beds, and being underground. There could have been many reasons, but whatever the reasons are, I hope that they'll open back up to conversation. Ultimately, I'd rather not be punishing them any more than I already am.

I also should be finishing up the second to last guardhouse today, and Zeb has been working on getting some of the tunnels dug to the sewer for the public restrooms, so that project should be much faster to complete than I had initially anticipated.

[Vol.3] Ch.26 Siege Engines

Ten days of work, and I've gotten the final guardhouse complete, and the public bathrooms are done and functional. I've started work on the first of the high density housing buildings. It's basically a two story building with a central hallway connecting four units on each floor. It takes the space of about four houses, but since it houses eight goblins, it's not just more effective time-wise, but also space wise. I plan on building three of these buildings for the time being.

The prisoner's moods have also been deteriorating even more over this time. What started as general unease amongst them has changed to an even more foul mood. The goblins on duty have reported that they occasionally yell at each other now, although we don't understand what they're saying. I've decided we should keep more goblins stationed to watch them, in case they fight each other. If that happens, we'll probably have to move some to the smaller cell to keep them from hurting each other.

After another six days, the group of prisoners had an incident. It seemed like tempers had been flaring, and eventually, a fight broke out between the human and dwarf who had been wearing armor before. Although the goblins on duty tried to stop the fight quickly, both the human and dwarf ended up quite beaten up. They also ended up harming not just the two goblins who tried to stop the fight, but also the elf who attempted to break the fight up early. I'm personally just thankful it wasn't a ploy to escape. When I heard that they had started fighting and the goblins watching had attempted to stop it, I immediately thought of the possibility that the goblins might be killed and the prisoners might attempt to escape.

Although they hadn't been very communicative up until this point, the dwarf we had talked with in the past helped us to at least identify that the human had been the aggressor in the situation. As such, they've been moved to the solitary cell for the time being. Unfortunately, they now occasionally shout at the other prisoners from their lone cell. The whole ordeal is becoming even more of a headache.

On the bright side, I'm nearly done with the first of the apartment complexes. The basement in the complex is a bit weird though. I wasn't sure what to do with it, since it's technically shared by all the domiciles, so for now it's just empty. It will at least give the inhabitants a place to hide, even if it is quite dark.

After two more days, I've finally finished the first apartment complex, and the human seems to have finally quieted down. There is a chance he's just lost his voice though, and the yelling will resume soon. It's hard to say. Considering how long it's been, I'm actually quite surprised no one else has shown up to try and rescue the prisoners. We've now got two steam cannon charges of Zaka's blood stored up again. Honestly, it might be worth building a stationary siege engine like a trebuchet or catapult to give us extra defensive capabilities against targets on the ground.

The steam cannon was necessary for dealing with the eagles, due to them flying, but having a trebuchet would probably be useful if we had an army trying to attack us. Of course, that could turn out to be entirely useless thanks to magic, but based on everything we've seen so far, I think it should at least be somewhat useful. Although magic exists, and some of it is fairly powerful, it seems like the overall power level of most individuals is fairly low. Following that logic, siege engines should at least be useful for cutting down the numbers of low power individuals.

Before I finish building the next two apartment complexes, I think I'll try my hand at designing a trebuchet, and if it works out, we can build a few around the walls of the village. It should be possible to try to build a ballista as well, given we have rope and wood. The concern I have with a ballista is that the wood here is a bit softer than earth wood. If we can make it work though, adding ballistae to the walls would also vastly increase our defensive abilities.

We have a few goblins who already can throw a spear almost like a ballista, and I've seen it be useful, so allowing other goblins without that skill to perform that feat should also be useful. At this rate, I'll end up turning the village into quite the fort. When the only threats were wildlife, it seemed like building heavy defensive weapons might be a waste. The only time it would have been useful, when the lizards were sieging the village, we were trapped without enough resources to attempt to make any siege weapons. Now that the threat is coming from intelligent creatures, I'm kicking myself for not considering building them sooner.

I've spent twelve days working on designing a working trebuchet, and things haven't been going great. I've learned some valuable lessons working on the trebuchet related to the strength of the wood here. The first four days were spent building a small model trebuchet, and the fifth day was spent calibrating it so that it would properly throw the projectile, which turned out to be quite the hassle. The bigger issues came after that. Since I made a smaller model, I figured all I would need to do is scale up.

That turned out to be harder than I thought. I mentioned before that the wood here is quite soft compared to earth wood. The larger scale trebuchet's arm snapped. Multiple times. This trebuchet is about the size I would actually want for defensive purposes. From top of the arm to base, it reaches about seven feet over the height of the city walls, for a total height of 18 feet. I've been working on a few different solutions for the arm snapping, but I'm getting quite frustrated. I don't particularly want to thicken the throwing arm any more than I already have tried to, as it's starting to significantly reduce the capacity of the device.

While I've been working on this, Zeb has been working on building the next apartment complex, and he's about a quarter of the way done. I often forget just how much time and mana I save with improved stone shaping, but when I see it in action, it's quite astonishing.

After five days, I had an idea and a breakthrough. I was at my wits end trying to reinforce the wooden lever arm of the trebuchet. Stone is both too rigid and heavy, and any combination and attempts resulted in failure. However, I finally realized that I do have the option of using metal for this. While copper might work, the new metal also should be useful, albeit labor intensive to make. Ultimately, I made rings of metal that I embedded in the wooden lever arm, and then ran a longer reinforcing beam between each of the rings.

Thankfully for my sanity, this resulted in a success. The larger trebuchet was completed. The bad news is that I want three more made, and it does take quite some time to process all the wood to make these. Thankfully, I had help building the first trebuchet in the form of the carpenter goblin alongside two recently summoned goblins who are now living in the first apartment complex. I'm hoping that I can leave most of the construction of the other three trebuchets to that group, and only step in to help when it comes time to add the metal parts.

As long as they end up being able to handle that construction, I want to move on to designing a ballista.

Compared to the trebuchet, the ballista has actually been a bit easier to design. Although it has its own issues. I've been working on it for five days, and although it isn't perfect, it's functional. The biggest issue with the design I've come up with is that after firing it between ten and twenty times, the wooden bow sections on either side tend to give out. The wood here just isn't quite to the construction standards I'd have liked really.

That's fine though. Unlike the trebuchets, it's easy enough to replace these sections on the ballistae when they break, which honestly, if you get ten shots out of them during a fight, then you probably will have time to replace these parts. I've designed this one with a stone base capable of being rotated and aimed, although it's maximum vertical angle is only about thirty degrees or so.

The downside of this is that I'll actually need to expand the wall of the village in sections where I want these built. The trebuchets are just being built behind the wall, since the lever arm and sling can shoot over the top safely, but the ballistae need to be built on the wall, which would leave no room to walk around the device or store ammo for it. As such, anywhere that I want to build a ballista will need a larger rounded section behind it in order to actually be useful.

I'd like to say that is easy enough to do, but we've actually managed to run most of our stone reserves dry again from all the other construction. Which means to actually build the ballista like I want, we'll need a new source of stone. I'd like to just expand the reservoir area to get the stone, but given that we still are unsure about being attacked at any moment, I think I have a slightly better idea for a way to get excess stone.

[Vol.3] Ch.27 New Information

I want to place a total of twenty ballistae on the walls around the village. For each, I'll need around 400 cubic feet of stone to improve the wall near it. Initially I thought I'd just make the expanded wall section solid, but after thinking about it for a bit, I think making the semi-circular expansion both larger and hollow with a stairway down inside will be the better option. That way ammo and spare parts can be stored directly underneath the ballistae themselves.

As for getting that 8000 total cubic feet of stone, I said I had an idea. I want to carve another tunnel. This time, the tunnel is going to be headed up the mountain, rather than down. The purpose? A second escape route. I mentioned that heading up the mountain is probably the safer bet if we had to flee the village, and that's exactly what I want to make a way to do. The tunnel is planned to be about 4 feet wide by 6 and a half feet tall. Which means it'll run only about 300 feet by the time I have enough stone for the wall sections. We'll probably have to go a bit further as well though, since more stone will also be needed for the new apartment buildings. I don't want the tunnel to end there though. I'd like if it could go much further before surfacing, so for now, it'll just be a dead end.

Overall though, I don't actually expect the construction to take too long. I should be able to cut quite a bit of stone in a day, and with some goblins helping haul everything to the construction sites, I suspect that my own travel time to and from the bathhouse to recharge mana will actually be one of the biggest time consumers on the project.

I was surprised by how fast we actually completed these additions to the walls of the village. A mere ten days is all it took. Of course, that isn't including the ballistae. Right now the carpenter is actually still working on the second trebuchet, so it'll actually be quite a while before any of the ballistae are made. Although I myself am quite interested in building them, things have been quiet, and most of the village has gotten quite complacent again. Ultimately, I want to know if there actually is a threat lurking somewhere on the island.

My demon language has come along somewhat in the last few months, which obviously has come in handy for construction, as I haven't needed Zeb to translate everything for me. It's also helped me build rapport with the goblins, which was something that I hadn't really considered as a cause for the strife between the goblins and myself before. To help build that rapport even more and for safety reasons, I want to bring three or four goblins with me on my short exploration mission.

By leaving Zeb in the village, the new apartments can also get more construction done, plus I can trust him to keep an eye on the prisoner situation. Speaking of the prisoners, they've become much more depressed in the jail cell lately. Is it the five stages of grief, or something along those lines? Sure seems like it. I mean, I guess they're in a pretty bad situation. If they cooperated, they wouldn't be in there though. They've chosen this path for themselves to some degree, but the opportunity for them to come around and cooperate is still on the table, if they'll accept it.

By tomorrow I plan on having the goblins selected and beginning our exploration trip.

Today we carefully did the first stage of the exploration trip. Which simply involved slowly using the road to return up to my cave home. After we checked that it was safe, and that no one was hiding inside somewhere, we stayed the night. We took about twice as long to actually reach the cave house as normal because we were trying to remain stealthy on our way up. This left us with an entire half a day to spend at the cave house. The goblins were content to just relax, so I let them. I myself decided to take the opportunity to weed as much of the terraces as I could, and then harvested some spuds for us to eat for dinner.

The intent for the next few days is to use the cave house as a base of operations. Since we're quite high up, there are occasional clearings which make seeing large swaths of the island possible. Our goal is to find these clearings, and use them to at least get a cursory look at any changes to the island.

We went to the first clearing today. This was one that I've known about for a long time, but I haven't come back to in years. It's the area where I first found the slightly sweet flowers that I've used for seasoning on occasion. Ultimately, if you head up through the difficult rocky terrain for a bit, you end up above the tree line by a few dozen feet, and get a good view of the island from there.

In fact, while up here, I was able to see the main goblin village. Although hard to tell, I think I also spotted the second goblin village. It isn't nearly as pronounced though, and I couldn't spot any buildings, just the fact there seemed to be an area with fewer trees. The main village has been clear cut in such a large area that I can clearly make out the rectangular city walls along with little dots inside it, which are the buildings.

Other than that though, I didn't see anything out of the ordinary.

In five additional days, we found two more clearings, and both didn't reveal anything out of the ordinary. With that in mind, tomorrow the plan is to climb to the peak. I know for certain that we can at least see every side of the island from there, although the view is from so high up that it doesn't tend to reveal much information.

Our trip up towards the peak today was far more fruitful than I imagined it would be. First, we found not one, but two abandoned eagle nests. Both were built in large rocky areas using large branches and trees as the base. One of the nests also contained an exceptionally large number of bones that were goblin sized. The other one also had a few bones, although not nearly as many as the first.

After that, when we reached the peak and walked around the rim of the mountain, I spotted something that was different from the last time I was up here. On the far side of the island, opposite the valleys where the goblins live, things looked a bit different. That area already didn't have nearly as thick of forests as the goblin side. Now however, there is a large section near the coast where it looks like trees had been cut down and a makeshift fort was made with palisades.

To make it all the way down there would probably take a full day, maybe more. After a discussion with the goblins, we've decided to start our trek down to investigate. We should be able to make it to the fort a few hours before nightfall. That should give us adequate time to scout from a distance to see if we spot anything.

We made our way down the mountain today towards the fort. From a reasonably safe distance we kept watch. No one entered, no one left. By nightfall, no fires were set either. We've retreated up the mountain a short distance to sleep for the night, tomorrow we'll observe for a few more hours, and if it looks clear, we'll attempt to enter the fort and see what is inside.

The fort ended up being abandoned, but it did leave us with some valuable clues. While there were a few buildings inside, they were mostly makeshift structures made entirely of wood. Two of the six had already collapsed, and there were very few items left inside. The only things that were left were pieces of furniture that had clearly been made from the nearby trees that were also used to make the palisades. A quick count of makeshift beds gives an approximate headcount of 30 people.

A small path had also been cut between the fort and the ocean. While there is evidence that small boats had been perched in the sand higher up the beach, any evidence of larger boats have been lost to the tides.

I recall from the first time I climbed to the mountain peak that the view of this beach stretched quite a distance with sand, but right now it seems fairly short. This is just a hypothesis, but I think that this beach actually reaches a decent distance out under the drastic tides that this island experiences.

Whoever had been here has clearly packed up and left. I'm tempted to burn the fort to the ground and lay traps everywhere, as an obstacle to any future landing parties, but if there is still a chance of peace talks, then I probably should refrain. With this valuable new information, we decided it was time to return to the village.

[Vol.3] Ch.28 A Conversation with a Dwarf

The trip back to the village took four days. After we arrived, I had a brief meeting with Zeb and Zaka discussing what we found. After some discussion about what to do, a general plan began to form. Currently, there doesn't appear to be any large presence left on the island, other than the individuals we have in the prison. That being the case, unescorted trips out of the village should be safe once again.

However, we don't actually know if it will remain safe forever. As such, it's been decided that a few goblins will each take weekly turns up at my cave home. Then, once a day, at least one of them needs to climb to the peak of the mountain and do a quick visual check around the island for anything out of the ordinary. It might not be perfect, but I could spot the previous landing point and camp from the peak, so I'm hoping any future landing points will also be visible. If something is spotted, then the scouts should return to the village immediately to inform us. Once winter sets in, we'll have to withdraw from the mountain peak once again, and we'll need a new plan at that point.

After the discussion with Zeb and Zaka, I talked with Zeb a little bit about the situation with the prisoners. Before I left, they were already quite depressed. Now, it's gotten worse. It's come to the point where the dwarf that we communicated with in the past stopped eating two days ago. Which is obviously very bad. I've decided to re-increase their meals to three a day as a stopgap for the other members who are still eating.

As for the starving dwarf, I've decided that we'll have to do something about the situation. I really don't want them dying by starvation. Which means I'm going to have to lighten their mood somehow. I can't just let them go though. Tomorrow, we'll start the process of attempting to improve their mood.

The first thing we attempted to do was simply talk to the dwarf. They haven't been talkative in the last few months, ever since the eagle incident, and today was no exception. Given they weren't communicating, or for that matter even acknowledging our attempts at communication, we decided it was time for more desperate measures. We removed them from the cell, and brought them outside. Their cell mates attempted to fight back some when we went to remove them, but given their weakened state, we were able to remove them without too much trouble.

Even if they aren't acknowledging that we're talking to them, they can still hear us, so we continued talking to them despite their lack of responses. The first thing we did was give them a thorough cleaning in the stream, which they didn't react to. After which, we attempted to give them food again, and they didn't eat.

"Look, I understand that we've been keeping you in a prison for a few months now, and that can be depressing, but from our point of view, you've killed three of our people, seem to have no remorse for it, and worship creatures that kill us in droves." I say in the demon language, occasionally pausing to ask Zeb for a particular word.

I take a brief pause. I don't really want to chastise them here, but I need to make sure boundaries are set before continuing, "However, I don't think anyone benefits from you or your friends deaths. I really do just want to get along with people peacefully. So, for today at least, I'm going to take you around the village, and show you the various struggles we've gone through in these past years since we've been here, so you can understand where we're coming from, and hopefully see that we aren't so different, and that I'm not just trying to trick you."

They still didn't respond verbally, but at least when I started to try to lead them around town, they walked under their own power. I started the tour at the stream, and recounted the construction of the levee after the flood years ago. Then I walked them along the streets, explaining the sewer system I built. Then I talked about the houses, and how the goblins here lived before the village was built with stone. I showed them the pavilion where the goblins gather and eat each night, and talk about each of their days.

Then I walked them down to where the workshops are built, and explained how each of the goblins had taken an interest in some trade, and how they worked hard each day to perfect their craft. I explained why we had walls in the village, and the tribulations with the giant lizards from a few years ago. I didn't lead them out of the village, but pointed down the path where I explained how goblins went out to bring back fish for the village, gather salt, and tend to the few fields that the village has.

After all that, I explained that ultimately, I'd like to just be able to relax and research the various interesting phenomena of this world. Alongside that, I showed them the furnace, and talked about the methods we followed to refine the metal ore. Finally, after a few hours, the tour ended at the bathhouse. Rather than explain the bathhouse immediately, I figured it'd be beneficial to just let them soak in the mana warmed water for a while.

After they entered the warm water, they showed some surprise on their face. While we soaked I said, "You know, what we have here may not be much, but for the most part, everyone is just trying to live their lives and enjoy what they can. Soaking in this water is something that all the goblins enjoy, even if that wasn't its original purpose."

The dwarf turns their face to me as I talk, which I take as a good sign so I continue, "I built this after almost two years of hard work doing research on something I call mana crystals. They're little crystals that we can find in a cave here on the island. They seem to have some kind of capacity for mana, and can recharge you if you're low on mana. This bathhouse is actually powered by one of those. A very large one."

I was getting ready to continue, but for the first time in what has been months, the dwarf spoke to me in a weak voice, "Show me."

I was glad they said something, but this poses a problem. I can't just show them the crystal immediately, mostly because I'm afraid what might happen if they have a way to break it.

I respond, "No, I'm afraid I can't show you it right away. I don't know that I can trust you. It's not exactly easy to make one that large, so I don't really want to have to do that again."

The dwarf replied for the second time, "Make? You made it?"

That was something I'm more willing to talk about so I oblige, "Yes, I made it. It's a real pain. It took me many months to make one large enough that it could go to the surface. Of course, if we touched it directly, we'd die. It was a big ordeal to get it down here, then build this bathhouse to allow the actual use of the thing."

The dwarf sat in silence for a while before saying, "Fine. I'll live for now."

That was good enough for me, so I simply relaxed in the water for a while with the dwarf. As the sun set and it became time to return the dwarf back to their comrades, I told them, "If we can come to some mutual understandings between us, it's clear this can be a beneficial relationship. We'll talk more tomorrow."

They didn't reply verbally, but when they were returned to their cell with food, they ate, which was a step in the right direction. Their comrades also seemed exceptionally worried about them when they returned, but thankfully no fights broke out between the guards and them in the night.

The next day, I went down in the morning to bring food to the prisoners, and then to have a conversation with the dwarf while they ate. Again, I had Zeb accompany me in case my language skills weren't quite up to snuff.

"Alright, as a bit of a trust building exercise, I figure we can ask questions back and forth to each other. You can ask first," I say.

The dwarf thinks for a little while before asking, "How did you make crystal?"

I laughed briefly to myself at this. I should have seen that coming, I reply, "Alright, you can ask another question. The crystal matter is on hold until I feel like we can trust each other enough."

The dwarf sighed and then asked, "Are you leader, or him?" He says, pointing to Zeb.

I let out another chuckle. In some ways I'm the leader I suppose, but no, I don't consider myself the actual leader. Mostly because I don't want to have to manage people. I end up giving my response, "Someone else. I don't like managing problems between people."

"Who?" the dwarf asks.

"Nope, one question at a time," I say. I think for a little bit before asking my question, "Why starve yourself?"

"Things seem bleak. No hope," the dwarf says.

I almost ask another question myself, but catch myself and say, "Alright, your turn."

"Who is leader?" the dwarf asks.

"A hobgoblin named Zaka. He's the oldest here," I say, giving the dwarf a little extra info for free. I then ask, "Why did things seem bleak?"

The dwarf pauses for a moment, and then talks to the others in the cell. After a minute they respond, "Rescue very late. Maybe not coming."

Well, that would certainly explain a few things. Thinking back on how things have gone with the prisoners, they went from somewhat cocky, to arguing amongst themselves, and then eventually depressed. If they thought they were getting rescued, they probably figured it was only a matter of holding out until then. When they didn't show up, they probably got anxious, and started arguing with each other over what to do. Then as they came to terms with their situation, they figured they were as good as dead.

As I finish through the thought process, the dwarf asks their next question, "Why not kill us?"

"I've said before, there isn't a benefit. I'd rather make friends than enemies. There are all sorts of problems in the world, no reason to make even more problems for myself," I say.

[Vol.3] Ch.29 Dwarven Lore

My turn for a question, "What's your name?"

They speak their name, "Shastasha Korsask."

The pronunciation was quite difficult for me to grasp, given it's quite different from both Demon and English.

The dwarf follows up with, "And your name?"

"Gokura Zakarus is my full name. I go by Zack," I say. Shortly after I stated it, I realized I hadn't had the chance to talk with the prisoners before about all I'd learned from Zaka about the history of the Gokura name. The surprise shows on Shastasha Korsask's face after I give my name, but thankfully they don't seem as disturbed as they did with the situation with the Eagle.

"Should I call you by your full name when we speak?" I ask.

"You can call me Shasta," she replies, "What do you know about the Demon Lord Gokura?"

I was going to tell them most of what I'd learned from Zaka at some point anyway, and since its unrelated to the crystal, I figure I might as well be open. I spent a few minutes recounting the information Zaka told Zeb and I, with Zeb's help for some of the more complicated parts.

Next is my turn, so I ask, "How did you learn the demon language?"

Shasta shies away slightly but says, "From prisoners. For information gathering."

Well, that does explain some of their difficulty with the language. Not that mine is particularly great.

Shasta asks me, "What is demon homeland like?"

"I don't know, I'm from this island." I reply. "How do your four know each other?"

"I'm researcher from dwarf capitol, 'Korsask'. They're group tasked with protection," Shasta says. Rather than ask another question after this, Shasta says, "I'm tired of questions."

Which honestly, I'm relieved. It's good for building trust and understanding, but it's actually getting kind of stale. I still have lots of questions, but I'm tired of the back and forth through the jail bars.

As a reward for the conversation, I offer to take the prisoners each, one at a time, to the bathhouse today. After Shasta explains to the others, the only one other than herself who takes up the offer is the other dwarf. Each seems to thoroughly enjoy the time relaxing in the bath as well, which I hope will help us move forward.

I've had a few more conversations with Shasta in the past three days, and gained a bit more information into her background. Dwarves, it seems, are named based on which mountain city they were born in. As Shasta was born in the capitol of Korsask, that is her last name. She isn't a particularly high level researcher in her country either. This entire expedition, in fact, was expected to end in failure.

The open ocean is considered incredibly dangerous, so it was half expected that they wouldn't even return to begin with. However, the eagles aren't considered guardian beasts for nothing. Historically, they've been known to single handedly thwart demon invasions attempting to move from the human continent to the dwarven continent. As such, they're considered something of a strategic asset to the dwarves.

They aren't exactly peaceful with the dwarves, however. The dwarves offer them up livestock year round to keep them sated. If livestock aren't readily available, then the eagles seem to be pretty indiscriminate with who they attack. Since any invading demons tend to scare off the livestock caretakers and eat any remaining livestock, the eagles begin preying on the demons that move into that territory.

The other dwarf's name is Katarko Lesigort and he apparently hails from one of the villages near the eagle territory in question. He convinced his adventuring party to take this task because he is worried about his hometown if the eagles disappear. Since he's the one who convinced them to come here, that's why the human got into a fight with him before. This human hasn't actually been with his party for that long, only a few months before coming here, which is likely why tensions flared to the degree they did.

There is a second place with eagles in the dwarven kingdom, and its the only other place that they knew of until now that houses a population. That place is in the nearby mountains around Korsask. This leads me to why Shasta is so interested in the crystal in the bathhouse. The dwarven capitol houses a unique artifact that was supposedly uncovered 800 years ago. A giant mana crystal that was found deep beneath Korsask. The dwarves called this crystal 'ParTor', which roughly translates to GodStone.

The city of Korsask itself is built near the base of the mountain, and partially inside it. Flowing down Mt. Korsask is a large waterfall and river, which the dwarves have carved multiple channels throughout the city to utilize the river. That river flows into a large bathhouse near the royal palace. There, in that bathhouse, is where ParTor is stored. It heats the water and imbues the river with mana. It's said in dwarven culture that once ParTor was placed in the royal bathhouse, the eagles blessed the capitol with their protection.

Shasta thinks, and I agree, that I've probably made an artificial version of ParTor. Given the recent information, I've decided that tomorrow, with extra escorts, I'm willing to show Shasta the large mana crystal I grew.

"Small." That is what Shasta said when she saw the crystal. I mean, I stopped growing it pretty much as soon as it could survive on the surface, but it's a little bit insulting to my pride to hear it called small. "ParTor is more than twice as wide," she says confidently while looking at the submerged crystal from above. "It looks similar though."

Personally, I hope that's a good thing. If my crystal was bigger, I'd probably have to worry about military invasion to recover this crystal as an artifact. Although I'm still worried that might see it as some kind of insult that a demon has something similar to their artifact. It'd be even worse if they think that because I made an artificial one I'm some kind of affront to god. Judging from Shasta's reactions though, I think that the worst case scenario is unlikely here.

After letting Shasta see the crystal, I close the section of the bathhouse up again. Now comes a much harder part. I say, "Look, I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I just want peace here. For that I'll need your help, and the adventuring party's help. Eventually, maybe soon, maybe in the distant future, people will probably show up again. When they do, I just want peace between our peoples. Are you willing to work with me to help achieve that?"

Shasta looked about for a little bit before saying, "What's in it for me?"

"You're getting pretty cocky for someone who's still my prisoner," I retort.

"This place would be run over in a matter of weeks if any of the alliance countries showed up. So, what's in it for me?" she says once again.

I mean, we're increasing our defenses, but yeah, if a few hundred soldiers and high level individuals showed up, I'd probably need years and years of prep time to actually mount a defense that wouldn't result in our total annihilation. I also can't just threaten them into it because once they're free, that threat is gone. So I'll have to come up with something to offer.

"What would you want?" I ask.

"Its a big ask trying to convince people that demons can be friendly..." Shasta trails off and sits silently for a bit.

"The way you made the crystals. Tell me it," Shasta says.

"No can do. Then you'll just have us killed after you know it," I say.

"Then let me set up a place for research here."

"How big of a place?" I ask worriedly.

"Well, it'll need helping hands, and likely an embassy, and..." she trails off again. "100 dwarves. That, and we'll need your crystal."

"Now, I can't just give you the crystal."

"Look. That crystal is bringing you nothing but grief. If someone shows up, and I can convince them to not kill you all, that's when I need the crystal," she says.

"Even so, the goblins won't accept it."

"We'll go set the crystal up in the existing eagle habitat somewhere. Then they'll stop coming to this island," she says, but I catch that she quietly says, "probably..." afterwards. "At that point, you can make another crystal if you want it so bad."

Ugh. I mean, I did want to possibly get rid of the crystal. If I can also get peace out of it, then all the better. That said, I'm not too keen on being outnumbered on the island here. I suppose that means I'll need to get back to work on the housing projects in the village. Finally I reply, "Fine, but I'll need to actually get Zaka's approval for it."

[Vol.3] Ch.30 Dwarven Skills

Zaka did not give approval immediately, for the same reasons I was concerned with. He considers the island his, so having such a large external group moving in concerns him. He said he'd want to have at least 500 individuals on our side before he'd be willing to accept that deal. When I told Shasta about that, she said that would be fine, as it would take time to actually gather the people and supplies for everything.

Which again means I'll be building housing for a while. I thought our previous wall expansion would be plenty, but to have 500 goblins means it needs to be expanded again. Considering everything, I suppose its time to really start the full restructuring of the goblin village. 500 individuals is way too many to keep under control without some bureaucracy. We won't be big enough to need a full military, but dedicated guards who double as police will be necessary.

I've hashed all those details out before, but now I'm considering the idea that all those individuals are going to need to be leveled, and physically strong to perform their job. I'd like to select a handful of those individuals now, so that we can have them help with the tree clearing process in order to fast track them to stronger forms. I myself could use quite a few levels, since I'm only level 10 now.

After a day off from talking with Shasta in order to talk with Zaka and plan out for the future, both Shasta and Katarko are much more willing to cooperate with us. It seems like I wasn't the only one who was talking things over with my compatriots. After some brief negotiating, they'll be allowed to do some supervised work within the village. I also will need to build a new building for them to stay in, rather than the prison cell.

Shasta tried to negotiate to have the other two individuals included in getting to not stay in the prison, but I was adamant that they had to be cooperative in order to not stay in the prison cell. Based on the reactions of the individuals in the prison, I find it unlikely that the human will cooperate, but the elf might.

As for finding actual work for them, Shasta seems to have general knowledge of quite a few things in the dwarven kingdom, and Katarko is knowledgeable enough about metalworking that I think I can trust him to work the forge. Shasta will need to be the go between for communicating with him for now though. Honestly, that's way more than I was hoping for help-wise.

As for magical abilities, it seems that Katarko's abilities are all combat focused. Shasta has some abilities that are a little interesting though. It seems she's capable of something somewhat similar to stone shape, although different in its own way. It lets her cut a block of stone out from a wall. It works a little faster than my stone shaping, and it costs less mana, but its the same size and shape every time. Most dwarves that get that ability cut blocks that are almost the same size and shape. Occasionally though, there are some who get unique shapes and sizes.

Shasta is one of those individuals. Her blocks are apparently about four times the size of normal dwarven blocks, at four times the cost, which makes them much less useful because of their bulk. So, instead of continuing a career in which she was unwanted, she turned to research. As for helping us though, it can be quite useful if we have some strong goblins or hobgoblins to actually move those blocks. Her blocks weigh about 300 pounds though, so either someone will need to be exceptionally strong, else Zeb or I will need to at least split the blocks once to make them a more usable size.

Of course, we also don't plan on letting them leave the village, so I'd also need to figure out where I'd have Shasta cutting stone at. Push comes to shove, I can always just have her cut stone from something about the size of the warehouse I built. There are a few more convenient places she could cut stone from, but I still don't trust the dwarves enough to let them see our sewer system, the escape tunnel, or the dam.

As for where they'll stay, I've decided to build something akin to an inn. Since there is the other goblin village on the island, and potentially a dwarven outpost at some point in the distant future, somewhere that travelers can stay for either a short or extended period seems like a good building to have. I'll have to ask Shasta what sort of amenities would be expected for such a place. Ideally, I'd like it to be able to handle twenty people. Which might seem like a lot, but it can double function as temporary housing for any goblins or other individuals who have to have their housing displaced for one reason or another.

I've been working on the inn building for five days now. At Shasta's recommendation, the rooms will be moderately sized and include a bed, table and chair, shelf, and a moderately sized window. She said that the basic necessity is just a bed, but if I want it to be able to house individuals for more than a few days having a few other basic pieces of furniture makes the experience more bearable. She also recommended having an enclosed outdoor area, as well as some central lobby area.

I ultimately settled on a two floor, U-shaped design with the enclosed area inside the U with a small fence. The design ends up with 28 rooms. 12 on the first floor and 16 on the second. The first floor has a central lobby which then leads to the enclosed yard, and a set of stairs that leads up to the second floor or down to the basement on either side of the lobby. As with all buildings in the village, I'm digging a basement. This basement is going to be left relatively empty save for support pillars, and is mostly just built to acquire more stone for construction.

As for where the construction is at, I've gotten the basement complete, and some of the first floor walls done. It'll probably take around ten more days before the inn is done. The carpenters have been making good progress with the trebuchets, and Katarko has made better quality metal than I did from the ore I provided.

He's actually been quite excited by the metal itself, which is surprising. He said the quality of the ore and metal is some of the highest he's seen, and asked if he could use some of it for personal use. I asked what he planned to use it for, and he apparently wants to make a new weapon and armor for himself. After some bargaining, it was decided to let him do so, but only after he makes weapons and armor for some of the goblins.

As for the metal ore itself, well, we actually are going to need more of it moving forward. After the inn is completed, I've got two small tasks I want to work on before returning to village expansion. The first task is designing and building a rock crusher out of metal. We'll see just how durable it is, but the metal itself has some pretty good properties for it so I'm hopeful. If the rock crusher works, then it'll be much easier to get more of the metal ore. Which brings us to the second task, cutting blocks of ore out. If the crusher works, I can just cut blocks of the ore out, and goblins can transport it down to the village using the cart system and then use crushers to make fine powder.

Finishing the inn took twelve days, but the structure is now complete. It'll still take a day or two to get the furniture finished inside though. Zeb's finished the two other apartment style buildings as well, so I've set him up with a new task. He's to continue digging the escape tunnel with the help of some of the goblins so that we have additional stone resources available for the wall expansion.

I also neglected to think about how much additional food we'll need to support this much larger population. The field inside the walls is already going to need to be replaced with housing as part of the expansion, making the issue even worse. We've been clear cutting trees on two sides of the village to prepare for expansion, but actually, I think we'll need to clear a much larger area than I thought.

I talked it over with Zaka, and what we've decided is that a road should be made from the village all the way to the bay area following the stream the whole way. Then alongside that area, the trees can be cut down to make room for more fields. I also decided we'd mark some trees along the path and stream that we should keep to provide some shade and help prevent erosion.

Overall, it's quite the significant undertaking, and is going to end up producing a lot more wood than we'll know what to do with. That's why Shasta has been given a marked area where she can use her block cutting to help dig out a basement, then a second basement, right next to the existing warehouse. That should give us plenty of stone to work with for a while, and provide us with storage space for quite a bit of wood and charcoal.

[Vol.3] Ch.31 Meeting the Elf

The elf of the group came around to the idea of cooperating as the day for the dwarves moving to the inn arrived. I suppose the idea of staying down in the holding cell alone was enough of an incentive. The human, however, still shows no signs of friendly behaviors. As for how the elf can help, they're knowledgeable about both how to make bows and how to use them. I'm sure they've probably got other info as well that we'll learn over time.

We've also now been formally introduced. The elf's name is Ambella Elloetta. Unlike the dwarves, who are named after the city they hail from, elves take the name of their family matriarch. The matriarch themself only has the one name, and when they pass, there is a whole ceremony to select the new matriarch, who then drops their given name, and takes that matriarchal name as their only name. It's honestly quite interesting. Occasionally a wealthy enough elf may set out and form a new matriarchal family, but it's relatively uncommon.

After a bit of talking with Shasta, within that adventuring party they all speak the dwarven language, in addition to their own languages, which is one of the reasons they were able to take the mission. After I finally started to get a grasp on the demon language, there are even more languages being thrown my way.

Shasta also asked on behalf of the group if they could travel back to the mainland. While I'm not opposed to it, in fact, it would probably be beneficial if they could, building a boat capable of getting them back is a bit out of my wheelhouse. A basic boat, sure, but when I asked Shasta if any of the group had knowledge as a ship captain or navigator, they all did not. Without that knowledge, they are very likely as good as dead if they set out alone currently.

In the future, if we made some astronomic observations, at least I could give them some navigation advice, but that requires quite a bit of dedication. I told Shasta that, and she at least was aware of some use of navigation charts using the stars. Without paper though, making repeated observations would be difficult for her. I can at least carve into stone with stone shaping, which is what I've been doing for a while now. Others here rely on word of mouth, which makes me think that a writing material might be useful.

I'd like to use parchment, but getting decently sized animal hides on the island isn't easy since we wiped out the giant lizards. Mechanically processed wood pulp for paper also isn't actually all that stable long term. Although I suppose for the purposes of just taking notes it would be fine. Any important info could later be carved into stone as needed.

The biggest issue with this plan is the amount of mechanical energy involved in pulping wood. Then even more energy is involved in processing the wood pulp into paper. We do have access to an untapped source of mechanical energy though, but it'll require quite a bit of work from some of the goblins to actually access. Of course, what I'm referring to is a windmill. We also have a coastal area that has decent breezes most of the time.

One of the big holdups in building a windmill before was a lack of decent metalworking ability, because building a low maintenance windmill requires at least some metal, but considering we have that now, it's definitely something worth considering building. Of course, it isn't a high priority, so it's just something for me to think about the design of while I work on other mundane tasks for the time being. However, I will instruct the carpenter goblin to try to keep some of the straighter trees in a stockpile so that there is plenty of useful wood.

It's been about eight days since the elf and dwarves have moved from the jail cell to the inn space. Many of the goblins have gotten used to seeing them around and working with them, which is good. I've finished building a new apartment style building, bringing the total to four. I plan on building another two while we wait for the tree cutting and clearing process to complete around the village.

One downside to the apartment style buildings is that I produce them at a rate barely faster that Zaka can fill them. Which means that when I stop building, the population stops growing. Back when Zaka had to go to the cave to summon imps, building houses was easily faster. The extra available labor is at least useful. We're starting to get a decent stockpile of stone built up, so we should have plenty for extending the wall when the time comes. Building the road to the ocean, however, will need even more still.

Another sixteen days, and we're now at a total of 6 apartment style buildings in the village walls. The village has completed a few other things as well now. The four trebuchets are done, and honestly, I think they'll be plenty for the new village size as well. Shasta has carved out enough stone for both floors of basement for the new warehouse, so Zeb will begin working on that project for a little while.

The amount of wood has really started to be an issue outside the village. Some of the new goblins and some of the previous ones are basically running the charcoal kilns during all daylight hours, and likely will be for a very long time. At least the actual area that we plan on expanding into is getting cleared well.

With the extra labor, I've also picked four new goblins to help with building the new road along with assisting Zeb when they can. The hope is that at least one will maybe get earth manipulation and eventually stone shaping. As such, they're also going to be getting in on the next round of tree cutting where future fields will go to power level them a bit. With plans for the village to grow, extra individuals capable of stone construction will be a necessity. It's already the chokepoint for expansion, and that'll only get worse when there are more people.

I myself am going to start on expanding the wall next. At least I won't be retroactively adding sections for ballistae now. The bad news is that we'll need even more ballistae. At least the carpenter will be busy, although the ballistae shouldn't take as long to make as the trebuchets did.

As I've been building out the new city wall for the past eleven days, Zeb has made good progress on the warehouse. He hasn't quite finished the first floor yet, but both basement layers are complete now, along with all the storage bins. Which means that a lot of the charcoal that was sitting in piles has been moved into that warehouse, making the area around the village a lot more clear than it was a few days ago.

Of the goblins that I assigned to directly help Zeb, one gained earth manipulation as a trait after it prestiged about two days ago. Two of them gained improved endurance, and the last one gained heightened strength. After talking with Zeb a little, it seems like they gained it based on how they chose to divvy up the work they'd been assigned. That seems to reinforce the hypothesis that traits are gained based on activities you've performed that would benefit from the trait.

Some of the goblins have also started hunting with bows now to mixed success. The bows aren't very high quality because we're relying on inferior plant material to make the strings, but at least they're functional. The goblins who've worked with the local plants to make rope and cloth have been helpful in the assembly process, which is good. I'm glad that the elf has had a useful function within the village.

As for the wall expansion that I've been doing, I'm probably about a third of the way done with the wall, then there will be the new gates and guardhouses to handle, which will involve some reconstruction of existing walls to move gates around. By that time though, Zeb should be finished with the warehouse, so I can hopefully move on to a different project.

Before I finish the wall though, I'm going to need to go up the mountain for two or three days to get more metal ore for Katarko. He's finally about to exhaust the existing supply of ore. It's largely been processed into ingots for later use, although he's made some armor sets for the goblins, along with one for himself. I've instructed him to make some swords and shields as well moving forward.

After I bring the ore back, we'll work on making at least one rock crusher, but probably we'll need multiple to properly break the ore into small enough pieces. Hopefully all of that won't take more than four or five days. We've been clear cutting a lot of the trees lately on the path to the ocean, so I'd rather not miss any more days of that than I have to. The levels won't be wasted per se, but I personally would like quite a few of them.

<LEGENDARY LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 28
HP: 1727/1727
MP: 960/960
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike

[Vol.3] Ch.32 Leveling Sickness

It took four days to design a few metal rock crushers using metal, and then I went up and mined out metal ore for two whole days. The amount of ore should last us through the winter, at least I hope it will. Katarko seemed pleased to have more of the metal to work with, and I gave him the okay to make his own weapon alongside the new goblin ones. Katarko has been processing so much metal that multiple goblins are on shell collecting duty, and bring back entire backpacks worth each day.

The goblins collecting shells have started to have to harvest from the water traps I made for fishes, where fresh shells settle out each day with the tides, which means we'll probably have fewer shells coming in soon, since the beach is getting close to being picked clean. I need to expand the artificial tidepool area soon to keep up with population growth anyway, so I hope that helps with seashell collection as well.

I've been working on the city wall for another ten days, when I had a bit of a surprise this morning. Zeb prestiged. Actually, he had prestiged a little while ago without me knowing, and he didn't really want to tell me about it. I had thought he seemed a little bigger than I recalled, but I had been quite focused on some of the other tasks at hand, and we weren't working together as much that I missed it.

As for why he didn't want to tell me about it, it seems he's still not fully over the fight he had with Kurg. What he gained from that prestige was Improved Earth Spike, which had I known about, I probably would have had him help me capture the prisoners, given its improved range. I suppose that's also the general reason he didn't tell me about it in the first place though, because he has an aversion to combat. He gained that shortly after the pair of eagles attacked, but kept that to himself as we were busy repairing everything.

Today, or rather yesterday, he prestiged again though, and this time he finally got Improved Stone Shaping. I'm very excited for that. He'd been helping with the tree cutting while I had been on the mountain, and did a little when I came back, enough to prestige. Given how much more useful he'll be with construction now, I intend to have him gain more levels, much like how I am, so that he'll have a much larger mana pool, so he can work for longer.

<RARE LESSER EARTH DEMON> (Zeb)
Level: 0
HP: 1229/1229
MP: 470/470
Traits: Mimicry, Mana Affinity
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Improved Earth Spike

In only six short days both the warehouse and the city wall are now complete. With Zeb's massively improved stone shaping speed with his prestige, he was able to make quick work of the warehouse, then helped me finish the city wall in the remaining time. Counting both Zeb's new speed, and the small amount of help that Shasta gives, I'd say the overall level of stonework speed in the village has about doubled from where it was six months ago, and is well over eight times the rate it was back when I first came to the goblin village.

I'm going to leave Zeb to work on the gates and guardhouses in the village while I go work on expanding some of the necessary facilities outside the village. First, I want to mark those trees that I want to keep along the path to the ocean. Next, I plan on drafting some extra goblins to start all the necessary hand digging of dirt for the road. Once they've gotten the road dug, then we'll also be expanding out the salt evaporation ponds, and eventually also be digging out the areas to make the flooded fields that the swamp beets need.

My hope is that, by using a new set of five goblins and having all their work be shoveling dirt, they'll all get earth manipulation as a trait, which seems to be a precursor to stone shaping. It may not be completely necessary, but I think it helps. Once they're set on a task, it'll probably take them some time to complete each, due to each task's scope. While they work on that, I plan to have other goblins help haul stone blocks alongside where the road will go, so that my job of building the actual road shouldn't fall behind the rate they dig dirt.

After twenty days of work, I'm about halfway done with the road to the ocean. It generally follows the path of the stream, and it doesn't have a cart system. It's just meant to speed up the trip between the village and the ocean work areas. When it is done, individuals won't have to worry about tripping over tree roots or underbrush while they travel. Zeb is still a little ways from finishing his work as well.

I had three interesting interactions today. First, the five goblins I've been having dig the road have all prestiged as of yesterday evening, and of those five, three got earth manipulation. The other two gained improved endurance. The second interaction was that none of the four goblins helping Zeb have gotten stone shaping, and they all finished prestiging for a second time yesterday. One of them picked up earth manipulation that didn't have it from before.

If I recall correctly, when Gakus got stone shaping, Zaka had said he was trying to manually cut stone himself. Since the reservoir is pretty much empty this time of year, I might pull one goblin from my group and one from Zeb's group, who each have earth manipulation, and have them go manually break stone in the reservoir for a while. Before I do that though, I'll need to have Katarko make them proper tools for the job. It seems like a waste of the labor right now, but if they can get their hands on stone shaping, their labor will be far more valuable than it is now.

The third interaction was with Shasta. She asked me, "Do you not experience leveling sickness?"

"Leveling sickness? What's that?" I asked, a little confused.

"Well, it's a sort of disease you get from powering up too quickly. Weak leveling sickness just causes mild pain and fatigue, but at extreme leveling sickness can be lethal." She says.

"I've never seen or heard of anything like that." I reply honestly, "What makes you ask?"

"I noticed that new batch of goblins has been cutting down a lot of trees and have been getting bigger. Normally, leveling sickness is a problem during adolescence, but occasionally happens in adults as well. There are a few professions that tend to be susceptible to it, and lumberjacks are one of them. If people work with lots of livestock, that can also be a problem. Once you're high enough level, its much less likely to happen, although a few people have had it occur later in life." She explains.

"I think if that was something us demons were susceptible to, I'd have died multiple times by now." I say with a laugh. After I moment, I regain my composure and ask, "I am a little curious though, us demons prestige and evolve into new forms, what exactly happens with you dwarves? Do you get bigger, or change form in some way?"

"No no, nothing weird. We just gain levels and periodically get access to new class features." Shasta says dismissively.

"Wait. What do you mean class features?" I ask. I feel a little left out. I'm over here getting all these open ended traits and magics without any sort of guide, and dwarves get a guided path? I take it back, I don't feel left out, I feel jealous.

"Take me for instance, my class is 'Mason', as I gain levels, I get features and magic that make me better at that task." She says.

"How is mason a class? What other classes are there?" I ask.

"Well, there are lots of classes for lots of things. Farmer, Warrior, Lord, Fisherdwarf." Shasta says, seemingly confused at my confusion.

"So just about any profession has a class to it? How do you get your class?" I ask, even more confused than before.

"You generally get it from one parent, although sometimes you might get it from a grandparent or a distant relative. Depends on the class I suppose. Although there are some differences between individuals, even more so if you look between races." She says.

That definitely sounds like it's genetic. I follow up with, "What exactly do you mean differences between races?"

"For instance, humans don't have a 'Mason' class, but they do have a 'Builder' class, which functions pretty similarly. There are some hybrid 'Builder/Mason' classes that exist in the few people who are half-human half-dwarf. There are a lot of similar classes between the races, but they usually function a little differently. Enough about us though, I want to know more about you demons. We've known for a while that you grow bigger and change between forms, but when does that happen exactly?" She asks me.

"When we cap out our levels. It's always at level 100, then we either evolve or prestige, our choice. Sometimes though, one of the options might not be available. If we prestige, we usually get some kind of new trait or magic to use, seemingly based on what we've been working on recently, and if we evolve we generally get a lot stronger, and sometimes get some free traits." I say.

"Wow, that's a lot of levels. I'm only level 27. Wait. That doesn't make much sense, you said you've only been here like seven or eight years." She says.

"Well, there seems to be a variance in how quickly we gain levels based on how many times we've prestiged or evolved, I haven't worked the math out yet, but it takes me a really long time to gain levels now. Back when I was first spawned, I gained 100 levels in a matter of hours. From the sounds of it, this might be why we don't experience leveling sickness, although it's hard to say. If we have hard caps where we then morph our bodies, it might prevent whatever sort of illness is caused in your kind." I speculate.

"...that might be. Although it could be that you just haven't gained enough of your high powered levels at once to experience it." She says back.

"I doubt that. I know its a sore spot, but I did kill an eagle by myself in the woods. It power leveled me up, and then that evening I fell asleep and prestiged... Wait, maybe the exhaustion that we feel when we cap out our levels is something similar to that? We usually get really tired at that point, and fall asleep within a few hours, and then sleep for a while, sometimes days if we're evolving." I say.

"... I do expect killing an eagle by yourself would probably cause pretty bad leveling sickness in even a decently strong warrior. The symptoms don't match perfectly, but it might be something similar to when you hit your level cap." Shasta eventually agrees.

"... Do you have a level cap?" I eventually ask after things go quiet for a little bit.

"I don't know of anyone who's ever reached one, but they really do seem to slow down at some point, and the perks and magics we get slow down significantly after level 100, and those perks are heavily dependent on ancestry. That's when you start getting perks outside your normal class. If your mom was a fisherdwarf, and your father and you are both warriors, then your perks past level 100 aren't likely to be that useful to you as a warrior, although some of them might be, like improved swimming abilities." She explains.

"We'll have to continue this conversation at a later time. I've enjoyed it thoroughly, but I'm afraid that I've got to get back to road work, or else I'll fall too far behind the goblins I've tasked with digging, and I don't like to show myself as lazy to them." I say. Shasta nods, seemingly content with having some more of her questions answered as well.

[Vol.3] Ch.33 The Improved Village

After ten more days of work on the road, I decided to pull the two goblins to go break stone in the quarry. Katarko finished making the pickaxes and shovels that I requested for that purpose, so it seemed like a good time to send the goblins off to work on that. Today, each of them filled a single cart with stone and brought it back to the village. It's not much, but it's something. They then had to have Katarko sharpen their pickaxes, as they had become dull from use.

Most of the goblins in the village have prestiged at least once now, due to the amount of trees we've been cutting down, and there is still a large amount more to cut to make way for new fields of swamp beets. The primary focus thus far has been on the goblins that we expect to become the guards and soldiers in the village, but letting everyone get some occasionally as well. From here on out though, I think we'll be focusing it down to people who can really use the boost.

The soldiers and guards who I would like to evolve are first on this list. Next is Zaka. He's actually recovered quite a lot over time thanks to his Improved Regeneration. He's actually gotten to the point where the stub of his leg is about where his foot should start. In an emergency, I think he could hobble without his crutches now. However, if he prestiges again, or evolves, I'm pretty sure he'll be completely recovered, which is somewhat remarkable. Next is myself. Every level equates to a longer period of time that I can work without needing to recharge at the bathhouse, which means I can get more work done in a day. For the same reason, Zeb, the two goblins breaking stone, and the carpenter are also on the list.

Everyone else, who has been getting a tree or two a day until now, are going to no longer be included in the task. The fishergoblins and handful of hunters haven't been cutting trees this whole time anyway, as they actually do gain some levels from their respective prey. Speaking of those groups, the hunters have recently been gaining Improved Dexterity and Improved Perception when they prestige, which I think is likely thanks to using bows over spears.

After eleven more days, the road to the ocean is finally complete. Zeb should be finishing up his work in the village soon too. There won't be any rest for the goblins working for either of us though, as the next thing on the agenda are the new swamp beet fields and the new salt evaporation ponds.

Both of those tasks require less stone shaping than building a road does though, so in the meantime, I'm going to make another apartment style building while my group of goblins dig the salt evaporation ponds to the level where I need to do a small amount of stone shaping to finish the design.

It still takes the usual eight days to finish the apartment building, and by the time the building is done, Zeb has also finished with all the new guardhouses and entrance gates to the wall. Moving forward, Zeb and I are going to trade off building new housing buildings while working on the external projects like the new fields and salt evaporation ponds. The carpenter and his assistants are also only a few ballistae from being finished with that portion of work as well.

Shasta asked me a few days ago about the ballistae and trebuchets, "Why do you need all these large weapons, there doesn't seem to be much of a threat on the island?"

I didn't have the heart to say that their most likely use would be fighting her brethren if she can't convince them to let us peacefully live, so instead I told her "We've had multiple unexpected attacks in the past that cost us many lives, so it's best to be prepared." Which is also true.

At this point, the two dwarves and the elf seem resigned to the fact that it'll likely be a long time before they can return home. As such, they've sort of settled into the village. Aside from Shasta, who's demon language skills have improved to near fluency, the other two have started to pick up basic phrases for communicating with goblins that they work with on occasion. Seeing that makes me a little embarrassed that I waited so many years before even trying to learn the language.

It took seven days for me to finish up the new salt evaporation ponds, and the two goblin construction help crews are busy clearing tree stumps and digging out areas to flood to grow the swamp beets. Since the beets require swampy terrain, we actually have to cut some stone out from the bottom of the field so we can cut channels from the stream to flood them during the drier months. The previous fields were built that way as well, but never on this scale.

There is a lot of extra dirt being produced that I'm currently unsure what to use it for. For now it is being piled carefully behind the fields, creating a dividing hill between the forest and the fields. Perhaps it will discourage the larger ground birds from running amok. If we need it in the future, we know where we can get it.

Zeb should be done with the next apartment building either tomorrow or the next day, so while I wait, I'm going to work on expanding the artificial tide pools that we use to gather sea life to eat. Each layer gets more time consuming to build because each one is a progressively larger ring around the bay, but that also means it provides more food. For now, my intent is to actually cut a few new staircases down to the bottom. If there are going to be more goblins traveling up and down, it'd be best if they aren't all trying to move past each other all the time.

After two days, Zeb finished up his apartment building, so I began my turn, completing the task in the usual eight days. In the time where I worked on the new housing, Zeb got one of the new fields built, and then took a few days to see how the goblins in the reservoir were doing. While they've been making decent progress, they've also disrupted the cleanliness of the design. He spent a few days cleaning up and leveling areas in the reservoir as needed.

With the remaining time, he ended up cutting out massive blocks from the reservoir so that the goblins working there could simply break the blocks down and haul them out, keeping the area more neat than it would be otherwise. I'm a little worried what might happen when water floods back in if those blocks aren't fully broken down and removed though. I told Zeb that moving forward, he probably shouldn't do that unless he's certain that the stone will be removed. It probably would be fine, but if something like a landslide occurred due to a bad rain storm, that large stone block could cause a lot of damage.

In sixteen days, we each completed another apartment building, and around a third of the new fields are completed now. I've also been steadily working on expanding the artificial tidepool areas. It's taking a bit of time, but between the new road, the excess stone in the village, and the extra helping hands about, I've made pretty decent progress on the second layer. It'll probably still take another few weeks to complete at the current pace, but that's still much faster than when I worked alone.

I've decided on a V-Shape for the overall filter on the bay. Basically, each tiered area will have about five feet of separation from the previous level, and a minimum six feet of filter above it at the bay exit. That way the whole filter stays connected, and fish are encouraged to remain trapped as the water slowly recedes in the artificial pools I've made.

I've also decided on putting filter material around each tier at a railing. First, so goblins don't accidentally tumble the five feet down to the next layer, but also so that fish don't hop out of the pool they're stuck in once the water recedes to the ocean. They can flop out for a little while, but ultimately they'll have nowhere to go, preventing them from overfilling the lowest level over time.

In Zeb's off time, he's been trying his hand at designing his own building. Since he's been replicating mine for a long time now, I figure he should be fine to experiment. It's his free time after all, plus I think it'd be way more useful if he could work on designing his own projects, rather than it always having to be me who builds them. As for what exactly he's designing, he said it's a secret.

We've had two goblins evolve into hobgoblins recently, and quite a few of the guards have prestiged to varying degrees. Considering we're almost done felling all the planned trees, that seems like that'll probably be all the new hobgoblins we get. Zaka is getting close to his prestige point, and Zeb is about a third of the way to his.

As for myself:

<LEGENDARY LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 57
HP: 2336/2336
MP: 1216/1216
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike

[Vol.3] Ch.34 Complications

Two more apartment buildings built, and Zeb showed me the building he designed. It's pretty much just a small shed, designed to be built at each field. Inside there is a rack for storing basic farming tools, a bin for seeds, and an area to temporarily keep harvested food for hauling. It's honestly quite thoughtful considering the distance some of these fields are from the village. Carrying tools to and from some of the new fields would likely waste a lot of time, and these sheds should help cut down on that waste.

Thinking about it that way, I should honestly build a building for the fishergoblins and salt gatherers over by the bay with the same intent. Spare spears and places to keep salt indoors so you don't need to stop in the middle of a task to return to the village. Zeb's idea was honestly quite good.

With winter just around the corner, the scout goblins will no longer be able to go up to the peak to keep an eye out for any threats on the island. That being the case, we've been trying to decide how to best monitor the island now. Navigating around the outside of the island can take a week or more, so keeping an eye on the whole island is probably not possible. We can, however, at least try to keep an eye on the previous landing site and fort that we found. The group will probably need to be comprised mostly of goblins familiar with hunting, so that they can easily sustain themselves while they're watching. They will basically need to set up an entire camp of their own and live there for a few months.

It took a little less than 24 days to finish all the fields and get them ready for planting in spring. Three more apartment buildings also means we're really going to need that extra food from both the fields and the fish. I took a break from expanding the tide pool area to build out the two storage buildings at the end of the road near the bay for both the salt evaporation pond and fishing. They're now both complete, as are the sheds along the new fields.

Snow fell on the mountain a little over a week ago, and a week before that we sent off a group of ten goblins to keep an eye on the fort and landing area. I'll consider the fact that we haven't heard anything from them to be a good sign so far.

The village population has grown quite a lot, and many of the goblins no longer eat their meals at the pavilion, opting instead to eat in smaller groups. Sometimes it's with goblins they work with, and other times with neighbors. The pavilion was never meant to handle this many goblins anyway, but it makes me wonder if I should build some new eating area and food storage location. Instead of one big one, maybe multiple smaller ones would be better? I'll ask around the village and see what the other citizens think.

While I worked on the next apartment building for eight days, I asked around the village about what they'd want for places to eat. I got mixed responses. Some of the goblins wished that the apartment buildings had a central area where they could all cook and eat. Others wanted a larger area nearby where they could enjoy eating in groups of more than twenty. That being the case, I think first I should design a new moderately sized eating area.

Fish doesn't keep all that well when smoked, which is why we've been using a lot of salt. Salted fish lasts quite a long time, and considering the change in diet here in town, I think it would be reasonable to have the new eating building just have a room where barrels of salted fish can be stored.

I also asked around to see if goblins would be interested in moving into a new apartment building if it had that central cooking area. Most of those who were interested in the idea said they would be willing to move. So I've decided to start planning out a new apartment building that has those facilities. I could hypothetically just remove one of the first floor rooms and throw on an external fireplace, but I personally would rather the building be fully redesigned.

I started asking the goblins how many people in one building they would consider to be too much, and the general consensus was twelve. A few individuals said less, some said more, but twelve seemed to be a pretty stable middle ground. So I'm thinking about trying to design the new building to have about ten individuals with their own kitchen and dining area. I also want the way into the basement to be through the kitchen, so that salted fish and other preserved foods can be stored in the basement. In most of the existing apartments, the basements are relatively unused currently.

Before I can work on any of these though, I need to finish the expansion of the tide pool traps, so that there is enough food to go around to begin with.

After Zeb finished the next apartment building, we put a hold on that project. Instead, he's been working with me to finish the tide pool traps. He's been helping me for an additional ten days now, and we've just now finished the second layer. Hopefully this should lead to over double the amount of captured fish.

While this is great, I do wonder about the hypothetical upper limit of this technique. At some point, we'll surely start getting reduced returns per layer. Then we also might need to worry about overfishing locally as well. For the current population though, and for the population for the years to come, I doubt it will be an issue.

I've come up with a design for a new eating area for the village. It consists of a building, that is much wider than it is long, which then opens to a covered area with a central fire pit, somewhat like the pavilion but a little smaller. Like most of the buildings in town, I intend to dig a basement underneath it to get the stone necessary for construction. This time though, the entrance into the basement will be in the side building. The side building can then store some amount of food, and the basement can keep non-perishable cooking related materials, like charcoal and salt. As long as it's only one basement level, then I can simply drain it into the sewers as well.

While I work on building one of this new dining building, Zeb is going to go help the goblins in the reservoir finish breaking down any of the large blocks he pre-cut. Once they're done, I want them to return to the village. We're about a third of the way through winter, but if there is an uncharacteristic heat wave or some other large water causing event, I don't want anyone near the reservoir at that time.

I was about three days in to construction on the new dining building when we had a disturbance. Six of the ten goblins returned to the village from the scouting party. A new eagle arrived on the island. It flew in from the direction of the landing bay, and grabbed one of the goblins watching the ocean before flying up the mountain.

The scouting party hurriedly packed their things and began the journey back to the village, which took five days of travelling at a fast pace. By the time they arrived here, three more goblins had been grabbed. Which means tomorrow is likely when the eagle will be hunting again. There definitely seems to be a pattern of the eagles only arriving in winter.

The goblins coming back to the village made such a commotion that Shasta overheard. She had a complicated expression on her face as she listened to what happened. The other goblins who overheard started getting all the usual preparations ready.

"You aren't planning on killing it, are you?" Shasta asks indignantly.

"It's already killed four goblins. Are you really going to say we should just let it continue killing us?" I retort.

"Well no... but can't we do something else? We normally provide them with livestock as sacrifice." Shasta replies.

"In case you didn't notice, the largest land animals here outside of us are those ground birds, and I don't think the eagle cares much for those." I reply.

"I just... I don't know that peace will be an option if you go through with killing the eagles more now. Before you knew about them, I think it's excusable, but to knowingly kill something we see as a protector is going too far." Shasta says.

I let out an audible groan at that before replying, "Fine, I'll try to think of something, but I want concessions for this. The shoe is on the other foot right now. I already know I can kill the eagle easily enough. So, if I'm going to go through the effort of sparing this eagle, I want some guarantees about how we'll be treated in your negotiations for peace. I want full independence. Final offer."

Shasta thinks for a few minutes before replying with, "Alright, but that hinges on the eagle not just living but living well. If it doesn't attack any more goblins, I might be able to use that in your favor during talks."

I hadn't thought about that, but it's probably true. If the dwarves see the eagle as a protective beast, and it isn't attacking us, then they might not see us as threats either. The hard part is going to be figuring out how to get to that point, and also convince the goblins to not provoke the eagle...

[Vol.3] Ch.35 Trouble Knocks

After thinking on it for a little while, I have an idea. An eagle before fell for the bait of a bunch of fish dressed up to be shaped like a goblin. I don't know how well it will work though if the eagle can't carry the food off to its nest. So we'll need a decently tough skin for the meat. Something that won't fall apart while the eagle is carrying it. Perhaps if we use fish skins, tie them together, and then also use an overall binding, we can make a large enough chunk of food that the eagle will take it.

It's obviously quite the large food sink to have to feed this eagle every two days though. Plus we'll need to be conscientious of when the eagle comes for food, so no goblins accidentally get taken. If it works out though, we can make a feeding pedestal, and just leave the food there outside the village, and hopefully train the eagle to come get food at a certain time, then it shouldn't become as big of an issue.

As always though, executing this plan isn't easy. First, I'll need to convince the goblins of the plan tonight, and then also prepare the food tribute. Those two things themselves are going to be cutting it close time wise. Then we'll basically just be waiting around tomorrow, hiding, until the eagle actually comes for food. Fingers crossed it doesn't kill a goblin in the other village instead. We can't even send a goblin to go communicate the threat to them, since it'd leave the messenger open to attack.

It took less time than I thought to convince the goblins to give this plan a try. Mostly because so many of the goblins are new, and didn't live through the previous eagle attacks. After that, I had a bunch of goblins help me gather fish skins and meat, and make the large food bundle. So today, I manned the steam cannon in case we needed it.

The eagle flew overhead for quite a while. It didn't come down from the mountain when we first saw it, but instead came around the island from the direction it had hunted the goblin scout squad. After looking around for a while, it eventually did come down to the food bundle we made. It stood over it for a while, seemingly unsure if the food was good or not. I mean, if it's used to getting live food, I'm sure this is confusing. Eventually though, it leaned over and bit into the bundle of fish.

The eagle initially tried to carry the bundle, but after having torn into it, the innards spilled out when it grabbed the bundle with its talon. Thankfully, the eagle just decided to eat the spilled food before leaving.

The good news from all this is that it seemingly worked. The bad news though is that preparing that much food for the eagle is basically a full time job for a goblin. The adventuring party seems happy about the outcome, so I figured I'd take advantage of that fact to "encourage" Shasta and Ambella to be in charge of preparing the eagle's tributes. Both of them have been low on work for a little while anyway, so I don't feel particularly bad about that.

My next plan is to build a raised stone pad just outside the village on the uphill side where we can leave the food for it. By putting the food uphill, closer to the mountain, I'm hoping that the eagle doesn't even bother going further, since most of our village's constructions are downhill of the village, except for the dam and reservoir which we don't need to go to often.

The eagle has gone through two feeding cycles now at the stone pad without much of a hitch. Shasta is complaining about everything smelling like fish, but she seems to just be joking, rather than actually being upset. The goblins still get quite nervous when the eagle comes down, and I don't blame them. The messenger we sent over to the other village hasn't quite returned yet, but I imagine that village is going to be even more concerned over the whole ordeal, but I really doubt they have anything they can do about it.

I'm thankful we expanded the tide pools before this, but now we'll need to consider expanding them again sooner than I anticipated. That eagle is eating as much food as nearly 30 goblins. Since we're currently not expanding the population of the village anyway, I want to focus on getting the new eating location built within the village.

The messenger came back from the other village after an additional two days. I was right, they are clearly not happy with the idea that we aren't going to kill the eagle. They've been told to just hide if the eagle is overhead, and it should come and eat the food we've prepared for it. They're their own people though, so if they want to attempt anything, they're welcome to. I doubt they will though. That village is all made up of goblins who have been around since the first eagle was here, and all probably have some memory of their attempts from that time.

Things had been pretty quiet for two weeks, so I should have known we'd have some problem. Three goblins came running to our village walls in the evening. They were yelling and asking for help. We quickly realized they were from the other village, and after they entered they started to frantically explain the situation.

I was worried that perhaps their village had been attacked by the eagle, but what has actually happened is much worse. Since the eagle incident, we hadn't sent the scouts back out to watch that side of the island, because we were worried for their safety. Well, that's coming back to bite us now. A group of hunters from the other village spotted strange new creatures in metal armor. When they called out to them, expecting them to be some new form of demon, they were attacked.

One made it back to warn the rest of that village, and they formed a fighting group to face off against this new threat. These three goblins were the first to run when they saw how outmatched they were. The village was overrun by hundreds of the armored creatures, and everyone was brutally slaughtered.

It didn't take long through the explanation before Shasta had wandered over, and the fearful goblins looked at her, and made the same connection that I worried about. It seems like the long awaited rescue party arrived while we had a blind spot. Not only that, but it seems like they've come with the same attitude that the group we captured had. Slaughter all the demons you find.

Shasta actually seemed quite saddened while listening to the goblins extol the horrors of watching their village be destroyed. I myself am saddened a little. Most of the goblins there had some form of disdain for me, but I didn't wish death on them. The only individual there that I am truly sad to hear perished was Gakus. He was a pretty straightforward guy, and hearing that he was likely killed while protecting the place he set out to build has me feeling angry.

I calmed myself somewhat before I spoke with Shasha, although I was still quite stern, "Go. You, Ambella, and Katarko. Take your weapons and armor and go meet that army. You can come back with a small group of fifteen people including yourselves to get the human and the crystal that reminds you of 'ParTor'. If anymore show up, we'll fight back."

Shasta seemed worried about my tone, "Now? It's almost night. I'm not happy about what they did either, but if I just explain the situation when they get here..."

"No, if an army arrives here now, I myself am already pretty upset, and I wasn't particularly fond of most of those goblins. The rest of this village is likely very upset. So go. Now. Either you can convince them we aren't hostile, and maybe we can have further conversations, or we'll give them the fight they want. If that is the case, it was at least nice to get to know you, Shasta." I said.

As the three quickly gathered their things to set off into the night, I made sure that they had general information about the location of the other village, as well as torches for traveling at night.

After they left, we began our preparations to fight...

[Vol.3] Ch.36 Warfare

For a full day, we prepared for the arrival of an army. Goblins were told to be ready at a moments notice to flee to the pavilion basement. There, if either Zeb or I survive, we can at least attempt an escape into the sewers if the worst comes to be. The other escape tunnel, while long, hasn't breached the surface for escape yet, and trying to run over a hundred goblins down that tunnel might not work well.

All the gates are barricaded and reinforced, and plenty of ammo has been lined up for the siege engines. I've instructed goblins on how to operate them when the time comes, so hopefully we won't have any mishaps. For good measure, food was moved to be stored underground, and extra water was collected in buckets and kept with the food. The real concern, though, is magical attacks from the enemy. I have no idea what to expect. If they have anything very long range, that could be a problem.

It didn't take long for the army to reach our village. On the dawn of the day after Shasta set out, the army exited the forest a little over a hundred feet from our walls. It was comprised entirely of dwarves, which makes sense considering the eagles seem to be most important to them. I didn't, however, spot Shasta, Katarko, or Ambella.

The dwarves seem to have done some scouting in the night, and picked the area they thought would be the easiest to assault the village from. In the uphill direction of the village is both our water source, and has the closest tree line to the city wall.

Initially, a group of about fifty stormed towards the wall. We fired ballistae on the group, killing a few as they approached. The trebuchet launched a boulder at the dwarves further back, but they easily sidestepped the high arcing rock. Once the dwarves got to the wall, I wasn't sure what I should expect, as goblins tossed spears down at the well armored dwarves. Soon though, I found out what they were attempting. A few dwarves put their hands to the wall, and sections started to form into balls and roll out from the wall itself.

They were attempting to dismantle the wall! Unacceptable! I built that wall with a lot of effort! I shouted to Zeb to start stone shaping the wall from the inside to repair it while we attempted to stop them. A second round of ballistae took out a few of the dwarves from the back of the group, but aiming directly down the wall wasn't planned, so the dwarves attempting to dismantle the wall directly were safe from that.

Well, it was time for plan B. Two of us could dismantle the wall. I cleared the goblins from on top of the wall section, and stone shaped a large chunk from atop the wall to collapse forward onto the dwarves. About half of the group casting the magic on the wall were unable to escape the large falling chunk, and were killed. The others who were casting magic retreated while the remaining group of dwarves attempted to scale the damaged wall section.

Stone is my specialty, and I'd like to think it's mine more than the dwarves. As the wall was slowly being repaired by Zeb, a few dwarves began climbing up, only to be impaled through their helmets by my earth spikes. A second group also attempted to climb before the wall was too repaired, only to meet the same fate. After the second group was halted, a third round of the ballistae fired off, killing a few more of the dwarves in the group, and they began their retreat into the tree line. Lucky for me, because those three actions used most of my mana.

As they retreated, I also ran back to the bathhouse to charge my mana. By the time I had recharged, the stream had run dry. I figured that might happen. It seems they have decided to halt our water for the time being. The wall, while not fully repaired, was at least functionally reinforced for now. Zeb traded spaces with me, as he returned to charge his mana.

After a short time, two groups of around 100 began moving on the wall, and a group of fifty began moving towards the gate on this side. The gate was honestly the most reinforced section of the whole wall at this point, so the group of fifty was given the least concern. However, knowing how much damage these mages could potentially do, I decided to use one of our five magic steam cannon shots. The ballistae focused on the group moving to one side, while I focused on the group moving towards the already damaged section. The regular steam cannon had been lit, and was building pressure, but it wouldn't be ready for a little while yet.

I gave a loud shout, indicating I was going to fire, then dumped my mana into the chamber. For the upteenth time now, my hearing went out, but I'm at least no longer disoriented by the blast. With my mana gone, there wasn't time for me to go observe what had happened, I had to rush to the bathhouse again.

Zeb was about half-way charged when I entered. It was honestly quite the odd experience lowering myself into a bath while a huge battle going on outside. Before long though, I could tell something must have happened, because my hearing started to return, and it was clear that something beyond the steam cannon had happened. Zeb was the first to leave the bath, and I felt myself growing anxious hearing the sounds of battle while waiting for my mana to recharge.

When I finally was full on mana and exited the bath, I saw that the wall had been breached by the group of 100 that I hadn't fired the cannon at. Surrounding the breach there were goblins and dwarves fighting, some by mundane means, and some with magic. The hole itself wasn't actually that large, so only a few dwarves could get in at a time, but nevertheless there were many dead individuals from both sides on this side of the wall.

Not wanting to let things get further out of hand, I rushed back up to the steam cannon, and readied a new magic shot to fire through the gap in the wall at the dwarves that were attempting to breach. This time, instead of returning to charge my mana, I started aiming the non-magical steam cannon as well. Once the first steam cloud had cleared, and I could see the carnage left by the first shot, I noted a marked decrease in enthusiasm from the dwarves trying to push through the hole.

I didn't want to risk them pushing further, or rallying, so I fired again into the invading group. This time, it drove the dwarves to retreat. When I looked over the damage from that skirmish, I saw that the wall had been breached on this side, and the gate had been broken. However, the stone behind the gate was left alone. From short discussions with goblins, the first army that got hit with the steam cannon moved over and joined the dwarves attempting to break the door, then both of those groups joined the third group when they breached the wall.

We lost about fifteen goblins in that fight, and Zeb was minorly injured while attempting to repair the wall. In a few short hours, this is where everything is at. A damaged wall, fifteen dead goblins, and around fifty dead dwarves. Among those dead on our side, it seems that the dwarves have some nasty close range magic attacks of their own. A few of the goblins were seemingly pancaked between two plates of stone that rose from the ground.

While the siege on this side was happening, a small defensive position has been built along the tree line by the dwarves. Their wall is also made of stone, which is probably to protect them from any of the cannon shots or other siege engine attacks. As their army regrouped, our side began hasty repairs of the walls again. Given the loss rate up until that point, there was a chance we could at least repel them enough that siege would be impossible. However, as time dragged on, it became apparent that their initial attacks were simply probing our defenses.

After an hour or so, their army began forming up again, this time in full force. There would be no recovery if this army breaches the walls. As I watched the army form up into regiments, a final spark of inspiration struck me. I dashed out towards the civilian houses, giving them the warning to take shelter in the pavilion basement, and opened the path to the sewers. If things go south, at least they can hopefully flee. As they each left their own basements, I collected a little of what I needed from each house.

[Vol.3] Ch.37 Morale Crusher

Time to deploy the final desperate ploy to use on this advancing army. If it worked for them at some point, it can maybe work for us. I look up to the sky, and hope we can hold out long enough. I pulverize a bunch of fish meat that I gathered from the houses, load it into the sling of one of the trebuchets, and let it fly out and rain on the dwarven regiments. When they see it fall apart in mid-air, they don't even bother attempting to avoid it raining on their metal armor.

Not long after, the dwarves began advancing towards the walls. They heavily concentrated their position based on the already damaged sections of wall. It was clear that they simply intended to bulldoze through the damaged sections, and invade using their superior numbers. The ballistae cut a little into the dwarven numbers as they advanced, but not nearly enough to actually cause any major damage. Everything we can do to slow them down will be useful.

I fired the normal steam cannon into them again. Despite it not being fully charged, it did cut down about 10 dwarves. I decided that the other steam cannon should be saved for shooting into the first breach, so as to hopefully make enough carnage that fighting through that area is demoralizing. A few of the ballistae on other walls have been rotated to point in the the previous breach points, rather than the outside to hopefully help thin their numbers when new breaches occur.

It's unfortunate that I'm going to have to save my mana for firing the cannon, rather than using it to fight the invasion. I thought about that fact as I moved toward the wall. Behind the previous breach points, we've set up barricades to help us contain any future breakthroughs, which now seem quite likely. Despite the existence of magic in this world, it seems that most mundane tactics still work. I think that fact is likely due to each individual only having enough mana capacity to do a few magical attacks before having to resort to mundane methods again. Though it does allow some individuals to be more effective than they would be otherwise.

It also negates the need for certain siege tactics, as breaching a wall is simply a matter of getting a few individuals close enough to do so. Though perhaps the fact they are using mana to break the wall down does play in our favor, since they likely have less mana left for actual combat. I suppose magic in large scale combat can be seen as on par with many machines of war from earth, such as a battering ram or siege tower.

As they once again approach the wall and begin demolishing it, I wish that we had collected leftover oils from cooking. Boiling oil at a time like this would be invaluable. Instead, I instruct Zeb to once again collapse some sections of the wall directly onto those trying to breach. It will make it easier for them to get over the walls, but if it can take down a few of them as it happens, that's the best outcome we can hope for.

After the first section of wall gave way, I retreated back up to the magic powered steam cannon, to fire another grapeshot into those climbing through the rubble. Once enough had started to fill the gap, I fired the cannon.

For the fourth time today, almost a dozen dwarves were killed by one of these blasts. Despite how many had died so far though, it didn't seem like an end was in sight. For each dwarf we managed to kill, another simply replaced them. I know in practice that there were likely only a few hundred, and at most a thousand, but our own village only has close to 200 residents. Over half of whom are non-combatants. So the numbers were not in our favor here. The ballista were at least occasionally able to take another dwarf down, lowering their numbers. I myself was torn as to if I should go and recharge my mana, or pick up a weapon and try to physically repel those invading the wall.

Then, as things were just starting to look bleak as the second wall section gave way, from overhead we heard a loud screech. The dwarves initially let out a huge cheer and began fighting with extra vigor. To them, I'm sure it seemed like their protector beast had come to bless their fight. What happened moments later though was shock among their troops, and a turnabout of conditions within the walls.

The eagle swooped down, and landed just outside the walls on the north side, near the stone altar where we'd been feeding it. After hopping once or twice and looking about, it proceeded to pry open not one, not two, but three dwarves, eating them on the spot. To the eagle, I'm sure it was a similar experience to the first day we fed it the strange fish bundle. Here are these small packages that smell like the fish, all running about.

The dwarves nearby the eagle all panicked and began fleeing full speed from the area, abandoning the battle. Those a little further away began turning their attention away from the breaches in the walls, retreating from the eagle in either direction. Those inside the walls continued fighting, but as they were slowly killed, fewer and fewer dwarves funneled through the gaps, as the majority of the army outside the walls was retreating.

I was very thankful that the dwarves didn't bother to dodge the fish ball I had flung at them earlier. I don't know for certain that the eagle would have decided to eat the dwarves if they didn't smell like the food it had been eating recently. As the dwarves retreated, the eagle took flight, grabbing an additional dwarf in one of its talons as it returned up the mountain.

After another ten minutes, the fighting had stopped again, with the last of the dwarves in the walls being slain. Our casualties numbered 18. The dwarves lost something near 70. Repairs were immediately started again. Rocks and stone were piled up near the walls as Zeb began stone shaping them back into solid pieces.

I retreated to the bathhouse to recharge once again, and this time, Zaka was here recharging. He held down the other breech in the wall pretty well, using his fireballs to hinder and sear dwarves as they approached the barricades. Zaka left before me, and Zeb entered having depleted his mana as well. The three of us have been recharging our mana a lot today. A few of the hobgoblins and other goblins have been here as well though. Although none of their magic attacks are as flashy, those who can throw a spear with extreme force do use mana to do so, and have had to stop in occasionally.

Ultimately, without this bathhouse, we'd have likely succumbed during the second attack. I'm starting to rethink the deal I had with Shasta, although the whole thing is going to need reworked in light of the attacks we've suffered. I'm leaning more towards the idea of waiting for a year until I have a larger crystal for myself here to send the old crystal back to the mainland. Ultimately, I don't want more eagles here, but I don't mind keeping the one we have. It did save us this time after all.

As the day dragged on, we repaired our walls the best we could, and piled the dwarves bodies outside the walls after stripping their armor and weapons. It started to become apparent that it was unlikely we would be attacked again today. The wounded were treated, and the goblins in the pavilion were returned to their homes. Siege engines were repaired as needed, weapons replenished and repaired, and the sewer was re-sealed. By the evening the mood in the village was bittersweet. We had repelled the dwarves today, but if they continued fighting it was obvious to us that we would lose. The hope, however, was that it wasn't obvious to the dwarves themselves that this was the case.

The next morning, a group of fifteen individuals were the only ones who arrived. I recognized three of them as Shasta, Ambella, and Katarko. Then there were ten dwarves who were in full matching armor, a single dwarf who wasn't in armor, and a human who was wearing light armor. I told the siege engine operators to hold their fire as the group approached.

"We are here to make peace!" shouted Shasta.

"Asking for peace now after both sides have spilt blood? You must know that any previous conditions will need to be renegotiated?" I yell back.

Shasta turned and spoke to the unarmored dwarf, and after some back and forth she shouted back, "As long as the negotiations aren't too far from what was agreed upon before."

I thought for a bit, are there other concessions that I might want? Maybe a few, but none should be too extreme. "Fine! However, half of you must leave your weapons outside," I shouted back.

After they complied, we cautiously opened a section of wall for their group to enter through. Our fighting force barely outnumbering them two to one. We didn't have a meeting place prepared, so Zaka's house was used. A few guards were let in from each side, along with Shasta, the unarmored dwarf, myself, Zeb, and Zaka.

[Vol.3] Ch.38 Terms of Peace

As we took positions around the small table in Zaka's home, the atmosphere became tense. A lot of things were riding on the discussion that was to come. As everyone got situated, I opened the discussion with a question, "What terms are you seeking?"

Shasta turned to the unarmored dwarf to speak with him, likely relaying the question. I could finally get a good look at the dwarf who is seemingly the leader here. His face was marred with lots of scars, but contrasting that, he has quite the bulbous nose and finely groomed facial hair giving a somewhat friendly but serious impression. It's clear that he has seen a lot in life, but also takes his appearance seriously.

As I observed the dwarf, Shasta and him seemed to have a small argument before Shasta spoke to us again.

"These islands are to become a protectorate of the Dwarven Military Leader Kao Ostark. The artifact crystal similar to ParTor will be given as tribute in exchange for the protectorate status. Further, a military outpost will be placed on this island. Soldiers are to be fed by residents of this island as part of their protectorate status. As a further consequence, all current prisoners shall be turned over to us." Shasta said, seemingly upset with what she's was saying.

"First, those are worse terms than what we discussed before. Here's our counter offer, this island, and other islands in this chain are recognized diplomatically as an independent nation with us in charge. We'll allow a dwarven embassy to be built. In addition we'll provide the artifact crystal next year as a sign of goodwill, and return our one prisoner." I said.

After Shasta relayed the information I swear I saw a glint in the other dwarf's eye as he begin begins his response.

Shasta translated again, "How about a compromise? While you'll be recognized as independent, we'll build a military outpost on one of the other islands. That outpost will be considered our territory, but on lease from you. The regular embassy will still be built here, and we'll take the artifact crystal back with us when we leave in the coming weeks, along with the prisoner."

At this point, I think I understood why the dwarf had a glint in his eye. He likely was no stranger to negotiation, where as I myself am a novice. By starting the negotiation from such a hardline stance, it makes the current compromise seem more moderate, but it's actually still worse than what I had discussed with Shasta before.

I wasn't completely cornered though, and I gave another counter offer, "Instead of on another island, your base can be on this island. Still leased from us, of course. The crystal is actually non-negotiable for another year. Not only is it necessary for our own construction, but if we were to remove it now, I suspect your return trip would end in failure without the crystal in place here. You may, however, leave with our prisoner today."

As Shasta and the dwarf had another back and forth, the dwarf seemed upset about something initially, but eventually had a counter offer. "Instead of any unnecessary leasing discussions, why not simply let us take the island closest to the mainland. From here, it's about seven days of sailing if the weather is fair. The crystal can wait a year, and we'll take the prisoner today." Shasta said on behalf of the dwarf.

I didn't have any idea if that was or wasn't a good deal, and I didn't have anyone on my side of the negotiation who would know either. The other dwarf was carefully gauging my response, so I felt pressured to not ask for extra info. However, to not ask would mean that we potentially miss out on a good deal.

I eventually asked, careful of my wording, "As I am unversed in any islands further than the next in the island chain. I'm afraid I myself haven't travelled nearly enough. My companion might know more, although he hasn't travelled by sea in many years. This distant island, can you tell me more about it, since you've travelled there recently?"

After further back and forth between Shasta and the other dwarf, she replies, "I myself have been given permission to tell you what I know about the island. The first island is a bit smaller than any of the other islands. It barely has a hill remaining in its center, but boasts multiple beaches. This is between you and me, but it seems like a fair deal, and there are two islands between it and here which are also uninhabited."

There is always the chance that I was having the wool pulled over my eyes, but ultimately, it might not be too bad of a deal. I mean, not having to deal with the dwarves directly as some kind of vassal state is good, and we aren't even on any of the other islands. Maybe at some point in the future it will be a problem, but honestly, it's just as likely not to.

"Fine, we accept these terms. You can follow us and we'll give you the prisoner, so you may take him with you. Also, you may send unarmed men to collect your dead." I say.

The other dwarf seemed quite pleased with the result, as he hummed to himself while we lead him to the jail to collect the human prisoner. After they gathered the prisoner, the negotiating party left the village. I myself am shocked we came out of the whole endeavor intact. I'm sure that down the road there will be headaches as a consequence of this discussion, but for today, I am just glad to be done with the fighting again.

Over the next two days, some dwarves came at random times to gather up their dead. It was somewhat awkward, but I just reminded myself that they had also devastated the other town on the island, so I shouldn't feel direct sympathy. These people were soldiers, and should be treated as such.

The eagle also came down to feed during that time, but we had prepared another bundle for it, so it gladly just ate the offering. A few dwarves that were handling the dead at the time looked on with initial fear, but calmed when the eagle didn't attack them. It makes me wonder just how deep their cultural relationship with the eagles is. To me, it seems like many don't interact directly with them, and only seem to have some spiritual belief about the eagles themselves. That was to our benefit this time, so I'm not going to tell them that it's just superstition, and the eagles are like almost any other wild animal.

We've been fully repairing the walls in this time, but have remained on lockdown. I don't know how good a dwarf's word is, or even if any documents would have any meaning. Without third party witnesses, they could easily just decide to attack us again, and no one would know that they betrayed us. So, until we can verify they've left, we're going to be on high alert.

In the time since we fought, we've gotten a good count of survivors. Unsurprisingly, almost all the goblins who participated in the fighting and survived have prestiged, and three evolved into hobgoblins. Zaka is also getting really close to his level cap. I think it'll be quite good for him to be fully mobile again, which I hope will happen when he prestiges or evolves.

Three more days have passed, and we haven't seen any dwarves in this time. Upstream from the village, we found that the dwarves had made a temporary dam to halt our water supply, but without maintenance, it had overflowed. Not wanting it to cause any accidental damage, I slowly breached the dam to drain the water. We're going to send some scouts out tomorrow to look for any further information on the dwarves in the nearby area. If everything seems fine, we'll send a larger scouting party out to the far side of the island to report if the dwarves have left or not, and allow goblins to resume fishing, as long as they're escorted to and from the bay area.

After twelve more days, the scouts have returned and it seems the dwarves have left the island. Which means we no longer need to have all individuals outside the city walls be escorted. It also means that Zaka plans on re-summoning imps to get more goblins to replace the population of the village that was lost. Thankfully, most of the damage was done to the city wall, and we've already repaired that.

After the negotiations, I plan on attempting to grow another massive crystal this year. This time though, I plan on bringing a few goblins with me to work the forge and handle food, allowing me to work at a faster pace. I really hope I can get it done in a single year, as it took longer than that in the past for me when I was working alone.

[Vol.3] Ch.39 Looking Forward

First thing I had to do before spring was finish the new dining building that I was in the process of building before the interruption of the eagle and dwarven army. Zeb also helped, so getting that whole building done took eight days. The goblins who wanted a new dining area were quite happy with it, so I'm glad.

The next project that Zeb and I are going to work on is the integrated dining area apartment building. I need both of those buildings done before the spring thaw so that Zeb can replicate them in the village to help expand the population while I'm busy up on the mountain growing the new crystal.

Getting the new twelve person apartment with built in cooking area took a little while longer than I thought. Overall it took fourteen days to get the building completed. Thanks to how long they take to build, we agreed to only build them on demand from now on. I decided to have a planning discussion with Zaka and Zeb as well about the future development of the village.

One of the main topics was actually related to things I learned from the war with the dwarves. I learned that a single layer of defense isn't as useful as I thought it would be. Thanks to mana capacity of individuals, there exists a burst of strength that either side can display to get through singular problems for a short period of time, if they have the right magics to do so. For us, the steam cannons were one such tool. For the dwarves, that tool was the ability to quickly break through walls.

The conclusion of that knowledge is that we should layer defenses. Any future expansions of the village should have a new wall built in a new layer, rather than expanding the old wall. That way, defenses can be layered, and allow for strategic retreats inward, depleting any sieging army's mana supply. Normally, that would hurt both sides, but with a mana restoring bathhouse on our side, that should give us an edge that means we would win in longer sieges. Not including starvation and lack of water as potential threats, obviously.

We should also build a new building once we have two wall layers. That building is a central castle. A towering building where siege engines can be placed high enough to fire over all the city walls, and big enough that the bathhouse area can be kept inside. This facility should basically be the final retreat point for all the villagers, where the last layer of defense, and any potential underground escape tunnels, are located. Building a castle will take quite a while, and will likely displace a number of homes, and would require a decently sized workforce and military to properly support, which is why it should wait until the village grows to the size of a proper city.

As for other buildings, they'll need to keep an eye on population size and food stores to determine if and when they expand any of the fields or the artificial tide pools. Since I'll be gone for almost an entire year, I figured we should plan out all the constructions we'd need in advance. There were some discussions about where to cut stone from, and it was decided that the escape tunnel should be dug to completion for stone, then the reservoir should be expanded afterwards.

I spent the final few days in the village helping with various construction tasks while asking around to the goblins to see who would be interested in helping me on the mountain. As it would turn out, not many were keen on helping me for the entire year, but many said they'd work with me for a month or two at a time. After doing some scheduling, I had enough individuals scheduled to help me throughout the year that I shouldn't have any issues, outside of retraining them occasionally.

There were a few goblins that I wanted to come up more regularly though. Namely, the building crew. Since we'll be working with crystal material, I figured it would be a good idea to attempt to get them mana affinity, like both Zeb and I. There also will be a need for more trees to be cut down up on the mountain occasionally, so giving them more opportunity to gain levels through that process should also come in handy.

Overall though, I'm hoping that the next year will be pretty boring.

[Vol.4] Ch.1 Return to the Village

The year, or at least the months without snow, passed by pretty uneventfully, although it did have its moments of surprise. The first surprise was that within the first two months, both of the goblins that Zeb and I had sent to the reservoir to manually cut stone got stone shaping. Given that success, it was decided that once the level in the reservoir returned to normal, three more goblins would be sent to cut stone to further expand the construction workforce.

In the next three months, a handful of goblins gained mana affinity while working with me on the mountain. It was decided that once any of the then reservoir goblins got stone shaping, goblins that had mana affinity should be the next ones to attempt to gain stone shaping. While all that was happening, I was making pretty good progress growing a new large crystal. With extra goblins working with me, I could spend the downtime during the gradual growth process making new vacuum chambers to fill with crystals, and the goblins would go melt the insides and bring them back to me.

In the next month, I got news that Zaka had fully recovered from his injury. Well, he evolved and fully regrew his injured parts would be more apt. He's grown to be not quite twice his previous height, and from his short visit, seems to be some kind of troll complete with rapid regeneration. His size is a bit of a problem for himself, as when he came to visit, he had to duck quite a bit to actually fit through any doors, and even standing inside wasn't possible. Part of the reason for his visit was to pass time while Zeb designed a new house for him in the village.

Speaking of the village, Zeb had expanded the housing to the point where he needed to add another layer at the tide pool. The total population had grown to almost four-hundred at this point, and they were starting to feel more growing pains. Namely, a lack of job opportunities. As Zaka returned, I advised that some more empty workshops be built, and to keep an eye out for any goblins that might have any interesting hobbies.

Once the winter deadline was about two months away, I had grown a new crystal to the size of the old one, but I hadn't decided to stop there. In the previous two months, in some of the waiting time, I carved out and designed an even larger apparatus for growing crystals. I then kept growing the crystal to the point it is at today. This new crystal stands about 8 feet tall at this point. I previously had only wanted to go up to the smallest limit of crystal size, due to safety concerns, but now I have a bit more knowledge about these giant crystals, and am not as concerned.

First, from living with the six foot crystal in the village, we observed lots of effects. Animals and plants nearby seem to enjoy some benefit from having the crystal in the area, it was helpful during the siege, and also produced quite the soothing bath to soak in. Second, knowledge about ParTor in the dwarven lands seems to indicate that the dwarves have a crystal that could be estimated at ten feet tall conservatively, but it still is able to functionally provide all the benefits without causing catastrophic harm. I could infer this fact from the information that the crystal there was probably found quite a long time ago, and yet they've maintained their capitol around it.

Which means I should be fine to grow the crystal larger this time, or at least, I presume that to be the case. Of course, I don't intend to install it in the old bathhouse until the dwarves have actually removed the previous crystal. I don't know when exactly they'll return this winter, but I'm hoping it's relatively early in the season. I'm pretty content with just having the one eagle on the island, and if they return too late in the season, there is a non-zero chance we'll end up with more eagles here. That is something I'd rather not have to deal with.

After packaging the new crystal within a large amount of stone, it took four hobgoblins and Zaka using the cart system to transport it into the village. There we moved it to one of the warehouses to store until we can replace the old crystal. Honestly, calling it a village isn't quite right anymore. A town would be closer to accurate. I get the vibes that in a village, everyone knows everyone, here, there are almost too many individuals for everyone to know everyone else.

Which means its time to formally establish the police force and a judicial system. The police force should be easy, as we've already planned for it, and been training a selection of goblins for the job for a while now. As for a judicial system, for now, that can still be rolled into the executive branch, aka Zaka. I doubt there will be so many crimes that it will eat up much of his time. However, we do still need to coat that basement cell with metal, in case any of the stone shaping individuals end up in jail.

In fact, that's what I'll be doing while I wait for the dwarves to return. It shouldn't be too bad, mostly just making metal plates that can be slotted and slid into each of the walls, then bars that also slot into place. Since I can shape the stone outside of the cell to actually hold all the plates, it shouldn't be too difficult of a project. The time consuming part will be shaping the metal.

I was right when I said it would be time consuming. I started with the small jail cell, and that ended up taking 14 days in total. As I was affixing the metal bar door as the last step, it started to rain in the village and snow on the mountain. The next jail cell will probably take about twice as long, just due to its sheer size. I think I want to take a short break from that and work on something else for a few days, just to break up the monotony of working around a forge, considering I did something similar for most of the year with the crystal growth apparatuses.

What I'd like to do is explore the expanded town, see Zaka's new house in full, and do some reconnaissance around the village to plot out where expansion should happen in the future. Ultimately, the village will need lots of new buildings and expansions, so knowing the best direction to actually expand the village to achieve future goals should be useful.

Zaka's new house is pretty neat, and reminds me a bit of my house up on the mountain. It has a large reception hall and extra rooms. When Zeb built it, he probably thought about the fact we don't have a good meeting hall for formal situations, and having the chief's house roughly work as that was probably a good idea.

As for the areas around the village, the next obvious direction for expansion of the fields is upstream, given that has the most readily available access to water. If I'm facing upstream, to my right is the direction towards the second valley, along with the direction with the most easily developed land. If I head left instead, the slope starts to increase pretty severely after about a half-mile, which would make construction beyond that point difficult.

Unfortunately, I didn't find any physical features that would be useful to capitalize on at this time. It might be worth looking around again in springtime though, as the heavy rains might reveal areas that have seasonal streams which could be modified and maintained to be more useful. As for me now, it's back to working on the jail.

After four days, I was interrupted by quite the spectacle. The eagle that we've had around was fighting another eagle in the sky above the island. Thankfully, our eagle seems to have won, and drove the other eagle off. Maybe it was something like a territory dispute? Either way, I'm glad they didn't just settle their differences and decide to coinhabit our island, taking care of one eagle is already enough of a pain.

I wouldn't be surprised if the dwarves return soon, as it seems like they arrive a bit after eagles show up in winter time. That being the case, I'm going to take a day or two to get the supplies ready for moving the crystal. I'll basically just be encasing it in a decent layer of stone, then attaching poles onto the crystal, so that they can carry it.

[Vol.4] Ch.2 Trade Negotiations

After working for another twenty days, I finished the jail cell, and just in time too. Later in the day, the dwarven envoy arrived. I figured it would be just a handful of dwarves who arrived, but to my surprise, it was actually about thirty individuals, including the dwarf I negotiated with before and Shasta. They didn't just come to collect the crystal either. They arrived with various gifts of their own. Alcohol and metal tools made up the majority of their gifts.

I also learned that the dwarf I negotiated with was a big shot in the dwarf kingdom. When we were negotiating before, initial discussions had us coming under the control of Kao Ostark. Well, that dwarf is apparently him. He seemed to be in good spirits as he entered the village, and was seemingly impressed with the rate we've expanded things in the village since he was here last.

In the evening, we officially met with Kao and Shasta in Zaka's new house to discuss matters.

"Kao is impressed with the improvements you've made in such a short time." Shasta said as we sat down.

"Well, we've had a lot of incentive to expand our population." I replied, "Anyway, outside of the crystal what other matters are there to discuss?"

"There are a few topics outside of just the crystal that we were hoping to establish in the coming days. First and foremost, we'll need to draft up formal documentation and international agreements to establish the exact relationship our two countries have, along with any stipulations that might need to be included within those agreements. After those are discussed, we can see what, if any, of the other topics are still valid." Shasta said, while reading from a piece of parchment.

"I suppose formalizing everything is probably a good idea, especially before we have any further interactions. Of course, I'll probably need to be informed somewhat about the workings of the dwarven kingdom as we discuss matters..." I replied.

After three grueling days, we've hammered out formal documentation for most of the important topics like trade, immigration, criminal extradition, sovereign borders, and military agreements. Criminal extradition and border discussions were easy and pretty straight forward. We both agreed to extradite any criminals from either country back to their homeland when requested. Of course, things don't always work out that way, but that's a discussion for when a problem actually arises.

As for border discussions, it was actually quite informative, in addition to being easy to discuss. It seems that, within the mainland where the dwarves come from, maritime borders in the ocean aren't really considered, because few people bother to travel in it due to the general risk of leviathans. Thankfully, the dwarves were willing to accept some maritime borders being drawn around the islands as being our territory. The distance varies somewhat, but the water between the three islands that we own is considered our territory, forming a bit of a bubble around the outside of them.

On topics of trade, the dwarves have a 15% tariff on all materials going into their country. The tariffs are generally handled by the merchants themselves, but need to be paid in dwarven currency. As for ourselves, we've decided on setting no tariffs on trade coming to us at this time. Without a formal monarch or government, it's not like collecting a treasury is going to matter for us right now. We did however set a 5 year expiration on this trade treaty, and it'll need to be renegotiated as that deadline arrives.

Immigration was a tricky topic. While Kao doesn't seem to mind personally, the dwarven king was quite adamant about not allowing any goblins or other demons into their mainland, but is alright with the singular island that is under Kao's direct control having them if he wishes. So for the time being, their borders are practically closed, outside that one island. As for us, we're actually going to set up a pretty strict immigration policy ourselves.

Those who wish to immigrate can apply on the island controlled by Kao, fill out an application, and we'll review the applicants before allowing them into our territory. First, I don't want this to turn into a colony of dwarves. I don't have much against them, but I also would like to keep things within our own control, and not be under the influence from a foreign power. Second, we don't want to bring people in who wouldn't actually want to be here. Conditions aren't exactly amazing here right now, and a lot of technology is lacking compared to a medieval society. As of right now, working and living here is somewhat harsh, and any immigrants need to have good motivations for enduring that.

When we arrived at military agreement discussions, I got even more of a glimpse into the workings of the dwarven kingdom. Their king doesn't actually make any military decisions. He's in charge of domestic policies, and has a relatively small army that is stationed at their capitol. As such, no country-wide military agreements are ever established. Instead, each independent military leader makes their own agreements, which includes their own armies. Internally, most of their armies all have defensive pacts with each other, but due to the difficult terrain in their homeland, having independent military decision making is important.

Given that fact, we could only make military agreements with Kao during negotiations. We settled on an agreement related to the islands. If an outside power threatens either our islands, or Kao's singular island in his territory, then the other party would be expected to provide military assistance. Honestly, it seems to be a more than fair deal to us, since we won't get dragged into any mainland fighting by happenstance.

By the end of the agreements I had a question that had been burning in my head, but I didn't dare risk asking until after the agreements were all signed. However, after they were signed off I faced Kao and asked, "Alright, now that all the paperwork is done, why be this generous? I'm grateful, but from what I can tell, demons seem to be seen generally as a scourge."

After Shasta translated, he let out a chuckle and replied in dwarvish, and I had to wait for Shasta to translate again, "There is something unique going on here. An eagle protected you, and you hold the secrets to crystals like ParTor. Many dwarves see the eagles as something akin to gods. I know they are mere beasts. They are fickle, but intelligent. If you can keep them on your side, you can show loyalty to others as well. As for generosity, I'd be inclined to be less generous personally, but Shasta thinks that big things are likely to come from here if it's given time to prosper. If it doesn't, then it's relatively easy for me to merely abandon the island outpost we'll set up, and let the world decide for itself your fate."

When his statement finished, I definitely understood his reasoning. It's likely to cost him nothing to actually give us these concessions, but if we end up being a problem, he can just look the other way, and no one else would actually fault him for breaking any agreements he made with demons. Without making us a formal protectorate, he's still managed to maneuver us into that role none-the-less. He's quite shrewd.

The next day, we sat down and discussed trade. The dwarves are going to set out tomorrow, and make the six day journey through the forests to the bay where they've docked, taking the crystal with them. They said that they could haul more items back if we wanted to trade for anything. This time around, they've brought a merchant with them who can do some appraisal, and give us rough estimates of what we could get in exchange for things.

First and foremost, I want crop seeds and domesticated animals. Diversifying food sources is always a good idea, since it reduces the chances of total collapse of the food supply. Crop seeds wouldn't be too expensive, but enough domestic animals to start a food supply would actually be a bit difficult to transport to the islands. It wasn't impossible, but it'd be expensive.

Two potential exports we could provide weren't very valuable, namely, fish and swamp beets. However, since we can always restock on fish, it's worth trading some of it. Salt is actually worth a bit more pound for pound, so we'll also be trading some of that as well. The most valuable item though is some of the metal ingots that Katarko made. I'm willing to part with some of them, but metal is also non-renewable, and we have lots of things that we'll need metal for in the future, so I don't want to ship away our entire stockpile.

After negotiating with the merchant for a few hours, I've decided to sent them off with about 20% of our ingots we have left, along with a decent amount of salt and preserved fish. In exchange, we'll be getting a barrel of seeds for three different crops that the merchant suspects should be able to grow here, and 9 medium sized livestock animals, eight females and a breeding male in total. They're grazing animals, so they hopefully can sustain themselves on general plant life growing on the island. After he described the animals, they sound like a mix between a deer and a sheep, so I'm intrigued to see what they taste like.

In the evening, I worked with some of the dwarves that were brought along to get the crystal properly packed away in lightstone for them to transport, ensuring that they could actually remove the lightstone as well using their own magic. Once everything was verified on that front, all the other trade goods were packed up so that the dwarves would be able to set out first thing in the morning.

[Vol.4] Ch.3 More Infrastructure

As the dwarves set out the next day, the merchant said he hoped to return this winter with our goods if he can, but that we shouldn't hold our breath in case he has difficulty trading for all the materials we wanted. After he said that, I asked him to consider procuring parchment for us for next year, in case he can't return before then. We'll likely need a lot of it for handling formal documentation between the dwarf kingdom and here, so getting a source of it now seems like a good idea.

After the dwarves set out, we went through the process of loading the new crystal into the bathhouse. By the evening, we'd gotten it loaded in and properly positioned. I couldn't say for certain, but the water feels even warmer than it did with the old crystal. As I soaked in the bathhouse in the evening, I thought about a few projects that are going to need to be completed at some point in the near future.

One of the looming problems is fresh water. The stream here was never very large, and with nearly five hundred goblins and other demons drinking from the stream, along with using the water for cleaning and growing crops, we've basically outstripped the available continuous freshwater here. A partial solution is to properly use the reservoir, and honestly, we should probably have been doing this already. The valves should be utilized and adjusted so that the winter snow melt is preserved to last longer into the year.

We might need to expand the stream system in the village as well. By that, I mean that if we keep expanding the village outwards, we should make new artificial channels for freshwater to flow through other sections of the village, so freshwater doesn't need to be gathered from as far away. Wells might also end up being a useful construction to attempt to build in some locations in the village to further help alleviate any water issues.

Another issue facing us as a nation is large scale infrastructure. The road up the mountain is useful for us, as is the road to the sea, but the best available harbor is on the opposite side of the island, and travelling through the forests around the outside of the island to get there takes seven days if you're traveling quickly, and longer if you're trying to haul things. A few roads should probably be constructed to the harbor on that side of the island to facilitate trade.

Another thing I wanted to make before but I can't actually do without a skilled smith is a windmill. Ideally, an English style mill that automatically faces the wind and adjusts its fans so it doesn't take extra operators to run multiple of them. There are a lot of locations on the island with pretty decent amounts of wind, and the ability to utilize that for mechanical work in various forms would catapult our economy forward.

Finally, and this is an issue I'm not actually sure how to solve easily, is the idea of building a port. The tides here are so extreme that the only way I can conceive of a port being made is by restricting access in and out to being during high tide at a wet dock, which we'd have to dig ourselves. It's not impossible, but I'd need a lot of info I don't currently have in order to complete that task. In fact, this is important enough that I think I'll try to make it over to the harbor on the other side of the island before the dwarves make it back, just so I can get a good look at their ship or ships to see what we're working with. Since they're a large group hauling supplies, I should be able to make it to that side of the island faster than them if I travel alone.

The round trip to the bay and back again took twelve days in total. Thankfully, I reached the bay before the dwarves left and was able to get a good look at their ships. There were three ships anchored in the harbor. One ship was larger than the other two, with three large sails mounted on the deck and many wooden slats which likely had cannons behind them. That ship probably required well over a hundred individuals to crew it. The other two ships were slightly smaller, with one large main sail and two smaller sails. They looked like they also had cannons, but many fewer than the first ship. They each probably required a bit less than fifty individuals to fully crew.

Even the smaller ships would be a real pain to make a single wet dock for, let alone enough to hold multiple ships. For now, I think that our best bet is to build a road to this side of the island, to facilitate the speed of travel around the island. I'd guess that with a good road, walking from one side of the island to the other via the periphery would take about two days at a leisurely pace, or just one if you push yourself. Right now it takes about eight at a leisurely pace due to the difficult terrain.

Thankfully, building this road should be much easier than building the road up the mountain for multiple reasons. First, we have a much larger goblin workforce and those goblins are more skilled than previously. Second, while the terrain is difficult, it isn't actually trying to ascend the mountain, so there is a lot less zig-zagging to do. Honestly, rather than go over some of the ridges, around the mountain, we might just tunnel through them, or cut a direct path up if necessary. The third reason is that this road won't have a cart system attached to it, since it won't have much of a height differential.

What I'll probably do is mark out a path, and then for the simple portions, let the goblins with stone shaping run that portion of the project. There will be a few sections that will require some more advanced decision making where I'll probably need to step in, but I expect most of the road should be fairly straightforward to build.

I've decided to break the process of building the road up into multiple parts. The first part is the section from the village to the valley edge in the direction of the now-destroyed second village. Once I figure out the best place to build road to connect the two valleys, that will be the endpoint of the first section. The second section will cross the second valley and up to the next valley edge. Unfortunately, after that the terrain becomes quite craggy, and will probably require plotting and engineering to make the remaining roads functional. All the craggy sections will need to be individually lined up, then cuts and fills will have to occur to allow flat roads to be built.

Thanks to my scouting before in the area, I had a pretty good idea of where the best crossing from one valley to the next occurs, so I got the first road section marked out in only five days. The general path will include a slight incline towards the center mountain, to try to make the path as short as possible to the other side while maintaining a very shallow grade. Crossing into the second valley will require a tunnel to be dug between the two valleys.

There is a lot of peripheral work that needs to be completed before the road itself can be built. First, we'll need lots of stone, and since we're approaching spring, the reservoir area will soon be unavailable. We've only got about three weeks before the reservoir will be inundated with water, so we'll want to make the most of the time we have for that. Second, there are a lot of trees in the way of the road that will need cut down. This is always a bit of a blessing, since the extra levels are appreciated, but it does take time to actually accomplish. Third, all materials for construction need to be moved to where they'll actually be used, which for projects like this is no simple task.

Once the spring rains and snow melt makes the reservoir area unusable for cutting stone, we can resume digging our emergency escape tunnel, as well as the tunnel for the road to acquire some additional stone.

With all hands on deck cutting stone for twenty days, we managed to excavate a significant amount of stone from the reservoir area. We even had a bunch of the goblins manually breaking stone so that we could hopefully get a few more stone shapers by the time we cut all the trees down for the new road. We ended up using a significant amount of regular laborers to keep up with the pace that we were cutting stone to haul it back to the village. The cart system was running full time to haul blocks down to the village, and even with that, the stockpile areas at the reservoir filled up throughout the day, and a night shift of goblins ended up being necessary just to have them emptied by the following morning. Increasing the reservoir's capacity is nice though, since it helps smooth out the stream's flow rate during the heavy rains and snow melt in spring.

[Vol.4] Ch.4 Economics

I got to work on the tunnel section of the new road, while the goblins were left to build the road itself, and cut the trees in the way. After a week, a noticeable issue started to arise. Despite the population of the village, we seemed to have a labor shortage, which didn't make much sense considering just how many goblins I'd see lazing around not working on anything. I decided to take a day to investigate the cause of the lack of work ethic among the goblins who weren't working.

I really shouldn't have been surprised by what I found. Most of the goblins simply didn't want to do manual labor, and after having seen other goblins not volunteering to help when we were quarrying stone, more decided that they didn't need to work. That's a problem, and not just for me, but the whole village as well.

Until now, outside of occasional incentives or trades for more complicated work, a lot of the goblins would contribute to projects when asked by Zaka without any real incentive other than just being asked. Most knew that whatever was being worked on would end up helping themselves in the long term, so they were easy to convince. I'd previously traded building houses or random furniture as an extra incentive, but now we're basically doing that for free. Plus, all their food is free, which almost all of the production of the food is thanks to our construction efforts.

Thanks to the constructions I've made, the amount of labor necessary to actually sustain the population is way less than the number of goblins here, which means that for many goblins, there is no incentive to contribute to society. Heck, back during the dwarf invasion, many of them didn't even fight for their lives. This can't continue for a healthy society. How long until even the fishermen start only getting fish for themselves and the whole society deteriorates back to just hunting?

Tomorrow, I'll talk with Zaka about this issue to try to come up with a resolution for the issue.

Zaka was surprisingly difficult to discuss this issue with. His initial take on the issue was that it wasn't an issue at all, and if the goblins didn't want to work, then they shouldn't be forced to. I discussed the matter more in depth with him though and voiced my concerns about societal regression occurring.

He made a good counterpoint though. There currently isn't enough consistent work in the village for any individuals to be forced to work. There's a decent amount of seasonal work, and a lot of random work that I want done for construction, but the amount of work that the goblins can just do without any instruction or supplies being built is low. Part of that is my fault, but I'd say the majority of it actually rests on the goblins.

I've been more than willing to help make tools or buildings for goblins who show initiative to develop their own work. That said, we lack an incentive structure to even let goblins know that the work they're doing is valuable. Basically, we lack currency. Without currency, everyone just barters, and since we have a surplus of food, everyone who doesn't have ideas on the scale of barterable actions don't have any incentive to work.

I'm opposed to forcing goblins to work by threat of force, as is Zaka, so that isn't going to be an option. Which basically means I'm stuck with having to develop currency for our country. I'd love to just make it out of stone, but considering there are other individuals with stone shaping, that's not going to be an option. That means we'll probably be stuck using metal. Currency comes with all kinds of problems as well, but those problems also make jobs, so it isn't the end of the world.

Of course, with most of the projects I'm working on being ones that don't directly benefit any individual, but instead benefit the whole of our society, it'd be odd if we didn't also implement some kind of tax system. Of course, we can't just assess taxes and charge the goblins for it, that would require an entire administrative state, which would be a nightmare to implement suddenly at a large scale. We're basically operating as a government already, so figuring this out is just the next step.

Instead, I suggested a few things be done. First, a very small fee be placed on using both the fish harvesting pools, and the bathhouse. We'll have to keep two guards posted at either location to collect the usage fees. They also double as protection in case any trouble happens near those locations. We can also create an emblem of some kind to use for unlimited access to the bathhouse for government usage. Second, when the swamp beets or salt are harvested from the existing fields, the government should be the initial buyer, since we're the ones who made the building. Third, the existing workshops should be charged monthly for usage, or a flat fee can be paid back in to the government given we also built those, and they have the means to trade for currency based on their craft. Fourth, all citizens will be given a one time allotment of currency, equal to five days usage of the fish harvesting pools. These things should get the ball rolling, and help the goblins sort out the value of the currency itself.

Finally, there are going to be some issues that arise over time, and we'll have to adjudicate those issues as they arise. Private property is a natural consequence of introducing money. We will no longer be able to just share food storage with everyone. I mean, I built most of the buildings in the village, and a lot of them are currently shared use among multiple individuals. One of the warehouses is currently being shared by multiple shops in the village. We might need to end up taxing them based on their usage. We also have excess charcoal, but we'll probably need to end up setting a price for that as well.

What about homes? We currently have multiple types of homes in the village, and if we're going to charge for the workshops we built, we should probably charge for the nicer homes that some of the goblins live in for free. There are two different styles of apartment buildings, and the default house design (ignoring Zaka's new house). Given how us demons reproduce, it'd be untenable to charge for basic housing, but anything beyond the basic apartment building will require someone to cough up money. If someone has a lot of currency and wants to pay to have a nice house built, that should be fine.

I'm sure there will be lots more issues when we go to implement this, but for now, that'll have to do. I plan on doing all the minting up on the mountain, where I can hide away the various molds I'll use for currency. It's also close to the source of our metal, which is important. I plan on taking up some of the ingots Katarko made to use for the highest level coinage as well. For now though, the mountain still has snow on it, so I'll have to wait before I can make any of this coinage.

While I waited for the snow to melt, I continued carving a tunnel out of the ridge at the edge of the valley. I worked for four days before I noticed an issue. I had been digging at a slight incline based on measurements I made of the two neighboring valleys, so that the tunnel between the two would connect properly. The issue I noticed was that a slow trickle of water was coming from the tunnel. Normally, I smooth the walls with stone shaping to prevent any water seeping in or out through the rock in case there is an aquifer, but given the size of this tunnel, I hadn't been doing that.

While it isn't a problem itself, the water will cause potential damage if I don't properly handle it. Thankfully, I actually do want more freshwater at the village, which is downhill from here. I'd like to build a channel for the water to flow alongside the road we're making as the first portion of fixing this water issue.

The second portion is harder. I'll need to excavate a smaller drainage tunnel on either side of the main tunnel, with channels to guide the aquifer water out of the mountain. I don't know how much water this is ultimately going to drain, and there will probably be even more after a rain, so I'm honestly planning on making the main tunnel on either side big enough that I can walk through it. Then I'll just bore shafts up into the walls a short distance. Ultimately, I'm just digging horizontal wells to properly drain the rock surrounding the tunnel.

That'll end up eating a lot of extra time to dig, but by the end of the project, we'll probably have a decent trickle of freshwater available for awhile, and I can be a little more certain about the stability of the tunnel. It'll slow down construction of the road to build a small channel out of stone next to it, but that should be fine.

[Vol.4] Ch.5 Freshly Minted

I continued digging the tunnel for another twelve days until the snow on the mountain started to melt again. It seems like the merchant is not going to make it back this year. It seems that the safest time to travel between here and the mainland is winter, so now that the season is changing, I'm expecting he won't make it back until next year. Hopefully by that point I can have the village bought into the idea of using currency, and I won't be the only one with trade requests.

Rather than go through all the stages of making the currency myself, I'm going to offer to pay a few of the goblins that helped Katarko to make copper ingots for me. I'll need quite a lot of the metal, so while I excavate the native copper on the mountain, the goblins can melt it down and form it into ingots down in the village. Once I think I have enough copper, I'll make some molds for coins and a press to use for imprinting a design on them. I'll also need to dig a secret vault somewhere in the mountain where I can keep excess currency I make.

I spent sixteen days gathering copper from the mountain, and a decent chunk of that time was spent finding new veins from existing ones using tectonic sense. Since I also had to cut new paths to those veins, I ended up shipping a decent amount of stone down the mountain as well to use for construction projects.

In the evenings, I spent my time designing the coinage for our initial currency while making lightstone to use for both the casts and the press to make the coins. I settled on using three different coins for now. All three coins are going to be circular and have the same sized square hole in the center of the coin, so that a string could be run through to easily keep your money together.

The smallest value coin will also be the smallest in size with a simple wave pattern across the coin. They'll be relatively thin and made of copper. The middle value coin will also be made of copper, but will be both thicker and larger than the first coin. Since this is the coin that I want to use as the basis for entering the fishing area, I figured it would be fitting to have the coin themed with the more popular kinds of fish that are eaten. I intend to set the value of this coin at ten times that of the smallest coin.

The last coin is going to be slightly smaller than the biggest coin, with a design of our mountain on one side, and a river on the other. These coins will be made from the higher quality metal that Katarko helped refine a lot of. I plan on having these coins be worth 25 of the large copper coins, so that they're generally used for large purchases, and to store wealth. Zaka will be given most of these coins to handle, at least until some form of bank is figured out. Then if someone wants to exchange a whole bunch of the lower currency for the larger one, we can trade it out for them.

We intend to give all the goblins an equal starting point with the currency, but since we'll be collecting from some places, we'll also have to introduce currency back in through paid work projects. With the road project fast approaching, that will be one place where we can re-introduce currency into the market via manual labor. The guards will also make a certain amount of money, which should trickle through by some method back into the market, but we'll need to keep an eye on currency circulation to see how the balance is being handled.

So, despite the fact that I only intend to give 5 of the middle tier of coins worth of value to each village member to start out, I'll still need to make a significant amount of coinage overall. First, I think that two middle tier coins, and thirty small coins is probably about the right denomination to start distribution at. With almost 500 villagers, that comes out to an absolutely absurd amount of coins. However, I also want to have more than triple that number actually manufactured in the first batch, so that we're prepped for both population growth and any unknown factors that might spring up. As for the highest value coins, I think just 200 of those coins should be more than enough to last us a long time.

Which means I'll need to bring in some goblins to help with making the coins. That means I'll also need to keep the minting equipment sealed away in the hidden vault as well, so that no one tries to make counterfeit currency. I suppose that means I should also get specific with some of the coin designs, so that a trained eye can spot counterfeits.

Once I get the hidden vault made, I'll actually make the molds and presses for each of the coins. Initially, we'll pour the copper onto a slate with many molds on it. Next, a bar will be run across the whole mold to remove excess liquid copper. Finally, as the copper starts to harden, but is still hot, the press plate will be lowered down onto the mold, giving the second face it's pattern. For the smallest coins, I plan on doing slates that have indents for about 500 coins in total. For the medium value coins I plan on doing 200 coins per slate, and for the highest value coins, 100 coins per slate.

Down in the cavern, I spent two weeks excavating the hidden vault. I'm not going to say exactly where or how its hidden, but there are multiple measures in place to make it difficult to both access and discover. It's got plenty of room for storing all the equipment for making the coins along with a significant amount of coins. I've even made denomination buckets inside so that I can easily remove exactly how much currency I need at any given point.

After the vault was completed I made all the various items necessary for the minting process, which took me another week in total. I've got all the ingots ready, so it should just be a matter of melting and casting coins from here on out. My hope is that I can pay the same goblins that helped make the ingots, since they're already familiar with metal working.

After a bit of a rocky start, we managed to start producing coins at a pretty decent pace. All in all, production of all the coins was eventually completed in 24 days. If I had done it all myself it would have taken significantly longer. As payment for their work, I gave each of the three goblins three middle value coins. Once they had left, I spent another two days just moving things to and from the hidden vault, and sorting them.

Finally, on the third morning after they left, I loaded up a cart with all the coinage and manually lowered the first batch of coins down the mountain. Moving the coins from one cart to the next took quite a while, and I ended up not getting back to the village until late in the evening. I got a guard's attention, and had him go get Zeb and Zaka while I protected the coins.

For tonight, we'll keep them in Zaka's house, and both Zeb and I will stay over to ensure that no one steals any coins before we get a chance to distribute them.

Finally, the time to distribute coins, and explain the changes to the way things were going to run has arrived. The initial explanation to the villagers took about a half of an hour, and didn't go over particularly well. Most of the goblins saw the whole thing as an unnecessary convolution to the way things already work. After all, they can already just bargain with each other for supplies. Not only that, but now a bunch of things that were free are now going to have a cost to them. The most vocal group to complain actually surprised me.

I expected that the goblins who rarely worked would be the ones to complain the most, but surprisingly most of them were quiet on the matter. The group that complained the most were actually the fisherman, who were upset that they would have to pay money when they're already providing something to everyone else for free. Despite attempts at convincing them to trade their fish for currency again to make back more than they spend going in, they weren't convinced.

If the baseline providers aren't going to buy in, then we would have a serious problem on our hands. The other workshops also were a little upset that they'd be charged for some portions of what they owned, seemingly arbitrarily. For some individuals, it would be less, based on exchanges I'd made with them in the past to construct things in exchange for goods, but others who I built things for free are being retroactively charged for the work, but in a lot of ways, they see it as unfair.

A few compromises were drafted up as a result in order to get these groups on board. First, to the fishermen, I eventually negotiated that we'd build an open marketplace where they can sell their fish. For fishermen and farmers, use of marketplace stalls will be free. For others, stalls will be rented out at a fixed rate per day. For the craftsgoblins, we've dropped the costs of their workshops for existing craftsgoblins, but the warehousing charges will be kept in place.

After those negotiations, it seemed like the majority of the goblins were at least willing to give the currency a try. At that point, we had the goblins form lines, and we distributed the currency to each of them.

[Vol.4] Ch.6 Innovation

The first two weeks of using the currency were exceptionally bad, but by the third week, problems become less frequent. There was a lot of fighting that broke out during the first two weeks when disagreements about prices would occur, and the majority of those were about the prices of fish. I shouldn't be surprised, but I was a little shocked none-the-less when all out brawls would occur when fishergoblins would undercut each other, or when the fishergoblins who sold fish the cheapest ran out while other goblins still wanted their fish.

I even got scolded by Zaka for causing so much strife, and I had to talk him down from annulling the currency usage. I'm thankful that incidents slowed down during the third week, otherwise we might have stopped using money. I'm just thankful that we haven't had any outright robbery occur, although there is a decent chance that will start happening soon. Basically, even the goblins who haven't worked haven't run out of money yet, but some are getting close. At that point, I'm expecting at least a few attempts at some form of thievery.

We've had plenty of job offers out, and have been adjusting our prices according to the going rate for food. Right now, food seems to have settled at about two of the smallest coins for a day's worth of basic meals. As such, we're currently offering five small coins for a day's worth of basic labor, whether that is hauling stone or digging dirt.

A few goblins have been proactive about taking those jobs, as the jobs started out paying more than they currently do because the food prices were high at the start while the fishergoblins were figuring out their prices. I'm hoping that more will take them as their funds start to dry up.

It took all three weeks for me to build the open air marketplace downstream of the village. Right now, it sits outside the city walls, but eventually we'll want to build a second circle of walls, at which point, it will be enclosed. I'm hesitant to build more buildings inside the first circle of walls unless they're vital to the city's survival, because they'll probably need deconstructed in the future to make way for official government buildings. Since the marketplace will need extra room to expand in the future as well, I figured it was best to build it here.

The market itself is quite simple. It's just permanent stands that have some shelves for display alongside the road, with other loops of roads in concentric circles, with more of the stands as you go outward. Between stands, I've put short fences of stone, to denote each lot, and keep people walking where they should. Since we now have some degree of excess stands, I'm going to move back to working on the road construction project until I'm needed again in the village.

It only took a day of working on the tunnel to realize why so few goblins were willing to take the manual labor work for the road. I hadn't realized because I haven't been working on this project for almost three months now, but the road to the tunnel and it's canal alongside it, have reached the tunnel already. The tunnel construction was still left for me, but the construction crew has been climbing over the valley edge, going back down, and following the next set of path that Zeb has marked. Which means that all the stone has to be hauled a significant distance to build road.

I've thus made a few changes to the work priorities for the time being. First, no more work will be done on the next section of road until this tunnel is complete. I'll have a few jobs available for manual labor to help me with the tunnel, and I'll also have one of the stone shaping goblins help me. Last month, another of the goblins got access to stone shaping, and I'm planning on sending a few more goblins to go manually cut stone in the reservoir in a few months when the water level drops to near empty.

Zeb will be in charge of adding another layer to the artificial tide pool traps in the mean time. The two other stone shaping goblins can either work for him, do other work if someone is willing to pay them, or just rest if they so choose. We pay a pretty decent wage for the stone shaping goblins at eight small coins a day, so I'm hoping that convinces them to keep working for us, otherwise I might need to increase their wages.

Progress on the tunnel has been moving at a pretty good pace with the extra help. We're eight days in on construction of the tunnel since I changed our priorities, and we've made it about six-hundred feet of the estimated 2000 total feet that this tunnel will need to span. I've actually found a pretty good use for the stone shaping goblin, which means he's being utilized quite well. I was initially worried due to his slower speed of stone shaping and inferior mana capacity that he'd barely be useful, so it's quite the pleasant surprise for both him and me.

What I've done is used stone shaping to drill a small line where the horizontal wells will eventually be located. The stone from that was simply shaped into balls and allowed to roll out of the path slowly. After using my full mana capacity to drill the line on one side, I'd go back to the village and recharge my mana at the bathhouse while the goblin would cut the proper tunnel using the line as a guide. The tunnel is too small for other goblins to come in and haul stone out behind him, so he has to cut the blocks himself and haul them to the tunnel entrance, but considering I'd have to be doing that instead of him normally, it means he's basically as effective as I would be at the task.

Since he's working on that, it frees me up to cut and shape the proper tunnel, where I can have the goblins haul the stone out while I just cut the path. Every so often I use tectonic sense to make sure I'm following the guide cuts I made for the wells on either side too. The streams coming out of those wells have increased to about the same rate as the stream running through the village during the dry summers, so it's actually providing a decent amount of water. Over time, that rate should drop until it reaches a new steady state, but without doing extensive groundwater studies, it's difficult to know how long until that happens.

Incidence rates of conflict have dropped in the village again, but we had our first incidence of attempted theft. Zaka had to preside over the disagreement between two goblins, where one claimed that the other stole coins from his room in an apartment building, and there seemed to be confusion as to whether that was true or not. Two witnesses came forward and said that they saw the accused thief going into the other goblin's room while he wasn't inside, and Zaka deemed that good enough to consider him guilty.

Zaka deemed it a pretty serious crime, tantamount to betrayal, and initially sentenced him to be exiled from the village the next day. When I came back, I talked him down from that to making the criminal spend 10 days in the small jail cell, and do 20 days of forced labor for exactly his meal costs and no extra money. I definitely don't want a den of criminals cropping up somewhere on the island, so exile is a no go. For now, the village is small enough that we don't really need to deal with much of a proper legal system, and Zaka functions in the role of a judge as the village chief.

There has also been a trendy new item that has appeared in the market. Coin cords. Tied off on one end so that coins can't fall off, and designed to be worn, the rope maker has started to make an obscene amount of money, and has already exchanged currency for two of the highest value coins. They're selling the cords at five small coins each, and they've been selling out of their wares every day in the market. I've given them a little bit of advice as I've watched their success. I warned them that eventually, everyone in town will have enough cords for themselves, and they'll only occasionally need replacements, so they should be sure to save some of their money for when that happens.

The other craftsgoblins have definitely taken note, and I've seen a few of them tinkering away when I walk through the area. It's been a while since I've seen as many of them as fired up as they are right now, which makes me glad I introduced the currency. I had been a little regretful, given how much turmoil it caused in the last few weeks, but if it's already bearing fruit, I'm excited to see where it goes from here.

Speaking of innovations, I've noticed a few of the fishergoblins have started to develop different methods to differentiate themselves from each other. One of the goblins is always at the artificial tidepool as soon as the water level is safe to use even the highest layer according to Zeb, and he only harvests the tastiest fish. He then spends much longer of his time in the market, selling them at a higher price than most of the other goblins. Where as there is another goblin who's actually taken to hiring some help himself. He gets to the tidepools later, and harvests just about everything that is left, even the fish that isn't that appetizing. He has his help haul it back to his stand, where it's sold dirt cheap in bulk. There are some who have taken to harvesting only the non-fish like creatures, and others who only get particular kinds of fish, and each has customers who prefer to go to them. Overall, I'm really starting to appreciate the heavy lifting that a little bit of competition has caused for both motivation and innovation among the goblins.

[Vol.4] Ch.7 Strategic Work

We finally broke through to the other valley after another twenty days of work. The tunnel is a little over a third of a mile in length, and elevates by almost ninety feet over the length of the whole tunnel. The horizontal wells were actually the biggest slowdown by the end of construction because of the amount of running water. The reservoir level has finally reached a low enough level to resume some amount of quarrying again, which should help provide the road construction crews with plenty of excess stone with which to resume construction of the road across the second valley.

They can resume construction on the road tomorrow, and I'll trade off and work on the artificial tide pools. I really want to get first hand experience for just how much fish is actually being produced, and how much more the new pools will provide. We've established quite a few government jobs that require only a single goblin to operate, so I'm hoping to increase the population again in the near future to reduce the percentage of the population that works directly for us.

One of the jobs that I neglected to realize we'd need included the person who is supposed to feed the eagle, and there was quite the panic as it came down the mountain only for no offering to be placed for it to eat. After that incident was resolved, we asked for a volunteer to permanently take that job and negotiated payment for them.

There is also more competition for the rope maker now. The clothes maker has started to charge people to add pockets to their simple clothing. Some people prefer the pockets, others prefer the strings of coins. I've heard murmurs of some goblins looking for places to safely hide their coins at as well. I've got no clue how to make a keyed lock though, so they'll just have to get good at hiding them. We've already dealt with a second would-be thief, who was caught trying to sneak into another goblin's house while they were gone. Ideally, we get a banking system organized, and they can just keep excess wealth stored there, but that'll require a lot of planning, and we have more pressing concerns.

The other construction crew had made really good progress, so I only ended up working for eight days to finish the next artificial tide pool layer. Surprisingly, some of the fishergoblins protested the new layer being added. The reason seems to be that they have a harder time cornering their portion of the market when there are even more fish and other sea life available for harvest. Some of them were happy though, like the bulk fish seller. Ultimately, they'll just need to adapt to changes as they come though. Those who can't will fail.

I've also started paying a handful of goblins to start quarrying in the reservoir again. The two who are actually breaking stone are those who have gained earth manipulation already, and they're being paid slightly more than the standard laborer pay. I'm paying two more goblins normal labor pay to haul the stone that the other goblins break all the way back to the village. We always have need for more stone.

Next, I think I'm going to expand our salt evaporation ponds again. Without requiring even more engineering, we're already using about a third of the available space for salt evaporation ponds along the bay where we harvest our sea food, and I'm thinking about doubling it. First, we need more salt to support preserving more food for a higher population, but secondly, salt is a decent trade commodity that doesn't spoil, and is basically renewable.

Plus, all this gives me an excuse to cut some trees down myself to gain more levels. I've done a bit of tree felling over the past months, but I've mostly left it to the other construction crews so that they can gain levels and expand our workforce capable of doing tasks on their own. Since they're working through the next valley over, I can take the opportunity to gain these for myself.

The tree felling of the area was completed after 35 days, and I ended up paying a lot of goblins to haul wood and make charcoal, which actually ended up being an extra boon, as there had been a slow drain on the money in circulation. This gave me a way to recirculate a decent chunk of the money that we'd been acquiring through the fishergoblins' fees to use the artificial tide pools.

I'm now very close to the level cap again, which has me thinking about what I should pick when I do.

<LEGENDARY LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 97
HP: 3176/3176
MP: 1568/1568
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike

On one hand, I haven't even been offered an evolution in a long time, which means I might be forced into prestiging. On the other hand, if I do have an evolution available, would I want it? I suppose it would depend on the options I have available for traits or magic. Plus there is the cumbersome issue of evolution making housing a problem. We seem to get bigger when we prestige or evolve as demons, which means whenever we hit certain thresholds, like Zaka did, we end up needing specialized housing to hold our larger forms. Even for hobgoblins it's almost too small in a standard house after they prestige a few times.

Another thing to consider is that I should probably work hard on something that I would like to gain some form of trait or magic related to. I level so slowly passively, that I could spend months working on something specific for a long time and maybe get offered something to help with that in the future. The question is, what sort of task would I like to gain a trait or magic for?

Obviously, the first thing that comes to mind is metalworking. I gained heat resistance before from working around it so much, so I wonder if there might be more things available to me if I keep pursuing it. I'll pay some goblins to do the manual labor of digging the dirt from the new salt evaporation ponds, then I can stone shape them, but in the mean time, I'm going to go mine a bunch more metal ore, and have it shipped down to the village to smelt.

I'll put in an order for more shells from the goblin that collects them to ultimately make more of the high quality metal. Since it seems to have a pretty high value with merchants, I'm hoping to hit two birds with one stone, and provide us with more trade goods while attempting to focus my potential traits or magic into the same area.

The seashell collecting goblin was ecstatic that I wanted more shells. They'd been taking up public labor jobs since currency was introduced because no one wanted to buy their shells. I offered to buy buckets of finely crushed shells from them at a pretty hefty price of two of the large copper coins per bucket. Considering they had quite the stockpile of shells already, I'm sure they're happy to finally have someone buy them, even if they have to crush them first.

After placing a standing order for them, I made my way up the mountain and began excavating more ore and shipping it back to the village while I waited for news of the salt evaporation ponds to be completed. All in all, I spent twelve days on the mountain mining ore, while paying goblins to ship it back and pulverize it with the crushers, so that it would be ready for processing when I return. Before I left the mountain, I grabbed a decent amount of all the currency to bring back to the village to help keep currency in circulation. Some of the goblins have taken to collecting a lot of the small coins, rather than ever using the medium value coins, since that's the coin they use every day, which means there is more demand for that denomination than I thought there would be.

When I returned to the village, I had to go finish stone shaping the areas around the new salt evaporation ponds before I could start smelting metal, which I'm now hoping to begin tomorrow. The ponds ended up taking eleven days to finish. During that time, the road construction crew has started their construction through the craggy quarter of the island, which will slow their speed heavily. A lot of stone and soil need moved to properly make the road through that portion of the island. Thankfully, we have excess stone, so the pace can probably be kept up if they can hire more help to actually move the rock to the destination.

The carpenter goblin actually came up with an innovation, if a small one. A pulled wooden cart. It's not much, but as long as it's on a road, two goblins can work together to move way more material than they would be able to by just carrying it. It's based on the rail carts I made, so there are some improvements that could be done to make it much better than it is currently, but I'll leave it to the carpenter to see just how clever he is.

At this point, the road construction crew has started camping for weeks at a time while they work as well. They have daily deliveries of not just stone, but also food, so they're able to keep up a good pace. Not too much longer though, and even the deliverymen are going to have to camp out as part of the process. I've had a message sent to Zeb that he should consider building a copy of my inn building somewhere on the far side of the other valley, where the deliverymen can sleep, or the crew themselves if they want.

At some point while they were building through the second valley, it became nonviable to make the trip back to the village to recharge mana, because they'd recharge it in the same amount of time as if they had just waited, that was the point where their construction pace slowed considerably, as their mana became the limiting factor for their work pace.

[Vol.4] Ch.8 Thermal Hands

I spent 33 days making metal ingots. When it comes to making the metal itself, I'm no match for Katarko. I don't actually have much practical skill with smelting and handling metal, and have been mostly working from theory. It's clear from just looking at them that my ingots aren't quite as good as his. That's fine though, my intent isn't to necessarily make the highest quality ingots I can, although it would be nice. No, my intent is to get a new trait or magic based on all this smelting I'm doing.

I've only paused working on smelting because the weather has taken a turn for the worse, to the degree that everyone who is in the village has taken shelter inside. It's been raining heavily, and the wind has gotten pretty severe. Thankfully, it isn't quite as bad as the last major storm we had, but I am still a little concerned about the construction crew. I hope they made it back to the inn that I advised Zeb to build safely. The craggy terrain they're working in could be quite dangerous in this weather.

I'm also keeping ready for any cleanup or emergencies that might occur. I've filled my backpack with a few basic necessities to use if I need them, or someone else needs them. I'm just hoping that the storm stays only at about this level.

The storm continued for two more days before it cleared, and everyone in the village had some repairs to make of one kind or another. I had to spend three days repairing the mesh at the artificial tide pool, as portions had been damaged by debris being thrown by the ocean into it. The fishergoblins were left to clean the tide pools themselves of all the debris that had settled into the bay area due to the storm. I then had to inspect the dam, as debris had built up there as well. That took three days, as I had to have goblins help haul all the debris out from the reservoir as the level slowly dropped. Thankfully, since all the valves were in the open position, none of them seemed damaged.

The construction crew was uninjured, but they're still in the process of fixing damage to the road. Not only did debris pile up, but some of the work in the craggy part of the island got covered in a minor mudslide. Overall though, I'm just glad it wasn't a repeat of the last huge storm we had a few years back. The sewer system seemed to manage all the rainwater, which is good. In retrospect, I wish I had braved the storm to check the sewer outlet to see how much of it's capacity was being used during the heavy rainfall.

One of the biggest losses was that the salt evaporation ponds all refilled with water due to the rain and likely some of the wave crashes, which means that a bunch of the salt harvests have been delayed. It's unfortunate, because we only have a few months of the year during summer where salt production is really productive, and as we enter fall, and rains become more frequent, it's unlikely we'll make much more this year.

I helped with repair jobs through the village occasionally while spending the remainder of the time smelting more of the metal into ingots. The storm did have one small benefit, there have been drastically more shells washing up to shore since the storm passed by, which means I've been able to work for longer than I initially thought I would be able to. Since resuming smelting, I've been making ingots for another 19 days, and I've used up around fifteen percent of all the charcoal we've been stockpiling.

I make three ingots most days, and each ingot weighs about twenty pounds. In total, we have 151 of these ingots, which means we have about one and a half tons of the metal available to use or trade. Unfortunately, I'm pretty much the only one here who works with metal, and I'm practically a novice. Not that I haven't been getting better. The ingots from when I started are noticeably worse than the ones I make now based on the quality of the metal itself. I'm still quite a ways away from being able to forge the intricate mechanisms that I need for some of the projects that I'd like to complete in the future.

However, I did tick over another level a few days ago, putting me to 98. Honestly, it's probably time to just bite the bullet and hit level cap. If fifty plus days of smelting metal wasn't enough to gain something related to it, then I don't know if anything will be.

I cut down trees just outside the village in order to level up. Unfortunately, due to the technique we use to cut trees down, it took twelve days to get to this point.

<LEGENDARY LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 100
HP: 3239/3239
MP: 1594/1594
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike

It's only midday, but I'm feeling tired, probably due to whatever our equivalent is of leveling sickness, so I'm going to see what I have available and go to sleep early.

Available Traits:
Improved Endurance: Increases the amount of strenuous activity you can do at one time.
Heightened Strength: Greatly increases muscle mass and by extension, strength.
Thermal Hands: Spell. Variable Cost. Allows thermal manipulation of objects held in hands and extremely high heat resistance during use. Cost per second scales exponentially with thermal gradient maintained.

Available Species:
Ogre

This is a tough choice. On one hand, I talked about how I might want to evolve again. Ogre seems to be a path for that. However, I did get something related to smelting, possibly. I'm actually very intrigued by Thermal Hands. I'm not sure just how much mana it will end up taking, but given I can spend an incredible amount of mana by utilizing giant crystals, I think it's worth it just to see how far I can take that spell.

I pick thermal hands, and let the darkness overwhelm me...

I was out for a day and a half, but when I awoke, I immediately noticed a change in my hands. I've noticed minor changes to my body before when I picked traits and prestiged, but this is a little more extreme than previously.

My hands, and a portion of my forearms, have gone from somewhat scaled with fur to jet black scales with peaks on the back of each scale. The underside of my hands also have changed to become seemingly calloused.

After I check to make sure I can still manipulate objects similar to normally, I check my stats.

<MYTHIC LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 0
HP: 1244/1244
MP: 882/882
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands

Its always a little saddening to see my HP and MP pools drop every time I prestige, but I've gotten used to it. I think of it kind of like molting for shelled animals at this point.

Similar to most other abilities, I have a general sense of how thermal hands will work intuitively. I basically just activate it, and I can mentally choose to heat, cool, or maintain the temperature of something currently contacting the rough pads on my hands. With that in mind, I decide to test it out on the larger copper coins. I know I probably shouldn't deface the currency that I made, but on the other hand, it's a convenient size for this test.

Copper is highly conductive to heat and has a fairly low thermal capacity, meaning I should be able to manipulate it's temperature fairly easily. I hold the coin with my hand open, facing upright, so I can observe what happens. First, I activate thermal hands, and just maintain temperature.

Surprisingly to me, I only lose two points of mana for the five seconds or so I hold the temperature. Next, I'm going to try heating the coin. As I do so, I barely feel any difference in my hand, and initially, I don't notice anything other than my mana draining. At first, the mana drains nearly as slowly as before, but by ten seconds in, I'm draining three mana per second.

Then suddenly, I'm startled, and drop the coin. I heard a high pitched noise from my hand. Looking at the coin, I can see heat waves in the air rising from the coin. I'm down about forty mana, so I wait a little bit for the coin to cool somewhat before I continue. I pick up the coin again, and start heating it, this time, I'm holding my hand up slightly more to observe my entire hand as well as the coin.

Again, as the temperature climbs, and the amount of mana I'm using increases, I hear a high pitched noise. This time, I don't drop the coin, and keep observing as my mana depletes faster and faster. The noise gets louder, and the pitch lowers, and then I see it. From the peaks on the scales, steam. The peaks seem to be getting a little wider, and steam is escaping from them. Interesting. I push the temperature of the coin higher and higher, until it takes on a slight glow due to heat. At this point, I'm down about half my mana pool. Rather than cooling the coin with magic, I merely place it on the stone floor of the building before turning off Thermal Hands, and wait for it to cool.

I double check my own status. No missing health, about half my mana used up. I don't feel dehydrated either, but maybe I didn't actually lose any water, or if I did, it was minimal. Steam does take about 1000 times the volume of water, so even though I was ejecting it, it may have actually been very little water at all.

Rather than wait for the coin to cool, I pull out a second coin, and try using thermal hands to cool the coin. Keeping a close eye on the scales on my hand and forearm. This time, as the temperature drops, the peaks open much quicker, but they don't seem to release any steam. I put my free hand underneath, and I can feel air moving. Interesting. I leave the second coin on the stone floor here as well. My mana is nearly depleted, so I'll take this opportunity to go to the bathhouse while I think about what I should focus on next, as well as what uses I have for thermal hands.

[Vol.4] Ch.9 Overheating

While I relaxed in the bathhouse, I contemplated Thermal Hands, and realized I probably need to do more experiments before I can come up with use cases for it. I've only tested a coin so far. What happens if I use wood, or a much larger piece of metal? I should probably do more experiments to determine the extent of this new magic's effects. I think I'll also want to raise my level back up to a higher value, if only for personal safety reasons.

If the merchant comes back this winter, which I would expect to be the case, we'll need to have fields for the new crops and livestock. Those areas should be a good place to cut trees to gain more levels again. Thinking about it, I'm starting to get a little worried about the available leveling resources on the island. It's honestly something I should put more time into studying given the growing population. One other source of levels that I've noticed is the sea life that we've been harvesting. All of the regular fishergoblins have prestiged multiple times, and honestly, I'm surprised that none of them have yet to become hobgoblins. Most of the sea creatures must not be worth very many levels is the only conclusion I can draw based on the limited evidence I have for that.

After my mana recharged, I tried out Thermal Hands to heat some wood from a stockpile. I wasn't exactly sure what to expect, but the wood that was in contact with my hand started smoldering pretty early on, and caught fire not long after that. I didn't even use that much mana, only a quarter of my total mana pool.

Next, I went out into the forest to find some damp wood. That wood didn't catch fire despite using the remainder of my mana pool. The wood started to release a lot of steam by the time my mana ran out. It's only a hypothesis, but it really does seem like I'm adjusting the temperature of whatever is in direct contact with my hands, not the whole object I'm holding. Dry wood doesn't conduct heat very well, making it possible to ignite just the surface I'm touching with relative ease, where as the water in the damp wood distributed the heat across the whole chunk of wood while simultaneously absorbing more of the heat energy in the water that had inundated the wood.

I decided to test this theory with one of the ingots of metal that I had smelted. Not just anywhere though, I decided to bring it with me to the bathhouse, and test directly there where I can offload more mana into the ingot.

After I waited for my mana to reach full capacity, I started to heat the ingot. Since I was submerged in the bath, I didn't notice any change in my mana for almost a minute, before it started to slowly tick downwards. At that point, the ingot was noticeably hot. It hadn't yet reached a glow, but it was radiating heat waves in the air. As I allowed the temperature to climb more, my mana started to deplete even more while I was submerged in the bath, and I started to feel warm internally, despite my heat resistance. As the ingot reached a moderate glow, my mana pool fully depleted. If it hadn't, I'm not sure that I could have sustained it much longer anyway. I felt like I was running a fever, and had lost 87 HP.

As my mana ran out, I instantly felt the heat from the ingot on my hand, and dropped it in the water of the bath, which then began ejecting steam at a rapid rate due to the ingot's heat. I lost another 10 HP as the ingot burned me. This is another guess, but the heat I was feeling during the heating process felt a lot like when I would touch a moderate sized mana crystal, or when I slept on the crystal pile, which might mean I was basically roasting my insides with mana conducting it directly towards my hands through my body. Probably something to keep in mind as a potential danger moving forward.

These experiments were simply qualitative experiments. In the future, I'd like to run some quantitative experiments to really nail down the fine details of Thermal Hands. Since it seems like I'm basically adding a constant amount of heat energy when I'm using it, I could in theory calculate the heat energy I produce per second by attempting to boil water. I could also attempt to calculate exactly the rate change of mana cost based on the object's temperature. With that information, I could potentially calculate the exact heat energy needed to perform various tasks. However, that would require a whole new lab, and rigorous testing of other materials to actually produce usable results. Even then, those results have barely any use on this island. I'll just have to shelf the study for now, like a lot of other studies I have planned, until we've reached a point where the value outweighs the time spent doing the study.

I started clear cutting the new field areas, and spent twenty nine days cutting down trees. I did a little bit of experimenting while I was chopping trees. Once I got through the bark, I tried using thermal hands on the wood inside a tree to heat it. I found that I could soften the local area of wood as it started to steam, and could chop into it a few more times. Of course, that used my entire mana pool, so it wasn't that useful, but if I ever need to cut down just one particular tree, it could speed up the process considerably.

I had mentioned that none of the fishergoblins had evolved, and we recently had one turn into a hobgoblin. Namely, the fishergoblin who was doing the bulk resale was the first to evolve, which I suppose shouldn't be a surprise considering he was killing more fish than any of the others.

As for myself, it always gets harder to gain levels every time I prestige or evolve, so I shouldn't be surprised that I've barely gained anything despite felling a little over two acres worth of trees.

<MYTHIC LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 16
HP: 1644/1644
MP: 1041/1041
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands

I hired a lot of goblins to handle the felled trees. They sorted the good ones at the instruction of the carpenter, who then had to buy the wood from me. I didn't want to seem like I was showing favoritism, so I had him pay for the wood, but I did sell it at a very cheap rate. The rest of the wood I paid to have made into charcoal, while some of the bark was saved to be used at the bathhouse.

There is still more wood to be cut down for the planned expansions of the village, but I'm going to leave that to the goblins who've been working in the reservoir cutting stone. Hopefully, they'll get stone shaping when they prestige. As for me, I'm going to clean up the reservoir area with stone shaping, since they've been breaking stone with pickaxes. After that, I'm thinking about going to see the inn that has been built along the new road, and then helping the road construction crew for a little while.

Cleaning up the reservoir took six days, and on the final day, snow fell on the mountaintop again. I'm honestly quite surprised that the eagle doesn't mind the snow up there. It's not a trivial amount. I still plan on going to help the road construction crew, but I'll probably only assist for a short while, because I want to be back in the village when the trader or anyone else arrives. The likelihood of them following the unfinished road isn't very high, since the path ends up being somewhat difficult through the craggy terrain if you aren't along the coast. Once the road is finished though, it should make travel significantly faster than it would be following the coast, so I think the trade off is worth it.

The inn was pretty much a duplicate of the one I built in the village, but it was clearly more lived in. On most days, it seems like around eight goblins are sleeping here as part of their hauling jobs to bring food and supplies to the road construction crew. I myself hauled a wagon of food and stone to assist in construction, and am pretty impressed with the road so far. They're doing a really good job. Unlike the road we had going up the mountain, which consisted of stairs and a rail alongside them, this road is flat. It still has slope, but that slope has been kept shallow.

The road going through the craggy terrain is impressive. It cuts along the ridges and valleys, and Zeb has done some engineering of his own it seems. Where they cut into the ridges to keep the road straight and flat, they've reinforced the cut walls with stone. When I asked Zeb about it, he said they implemented that after the mudslides, as those were the locations that collapsed. I gave him a little tip for building retaining walls moving forward. Rather than building vertical walls alongside, like they have been, they should build them slightly sloped towards the cut direction. It should be both easier to build and make it stronger. They don't need to go redo the previous ones unless they fail, as a straight retaining wall is still pretty good.

As I worked with them for eight days, I got a pretty good feeling for how much longer this project will take. I'd estimate another six months until the road reaches the natural harbor on the far side of the island at the current pace. With that taken care of, I made my way back to the village.

[Vol.4] Ch.10 Kembora

When I got back to the village, I started making a building near one of the areas we recently cleared. It's basically just a barn, but made of stone. I'm leaving the inside empty for now, since I don't know much else about the animals we're getting. I'll probably need to fence them in as well, but if they're like the animals high on the mountain, then they won't be able to be kept in by normal sized fences.

I luckily finished up the barn in the morning of the ninth day of working on it, and that afternoon, the trader arrived with a caravan and Shasta. They brought along all the traded goods I requested, including the parchment. The livestock look like they might be distantly related to the animals that are up on the mountain, but they definitely seem less skittish. I inquired in the best way to keep them corralled, and was told a fence a little taller than their heads should be enough to keep them in unless something frightens them. They also said that they'll prefer to run somewhere that they think is safe if they're frightened, which means the barn I built was probably a good idea.

They really do look like a mix between a deer and a sheep. They've got a deer's head and build, but sheep horns and fluffy hair growing over the center of their body. The dwarves call them Barga, and since we don't have a word for it in demon, it looks like we'll just adopt that name. We'll have to be careful to manage them appropriately, and we should trade for at least one more male for next year, to prevent inbreeding issues.

As for the three different crop seeds, the merchant actually brought an example of the plants, and someone to explain how to take care of them, which was quite informative. Shasta translated for him as he explained the various soil conditions, planting and growing periods, harvesting methods, and things to watch out for while growing them.

One is a fast growing root plant that grows well during high rainfall periods, but not in muddy soil. The soil needs to be well drained. It is generally grown along the coast of the dwarven country, where they have a rainy spring and fall. Since we also share those rainy periods, we'll just need to make sure that the soil is appropriate for them. The dwarves usually get two harvests in spring, and two in fall, so that should be quite useful for us. The dwarves call them Reka.

The second one is planted during the rainy spring, and is harvested before the fall rains. The edible part is the seeds, which would make it comparable to grains on earth. The seeds can be eaten roasted, but generally are ground into a flour before being mixed with water and cooked. Unlike earth grains, these plants grow in bundles closer to the ground. They're a bit of a pain to harvest apparently as well, but they're good for making alcohol. The dwarves call them Korogo.

The final plant is a ground vine that has large fruits that take most of the year to grow. You plant them in spring, and harvest at the end of fall when the fruits change color, much like gourds or melons. That said, they're actually more of a flat disc shape, and we've been informed that you should be careful while walking through the patch to harvest them, not only because you might accidentally step on one of the fruits hidden under a leaf, but because the fruit will actually explode, and the hard rind will cause some degree of injury. They'll also explode if you don't harvest them apparently. The dwarves call this plant Boto-Boto.

For most of the fields, we won't need to do much work, but the Reka field will need to be modified to make sure that the soil drains well. Our soil here can get quite muddy, so it'll probably need agricultural tile dug underneath it to assist drainage. I would have been quite happy with just that, but Shasta says there are a handful of people who want to migrate. They're currently back on the island the dwarf's control, so she wants me to come up with an application form for them to fill out. That'll be a whole ordeal, but ultimately, I'll have to have Shasta translate and make the forms, then translate for me again.

Before that though, I brought out what trade goods we had available, some of the metal ingots that I made, which the merchant evaluated to be worth only about a quarter of the ones that Katarko had made, which was a shame, but it did provide us with the funds necessary to trade for three more females and two males of the Bargas, more parchment, and the remainder in dwarven currency. The merchant was surprised we wanted some of their currency, but I currently don't have any other items that I want from them.

They seem to also use coinage, although their coins seem to be made from copper, silver, and gold. They have two copper coins, one silver, and then two gold coins. Their currency has 12 small copper coins to a large copper coin, 12 large copper to a silver, 5 silver to a small gold (or 60 large copper), and 12 small gold to a large gold. Which means their smallest denomination is 8640 times smaller than their largest. Comparatively our currency spans only 250 times in value. That said, ours is essentially fiat currency, with value set by the arbitrary price points we've set for usage of government facilities.

Sometime in the future, I'd like to hear the reason that they have so many different coin denominations. In medieval times on earth, the gap in currency value within a country was generally quite low, as much of the trade was done via bartering. Honestly, I'm surprised our currency got into use as well as it did. I suppose making the food providers adopt it probably played a big role in that.

After we settled on upcoming trade, I sat down with Shasta to prepare immigration forms. This was a bit outside my wheelhouse, but I tried my best to ask important questions such as: "What is your reason for wanting to move to our country?", "What skills or abilities do you have?", and "How many people do you intend to bring with you?". I realized while we were working on the paperwork, but we don't have a name for our country. It didn't come up before this, and while we were working on the questions, I worded them carefully to avoid using a name. According to Shasta, we're referred to as an aberrant monster country by the few people who know about us.

Considering the fact that people know we're a monster country, I'm surprised that anyone would want to move here. However, we have 12 applicants to deal with, so I'll have to work with Shasta to see who, if any, we want to allow in. It'll be a few weeks before she returns. I'll have to be sure to talk with Zaka and Zeb about a name for our country.

After three days, we got Zeb back in the village to discuss the idea of our country's name. I should have known this would happen, but Zaka insists we call our country Gokura. Thankfully, Zeb and I were able to talk him down from that. It would be fine, except the mainland literally just fought a war of life or death against the individual they refer to as 'Demon Lord Gokura'. I'm not in the business of inviting conflict back here. If we were seen as a surviving outpost from that, I'm sure most countries wouldn't even need to declare war, heck they might already have alliance treaties they could call on to raise armies to come smash us.

No, we needed a new name. We brainstormed for a few hours, until we settled on a name, Kembora. Kembo is part of the demon word for friendly, and the suffix ra is used to mean 'from'. So our name translates to something like "We're friendly". As an interesting point, Gokura translates to something close to 'Of the Goblins', which I actually find to be quite fitting. According to Zaka, the Gokura territory is the historic homeland of the goblins.

[Vol.4] Ch.11 Migrant(s)

After two weeks, Shasta returned with the filled out paperwork. In that time, I've been teaching a goblin how to take care of our new livestock. For now, we'll be paying him to take care of them, but eventually, he shouldn't need to be paid. I've been told that you can sheer their wool off once each summer, so that is one potential use for them. Once we get a bit of a larger herd, we can also harvest them for meat. They only breed once a year though, so that'll be a slow process.

Shasta and I sat down and started going through the applications. There were five in total. The first three seemed to be shady individuals without much of a background or skills, so we declined them. The fourth application was interesting to say the least. The application was for a whole group of dwarves, and seemed to be something like a company. The application was definitely not designed to handle what was being applied for, but I gave it a fair shot anyway.

They seemed to be applying to set up a mine on the island, to export whatever they dig up. Honestly, after reading through their details, they're getting declined. They sound like a bit of a predatory bunch who would leave as soon as our resources dry up, and wouldn't even contribute to our own growth in the mean time. I wouldn't be opposed to having a group come in to set up business, but when its goal seems to be depleting our natural resources without much in return, that's a problem. Since we don't have a strict tax structure, and don't have tariffs, we'd get nothing out of the deal.

The last application was one that I was intrigued by. A dwarf wanted to immigrate along with his family of 6. His stated reason was to work with the high quality metal we had produced. He was a blacksmith by trade, and had a little over ten years of experience in his field. He had worked with one of the ingots we had sold, and traced it back to here. He's stated that as long as his family and him are fed and housed, and he gets to work with more of the metal, then his conditions are met.

One of the potential downsides of having him is that he has a family with him, a wife and four children aged 2 to 8, and none of them speak the demon language. I'll also have to design and build a house for them to comfortably live in. All of those can be worked around though. To get our hands on a blacksmith, something I've been missing since Katarko left, is worth much more than the costs being presented, so I gave my approval for them, and then got Zaka's approval as well.

After we handled the immigration paperwork, it seemed like Shasta wanted to say something else, but kept it to herself.

The next day, Shasta and her guards set out to return to the other island to inform the prospective migrants of their fate, and escort the successful ones here. Considering her group didn't have much to carry this trip, I encouraged them to take the road back, as it should speed their travel drastically, even if the last leg isn't complete yet.

After they left, I started doing some planning. Until the new dwarf and his family arrive, I won't know exactly what kind of house he wants, but I can at least try to plan where his house will go. We haven't built any houses outside of the central area yet, but I might end up doing so for him. I'm actually a little bit torn on the matter. On one hand, it might seem a bit discriminatory to have his family live outside the central wall area, on the other hand however, many of the houses inside the central wall are going to end up getting flattened and replaced in the future.

Ultimately, I'll just plan on two different locations available to ask the dwarf about. Hopefully I can have Shasta translate that for me before she leaves again. Until that time comes though, I'm going to start attempting to fix the drainage on that field for growing Reka.

I worked for twelve days getting the Reka field set up with drainage tile. Working alone, I only finished about a third of the field before the new dwarves arrived.

It was quite the sight to see as they approached the village. I could tell who was who from sight as they approached along the road headed towards the ocean. I recognized Shasta, her guards, and a handful of the dwarves who were carrying various crates and items. However, there were exactly six individuals that I didn't recognize.

Two adults and four kids. Dwarves are a little hard to tell the males from the females, but judging from muscle tone I think I can tell which one is the blacksmith. As they got closer, I could tell that the children and wife seemed to be getting a bit scared. Thinking about it, that's not surprising. Historically demons were an existential threat to these people, so I wouldn't be surprised if they tell quite the dark tales among themselves about us. It just means we'll have to be more cautious about how we interact with them.

I made my way out of the field I was working in to introduce myself to them. I greeted Shasta when I reached their caravan and began my introduction.

"Hello, my name is Zakarus, but you can call me Zack. I'll probably be the individual you're interacting with the most initially while you're here in our village."

I extended my hand out to shake hands, but then had to hold it there for a short while during Shasta's translation. The family looked on in concern at my outstretched hand, and in retrospect considering how my hands look now, shaking hands might appear to be more of a threat than a cooperative gesture.

Either way, once Shasta translated, the one I suspected of being the blacksmith stepped forward and shook my hand before speaking in the dwarven tongue back to me while gesturing to members of his family. I then waited for Shasta to translate again.

"My name is Karsh Rembro, this is my wife, Rishi, and these are our children, Tambiri, Pilina, Dashaka, and Saba."

I nod to each of them as I let go of Karsh's hand. "You'll probably find that you're lacking in many of your normal comforts here, but I hope we can work to restore some of them together."

After Shasta translates for him, Karsh nods, but his wife looks concerned.

As we enter into the village proper, through the set of walls, I continue speaking, "For now, you'll stay in our inn while I get your input on what kind of house you want, and where. I've got two plots I'd like to show you, and from there, we can hopefully work out the design for your home. Shasta, if you wouldn't mind being our translator for the day, I think we'll probably have a lot to discuss."

"Sure, it's not like I'm doing much else today anyway," she replies.

"Speaking of, you're the only translator we've had, what happened to your old job as a researcher?"

"As you can probably guess, I've been hired on as the official liaison for Kao Ostark's territory between you and him. It's not exactly research work, and I hope I can get back to that at some point, but for ten months, the work is pretty light and I get paid well."

I nod along as I listen to Shasta tell me a bit more about some of the details about her job as we arrive at the inn. After about thirty minutes, all of Karsh and his family's belongings have been unpacked and moved to the inn. Afterwards, I guide the family to the first of the two potential locations for their house. It's located in the first rung of the city walls nearby some of the goblin apartment buildings.

"So, this location is your first choice, it's inside the current city walls. In the future, however, there are plans to build a new set of city walls, and relocating most of the residents from here to the outer wall area. So your home if built here will probably need to be rebuilt in the future. Since it's inside this set of walls, it's also a slightly smaller plot of land, which means a smaller house. Before you make up your mind, let me show you the second plot."

I paused throughout my explanation so that Shasta could translate. After she finished, I guided them out of the gate that headed towards both the sea and the open air market. Not far from the gate, just off the side of the road, I showed them the second plot of land.

"This is your second choice. It's closer to the market, and has decently more space. The downsides are that you'd be the first residents outside the inner city wall, and that the nearby road is fairly busy at certain times of day. Now that you've seen both options, I'll give you some time to discuss which you'd prefer."

Karsh and his wife start discussing, but his wife seems to be the one more animate in the discussion. She's not quite yelling, but seems fairly angry about something during their discussion. After nearly five minutes, Karsh eventually seems to give in, and says something to Shasta.

[Vol.4] Ch.12 Rocky Start

"We'll take the one outside the walls." Shasta translates for Karsh.

Considering the amount of animation I'd seen between them during that conversation, I honestly expected the response to be 'We'll take neither, we're leaving'. I wasn't one to look a gift horse in the mouth though, so I hurried us onto the next topic. I produced a piece of parchment and a piece of charcoal shaved down to make it useful for writing. I divided the parchment into two parts with a charcoal mark, one smaller, and meant to help layout their yard, then the rest to roughly design their house.

"Alright, first we need to decide on the shape and size of your house in your lot. If you want to discuss it, then let me know how you want it to look, we can sketch it on this piece of paper. Keep in mind all the rooms you'll want, and the basement space," I say while holding up the parchment.

After Shasta translates, Karsh and his wife discuss the topic for quite a while. While they do, I contemplate the consequences of what I'm doing. On one hand, it's almost certainly necessary to make a custom house in order to keep them satisfied here. On the other, it's surely going to cause there to be a demand for custom houses. It's not necessarily a bad thing, as long as I can train at least one of the stone shaping goblins to take over that job. Then it's just a matter of money. If I didn't think this dwarf would be valuable, I wouldn't be doing it.

I wrapped up my internal monologue just about the same time Karsh and his wife finished their discussion about their house. Through Shasta, we communicated various details about the design and necessities for the house. There were many features that I would expect, such as multiple bedrooms, a place to go to the bathroom, a kitchen, and a root cellar.

There were also many features I didn't expect. They want a wood privacy fence around a portion of their backyard for airing laundry to dry, and where their kids can play safely. It seems like they live in normal, albeit shorter, houses. They also requested that the walls not be plane, but be etched to look like blocks, since that is what houses in the dwarven country are made from. It's doable, but that's going to be a pain. They also requested it only be one story tall, so their house is going to end up taking up a lot of the available space of their lot along two edges, leaving a minimal yard cut out from the remaining corner.

All the bedrooms will have shuttered windows, and they'll have a door at both the front and into the backyard. Compared to the houses we've lived in up until now, it's quite the luxurious place. Goblins don't have close family units though, so a lot of this sort of design is superfluous for us demons.

After everything was written out and designed, I ended up using an additional two pieces of parchment, and we'd spent quite a few hours out here discussing. I'll be busy for quite a while working on this house, as will the carpenter. Before that though, I'm going to get Karsh introduced to our forge and the metal we have available down here.

I invited him and his wife to see the forge, but she declined, so we took her back to the inn before continuing to the forge. Once there, he seemed initially disappointed, followed by excited.

"The ingots you sold last year were made here?" he asked and Shasta translated.

"By a different dwarf, yes."

"I'll be honest, it's a pretty low quality forge and furnace. However, if a forge this quality could produce that metal, I'm fired up for what I'll be able to do with a proper setup!"

His words stung my pride a little, but he's right. I basically made this furnace and forge from theory, so I'm sure he has much better ideas of how to make a better one. Hopefully he's a quick learner in languages, because otherwise trying to communicate designs for a forge will be hard outside of schematics. Doable, but hard.

Finally, after a full day, it was time for dinner. Karsh didn't seem to mind the fact that his dinner was mostly fish and a small amount of swamp beets, but his family and especially his kids, didn't seem to thrilled with the meal. Hopefully our imported crops grow well this year so they can have a taste of their homeland. Either that, or they find a type of fish they love to eat, or at least that they can stomach having for every meal.

Before Shasta and the crew left, I asked her to wait around for a little bit and help translate for Karsh while he got to work at our furnace and forge area. Thankfully she agreed, and so I brought Karsh some of the ingots I had made before.

"Such a waste..." he said. When Shasta translated that, he put his hand over his mouth realizing he'd inadvertently let that slip.

I let out a small, dry, chuckle. I knew I wasn't making the highest quality metal, but to hear it stated like that still stung. Although I suppose I got Thermal Hands out of the ordeal, so it wasn't a total waste.

"I know it's not the highest quality, but hopefully you can make do for a while with this. During the winter we can't access more ore, but in spring we can get you some to work with. If you need any molds or casts made for things, let me know. As for things we could potentially use, pots and pans, nails, and spearheads. Once we have fresh ore, I'll have more complicated items that I'd like made."

After I said all that, Karsh looked visibly disappointed.

"Think of it this way, you'll hopefully have a better forge and furnace by the time you get to work with the higher quality metal."

After I say that, Karsh's mood lightens a bit and he asks, "So, what do I do for fuel?"

Right, I should probably show him around the auxiliary parts of his job.

"For the time being, you can pull from our charcoal stockpiles for free as we have a massive excess and I'd much rather have completed metal products available. In the future, we have a bunch of charcoal kilns, but you should ask about cutting trees down before you do so. I'll show you to the various stockpile locations."

After Shasta finishes translating, I start leading him to the various different locations where we're storing charcoal.

"Before I forget," I begin while pulling out a few cords of coins I prepared overnight, "Everyone starts out with some amount of currency in our country, due to the way we reproduce. This is six times the amount an average goblin would start with, since you have a family of six. You're welcome to sell the items you make to anyone. Otherwise, I'll give you a stipend as long as you're working on things I need. Sometimes I do free work if I think it's valuable to me or the community, but I'll generally charge you for my labor moving forward. I'm going to be setting a general debt for the construction of your house, but I won't have it accumulate any extra debt and, as long as you're working on things for me, I'll generally just reduce it until it's gone."

Karsh looks a little worried about all this information. "Is this a lot or a little money? Also, do I need any permissions to use anything?

"The market is a short distance from where your house will be located, and the food is cheap, if a little repetitive. Money shouldn't be a problem, but if you have issues, let me know. I'm also going to give you a bunch of stone tablets that are lightly colored so you can use them to draw things with charcoal to help with communication until you learn the language."

It seems like I've assuaged some of his concerns for now, but it's clear that the gravity of moving to a new country is starting to set in for him. I just hope that he doesn't decide he wants to leave. Well, he'll basically be stuck here for a year once spring comes, since ships can't seem to make it here any time but winter, so I'm sure that's also a bit concerning.

After I've shown him to where he can find the charcoal, as well as where the kilns are, I'm greeted by a pleasant surprise. The eagle came down to feed, and when it did, Karsh's face lit up.

"The eagles really do protect this place!" he says.

"Well, the eagle, singular. It lives up on the mountain and has protected us in the past." After my half-truth, Shasta gives me a side eye, but doesn't say anything. I pretend not to notice however, and shortly after we say our goodbyes to each other. Shasta and her escorts head off along the new road, no longer encumbered by cargo. I head off to make some stone slabs out of lightstone, and leave Karsh to his own devices for the day.

[Vol.4] Ch.13 New Blacksmithing Area

The first few days after Karsh and his family had moved into the village were very difficult for them. It's not a big surprise, but considering they don't speak the language, nor do they know anyone here, they probably felt isolated. Beyond that, they were surrounded by demons without a single dwarf to talk to outside of their family. Honestly, I was feeling pretty bad for them.

Thankfully, Karsh didn't let that deter him from doing work. I myself was busy working on their house, but I made sure to check in multiple times a day to make sure everything was going alright for them. Thankfully, by the fifth day after Shasta left, things started to fall into a reasonable pattern for them. Karsh's wife, Rishi, would go to the market to get one meal a day for their family, and in the evening Karsh would be the one to pick up food.

They might not speak the language, but it's relatively easy to point to what fish or swamp beet you might want, and then get the price estimate. I watched the first few times to make sure they weren't being swindled, and thankfully, it doesn't seem like any of the goblins were arbitrarily charging extra.

The skeleton new home should be finished by sometime tomorrow, eight days after I started construction. Doing the detail work to make it seem like the walls were made of blocks rather than solid stone took a bit of time, so I hope they appreciate it. I've seen a few goblins stop on their way past the house and look at it for a while, so I'm hoping that it doesn't kick off a new phase this early where they all suddenly want these custom houses. If they pay for it though, I suppose it would give them something to work towards.

After the skeleton of their home was completed I asked Karsh and his wife to follow me to the house so that I could get details on furniture. Since much of the furniture is going to be made from stone, I wanted to make sure it was all placed where they wanted it, so no one had to strain to try to move things.

It took quite a while to go from room to room, marking where things would go, and of what size, but after a few hours, I'd gotten all the info I needed from them to begin making their basic furniture. Beyond basic furniture, they'll either have to hire someone else to make it, or trade for it. They at least seemed pleased with the house thus far, which made me glad.

Finishing their basic furniture took another three days and brought us into the last month of winter. Once the snow melts, I'm sure Karsh will want fresh ore as soon as possible for smelting. Before that, the priority for me is going to be getting the Reka field set up to drain properly so that it can be utilized through the entire spring season.

So now that I've finished with Karsh's house enough that his family can move in, that's exactly what I'll be working on. I'm going to hire out some goblins to help dig the trenches necessary for installing the drainage tile in the field to speed up the process. I'm also going to pay a bunch of goblins to start removing the tree stumps from the other planned fields so that we'll be ready for spring.

Getting the Reka field finished took an additional ten days, and was sped up drastically by the help of the goblins that I hired. Karsh has started to make a bit of money by selling metallic cookware like pots, pans, and even grilling covers, which are much better than stone for cooking. This was one of the many reasons I was glad to finally get a proper blacksmith in town who could work full time.

Stone has a lot of uses, but there are many where metal is a significantly better option, and I wasn't about to spend all day learning to properly smelt when there were more pressing tasks to try to achieve. When Katarko was here, it was a big help having him around, and even then he only knew a bit of blacksmithing from doing repairs and growing up around some smiths.

Karsh's ability as a blacksmith is easily ten times more valuable than that. It seems that his class is 'Blacksmith', which confers a lot of benefits to him in this process. He's at a middling level, but he has bonuses to heat resistance, endurance, and strength. Each are very useful to a smith. He also has something similar to my 'Thermal Hands', but it only expends mana to resist heat, rather than change the temperature of the item.

I have no clue what it's called though, since neither of us has learned much of the other's language yet. It took over an hour just to get that small amount of information conveyed to him. That was off topic from what I had initially wanted to discuss, which was upgrading the forge and furnace. I had asked because I saw him holding a red hot cooking pot in his bare hands to quench it in some nearby water, which shocked me.

After discussing that for a while, I remembered to ask him to help design upgrades for the forge and furnace. The rest of the day was spent charting out designs.

There were quite a few things that were simply impossible for us to make on our own, and would require trading for next year, or Karsh would have to make them himself at a later point. There were a lot of improvements and new facilities that I could make with him, however, so I spent two weeks working with him to get his new work area into the best possible condition I was capable of.

The previous area had been pretty simple, with a flat area for working in, the waterwheel powered smelter and furnace for melting metal ore and heating it for shaping respectively, a few stone blocks to function as anvils, and an area for sand molds. Now it's been properly organized. The furnace and smelter are built to a much better standard, with better airflow and workability. The area with stone blocks has been replaced with a proper anvil and stone containers of various sizes filled with either fresh or briny water for quenching. The sand molding area has been left relatively unchanged, save for some new bins for storing sand or other materials. Many of the areas are now covered, but in a way like the pavilion, where it's all open air from the sides to allow work during mild rains. There is also a covered area nearby for storing enough charcoal for a few days worth of work.

All in all, it's quite the improvement over the old area. While I was improving the overall area, Karsh was making more tools for himself, and then storing them along a working wall in the anvil's area. He should be good to work once we get some fresh ore for him. The snow should be melting any day now, meaning we'll be able to get ore soon.

Hopefully it helps improve his mood some. It seems like he and his family have been quite depressed lately due to the bland diet and lack of entertainment or social interaction. Karsh and his wife seem to be learning small amounts of the demon language from their daily interactions, so that's a good step towards more social interactions for them.

The spring rains came a little late, so it was another two weeks before the snow started to melt on the mountain. It took another eight days after that before I could even reasonably go get more ore, however. In those 22 days, I took the time to build a new apartment building for goblins outside the city wall towards the marketplace along with a new stretch of stone wall. While doing that, I also started clearing more trees from nearby with the intent on getting yet another field area set up for future Barga herds.

Ultimately, we'll need a lot of these animals to supply not only meat, but hides and wool too. It's become painfully obvious how far behind our clothing is since we've started interacting with the dwarves, and wool should be at least a step up from random plant vine fibers. The hide should also be useful for both leather and parchment, which we'll probably need a decent amount of. The new type of meat should also prove valuable to diversifying our diets. Thankfully, Barga are willing to eat a lot of our plant material scraps that are left over from our various industries, and we'll start having even more available once we get more fields of the new dwarven crops.

I finished cutting the last of the trees growing in this new field area yesterday, bringing my level up to 19. I'll leave the cleanup of the wood and stumps to the goblins, because I'm going to be mining ore next.

<MYTHIC LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 19
HP: 1719/1719
MP: 1070/1070
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands

[Vol.4] Ch.14 Low Tech Solutions

Sure enough, once I told Karsh that the mountain was clear enough for mining ore, he insisted that I go mine some. He wasn't actually pushy about it, instead offering me money to go mine as soon as possible. I turned his money down. I myself have a lot of projects I'd like him to work on soon, so getting him plenty of metal to work on those projects with means our goals are aligned for now. Plus, I'm sort of the central bank, money isn't actually valuable to me. Instead, I'm in charge of distributing money to goblins via jobs that would help the village, so I'm going to hire a few to help me ship ore back down to the village and process it in the rock crushers.

As such, I've spent the last twenty-eight days excavating ore. Part of that time I've had to actually develop a new rail line in the cave system, to help with moving ore out from the ever deepening shafts that I've made. I'm glad that there doesn't seem to be an end in sight for this vein of ore, because buying and shipping in metal would be a nightmare to have any reasonable amount of it. Plus high quality metal is currently our most valuable export ignoring the fact I can grow gigantic crystals.

When I made it back down to the village today, I was glad to see that Karsh had been hard at work refining the metal. There were still large piles of unprocessed ore, but there were also a whole lot of ingots in piles. Normally, tailings and slag from processing metal like this would be a pain to deal with, but with stone shaping they can be formed into blocks which we then dispose of by imbedding them in the road construction process.

Karsh has learned a little more of the demon language while I've been gone, although it still remains very basic. I took some time to check in with him since I was gone nearly a month. His wife and kids miss a lot of the amenities from back in their homeland, but Karsh seems happy that he's finally getting to work with the metal that was the whole reason he moved his family here. We took the whole day conveying this sort of information back and forth using large lightstone slabs and charcoal to draw complex ideas to share.

Karsh had an interesting question which led us down an entire rabbit hole. The question was basically, "Why do you let the stream flood this much?" It is early spring now, which means that between the snow melt and frequent rain, the reservoir is slowly getting filled, leading to increased output flow. So I went and showed him the dam. Once we returned, he had a second question, "Why build it so big?"

That question intrigued me, and I asked him what alternative he'd propose. To which he did some basic drawings that conveyed an interesting idea. Rather than build a large dam, which has these complex mechanisms, the dwarves would put small loose rock dams at various points down valleys where streams would form during rainy seasons. This would slow the water down and prevent it from all flooding at once, leading to a more smoothed out river and stream cycle. This is apparently pretty common knowledge among dwarves, since their country is mostly mountains and hills.

I hadn't really thought of doing something like that. I went and built a huge engineering project, when I could have just been piling stones up in various places to accomplish a similar feat. I thanked him for the idea after that discussion, and decided to set out to track where the tributary streams form during the spring with the rain and melt.

I'll be missing out on the smallest streams, which likely only form at the very start of spring when all the mountain snow starts to melt, but I should be able to find plenty of small streams to demarcate in the valley higher up. Once I get a few of those marked, I'm going to make a few loose rock dams, and teach a few goblins how to make them, then pay them to keep making them along all the tributaries.

With these dams, you can't just build one on a stream and be done with it. Each stream needs many dams placed every so often to continually slow the rate of water flow down the hill. If the stream is too large, or too rapid, it'll knock the dam down, but for small streams, the water loses momentum hitting the rocks. It then pools up behind the dam while it slowly drains between the rocks. That spreads out how long the water takes to reach the main stream, and by extension the ocean, and provides a much smoother volumetric flow in the main stream. It should also make the water cleaner as more fine particles drop out of the slow moving water.

The main dam can already handle a lot of water flow, but to add capacity to this dam requires a lot of excavation of stone. Something we sometimes need, but we can get a lot more bang for our buck labor-wise by just having some goblins build rock dams. As an added bonus, when we have goblins manually breaking rock in an attempt to get stone shaping, we would often have to spend some time doing our own stone shaping on the broken rock to make it into a shape that is more usable. Instead, the worst shape rocks can just be shipped up the roads to be used for making rock dams.

For five days I followed our main stream upriver and drove two foot tall stone stakes into the ground wherever I found a tributary while it was sprinkling or raining. The work itself was pretty miserable since it was raining. I found 3 tributaries, and then followed those tributaries to find an additional 18 second-order tributaries.

A lot of them are a real pain to hike to, but there is a ready supply of stone nearby many of them, so a goblin with a decent pickaxe could probably break stone to make the rock dams. Otherwise, an individual with stone shaping will have to be used for some of the tributaries. In either case, I'm going to spend a few days making a few example rock dams so I can teach a few goblins how to make them.

After five days I've cobbled together three example rock dams. One is quite large, and sits along one of the major tributaries of the stream. It took the longest to build, and required me to stone shape some materials because I ran out of easily accessible rocks in the nearby area. The second and third dam are in second-order tributaries, and each shows off a slightly different aspect of things to consider. One tributary had cut a fairly deep gash in the earth, and so that dam had to be first piled into the gash, then raised a bit above that into the surroundings. The other one I built just before a small section of steep elevation change, where it would be impossible to build a dam inside.

The idea is that each of these dams can help to explain an aspect of rock dam building, so that the goblins know what they're looking for. For now I'm holding off on building any rock dams on the main stream itself, since they'd either have to be built closer to it's source where the flow is much smaller which would mean a much longer hike for anyone working on that project, or would end up being very large and take a lot of stone and care in their construction.

I took two days finding goblins who would be interested in some long term work, and after I found five who were interested enough in building the rock dams, I took them up the mountain to show them the ones I already made. I then took another four days making a few rock dams with them to make sure they understood what work they would be doing. I then showed them how often and where we want the dams.

I'll pay them slightly more than standard labor jobs, since they'll have to trek through the wilderness for a large portion of their work. I'll also check in on their work in a month to see how progress is coming. If they can complete between one and two dams a day, then we should have all of the tributaries mostly dammed by the end of the year. Then next year during the spring we'll check to see how all the dams are holding up, and whether we need to repair any, or change them.

[Vol.4] Ch.15 Windmill Part 1

Now that I'm back in town, I've checked over the new crops we're growing. While there are a few minor problems, it seems like the goblins are doing a good job of managing the fields. The first rotation of Reka are almost ready to harvest, which I hope will improve Karsh's family's mood.

Karsh himself seems pretty happy making high-quality metal ingots. In another week or two, he'll probably be done processing all the ore, and I want to get him working on the next project I have planned as soon as possible. Which means I need to clear an area behind the salt evaporation ponds near the ocean. There, I plan to build the first windmill on the island. It'll be a large construction, and I'll need a lot of help from the carpenter to complete the building.

The intent is to build it similar to old English windmills, which had the most automation before steam power became commonplace. The roof and main fan will rotate to face the wind, powered by a smaller fan that rotates the whole apparatus slowly until the small fan's blades are parallel to wind flow. At that point, the main fan will be properly aligned. Then, by using spring tension, the fan blades themselves will be automatically adjusted to keep the fan rotating at a constant speed.

The automatic fan adjustment will be the hardest to get right, and we'll probably have to tinker a lot with the size and thickness of the spring. Thankfully, once we get it right once, any duplicate windmills can use identical springs. Since we're right along the ocean, we should be able to take good advantage of the wind blowing in for mechanical power.

We'll need that for processing the Korogo seeds to make flour in a sizeable volume. Considering they seem to have alcohol, there must be some kind of rising agent like yeast available. That means that we could make bread at some point in the future. Even without yeast though, there are many different cooking uses for flour, so I'm looking forward to getting our first windmill set up. We have plenty of other uses for mechanical power after that however, so I think we'll probably end up building many of these buildings.

I spent twelve days clearing the plot where I want to build the windmill. There were quite a few trees in the way that I cut down, and I ended up using thermal hands to speed up the process of felling them so that I could start prepping the land. Karsh finished refining all the ore yesterday with the help of a few goblins running the rock crushers, so for now he has free reign to make what he wants with the ingots.

I've flattened the land here, but I need to attach this building to the bedrock a foot below the surface, so I'm going to have to remove dirt here first. Then, the central area of the windmill is going to be a ten foot radius circle, which slowly tapers up to the roof section. Then the roof itself will be made primarily from wood, with a thin lightstone cap to make it more water resistant while keeping the weight down.

For once the lighter properties of the wood here are going to come in handy, since it means less mass on both the roof and fan blades for turning. For now, we won't waterproof the fan blades, since we don't have a good waterproofing agent for the rotating blades. Considering the ships that arrive are made from wood means I should be able to trade for a waterproofing agent next year. For now, we'll just plan on replacing the blades when that time arrives.

Getting the shell of the windmill built took twenty-two days. I had to build the internal stairwell as I went, since the whole thing is just over fifty feet tall. I ended up commissioning a few goblins to help haul the stone I needed for construction, and I ended up using much more than I thought I would.

The reason it used so much stone was that I initially had thought I would just taper the whole thing down, but I realized as I built that the base had to be built much thicker, so the inside of the mill is basically a cylinder, and the outside is more of a conical shape. This makes it extra sturdy, which should we get another bad storm, at least the base should stay intact even if debris hits the building.

The fishergoblins really started to take note of the construction once it was built to over twenty feet, and I could see them looking up from the tide pools occasionally to watch me shape more and more stone onto the building. From on top of the building, I can tell I have a new problem I need to solve before we attempt to affix anything on the windmill. I didn't clear enough trees from nearby. The blades for a mill this large are going to reach too far, and have the potential at certain orientations to hit a tree, which means I'm going to have to spend some time cutting more down.

At this point though, I have some work for Karsh to do. I need bearings made for the mill. Some large bearings for handling the roof's rotation, and some smaller ones for handling the various turbines and shafts within the mill. Which means I'll also need grease. Thankfully, with the amount of fish that is eaten here, if we actually start collecting the fat from cooking, and render it properly, we'll have a ready supply of lubricant if we cook it with lime made from sea shells.

Speaking of sea shells, since they were in such high demand again and will be for the foreseeable future, the goblin who collected seashells has hired some other goblins to help them with the work. They've even started paying to go down into the tidal pools every few days to collect shells that slowly deposit in there. They've recently put in a request to use warehouse space to store more shells they collect, which I intend to let them use at a steep discount considering how useful those shells have been. Once Karsh is done helping me with the windmill, I'll probably have him make a rock crusher for them to use for pulverizing shells. Not only will they take less space that way, but considering we want them pulverized for lime already, it'll save us the hassle.

I worked with Karsh for a week to get the smaller bearings designed and a few made. In that time, I also worked with the carpenter goblin to start on the roof for the windmill. It'll be a dome shape, but first I want a ring of wood made, with a skirt on either side to help with rain. After Karsh finishes all the small bearings, I'm going to work with him to try to get a bearing loop made to sit under the wood ring, so that the whole roof's weight is distributed on large bearings.

The wood ring and skirt should help keep those bearings dry. Eventually, the inside skirt will be removed, so that the bearings can be accessed from the inside, with a few removable portions for maintenance. Once those bearings are installed, we'll begin the construction of the dome proper, along with various internal metal portions for transmission of mechanical energy. In an ideal world we'd have specific metals for both the bearings and springs for this whole process, but we can only use what we have on hand...

I've also gone to check on how the rock dam construction is coming along. They've managed to build 30 of them, with plenty of available space to keep building them. The water in some of the second-order tributaries has stopped flowing, likely due to the decrease in overall rainfall as we slowly change seasons. That doesn't mean that we don't need rock dams there though, and I took a little time to show the goblins how to follow where the water flows even when there isn't any currently there.

After a solid month of work, we've made some good progress on the windmill. The daily light rains have let up in the last few weeks, meaning the rainy spring season is probably over. We've gotten the roof made on the windmill, and I've put a thin lightstone cap over the whole thing. Building the cap ended up being way more of a pain than I initially thought due to the height all this was built at. For both the carpenter and myself I attached a stone platform around the outside of the windmill, so we can walk around the outside of the dome. That was also built from lightstone, and has diagonal support struts attached back into the windmill for stability.

With a bit of effort, I can rotate the dome, which is a good sign for the future of the whole project. The next few parts of the construction are going to be tricky. First, I want to build the auxiliary fan which will rotate the whole roof. For that, I'm going to have Karsh make some gears so we can get a high gear ratio from that fan. Next, I'll have gear teeth made around the perimeter of the mill on the inside near the top, and a drive gear which will be used to actually rotate the roof when that fan turns.

[Vol.4] Ch.16 Windmill Part 2

We spent another twenty days getting the dome to rotate thanks to a small fan installed on part of the dome. There were a lot of small tweaks and changes we had to do to make it work effectively, but I'm glad the whole thing works now. It's also been about long enough now that I expect the road construction crew will be finishing up. Once they do, I want to have them add another layer to the artificial tide pool. I've also set a few goblins up with rock breaking jobs in the reservoir area. The larger and nicer shaped rocks get shipped to the road construction crew, and the more oddly shaped ones are used in rock dam construction along the stream.

The next part that I'm going to have to work on is the power transfer and mill portion inside. While I work on some portions of that, I'll have the carpenter begin making the fan blades, so we'll be able to move on to the final step quickly when we get to it.

I spent another eighteen days getting the internals ready for the mill, including the gearing, bearings, mechanical levers, and millstone to make the whole thing run. After fifteen days of working on it, the road construction crew reported that they finished building the road all the way to the harbor on the other side of the island. That should end up expediting our trade considerably. Since I'm over here working already, I decided that it would be a good idea for me to manage the construction goblins for expanding the artificial tidepools, and have Zeb build another inn along the new road, closer to the harbor.

Of course, I told both Zeb and the other goblins that they could relax in town for a week or two considering how long they worked on the road. None of them have started working yet, so I assume they're just enjoying a well earned vacation. In the meantime, the next portion of the mill is going to be one of the hardest to properly install. Getting the fan blades into position given their size isn't a task I can do myself. Thankfully, I can get help, and I've designed the blades to be able to be attached from below with some help from ropes. Once they're in the actual rotating portion, metal bars secure them, and the whole fan can be rotated to allow the next blade to be attached. Having the external walkway should really come in handy for all of this.

I ended up waiting a little bit for the fan blades to be made, which meant it ended up taking ten days to get the blades attached and checked to make sure they would rotate properly. By the fifth day of this process, a few of the construction goblins started work in the tidal pool area. Not quite all of them have returned to work here yet, and honestly, I don't blame them. They've probably got quite a bit of money saved up, so they can afford to take a break for a while.

I heard that one is doing some stone shaping for other goblins in town, and that's fine, as long as it doesn't interfere with city planning. Speaking of city planning, as the construction goblins came back from working on the road, I've realized that outside of a few projects here and there, I don't have many long term projects that I can just leave them to their devices to construct right now. That being the case, I think it might be beneficial to set some laws down, and train a goblin to be a proper bureaucrat.

Within a certain area of the city, I'd like to properly establish construction rules and regulations, and have planned sketches of where certain things can go so that the goblins can start being more proactive with their work. All the work we've been doing lately is in preparation for another increase in population, and this is already too much for two or three people to manage without written rules and middle managers.

It ended up taking a whole forty days to finish the windmill. I'm honestly quite disappointed by just how much fine tuning it took to get things right. That said, I always knew it would take some time to get the springs fine tuned for the orientation of the main fan blades. The biggest time lost was waiting for wind speeds to change to determine what needed changed in the springs. It's not perfect yet, but it's at least good enough to use. Whatever goblins end up working in this mill, I'll be sure to have them notify me if speeds are a little too fast or too slow on given days, and what the wind conditions were at that time.

It wasn't all wasted time though. I helped finish the layer for the artificial tide pools as more of the construction goblins filtered in. Zeb finished building the second inn during this time as well. Between the two of us and the goblins working on the tide pools, we actually ended up getting two layers finished. At this point, there is only enough room for about another two layers. As I mentioned before though, each layer has more space than the last, so the two layers we completed now have a little less area in total than the previous four do combined. Meaning we could hypothetically support twice our current population.

That being the case, the next task at hand is going to be getting the area outside the current set of city walls prepared for construction, which means roads, sewers, and clearing forest. Once Zeb and I work out where exactly all those are going to be built, I'm going to start work on a proper city hall building. It'll be a fairly large building, built right inside one of the gates of the current village. I'm oversizing compared to our current needs so that we can grow into the space as the village grows.

I'll plan on it having a large meeting area, something akin to a courtroom, multiple reception offices for handling different regulation and managerial matters, a few archives where documents can be kept, and a few other offices that aren't open to the public for handling other internal management issues.

I think that ideally, considering how our society currently operates, Zaka would likely transition to a role similar to a high court position. He presides over the rules and has to give affirmation of major decisions, but for a lot of the daily operations he leaves it up to individuals. Likewise, although I make a lot of executive decisions, in the long term I'd rather delegate a lot of the smaller planning and decisions to other individuals. I already spend a decent portion of my time just planning construction projects for the village, which I'd rather spend working on my own projects.

Of course, I've gained access to a lot of resources I wouldn't have otherwise thanks to the village's expansion, so I can't say it's been a waste of time, just that I'd prefer if it advanced on its own without me having to be concerned about safety or waste. Which is exactly why this city hall needs to be built. There, I can train goblins to do a lot of the individual tasks that I normally take care of, and make it their job instead of mine. Previously, we didn't quite have enough oversight jobs to justify doing this, but I think we're reaching the tipping point now with plans to expand the village again.

Getting the layout for the roads outside the existing city wall took a solid two days of discussion and planning, but I think we've settled on a reasonable layout for now. We'll have three concentric rings of roads, with crossroads branching between them like spokes. In some of these places, it overlaps with a field, and in those places, the field will eventually be moved further back after harvest season. On one side of the village, it'll mean we'll be cutting back another decent chunk of trees as well.

We've had another three goblins breaking rocks in the reservoir area this year, so they'll be first in line for cutting those trees down. The next in line will be the goblins who we are anticipating to hire on as guards for the new portion of the city. We still plan on keeping only four openings to and from this section of the city when we eventually build walls, but these gates will be wider than before, to allow more individuals through. For now it will remain unwalled, however.

We'll also be splitting the stream's flow into three channels. One that goes through the middle of the village, and one that goes around either side of these road rings we're making, following the middle road. With the increased flow from the aquifer that we accidentally dug into while making the road, and the potential to drill more water channels into the mountain as needed, we should be able to sustain all three channels fine. However, we will need to expand the downstream water infrastructure to handle the extra water and excrement. I'm not about to make a water treatment plant, but making sure that the sewer water actually exits to the ocean a decent distance from the artificial tide pools seems like a good idea.

However, all that will be after they actually finish expanding the roads and sewer, so in the meantime, I'll be working on getting the city hall set up.

[Vol.4] Ch.17 Moving Costs

Progress on expanding the village has been going relatively smooth. It's been 23 days since we started all the construction, and we've gained two more stone shaping goblins in that time. One is helping me, and the other is going to make the reservoir more orderly before winter, which is slowly approaching. The sewers and roads aren't quite done yet, but they're getting close to finished. Bridges still need to be put in, and then a new outer wall will have to be constructed after that, so they'll still be busy with construction for some time. The bathhouse really helps with all this though, and many of us doing construction can be seen going in and out of it dozens of times a day to recharge mana.

The dwarven crops are also starting to get close to harvest, which I hope will be a big mood improver for Karsh's family. Both he and his wife have picked up the demon language pretty well, but it seems like their children still struggle with it. Since I really don't want them to leave, I'm planning on basically bribing them with trade goods to attempt to keep them here. I'll also probably be more lenient with letting a few more dwarves immigrate here so that they can have more of their own kind live here. Given their different cultural and biological requirements for housing, I'm thinking about zoning a section of the village around the outside to be for dwarves, so that they have their own neighborhood of similarly shaped houses. They'll be free to live wherever, but given that they have families, I feel that their preference will be towards single family or generational homes, rather than the goblin communal apartments or tiny houses for one.

The population will remain stagnant for a little while as well, since I plan on announcing that most of the houses and apartments in the inner wall will be replaced soon. Residents will be given the option to move into newer housing of the two apartment types in the new section of village, pay some money to have an individual home, or pay a decent chunk of money to have a custom house built. I've already talked it over with Zaka, and he's fine with this.

There has already existed some disparity between the goblins who got individual homes in the past for free, and those living in the apartments, so this is basically rectifying that. Of course, there will likely be complaints, but I haven't been keeping it a secret that there was a plan to do this for a while. Ultimately, the goblins will still have months before this starts being implemented, so those who want at least the smaller individual houses should be fine. Its very likely that the skilled laborers will all want custom houses, considering how much money they have.

Once we get the majority of the residents moved out of the central village area, we can expand the population and start planning out projects like the castle, a mill in the city, more workshops, and other high importance buildings. After all, the reason the majority of residencies will be moved from the inner wall is for security reasons. The buildings that will be most important in case of another war need to be protected the most.

I spent a week going around the village to inform all the residents of the approaching deadline for moving, and as I expected, letting them know they'll be moving in a few months to a year wasn't a very popular thing. However, I did sweeten the deal for them somewhat. I've started a tally of who wants to live in what kind of house and where, and let them know that they'll be compensated a certain amount of money since they'll be moving. Ultimately, it comes out to about a month's living expenses, and I'm planning on setting the single house price at about 1.5 times that amount. So they're essentially getting a discount if they want to move into one of those houses, or they're being compensated for moving.

Since they'll be moving to their new homes spread out over months of time, I don't think it should disrupt the economy too much to pay everyone for this. Its very likely that a lot of the goblins are going to want work to do so they can save money to buy a new house, so I'm trying to be conscious of that fact and consider what relatively unskilled work to provide for goblins.

One option is to expand the workforce who are working on rock dams, and potentially expand the scope of the project out of our valley and into other parts of the island. We may not need it in other parts of the island right now, but having it already complete would potentially make future projects run more smoothly.

A second option is to hire out some goblins to start teaching them forest management. Essentially having them clear debris throughout the forest. We really don't need every road to be these expensive stoneshaped paths, and we could easily have managed dirt paths that meander through the forest. That would likely improve the gathering ability for the various goblins who use vines and other plants to make various products, as they would have an easier time navigating the forest. Plus the fallen branches and other debris that is cleaned up can be used for fuel in the village, not that we currently need more.

A third option, and one I'd like to do in the next two months before it snows, is head back up the mountain to mine more ore. While we currently still have plenty of metal ingots, I want to make sure we'll have plenty post-trading to keep Karsh happy through winter. This time, I might bring a few other stone shaping goblins with me, so they can recharge directly with mana crystals in the cave to increase their chances of gaining the mana affinity trait.

For the next few months, I could have Karsh make a bunch of pickaxes and open up a bunch of jobs for expanding the reservoir, since we'll need a lot of stone for construction in the coming months. Hopefully, by offering all of these jobs, there'll be enough money in circulation that anyone who wants to buy a house can.

The downside to all this is that I'm going to have to pause the city hall building construction temporarily to handle all the task management, which is exactly the opposite of what I want to do since handing off task management is why I'm building the city hall in the first place.

I spent four days advertising different jobs that I was paying to have done in order to give the goblins plenty of time to earn money. While quite a few goblins were interested in doing work, I was surprised that there weren't more. I ended up with only around forty individuals who wanted to work, and they were split up among the various options. Five were interested in learning how to make rock dams, so I paired them up with the existing task force to learn how to make them.

Ten were interested in forest management and making trails. I'll have to come up with a few rules for them to follow, and teach them some basics before I head up the mountain to go mining. For mountain mining, I had twelve interested goblins, which means I'll probably bring along two stone shaping goblins so that we can keep a good flow of ore and keep all those goblins occupied with ore hauling and crushing.

Finally, for breaking rocks or hauling rocks from the reservoir area, I had another eleven. There currently is one stoneshaping goblin doing some work in the quarry, so I'll probably have him stay there and keep an eye on the other workers while he uses stone shaping to make the process easier and more productive.

I spent a week giving the forest management goblins a crash course on what they'll be doing, and two decided that they weren't interested after a few days, given the amount of hiking and hauling they'll have to do. Their beginning task is actually to aid the goblins making rock dams. They'll be making a pathway through the forest following the stream and tributaries. They won't do it directly along the stream, instead keeping around ten to twenty feet of distance between the path and the stream, so that plant life continues to grow along the banks of the waterways, to help prevent erosion.

For starters they'll be clearing debris along where they make the paths. When I come back, I plan to make some trail markers using darkstone with some lightstone stripes on them that we can have a stoneshaping goblin secure into the bedrock to mark our trails. I'm debating using a marking system based on the number of rows and maybe some symbols to indicate information about either the trail or distances to things for navigational purposes. That would require a lot of extra work on my part, so I probably won't. I might put up a request at city hall and maybe get the attention of an entrepreneurial stoneshaping goblin to retroactively modify the trail markers for that in the future.

Either way, once they've cleared those paths, I gave them a few other general directions to go from the village to make more paths through the forest near the village to provide extra benefit to the goblins who harvest wild plants.

[Vol.4] Ch.18 Bureaucracy

Myself and the mining crew spent three weeks up on the mountain mining. We shipped down a significant amount of ore, and ran into one edge of this ore deposit. We haven't run out yet, but in theory it could run out at any time now, which means that we might end up wanting to make an exploratory mine part of the way up the mountain below the snow level to try to find new valuable deposits of things like ore. If we do that, I don't have to worry about workers intruding on my mountain house either.

With the amount of ore we shipped back this time, Karsh should be busy for a few more weeks after this just making ingots. He's welcome to work on any other projects in the meantime, but it gives him something to do that we know produces value, so I'm hoping this year we can trade for some interesting items. At the very least, having a lot of wealth to trade spreads rumors about our island, which should attract new migrants. It might not be until next year that the migrants show up, but I've really decided its a good idea to get skilled talent in from the rest of the world.

I can only do so much, and with Karsh around, its apparent that I lack knowledge in some places. By bringing in a small number of outsiders, we can more effectively expand without having to rely on myself as the sole bringer of new technologies. An even bigger difference is the comparison between my own skill with those technologies and other's. I made a furnace and smelted metal, but all my work is childish in comparison to Karsh's speed and quality. Plus he told me about the idea of rock dams, which we'll see how effective they are in a few months when the spring rains and snow melt happen.

I also brought down more of the coinage from the mountain after all the goblins and haulers left. We don't quite need it yet, but I would hate to be left without any new currency during winter. I'm probably going to have to do a second coin minting in spring, just to be ready for when the population ends up expanding.

I've finished up the structure for the city hall after another week of work. It'll take some time before it's completely ready, since I need to make and commission a bunch of furniture for the insides. We've had a couple good developments in the meantime. The construction crew has really made some good progress, and has all the sewer lines, roads, bridges, and even about a quarter of the new city wall completed, save for those blocked by existing crop fields. This time, we're making the wall a little thicker to hopefully make it a little more effective against a second invasion where they just turn the stone in the wall into spheres. In a perfect world, we'd coat the walls in a thin layer of metal to prevent that, but realistically that would be far too much work and value lost to cover such a huge area in metal.

All the dwarven crops are finally ready for harvest as well. We've already had plenty of reka through the year, and it's been interesting to say the least. I personally find it to be tastier than swamp beets, but the majority of the goblins seem to have an acquired taste for swamp beets over the more mild reka. Once the harvest of the korogo and boto-boto are done, we'll see how those taste. I might have to consult with Karsh's wife for information on how to properly prepare and eat them, although I know we can at least make flour from the Korogo seeds.

I'll have to keep a close eye on how hard it is to process the korogo to get the seeds though. If it's anything like wheat, I might have to make a second windmill to power a thresher to make that process significantly easier. In either case, the vines from the boto-boto once the fruit are harvested should also be useful for some of our industries, and the korogo stems should be edible by the bargas, so we'll have plenty of harvested goodies.

I wasn't sure when exactly the bargas would begin mating, but it seems that it's also around this time. I'm hoping that means that by spring we'll have a few new ones ready, which means I'll need more than just one additional field for them. It'll be important to keep them sorted genetically, so we don't run into inbreeding issues in the long term as well. That's why we're getting a few new breeding males via trade. The females born of one herd can be reorganized into the pen with a different male, and so on. After five or six generations young could be reintroduced into the original genetic group and they'll be different enough that it shouldn't cause an issue.

I spent another eight days working on furniture and other design within the city hall before the korogo was hand threshed, and it became time to show a few goblins how to operate the mill. We first lubricated the bearings with our homemade fish soap lubricant made from oil and lime. Then I showed them how to operate a lever to lower the upper grindstone onto the lower one, and operate a chute to feed grain into the eye of the main rotating stone. After a few practice runs, and some tinkering on my part, we got it working, and started milling flour.

I figured the first person to inform of this should be Karsh's wife, Rishi, as she would be the most likely to know about making bread. She initially seemed excited, but then seemed to realize she didn't have some of the ingredients she'd want to make what she wanted. I'm not that surprised, but I told her to make a list so we could try to trade for it. Until then, I offered her quite the supply of flour, and asked if she'd do some experiments with making flatbreads, since they need only water and flour. Obviously, other ingredients can be added, like salt or fats and oils. I gave her some of each of those as well, and told her to let me know if she needs any other ingredients.

After another eighteen days, I finished furnishing the city hall. In that time, snow had fallen on the mountain and Rishi had come up with a few viable recipes for flatbreads, which I was glad to hear. I'm not going to push her to work, but if she decides she wants to make a bakery, I'll probably end up giving them priority and a discount on construction.

Now that all the fields are fully harvested, the construction crew was able to build the remaining sections of road and sewer that had to wait for the crops to finish growing. Since we've had to remove parts of some of the crop fields, we're going to have to build them again, and I figured if we're doing that already, we should probably expand them further, in anticipation of needing more food moving forward.

I have more exciting priorities right now though. With the city hall building done, I can finally start having other individuals handle the management of work. Sure, I could just train someone to handle it, but without a physical institution where records are kept, if that goblin just stops working, it would be worse than if I didn't have them at all. With the building in place where records can be kept, it means anyone with training should be able to pick up where someone else left off.

For now, most of the rooms will be unused, since it's designed much larger than we currently need, so we can grow into the space as needed. For now, I have three jobs in mind that I'm going to advertise for. The first job will be for someone who manages hiring and paying goblins for tasks that I lay out. Instead of me going around recruiting people, outside city hall I've put up a large wall where I can hang plates that have pictographs of certain kinds of work. The goblin is in charge of putting the correct pictograph up, and then helping anyone who inquires about work inside.

The second job will be for an overseer. Their job is to go to different jobsites and make sure that work is being done. Ultimately, they aren't in charge of punishing anyone if they aren't working. Instead, they're to inform Zaka of what happened, so he can make a judgement call after talking to them. I intend to be lenient about labor, they don't need to be working super hard all the time, but I also don't want someone to be slacking on a two month job, and find out we've been paying them for doing nothing for a few months.

The third job will be for recordkeeping. That one will require some degree of training, since they'll need to learn a written language. I don't doubt that the demon language has a written form, but no one here knows it. Zaka only spoke the language, and since he is the entire island's source of information on the matter, we're stuck without a written form. Which means we need writing.

I could go one of three ways with this. In Europe for a long time, many records were kept in latin, despite no one speaking the language anymore. I could go that route, where we use English for our written records, and we speak demon. The other option is that I have to come up with an entire written form of the demon language, then teach a goblin that written form. The third option, which I'm even more torn about, is using dwarven for our written language. Over time, this would probably lead to a hybrid demon-dwarven language that gets spoken on the island, which might not be a bad thing. Plus, it would facilitate trade, since city hall workers would be able to read and write in the language of the country we're trading with.

Given those choices, I think we'll end up going to with the dwarven. Of course, one further issue arises from that. If Karsh or Rishi don't know how to write in their own language, then I'm going to have to either give up on the idea, or hope I can find someone who does over this winter.

[Vol.4] Ch.19 Handing Off Work

As it would happen, neither Karsh nor his family can write in dwarvish. Karsh can read some basic things and sign his name, and the same goes for his wife, but it's not nearly enough to deal with record keeping. Which means that if I don't find anyone by the end of this winter, I'm going to either have to choose one of the other options for a written language, or give up on keeping records for a year, and neither of those options sound particularly good.

Outside of that, I've spent two days interviewing goblins who were interested in the two other jobs. For the overseer job, I narrowed my choices down from an original seven goblins down to the candidate I think I'll pick. A goblin named Kertus. He currently already works as one of the city guard, and oversees the collections at the artificial tide pools. We'll have to hire a new guard after he changes jobs, but I'm glad to have it go to someone who already works a consistent job. He seems well liked by his peers and has a relaxed attitude, but can be serious when he needs to be.

For the job of managing tasks, I'm still narrowing down my choices. I started with ten individuals, and I've narrowed it down to two. Each one has their strengths and weaknesses. One of the goblins, Zata, is very personable and responsible, but can be forgetful at times. The other goblin, Kita, has a very good memory and is very methodical, but sometimes comes off as rude due to their bluntness. This job will require a lot of interactions with other goblins, but also requires them to keep track of all the jobs we currently have going, and remembering where they actually take place, and instructions to give to the workers who are interested in them.

I'm inclined to hire them both, so that I can get the benefits of each. I'd have Zata run the reception desk, handling most of the interactions, and Kita would set up the pictographs out front, and interject as needed if Zata forgets something about the tasks that need handled. For now, both will have a pretty light workload as a consequence, but once the population expands, we'll need more people to manage this anyway, so as long as they get along it should be fine.

I spent just about two weeks training the three goblins on their jobs in city hall, along with money handling tasks. Ultimately, I've given them a simple way of keeping track of how many individuals are needed on each job, and how many worked it in a given day using pegs and rings. Then we have a second peg system that they use over time to keep track of how many work days worth of work have been done on any given task.

All this is in place so I can check the amount of money I give them against the pegs to make sure that no one is embezzling funds. Of course, someone could still do so, but it would require them to also fudge the numbers on any given day to make the totals add up. It's possible, but for now, unlikely. I've given them a few secret compartments for storing money in a shared archive room, and they can keep a small amount of funds on hand for paying individuals at the end of a work day in the room where they work.

It took a little while for the goblins in town to catch on to where they are supposed to go to find work, but now that some are catching on I've already had requests from some of the craftsgoblins to allow them to post their own job requests on the board. I've declined them putting the job requests on that board, but I've agreed to make a second board that I'll put a different symbol on top where, for a small fee, they can place their own symbol, and inform Kita of what task they're requesting, what the pay is, and how many positions they have available. This way, the goblins have a centralized job agency, which already seems to be facilitating work.

As for Kertus and the overseeing job, each day he's supposed to check in with either Kita or Zata and see what jobs are being worked on, and pick at least one to go observe the jobsite for a brief period. I've started reorganizing the existing long term jobs to check in with Kita and Zata as well, so it's no longer my problem to keep track of their pay.

I've also made two small changes to the way we're paying for jobs, just to make things easier on the goblins handling payment. Goblins can either be paid daily for their normal pay, or they can be paid one time a week, on the same day for all the goblins, and get a very small bonus added in on their pay. They get a little extra money, and Kita and Zata only have to handle their pay one day a week instead of every day.

Now, when Zeb, Zaka, or myself have jobs we want done, all we need to do is brief Kita and Zata on the job, and they'll handle the rest of the work for getting goblins working on it, and Kertus will be oversight making sure the jobs are actually getting done. I've been elated for the past few days as I've helped them handle learning their jobs because it feels like I'll finally be free to work on projects myself again without spending months managing all these side projects.

I didn't have much of an opportunity to take advantage of my new freedom from managerial duties because after only one day, the merchant returned along with Shasta. He brought with him the five bargas and the extra parchment we requested last year. He gave his compliments on the road we built, which made their travel across the island both quick and comfortable. I'll be sure to inform the construction team about the compliment. I asked if the extra time they saved thanks to the road is enough that they'll be able to return again this winter, rather than having to wait a whole year, and the merchant replied that it just depends on the speed of procurement of goods on the mainland, but it should save them almost two weeks worth of travel time for each trip to the island, so it definitely doesn't hurt.

I then asked what it would cost for us to have two trips worth of goods brought back to us, one of what they could get in time to make the trip this year, and the rest for next year. The merchant thought on it for a bit, and gave us an estimate. It wouldn't be cheap, but it is hypothetically doable.

I then went and got Karsh and Rishi to get their requests for trade goods they needed. After they each listed quite a few things, but considering most of our money this year will likely be coming from ingots that Karsh made, it seemed fair to give them carte blanche to make trade requests. None of the things they requested seemed excessive either, so I'm not going to complain.

While they were discussing, I had a member of the construction crew start hauling over ingots of metal to trade with. I've only brought out a quarter of our supply, but its more than triple what I traded the first time the merchant was here. I'm very interested in seeing just how much we can get for this. We also brought out some excess salt and the wool we sheared from the bargas this summer. I didn't have time to make anything for properly turning the wool into yarn or string, and the goblins who use plants for fibers couldn't figure it out. So I decided we'd just sell it this year, and potentially handle it next year.

I made a request for two more male bargas and twelve females along with a large amount of the materials we would need for waterproofing wood. Between those items and the costs of having the merchant make an early return trip regardless of trade returns, that ended up exhausting the available trade value of the ingots and other items we were trading.

We offered to load the goods into some wagons and have some goblins help haul the goods to the other side of the island considering the weight of the goods. I think I'm going to have the construction crew build a barn over by the harbor where a few wagons can be stored year round to further help facilitate trade.

With trade negotiations done, I had a few questions for Shasta this year. First, did we have any applications for immigrants? Second, does she know anyone who could help train some goblins in written dwarvish over this year? Third, how are things going on Kao's island in the chain? Fourth, has anything interesting been happening on the mainland, and are there any rumors circulating about our island?

[Vol.4] Ch.20 Written Word

For immigrant applications, there were a few, but none were appealing, even with the lowered standards for Karsh's sake. It seemed like this time it was mostly individuals with questionable pasts whom I would rather not allow into our fledgling nation. As for training goblins in written dwarvish, she said it's not that common of an ability to write in their language. Many can read the basics and maybe even write their own name, but outside of that, it's uncommon unless you're a researcher, record keeper, or have need for correspondence like a general or bureaucrat.

That being the case, she said she doesn't have anyone who could live here to teach written dwarvish, but she could bring two goblins back with her to teach them for a year for the right price. It won't be cheap, because she not only has to take extra time to teach them, but also pay for all their expenses for a year, including extra costs like clothing to make them presentable. Given my options, I decided to go for that option. She said she'll return in a month to pick up the two who she'll be teaching. In exchange I'll pay her in dwarven coin that I'll acquire from the merchant in exchange for extra ingots.

Kao's island is a pretty barebones trade and administrative outpost. It seems that they've got a handful of farms producing food they need to sustain the meager population. It's got a handful of soldiers posted, and a wooden fort that the residents live in. For the most part, it's quiet. An expeditionary mining force did some prospecting last year given the metal that was found on our island, but outside of some minor deposits of copper, they haven't found anything else yet.

The mainland has been quiet as well. According to Shasta, it usually is pretty peaceful for at least fifteen years after a demon invasion, so she expects it will be a few more years before any drama crops up. As for rumors, she hasn't heard much herself, but recommended I ask the merchant while I'm getting the money to pay her. He's much more likely to have heard what rumors are circulating about our island.

So, following her advice, while I traded for dwarven currency, I asked about any rumors about our island. He said that there were a whole bunch of rumors, but they generally fell into a few basic categories. The first category were bad rumors. These rumors said we were a hostile force gaining power to attempt to invade. They were the least common type of rumor, but in the towns where you'd hear them, they seemed to be the consensus opinion. These towns also happened to be those that were heavily damaged during the last invasion.

The second category were rumors saying that we lived on a veritable paradise island with resources aplenty but all of it was under the watchful eye of Kao Ostark who has managed to subjugate the demons, so one should think twice about going there to claim the fortune. I wouldn't exactly call us a paradise with plenty of resources, but I suppose if you're seeing high quality metal flow out of the island as a trade resource, you might get the wrong idea.

The third category were rumors in the opposite direction saying that this is a backwards island of tribal monsters who are cruel and barbaric, but keep to themselves. This is closer to fact than fiction in my opinion, minus the cruelty part. In a lot of ways we are backwards, and I'd like to fix that. As we continue to develop, I'm hoping we can reshape those rumors of our island.

Knowing these three different major types of rumors helps me understand why we don't get many immigrants, however. For any of these cases, people would be reticent to move here. Considering the only trade goods we have right now are basic necessities and metal, it's not a big surprise people would consider us backwards. If we produced fancy clothing or rugs, it might quell some rumors. We could get tourism going from dwarves based on the giant crystals I can grow, but not only does it take me a long time to make one, but I'd rather keep that on a need-to-know basis. I can't imagine the disaster that might occur if some terrorist shattered a giant crystal. So for now, I think we'll focus on getting our own economy up to speed and maybe diversifying our cloth industry.

After we handled all the trade I spent ten days finding goblins who would be interested in going to learn the dwarvish language and then returning to work as a recordkeeper. Ultimately, I'm hoping that I can keep Shasta training one goblin until they're fluent even after a year, while the other one will begin work as the recordkeeper. Of the eight who were interested, I went through multiple tests with them to find who I considered to be the most capable among them.

One was a goblin, Kaab, who helps with ore processing a lot, and as such, works with Karsh frequently. He seems to have a grasp of the very basics of spoken dwarven already, which should be a benefit to learning written dwarvish. The second goblin, Tak, wasn't familiar with dwarvish, but did exceptionally well on the memorization practice test I had them complete. For this, I used ten english words, and showed them with a picture of the item they were paired with, then after ten minutes removed the words, and had them scribble the word from memory. Most of the goblins got at most one word somewhat right, but Tak managed to get half of them right, which for a ten minute memorization task of an unknown language was quite impressive.

With the two goblins selected, I offered them both an extra reward. When they come back, if they're successful by Shasta's standards, I'll make them a custom house, within reason, to celebrate their success.

In the meantime, I've put up a new job for hauling stone to the far side of the island. I'd like to get around thirty wagonloads of stone moved to the harbor area as preparation for having a barn built over there. I'm sure the construction crew isn't too excited to head back to the far side of the island, so I've decided to pay them a little extra for the barn to incentivize them. They've still got quite a bit of wall to build before they finish with the basic infrastructure of what will become our city, but the barn should take priority given that the trader should return again this winter.

I also need to get a few more fields made for bargas, since we'll be getting more herds of them soon. I've been quite thankful that our eagle hasn't attacked any yet. I'm hoping that it's become more accustomed to how we feed it, but I have a feeling if we forget to put food out for it one day it'll take one of our livestock without hesitation.

I spent the twenty days until Shasta returned clearing more trees for fields for bargas, and I had a few goblins who had been breaking rocks in the quarry cut some of the other trees I wanted felled where we'll expand our reka, korogo, and boto-boto fields. The goblins were more amenable to eating boto-boto, as its a bit of a savory and sweet taste. The korogo flatbread has also been something the goblins have enjoyed eating. They buy flour in bulk pots, and then cook a whole bunch of the flatbread in copper pans that Karsh made.

Given the general success of these foods, I want to expand the fields so we have more of it available, rather than only an amount that lasts a month. Of course, I gave Rishi and Karsh first dibs on how much flour and boto-boto they want, since it's a food their family is more familiar with.

Overall, we got another two goblins with stone shaping, which means we have a sizeable number who can stone shape now. I think we'll be able to split our construction workforce soon, and potentially give Zeb a break so he can work on things he wants. It seems fair, given that I'm going to also be changing my priorities from construction as well.

Shasta arrived while I was cutting some trees down, and after some quick introductions, she was off with Tak and Kaab, and a bunch of dwarven coin. After seeing her off, I evaluated how much more forest needed cut until I could leave the rest of the work up to goblins. It seemed like it would only be a few more days.

It ended up being five days of work before the field areas I wanted cleared were finished. I then went and made a job request for removing tree stumps and tilling the land in those areas. It's honestly much nicer that at the end of a day I can just go tell someone else what jobs need finished and then just forget about it myself.

As for myself, cutting those trees didn't net me many levels, although not much does anymore...

<MYTHIC LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 26
HP: 1894/1894
MP: 1140/1140
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands

[Vol.4] Ch.21 Freedom

With all my priority tasks taken care of, it was finally time for me to do some forward planning. I spent three days working in the city hall in a yet unused room that I had planned for use for construction oversight. I planned out what construction needs done, along with what order it should be done in. I made a large diagram of the existing village layout with all the roads, and then marked planned construction sites for all the different apartment style buildings and houses, along with occasional open air eating areas like the second pavilion I made.

I've also marked a small area for two of a new style of building. These will be temporary housing for new goblins to live in for up to a month until they decide where they'd prefer to live moving forward. These buildings are going to have a lot of rooms in a small space. They aren't meant to be an enjoyable space to live, but rather a space-efficient boarding area to tide them over until they make their mind up about where they'll move to.

I then made a second diagram of the tidal pool area, complete with the salt evaporation ponds and the windmill. There, I added a location for the planned production of a second windmill. For the second windmill, I have a few minor adjustments I'd like to personally make to the internals, based on what we learned operating the first one for a season, but a large part of the construction can be done at any time. For now I haven't marked the remaining two layers of the tide pool area, but in the future I'm sure I will.

For now, these two diagrams sit attached to one of the walls in the room. The construction crew should be returning to town any day now from building the barn on the other side of the island. When they do, I'll give them the rundown on this room, and make some changes to our organizational structure. Until that time, I'm going to tinker with some ideas for a mechanical thresher for processing korogo.

After four days of tinkering, the construction crew returned. First, I talked with Zeb. It had been a while since I'd really gotten a long conversation in with him, so I was interested in finding out what he wanted to work on moving forward. After getting through pleasantries, we got to the meat of what I wanted to discuss.

"I'm sure you've noticed, but I'm trying to restructure how things operate here in the village. It's too much work for one person, or three, to really manage everyone alone. For a while now, Zeb, I've left you in charge of handling the large construction projects, and you've done a good job of it. Honestly, without your hard work and problem solving, the village wouldn't be nearly as far along as it is. We already have enough goblins with stone shaping that I was hoping to split them into two teams. What I want to know is what you want to do from here on out. If you said you don't want to do any more construction, that's fine by me, although I'd ask you at least train your replacements before you stop. So, what do you want to do?"

"For almost as long as I can remember, I, and most of the village, have just been copying your work and designs. Building duplicates of things you've made. I think, what I want to do is come up with my own projects to work on." Zeb pauses for a moment seemingly thinking about something, "I'm not leaving or anything. What I mean to say is that I've had some ideas for buildings and similar projects that I'd like to design myself. I've gotten pretty close with the construction crew, so I think I'd like to continue working with them, but I'd like to have more control over construction and building."

I thought about what he said for a while. On one hand, if he makes mistakes with large projects, it could have devastating consequences on the village. On the other hand he's worked under me for years now doing various construction projects, so he probably has a pretty good sense of how things are done.

"Alright, I can accept that, on one condition. If you plan on doing any largescale infrastructure, like a large tunnel or a dam, double check with me first. We've worked together for a long time, and I trust your judgement when it comes to buildings, but when it comes to mega-projects, those can be especially dangerous. Even our dam could have been a catastrophe if the dwarves had used it as a weapon against us in the war. Other than that, I have one other statement of information to leave you with. In the city design, I've purposefully set aside an area for future dwarves to live in if they move here, because of cultural differences and how they reproduce. Other than that, feel free to re-arrange the plans for the city."

It seems like a bit of a waste of the work I've already done planning construction in the city, but if that's what Zeb wants to do, he's welcome to. I honestly wasn't sure what he'd say, but if he wants to take over more of the construction and design duties, that's fine by me.

After our conversation came to an end, I let the construction goblins know Zeb was in charge from here on out, and left him to decide how he wanted to organize them.

Given my newfound freedom, I was initially at a loss as to what I should be doing with myself. For years now, it's been one project after the next to improve the city. Sure, I have more projects I could work on, but they aren't that pressing. I've decided, however, to return to an idea that I had tabled a while ago. I want to try my hand at paper making. We keep trading for parchment, which is something I'd rather not have to do. Paper is drastically more space efficient than the stone tablets I've been using, although I'm going to have to do a lot of testing to get a working product.

The first thing I want to try my hand at is mechanically pulping wood. If I can get that down, the next step will be attempting to press and dry sheets. Then I'll experiment with some different things to try to produce better quality paper if I can at least get the beginning of the process figured out.

I was tinkering for a week when the merchant returned with some of our goods. He had a little over half the goods that Karsh's family asked for, only the two males of the bargas we ordered, and about a third of the waterproofing materials. Thankfully, that is enough waterproofing material to coat four windmills of our current size, so we should have plenty to get us through the year. I'm not a big fan of paying the extra fees to get a second shipment in winter, but it's nice that it's at least doable.

As for how my tinkering has been going, I've crafted a few different mechanical pulverizers to crush wood into fibers. They're all still relatively small and just for experimental purposes. The next step will be coming up with a way to screen the fibers and dry them. Historically, a mesh filter was made to drag through a slurry of fibers, and after the water drained from that, the sheet would be transferred into an alternating stack of felt and other drying paper where it would dry even further. Eventually, they'd be individually hung to finish drying.

I've got two problems with that process. Our natural plant fibers aren't going to cut it for making a screen, and I've traded away this year's bargas wool so I can't make felt. Both of which need solutions. The making of felt shouldn't be too difficult, but it will require it's own mill for production. Ultimately, the bargas wool will need to be agitated and compressed repeatedly in hot water until a sheet is finally produced. That is, as long as their wool can actually produce a felt in this way, as not all hair can.

As for making a mesh, I think that while other options exist, I could try to knock out two birds with one stone, and make copper wire. With copper wire, fine meshes could be made which are very durable, and I'd have a ready source of copper wire for future endeavors. Thankfully, we should be able to make a wire extruder since we have some form of steel available. Then it's a matter of wire drawing after that to make more fine wires from the initial product.

[Vol.4] Ch.22 Wire

The first part of making wire should have been relatively simple. We just need a steel box with one end completely open, and the other end with an inch wide hole or so. Then, I'll need a mechanical press on the large opening that can be cranked with enough force to force a glowing hot ingot to deform through the inch hole. In practice, Karsh and I keep running into issues, and its been twenty-five days. The first attempt we didn't have nearly enough force to deform the ingot through the hole, the second attempt one of the gears that we were using to give us extra leverage for forcing the ingot through gave way. The third time we got about half the ingot through the hole, and the other half deformed around the plate and jammed the whole machine as it cooled.

The third attempt at least produced some result, so we're confident that we can make it work, it's just a matter of how many more modifications will be necessary. I'm hoping it'll only be a matter of shaping the plate more precisely and operating the crank faster to actually drive the ingot through. If we can get this working, we'll still need to move on to the next step of drawing the wire out to make it smaller.

After two more attempts over six days, we got the machine to work repeatably. After we made the plate oversized and then manually filed it down until it was an extremely close fit, we broke another gear due to the increased friction in the machine. After making the gears even thicker to compensate, we finally achieved making a wire extruder. Although the wire is incredibly thick still. The next plan is to make a series of funnel shaped steel apparatuses that you literally pull the wire through to make it smaller. Karsh had actually done this before he moved here, so I was free for a little while while he worked.

In the mean time, the snow has started to melt, and although it isn't technically my job I do want to take a few days here to go check the rock dams as the water flow starts to increase. So far, it does seem like the water in the stream is a bit clearer than normal, so I'm interested in seeing how other parts of the stream look and if any of the existing rock dams need more work.

I took five days examining the over three-hundred rock dams that the goblins have built over the past year. About a third needed some kind of minor updating, and about thirty needed major work done. Considering everything though, they're doing a really good job of levelling out the flow rate and keeping the water clean. There are still plenty more that can be built, especially since I told the goblins to hold off on building in the main stream until we saw how things went with the tributaries. I'll give the goblins insight into why the dams that need repair need it, and what they can do to make them last longer. Other than that though, they should be good to start building them across the main stream as well. If they keep up their current pace, in a little more than a year they should have all these waterways modified.

This is all in addition to the amount of rock that has been removed from the reservoir, expanding the capacity of the dam even further. It's easily triple the capacity of when I built it due to the amount of stone we've removed over time. I probably won't start filling the dam this year, but if we get a mine going this year so we have a new source of construction stone, then we could start using the dam as more than just a flow equalizer.

While I was doing all these examinations, Karsh was making the various wire drawing cones I'd asked for. He should be done by now, so hopefully we'll get to attempt to draw wire.

We ended up needing to build a few simple machines to give us enough leverage to actually pull the wire through the draw plate over the course of eight days. A one inch thick wire is just too strong to shrink by 10% manually with pulling. Thankfully, with those machines, we were able to pull the wire through a handful of successively smaller draw plates until we had the wire down to about a quarter of it's diameter before it snapped.

I was disappointed, but Karsh said it wasn't an issue. He said that the reason it snapped is that we'd worked it too many times without reheating the metal, and that if we just heat the metal until it was glowing, then tried it again, it should work. So we did, and sure enough, we were able to get it down to about a third of that diameter, or a twelfth of the original size, before it snapped again. I was actually quite impressed by how effective this ended up being.

After we reduced it twice again, it snapped, and even after heating it, it snapped. Karsh said not to worry, he had a few ideas, and that he'd be busy for a few weeks working on them. We're already approaching the size that I'd like the wire to be, so we're already at a pretty good point. Honestly, I thought I'd be working on this for much longer. At this rate, I probably won't need a mill to handle this unless I wanted to replace the ropes on the mountain winches with cable. That said, it shouldn't be hard to adapt the process to a more automated one if we end up needing it in the future.

If I'm going to be free for a few more weeks, then I'll have to find something to occupy my time.

I spent the first three days of the next nineteen just thinking about what I'd like to do next. It's kind of interesting. I spent so long taking on one project after the other, but with so many projects going on around me, but none needing my help, I was at a loss as to what to do. So I made my way up the mountain to my old home and resumed excavating the stairway that is supposed to descend out of the mountain from the inside.

Sure, I could go dig a fresh mine part of the way up the mountain, assist on some other project, or even just sit an relax, but I felt like getting back to my roots. Pretty soon the goblin village will start whirring along on it's own for some time, and when that time comes, I think I'd like to spent more of my own time up in my mountain home, away from the constant hustle and bustle of the village. If that time arrives, having a way to and from my home in winter would be ideal, so I figured I should get to work while I can.

After sixteen days of working on the stairs however, I recalled why I had disdain for them. The biggest part of the work is actually hauling stone, not cutting it, and for that, I'm only adding at most five new stairs a day. Which means I added about forty feet to the depth of the stairwell. A decent chunk, but honestly, if I got three goblins to help me I'd go three times as fast, so I might end up doing something like that. It was nice to at least experience returning to my roots and working alone for a few weeks again.

Once I returned to the village, Karsh had finished what he was working on, and showed it to me. He experimented with the sizes of the wire drawing cones, and managed to not only save a few steps that we'd had before, but get the wire down to the size I wanted. During the early steps, we were actually not aggressive enough with how much smaller we wanted the wire to become, and in the later stages we were too aggressive.

By making those adjustments, and experimenting with how often heat needed to be applied, he'd made the final product. These wires are quite thin, so they're somewhat weak on their own, but they aren't brittle. One ingot ends up making hundreds if not thousands of feet of wire, but ends up taking most of a day to do, although again, most of the work a goblin could do without any skill, so it wouldn't eat all of Karsh's time to make wire if I needed it.

That one ingot also should be enough wire to make multiple fine meshes for the size of paper I want. I could make it myself, but I think I'd rather pay the weaver to make them after I work with Karsh to get a template board made for them. After that, I can test if I can even make paper from wood here, which was the whole reason I started this long endeavor.

[Vol.4] Ch.23 Paper and Glue

After a week of tinkering with Karsh and the weaver, I've made a few meshes to attempt to strain the water from wood pulp, and then to attempt a drying process. I'm still lacking felt to layer between pulp sheets, but for now, I'll try placing them on wooden boards, then I'll press the boards to try to squeeze some water out and form the paper better. Without the felt though, they still might end up too moist. I won't lose hope if it doesn't work however, it just means I'll need to wait until we can try our hand at making felt this summer when the bargas' fur is ready to sheer.

I had mixed results over the course of nine days with making paper. On one hand, I did manage to make some of the paper work, but it's pretty low quality. Without the felt to help wick water from the pulp, only the thinner frames ended up successfully drying. Unfortunately, that paper was too thin to be useful for writing or storing information long term. However, since I at least had some successes, I can do some further experiments with the paper that I can make to try to improve it's color and strength. The results might not map perfectly onto thicker sheets, but it should at least give me insight into what is or isn't a good idea.

I've been tinkering with paper additives for twenty-two days now, and I've come up with two things that seem to help with paper quality. First, I've found that I get better quality paper by steaming and chipping the wood before pulping it. I'm not sure if it's because it softens the wood and makes it easier to grind, or if there is some chemical process going on. The second thing is adding a small amount of powdered seashells into the pulp water. This lightens the final paper color somewhat, and also seems to help make the paper more durable.

The next step to this process is seeing how the paper holds up over time. It's no good if the paper rots away or deteriorates in a short period of time. With that in mind, I've made multiple sheets of the best paper I can make right now, and I've stored them in different environments to see how long they last. In the meantime, I'll need to find something new to pass the time. It might be worth me doing some expeditionary mining.

I'm definitely no geologist, and picking good locations for a mine is clearly not in my repertoire. I spent five weeks digging three different mines, and found nothing. The first mine was dug not very far up the mountain beyond the reservoir. I dug there for a while, navigating downward at a slight angle, against the grain of the rocks in the mountain. Unfortunately, after a short while, I realized I'd need to smooth the cave walls to prevent water seepage, which slowed down progress. Using tectonic sense, I was keeping an eye out for any layer changes, and I found one, but the change in layer wasn't actually valuable, going from one shade of dark gray to a slightly lighter one.

The second attempted mine I dug a little higher up, where the slope was a little steeper, there, I still needed to smooth the walls, as water still wanted to seep in, albeit much slower than the lower mine. At least I know that there seems to be plenty of water trapped in the rock here. I got through two layers in the time it took to get through one, but I still didn't find any valuable layers in the expeditionary mine.

The final attempt also yielded no initial results, although it does seem to be the most promising. This mine starts just a few hundred feet shy of the snow line, where the slope of the mountain is quite steep. The natural angle of the mine cuts through layers pretty well, and there are clearly fractures that have been filled by secondary intrusions of lava at some point. Those intrusions are usually where you would find valuable minerals, although I didn't recognize any of the minerals that intruded in these particular instances. If anywhere is going to potentially be mined, this is where we should keep expanding deeper into the mountain.

I also tried to line up the angle of the main shaft so that my stairwell in the cave higher up might eventually meet down here. That would potentially save me a significant amount of time on that project if cut stone could be hauled down, rather than up. To do that though, I'll need to do some precise measurements to figure out exactly where I am currently in the stair digging process. It's not impossible to do, however. If push comes to shove, I could always make a horizontal hallway to make up the difference if we're off by a bit.

After those five weeks of mining, I checked on the paper and some of it was in pretty rough shape. Any of the paper that was exposed to sunlight had started to yellow and become brittle. Most of the paper was also dealing with high humidity conditions, and although it wasn't decayed quite as much as the sun exposed paper, it also showed signs of weakening condition and had started to warp. I stored one sheet in a vacuum chamber and one smashed between two stone blocks. The vacuum chamber sheet was in pristine condition, and the one that was between the stone blocks was also basically pristine.

The issue with most of the pages seems to be when the broad surface gets exposed to moisture or natural light. Which means if they were in a book, they'd store better, but ideally I'd store them in a lower humidity and stable temperature environment. I could, in theory, store them underground in a room which I keep desiccant to reduce humidity. We actually currently have access to a desiccant in the form of quicklime. When we've been heating crushed seashells to very high temperatures, we're making calcium oxide, which acts as a desiccant and could be regenerated, so in theory, we could make a location for long term book storage. We should probably get books themselves figured out for that first, considering we don't have a binding agent or cover material.

One of those two items we're pretty close to making in the form of leather. After we wiped out the lizards, we didn't have a good source of sturdy hides to make leather from, but with the addition of bargas being farmed on the island, we can probably finalize the leathermaking process soon.

As for glues, I have a few ideas to test for glue making. I'll have to get Karsh to make me a few pots for boiling water in however, as the easiest glues to make come from animal parts. Hides, bones, and even some parts of fish can be useful for making a glue, which again needs quicklime, unfortunately. We're really starting to use a lot of the stuff, which will probably end up lining the pockets of the goblin and those they hire to go collect all the shells that wash up on shore daily. I wouldn't be surprised if they started collecting shells from the beach on the other side of the island just to meet demand for shells in the coming years.

Either way, I'll need to gather up a few different animals of various types, including as many fish species as I can to start experimenting with which parts work best for making glues. I'll then need to treat the various parts, and then boil water to extract the glue material. I don't expect them to be particularly strong materials, which is why picking the best possible choice from among them is important.

After tinkering for ten days with multiple fishes, other sealife, and groundbirds, I selected the best two options for glues. One comes from an organ from a somewhat rare species of fish, which in any given month the fishersgoblins will see around twenty of. They normally don't bother hunting them, since they have an exceptionally chewy texture and a bland, slightly bitter flavor. Which means I should be able to get at least some of them. After this glue, it's a bit of a drop in quality to the next glue, which is made from the beaks of groundbirds. Since it's quality is worse, and I don't need a bunch of glue right now, I'll only ask for the beaks from the ones that have already been hunted if I'm in need of glue at that time. I still haven't tried any glue made from bargas, which I suspect that either their hooves, bones, or antlers will make a decent glue which is probably better than the groundbird beak glue.

For now, I'll put a standing order in for those rare fish with the fishergoblins, so I can start stockpiling the glue up. It's one nice thing about these glues, when I'm making them, I ultimately make a powder to which I add water to make the glue, so as long as I keep the powder dry, they should have a nearly indefinite shelf life. If things go well with the other projects this year, like felt and paper manufacturing, then I'll probably end up needing to teach a goblin how to make glue as a full time job.

[Vol.4] Ch.24 Sea Plants

While I've been wrapped up in my own projects, there has been quite a few developments within the city. Zeb's been busy with new construction, and he's already gotten about one-fifth of the population moved into new housing outside of the city center. We've also had a few more goblins evolve. A few of the fishergoblins have become hobgoblins, one of the construction goblins that we've had for some time became a lesser earth demon, and we had one goblin who has been doing a lot of hauling jobs turn into the same gorilla like demon that Kaga turned into.

There was a little bit of a commotion about him taking jobs at city hall as a result of his improved ability, so I stepped in to say that if he can haul twice as much as anyone else, then he can be paid twice as much. Since he can single handedly pull a cart, which is normally a two person job, I think that's fair. He's obviously also likely to be useful for other projects where his immense strength is useful, and will probably get special pay for those as well.

The market also seems more stable now, and it isn't uncommon to see goblins doing some form of apprenticeship or basic labor in employment of any of the craftsgoblins, fishergoblins, or Karsh. Which is exactly where I wanted things to go when I implemented currency. There are still goblins who only work as much as they need to survive, but it's better than the distribution of labor we had before, where large swaths of the population didn't work at all.

I myself am just doing random tasks to pass the time until it comes time to sheer the bargas so I can attempt felt making, which is one of the last steps before we can make paper at scale. We won't get much felt this cycle, given that we don't have many bargas, but the calves were born recently, so our herds are slowly growing. We'll probably keep all the females and two of the males, and the rest of the males we'll butcher when they are fully grown.

Ultimately, I'm thinking about talking to Zeb about the idea of building a basic school building. Unlike humans, demons mature quickly and goblins seem to pick up skills pretty fast when they're younger. So a normal school won't work. Instead, I'm thinking it should be something like a job academy. Right now we have optional apprenticeships, which let some goblins observe different jobs. As the number of jobs grows, and we keep learning about new traits, magics, and evolutions, I feel like it would be beneficial to educate the new goblins on all these options, so they not only know what they can do, but how they can achieve those goals.

The set we know the most about is lesser earth demons, mostly because I've documented a lot of it as I was going through prestiges, but also from empirical results based on all the goblins in the construction crew. I also have a decent idea of what it takes to become a hobgoblin, a troll, and a demon gorilla, although those aren't quite as set in stone. So I'd like to educate fresh goblins on what sort of jobs and tasks they can do to reach those heights while simultaneously having them report back when they prestige or evolve. That way we can collect more extensive data on what sort of activities lead to different abilities. Maybe I'll have to implement some kind of information bounty where we pay them to report when these things happen.

All this culminates in needing someone who can write and read, which means I'll be waiting for some time for the goblins who are learning dwarvish to return. I myself will probably need to learn dwarvish as well, considering how much we're integrating it into our society. What I'll probably do is run this academy for a time while I learn dwarvish. It'll probably be something where we run it for a few days a month to get all the new goblins from that month up to speed, and then set certain days for reporting, so it won't be a full time job, at least initially.

I checked in with Zeb and then Zaka for permission to build an academy in the village, and was given permission. It'll still probably be next year before we start summoning new goblins again, so I'm not in a rush to finish the building. I'm planning on having it be a simple three room building. One room will be large to function as something of a lecture hall where information can be taught. Another will be an office connected to this room, with it's own external door where people can come in to report information related to their prestiges or evolutions. The final room will connect to both of the other rooms, will lack windows, and ultimately will act as an intermediate storage location for all the reported information gathered about prestiging and evolution.

Overall, it's actually a fairly simple building, and I'm already about half-way done with it after a week of work. Of course, once the building itself is done, there are a lot of different furniture pieces that I want to make for the space. I'd like filing cabinets, desks, shelves, and chairs, and all those will take time to make. I'd also like to tinker with a dehumidifier design for the room using quicklime, once the other furniture is in place.

After another two weeks, all the construction except the quicklime dehumidifier has been completed. It's a little finicky, since the quicklime gives off heat as it absorbs moisture, and it reacts to form slaked lime, which has a higher volume. The idea I've come up with is essentially a box with slits in it that will house trays with quicklime that are about an inch and a half deep, and only half filled with quicklime, which can be replaced and regenerated as needed. One thing I wish is that this room could have windows made of glass. Right now, the doors need to be open to let in limited amounts of light, which causes the desiccant to get used up more quickly.

I've thought about glass a few times, but we have an issue with that here. These islands are volcanic, and don't have a ready supply of quartz. The beaches here therefore aren't actually silica sand at all, but instead are crushed shells, which means in a pinch we could use it to make more lime, but also means we don't have a good source of silica to make glass with. It wouldn't be impossible, as plenty of volcanic rocks are rich in silicon dioxide, and could be used to make glass, but we'd have to process them. We also lack soda ash, a necessary ingredient to glass making, especially when dealing with rougher starting materials.

Soda ash is a little difficult to get in our current situation, but not impossible. Hypothetically, there might be ocean plant life that is a good source of it. Likewise, some of the plants on the island here might be a decent source of it. It could be produced chemically, but without electricity and vast amounts of energy, that's not particularly viable. So if we want glass, we'll need to do some research into ocean plant life as the best bet.

It had been a while since I did work at the artificial tide pools, although this time I'm not working on them directly. I've spend the last six days carving out a stairwell on the far side of the bay that drops down to the sea rather than into the bay. Given the tidal changes here, I'm not sure exactly what sort of plants I'll find, but today should be the day I find some. Once we're at the lowest tide, I'm going to start searching for plants. There are some mossy plants that grow on the rocks just below the high tide mark, but they're so small that I doubt I could get much soda ash at all from them, even if they were rich with it, plus they're somewhat hard to remove, making it a bit of a waste of time.

I've brought a spear with me on this expedition, due to my concerns with larger sea life. I've seen at least one large sea creature trapped in our tide pools before, and I'd rather not run into it or something worse without a weapon. I'm a bit out of my depth in the ocean as well. I sink. I noticed this before in the baths, but it hasn't ever come up as a concern until now. On the plus side, I don't sink by much, so I can swim up if I need to.

Once I submerged myself in the ocean water, initially, my eyes stung and everything was quite blurry. After a minute or so though, my eyes got used to it, and I was able to see underwater. So I took one final breath of air and looked about. There sure was a lot to take in. The water was actually quite pristine, so I could see some distance. There were a few schools of fish swimming about, of which I recognized all of them from our various meals. There were also a few kinds of sea plants growing.

One type looked quite promising, the majority of the mass of the plant floated just below the water surface, with large leaves centered about a small float sac. The rest of the plant trailed down like a vine to the seafloor with small leaves forming small rings going downward. At the bottom, the vine coiled haphazardly for each plant. One vine would provide a substantial amount of mass, so I gathered one and returned to the coast to place it in my basket before returning underwater.

There was also what seemed to be sea grass growing for a few dozen yards or so along the descent into the deeper ocean. It didn't grow very tall, and each individual plant was quite small, but I gathered some of it as well, and placed it in my basket alongside the floating vine plant.

The final kind of plant like creature I left alone. It formed a mesh across a section of the rocks in an area underneath some of the floating vine plants. It wasn't green, and inside it's mesh, I could see a fish that was partially decayed and covered in many tiny roots. It may not even be a plant, it could be some other form of life, and quite frankly, I don't know if it scavenges, or if it killed that fish, so I left it alone.

With the two species gathered, I returned with my basket to attempt to recover soda ash from the plants.

[Vol.4] Ch.25 Paper Mill

I experimented for two days, and as I suspected, the sea grass wasn't very great for soda ash, but the vines with the float sacs, which I'm going to call float vines, yielded enough for the process to be worth it. The process involves burning the plants in a closed kiln, then dissolving as much of the ashes in water as I can. After that, I mix in slaked lime, which chemically pulls out a bunch of the other impurities, then I boiled off the remaining water, leaving me with soda ash, or sodium carbonate. The next step is going to be experimenting with mixtures of soda ash, silica, and lime until I make some decent glass.

I spent two weeks tinkering with various different powdered rock alongside soda ash and lime, until I made a half decent mixture of glass. As it would turn out, if I powder lightstone as the basis for the glass, the final product comes out almost transparent when I add about 10% soda ash and 10% lime.

I got a little bold with some of the cast glass, and tried to stone shape it, which ended with an odd result. It initially seemed like it might work as bits of the glass seemed like they were moving like a liquid, similar to normal stone shaping, but quickly, the glass shattered into small bits, and any influence that I seemed to have on it was lost. I attempted to stone shape the shards, but they wouldn't merge back into one piece, they'd only move about trying to take the form I was trying to make.

Unfortunately, the whole glass making process is quite involved to get all the prerequisite components. I'll be able to make some for the window I wanted with some more work, but I'll probably need to teach a stone shaping goblin the whole process if we want to have lots of glass. Given we currently only have the one forge, I'd also need to make a new place for making glass. So for now, I'll table the idea.

After three days, I'd made two moderately sized windows, which I installed in the documents room of the academy. During the daytime, they let enough light into the room that I can have the doors closed and still see plenty, so that should be enough for now. In an ideal world, all the windows in the whole building would be glass rather than just open holes, but I'd like to handle one industry at a time, and I currently have two others that are waiting to be developed.

Speaking of, the bargas are at the point where they could be sheered any day now, and the calves are getting big enough that they'll need separated soon. So my next course of action is to finally get working on developing felt. Not only will felt help with paper production, but it should be a step up from our current plant fiber clothes, at least when it comes to durability.

Between sheering the bargas, and experimenting with their wool until I got a semblance of a useable product, I spent a whole thirty-three days on the felt making process. It really is quite involved to get a decent product out. There are a lot of intermediate steps, alongside many preparatory steps, which is why experimentation took as long as it did. Ultimately, I've succeeded in making felt, but as I worked with the wool, I realized that we should also be processing the wool down to use as strands, much like how we're currently using plant fibers. However, given my need for felt and our low amount of wool right now, that will probably have to wait for some time before I try to dive into that process.

Right now what I want to do from here is process all this wool into felt, so I can make felt sheets that I can use and re-use for paper making. Given the number of bargas we have right now, I probably won't be able to make as much felt as I'd ultimately like for making paper, but it should be a pretty good start. Plus I'll have to spend a few days experimenting with the felt as part of the paper making process to see just how much different the final paper result is.

Turning all the sheered bargas wool into felt took a week, mostly because of my rudimentary apparatuses for doing the work. If I ever upscale the industry, there are a lot of improvements that could be done, and some automation would also go a long way. Then, experimenting with paper using felt sheets ate up another two weeks of time as I experimented with the paper some more as I worked through the improved process.

Ultimately, the felt did allow me to make thicker, sturdier paper, and even the thinner paper was markedly higher quality. Felt has the ability to pull water out of the drying paper, allowing it to evaporate off more evenly allowing a more even drying process, even when sandwiched in an alternating pile of paper and felt. I'm quite pleased with the result, and I think it's time to ramp up production.

Thankfully, the construction crew has been busy working in the city itself for this time, and hasn't built the planned second mill yet. Before, I had just planned on making it a generic mill that could be adapted to whatever process I might want, but I want a paper mill now, and I don't think the previous building's layout will suffice for what I need.

What I want is a longer building, which has space for all the various processing needs for paper making, along with a area for drying the paper, which will need to be kept free from rain, while also having plenty of airflow. Sure, these could be two nearby buildings, but that would still shut the whole process down if it rained. So instead, I'm thinking of making a much more grand building. Given the number of machines that paper making takes, having two fans instead of one seems like a good idea as well. The whole building is going to end up taller than the first mill, just to make sure that the building isn't hit by the fan blades at any point.

That doesn't mean I won't be re-using a lot of the design though. I'm basically just putting two copies of the existing mill on top of a different building, elevating them. The blades on the first mill still need replaced with waterproofed wood that we'll need to make with the materials we got from the merchant. So I'll plan on making all the new fans at once, rather than separately. First though, I need to talk to the construction department to get permission to build.

It was actually surprisingly difficult to get time to talk with Zeb, as he's been busy not only running the construction department, but experimenting with his own building designs. I didn't arrive early enough at city hall on the first day, and I didn't want to interrupt the work that was being done on the city, so I spent that day working on designs for the internals for the paper mill. It's a bit more complicated than the flour mill, since there is more than one machine that needs mechanical power. Instead of having all of them hooked up, I intend to make a gearshift to determine where the power actually goes from the two fans.

On the second day, I did catch Zeb before he headed out to work, and discussed my plans for construction. He was fine with it, but wanted me to mark it on the map that I'd made before. When I looked at the maps, I was surprised to see that many changes had occurred. None of them were drastic, but it seems like as buildings went up, some things shifted in their design, and they've been doing a lot of planning on where things should go.

When I finished with that, Zeb pulled one goblin from each of the two construction teams to help me with the project, which I appreciated. The construction teams have a decent number of individuals on them, so I didn't feel too bad about pulling labor away for my paper mill. For the city itself, it's getting to the point where Zaka will start summoning new residents, which means the construction crews will likely start switching some of their labor to expanding food resources again. We currently overproduce food, but that's on purpose, as underproduction is a significant issue when it comes to food.

Thanks to all the things I'd learned while building the first mill, this second mill's construction came along much faster. Between the extra labor and the ability to pre-order a lot of the things necessary for the construction, rather than having to wait to show what I needed at each step, we managed to get the skeleton of the mill up along with the basic mechanical internals in twenty-six days. From this point, the construction goblins won't be any more helpful than regular manual labor, so I returned them to the construction department.

The only items left to make are the fan blades and the paper milling machines, along with their respective axles for driving them from their power source. For the fans, I just need to explain how to use the waterproofing material to the carpenter so that he can build those to standard. However, the machines are going to be a little tricky. I'm going to have to work with Karsh for a little while to manufacture what I need.

[Vol.4] Ch.26 A Messenger

Getting all the metal machines made took some time. Considering I needed a wood chipper, a pulper, a lime furnace, five hand turned presses, a steaming chamber, and a stirring vat, I'd say getting them all made and hooked up in thirty-five days was a pretty good accomplishment. While Karsh worked on the machines, I was making frames for paper. I have three sizes of paper that I want, and three frames in each size.

The first size is pretty close to what would be standard A4 printer paper on earth, although it's slightly thicker to account for the fact that it isn't chemically processed so it will last longer. The second size is the same printer paper size, a bit thinner, but not so thin as to tear while writing on it. That paper is meant to be used as scratch, and thrown away when one is done using it. The final size paper is quite a bit bigger. In total, it's about the size of four A4 sheets arranged in a rectangle, and even thicker than the first sheet. These sheets are meant to be used for blueprinting. Basically, I wanted them large enough and rigid enough to be useful even when brought to a construction site.

The only thing left to do is a test run of the paper mill, however, I want to find about three goblins to man the mill, and teach them how to use it.

Thankfully, finding a few goblins interested in running this mill was fairly easy, partially thanks to the job board at the city hall. By the second day, I had filled the three positions I wanted. It seems that the goblins who were interested were ones that were interested in the first mill, and were excited to get an opportunity to work in a new one. That said, the other mill and this mill have quite a few differences, so I hope that doesn't scare them away.

We've also gotten the first of the snowfall on the mountain, which means that we can probably expect the merchant to be returning within a few weeks. I was hoping to get more paper made before that point, as its a bit more renewable than metal, so I'd like to use it as a trade commodity, but we probably won't have much if any made by that point. Thankfully, outside of getting a few more bargas, and whatever Karsh and his family needs, I don't think this year we're going to be trading for much. Though I'm more than willing to trade for some coin to keep the merchant happy. If we don't keep the trade channel open, it can be much harder to reopen it in the future.

As always, when starting up something this complicated, there are going to be problems. It took nine days to actually get the whole process working. Most of the issues were easy enough fixes, but they required downtime for Karsh to make a new part to relieve the issue. The biggest issue ended up being the steamer chamber, which I ended up having to rebuild as two chambers instead of one.

I had just made a stone base with small holes to separate the wood and the water in a single chamber, but as it would turn out, that caused a lot of buildup of organic gunk in the water chamber, and by the fourth time we started to use it, it had become so caked that some of the gunk started smoking. So ultimately, there is now a boiler which pipes the steam into the steaming chamber, rather than it being a single unit.

In any matter, we got the paper mill running from start to finish, and I got to see the first pieces of paper go to start the drying process. Ultimately, as long as the frame fits in the pulp tank, we shouldn't have any issues making other sizes of paper if the need arises, so I'm pretty content with the whole facility. My only concern is that with more and more mechanical devices being used, we might end up having an issue as things break down. Right now, we're nowhere near that limit, but with a single blacksmith in town, there is only so much metal that can be worked in a single day.

The paper mill finally gives us a much needed second output for all the excess wood that we get while expanding. For the longest time, we've used it for charcoal, which has been nice, but we have more than we'll need for many years. Now that all the dwarven crop fields are harvested, it's time to get to expanding those again while it's winter time. With population expansion coming any day now, we'll need the extra food, plus I'd like to use the wood for paper making.

I've been cutting trees down behind some of the existing fields now for ten days, while keeping an eye out for the merchant's return. Since I'm no longer in charge of construction, or for that matter, a lot of the management for the goblins, I've taken to keeping the levels to myself for cutting trees down.

If someone else needs levels, they can either cut down more trees for some other project, or they can take to working with the fishergoblins for a while. While individually, most of the fish aren't worth much, the sheer numbers they've killed over time has really manifested itself in a bit of a power imbalance. Most of the fishergoblins who have been at it since I taught them have evolved into hobgoblins. Even some of the newer ones have prestiged a few times.

At this point, the guard that we position at the artificial tide pools isn't really there for protection, just to collect tax. Which means we'll need to consider a way to get the guards leveled up more. I'd consider waiving the entrance fee in exchange for having the guards help with the fish catching, but that would take away from the monetary sink that is necessary to keep inflation low in the economy.

I suppose an option would be to reserve a portion of the tide pools where a few guards would be in charge of killing the fish inside, but the fishergoblins would still be allowed to take them for free. The fishergoblins themselves have gotten quite good at precision strikes to kill the fish while keeping the meat as pristine as possible, so the quality of the fish probably won't quite be up to their standards, but its better than having weak guards.

<MYTHIC LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 33
HP: 2069/2069
MP: 1209/1209
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands

It took two days of convincing the fishergoblins and Zaka to get the change made to the guards regimen. The fishergoblins were obviously the first to be concerned with the idea of suddenly losing access to some of the tide pools, but after some compromise they conceded the point. What we agreed upon was that not all the fish in those sections would actually be killed by the guards. The guards would have to learn which fishes were inexpensive and only kill those. In exchange, we got a few extra tide pools to make up for the difference.

While I was overseeing some of the guards while they worked in the tide pools on the third day, I got word that the merchant had returned, along with Shasta, two other people whom no one recognized, and significantly more guards than have arrived previously. I then promptly returned to sort out our trade while also going to see who these new people were.

When I arrived, I could tell two things before I actually got close enough to speak. First, the extra guards weren't dwarves, and neither were the two individuals who weren't armed. Second, whoever these people were, they were important. They were dressed quite nicely, and held an air about them exuding authority.

When I finally got close enough to speak, I could tell that one was an elf, and the other was a human. When I actually arrived at the group, the human started speaking first, in a language I couldn't understand, and hadn't heard before. As he spoke, he maintained strict eye contact with me, and finished with a flourishing bow. I bowed back briefly, and waited for someone to translate.

Unfortunately for Shasta, it seems like she ended up being the translator for this as well.

"I am the Baron of Compfur, servant to his majesty the King of Rathland, Besmond III."

After Shasta finished translating, the Baron continued.

"It seems that we have a bit of a legal conundrum on our hands. You see, these islands are ours. We have a document from a few hundred years ago detailing the actions of a fishing vessel that got lost during a storm, and eventually returned back to our kingdom. As those men were the first to set foot on these islands, they're legally our territory."

As the Baron spoke, his speech was filled with hand gestures as flourishes. I'm certain he's normally quite the speaker. Something about his eye contact bothered me however. It seemed that the conversation wasn't directed to me, so much as all the others who could hear him talking. Once the translation finished, I responded.

"Then I suppose we do have a bit of a problem. We can discuss it further this evening."

[Vol.4] Ch.27 Politicking

I politely asked the merchant to wait until tomorrow for negotiations for the next year. After all, who knows what new problems might arise after this discussion with the Baron. I did, however, make sure that we got all the merchant's supplies that we had previously ordered sorted to their destinations.

The elf patiently waited for me to finish my work with the merchant before speaking up themself, again in a language I didn't understand and hadn't heard before. For what it's worth, I'm actually quite impressed that Shasta speaks as many languages as she does. I've noticed a distinct lack of the two goblins I sent with her, but now isn't the time to bring that issue up. As I wrapped my own thoughts up, Shasta began her translation for the elf.

"Greetings Zakarus of Kembora, I am Elora Elloetta representative of Elloetta, one of the five Great Matriarchs of the elven lands. I myself am here to establish relations on behalf of our Matriarch, after we received quite the interesting recounting of events that unfolded here a few years ago. However, it seems that we should hold off on negotiations until you've handled this apparent dispute with Rathland. A word of advice, humans, and Besmond III especially, are notoriously underhanded."

"Thank you for the advice, and I'm looking forward to discussing matters with you soon." I reply.

When invited into the meeting space in the city hall, the Baron of Compfur insisted that he had at least four guards with him in the room. It didn't directly bother me, because after all, we are demons. Zaka, Zeb, and Shasta joined us for the meeting as well. The Baron launched into another long winded speech, making more eye contact with Shasta and his own guards than with Zeb, Zaka, or myself. As he finished talking, he passed a parchment down the table.

"As I'm sure you're aware, by the ancient treaties of defense, if demons invade a territory of any allied nations, the other nations are to aid in the repulsion of the demons. However, Besmond is a generous king, and comes with an offer. Return all the land that has been stolen, and submit yourselves as servants to Rathland. King Besmond promises fair treatment should you immediately comply."

Before I get a chance to respond, Shasta retorts in the human tongue. I cautiously observe, and see the Baron's eye twitch and he speaks again.

"I'm certain Kao won't stand for this. I retorted to the Baron, 'Surely you are aware that at least one of these islands is now under dwarven control. Do you intend to have us return that land as well?'" Shasta pauses before continuing, "The Baron replied, 'Yes, at some point we would expect that land to be returned to us, or negotiated for, however, that isn't relevant right now. What I'm here for is the demons' response, not some representative of Kao Ostark's.'"

I turned to start discussions with our side, "I'm opposed to this, but there is some weight behind the idea of some continent wide treaties being invoked. I doubt many countries would respond, but honestly, the weight of more than one nation would be hard for us to take on, and that's assuming that Kao holds his end of the bargain up."

Shasta interjects, "Kao talked big before about the ability to hold you ransom, but he's a man of his word, if an outside force really did want to take these islands, he'd fight tooth and nail. I recall him making vague threats before, but that was mostly as a deterrent for betrayal. Speaking of, suddenly submitting yourself to a foreign power might just classify as that..."

"So we're stuck in a bad situation." Zeb pauses for a moment, "If we give in, we make an enemy of Kao, and if we don't give in, we're making an enemy of the kingdom of Rathland."

"If its a choice between freedom and servitude, I think it's obvious." Zaka says.

I'm inclined to agree. Plus, I don't even know how legitimate this claim is.

"Yes, I suppose it is obvious." I say and turn to face the Baron, "We reject your offer. We have no reason to believe that any of this is valid, and further, your attitude plus your vagueness makes you seem untrustworthy. You may continue to stay here until the caravan leaves, but at that point, you're no longer invited to stay here."

"So be it. I told the King it was a waste of time to try to negotiate with savage demons."

With that, the Baron stood up and left the room with his guards.

"I have a bad feeling this was his goal from the start." Shasta says.

"Oh? What makes you think that?" I reply.

"As the representative of Elloetta said, Rathland is a pretty shady country. In all likelihood, they probably want the land for the metal you've found, and would rather there be no demons here at all. I'm guessing if you agreed to submit, they'd make the terms so unreasonable that you'd have no choice but to fight back later anyway. Either that or you'd all be slaves until all the metal was mined, and then they'd either abandon or kill all of you. Either way, they have a pretty bad reputation. What you need to be concerned about now is what their scheme is moving forward."

"Well, we should probably try to gain favor with Elloetta at least then, to stem whatever potential damages might come from this." I respond as we leave the meeting room.

As we began walking back to our respective sleeping quarters, I noticed a shadow up by the steam cannons. As I approached, the shadow darted off into the woods. Yeah, that's probably going to be an issue too. Someone's already collecting intel on us.

Thankfully, by the next morning it didn't seem like anything had been sabotaged. Whoever was skulking about didn't seem to break or damage anything. When I met up with Shasta and the elven diplomat in the early morning, I let Shasta know that someone was investigating the steam cannons, and likely other things in the night.

She didn't seem that surprised by the information, stating that "Given we're dealing with Rathland, we're lucky if that's all they did."

Shortly after, Shasta, Zeb, Zaka, myself, and the elven diplomat and two of her guards entered city hall and returned to the meeting room that many of us had been in the night before.

"Sorry for the delay in having this meeting, yesterday was a bit hectic but you have our full attention now." I said, accentuated with a slight nod at the end of my introduction.

"Yes, Rathland always does have a way of making everyone else's affairs more tedious." Elora agreed. "The matter at hand for the Elloetta Matriarchy was initially planned to just be some basic greetings and diplomatic relations, as our territory is an entire continent away, across the inland sea, but now that Rathland is involved, I'm already going to have to be careful with how we handle this."

"Then I suppose, in the spirit of cooperation, I should tell you that we rejected Rathland's offer. Although, it really was more of a demand than an offer."

"I appreciate the information, as that should at least make our relationship more clear. As always, politics on the continent are such a bother. I was looking forward to this being a simple, no strings attached sort of diplomatic meeting, but that's no longer possible. We elves prefer to keep things simple and peaceful, so when we heard that the demons on this island seemed more interested in keeping to themselves than taking any aggressive actions, we thought it would be a good opportunity. To us, most of the other races always seem a bit too busy fighting over minor things. I remember when Rathland was a quaint country along the inland coast a few hundred years ago, but those days are long gone. Now they're the third largest human country, and dominate a majority of the inland coast. Oh, but I should pause for our translator to keep up."

The elf paused and waited for Shasta to translate. Shasta was seemingly keeping notes on a piece of parchment, and she had a few more, but I thought it might be a good opportunity, so after she translated, I excused myself and quickly ran to the academy where I was storing some of the paper our mill had made. I returned after only a few minutes with a stack of 20 sheets of paper, and handed them to Shasta.

"Wow, you guys really have been busy. Paper's a nice commodity, but it's a bit of a pain to transport over the water, so the only place that I've used it is in Korsask. Who taught you how to make it?" Shasta asks.

"Oh, I had to come up with it." A half-truth, as my knowledge from earth gave me the gist of the process, but I had to rediscover a lot of the specifics.

"Incredible..." She said almost imperceptibly.

"Sorry, please continue." I nodded.

[Vol.4] Ch.28 The Elven Emissary Part 1

"Yes, as I was saying, us elves are generally a peaceful group, and prefer to not get involved in any conflict that we can avoid. If Rathland decides on some form of conflict, we'll stay out of it, as I'm sure most of the other elves will as well. We'll just sit back, as we've done in all other conflicts in the past. After seeing your village and talking with you, I don't see your country as an aggressive threat, so I believe that any defensive pacts that Rathland would attempt to invoke are null in this case."

"Well, that's a relief at least." I let out a sigh before asking, "You wouldn't happen to be interested in some trade? I don't know if we have much to offer, but living on an island has its drawbacks, so we're always looking for new imports."

"Well, as long as there isn't conflict, we'd be willing to negotiate for some things, although given the distance the price won't be cheap."

"I expected as much. I have a few questions that are relevant to what we'd be interested in trading for, but they'll likely lead to long discussions, so please feel free to stop the discussion at any time if it seems like it's taking too long."

"Hah! That's unlikely to be a problem. If anything, most conversations are far too short. I said before that the other races are far too caught up fighting over minor details, well they're all also too impatient. Perhaps its their shorter lifespans that are the reason for this, but I'd be happy to talk for days." Elora says with a sincere smile.

I take a look at Shasta, and I can tell she's not looking forward to the potentiality of an exceedingly long conversation. I feel like I've gotten access to a great wealth of knowledge, and I'd like to extract as much as I can even if Shasta might have to suffer through translating it. I'll give her some form of compensation afterwards to make up for the inconvenience.

"Well, I don't know about days, but I'm more than happy to talk for a long time. First, if you wouldn't mind enlightening me about what life is like where you're from? That will probably give me the best insight into what goods we might be interested in trading for."

"Life in the elven lands is quite different from life in the other two continents and here. Foremost, we live in harmony with nature much more than the other two races, and more than you appear to. Not that we are opposed to the other ways of life. In fact, many elves choose to spend some portion of their lives living among those other races. We do not have any domestic animals, and eat mostly plants, though we do hunt and have small amounts of meat in our diet. Cutting down trees is a hazard in the great forests of the elven continents due to their sheer size and age, so the wood we cook with is gathered from naturally fallen branches. Some among us have the ability to manipulate nature to some degree, which is used to help with housing or plant growth."

As Shasta was repeating what Elora said, I ended up borrowing a sheet of paper myself, and using some charcoal to make notes. So much info, and so much more that I want to ask based of that info.

"I'm quite impressed with the quality of your clothes. For a people who don't have domestic animals, the quality is superb. What is it made of, if you don't mind me asking?"

"Specialty silk-vine. It's a particularly difficult plant to cultivate in a way that makes it useful for clothing. We have druids who keep constant management of the plants to ensure they're growing in the correct way. They're prone to thickening and knotting if you don't keep a constant eye on them, but if managed properly, you get this wonderfully strong and light vine that is so thin you'd think it was hair."

"Ah, probably not something we could manage then. Do all elves have a set of clothes like that? I believe the other elf I met, Ambella Elloetta, was wearing more normal clothing."

"Ah, no. This is actually quite expensive, as an emissary I have a few sets of it, but generally most people don't wear this. In the last many centuries, it's become quite normal for us to import woolen clothing from the other two continents, although many elves still wear leather from hunted animals. In the past we also made woven clothes from a species of vine similar to the silk-vine, although it hasn't been cultivated in some time, at least not within any of the more civilized groups. It wasn't quite as tricky to grow, but it's still much less convenient that just trading for wool."

"I see, so we'll be unlikely to be able to cultivate any of those plants. What of the plants you eat? What sorts of plants are those?"

"We have many varieties of plants we cultivate, but they tend to come in three types. The first are fruiting vines. We grow them weaving through the canopies of the great forest, harvesting their fruiting bodies when ripe. They come in many varieties of fruit, but considering the difference in climate and distance to you island, as well as the different environment, I don't believe that any of those vines could grow here, nor would the fruit last on the long journey. The second type are a sort of parasitic plant which burrows into the wood of the great forest trees, surviving off their nutrients, after some time, their main bodies are harvested and eaten. We have strict requirements on how many of those we grow on a given tree, to make sure we don't tax their life force too much. The trees here are far too different from the great trees to support any of those plants as well."

As Shasta translates all this, Elora has a slightly telling smile on her face, like she knows that the next item is going to be something I'm interested in.

"Finally, the third type. These plants live off decaying matter. When a small portion of their spores are dusted over dead plant matter, they'll eventually produce a fruiting body out of it, as long as there is enough dead matter. There are a few varieties that we have of this, including two which prefer to use dead animal matter. I think these plants you might be interested in, as they're pretty hardy, and can be useful for breaking down dead matter. I've noticed that your small forests here have floors littered with dead plant matter, and all that could be used for growing food in the form of these plants."

That definitely sounds like fungi, until the modern era fungi were considered plants so I'm not surprised they're called that. Plus who knows, maybe these are just weird plants. Thinking about it further, there is quite the lack of fungal species on the island. Sure, I've seen mold and mildew, but no fruiting bodied fungus.

If we can get our hands on edible fungi, I'm sure we could farm it quite effectively. We could easily excavate underground farm locations where the fungi could be grown and provided with plenty of decaying matter. When we cut trees, outside of the wood itself, the leaves and roots are currently burned, and could instead be used for making food. Nevermind all the fish skeletons and skins that we currently have to deal with as waste.

"Yes, we're very interested in these plants. I'll make a note to return to this subject for negotiations later. I've heard you mention a few times the great forests where you're from. Could you elaborate on them? I've only ever seen the trees here. What makes the great forests different?"

"The great forests are unique to our part of the world. The trees grow to nearly a thousand feet tall, and a little over a hundred feet wide. They live for much longer than us elves do. Our lifespans reach nearly seven-hundred years, and although we've seen the trees die, we've never seen one that was a seedling die within our recorded history. As I'm sure you've heard by now, the other races cut trees down. However, cutting a great tree down results in a painful death for anyone who does so. The other races call it levelling sickness. We've learned to manipulate the trees to keep them alive and live with them, rather than against them. The floor of the forest is as dark as a moonlit night during the middle of the day, and most of us live among the canopies, although we do descend for various reasons. Save for a few unique locations, the great forest spans the entire continent without break."

That definitely puts things in perspective. I guess I don't know how long us demons live for, and none of us have died of old age yet, so I have no insight into how much longer my life is. That sudden realization gave me a sudden sense of dread, but I moved passed it to continue the conversation.

[Vol.4] Ch.29 The Elven Emissary Part 2

"I'm thankful you've shared all this info with us. We don't get much news from the outside, and given our relative youth as a country, our knowledge of the world is quite lacking. However, as you've been so open with us, I feel it fair to be open with you. Feel free to ask any questions you might have. I've been the only one asking questions so far after all." I say, while lowering my shoulders to try to relax myself somewhat.

"I do have a few questions, so if you're offering I'll ask them. I apologize if this is blunt, but why aren't you like the other demons, which ravage the land and spread destruction, multiplying as you go?"

"Well, I can't speak to that, but Zaka might be able to. He was the only demon who arrived here. From him, the rest of us were created."

I nod, to Zaka, pleased that for once, I won't be the one answering all the questions. Of everyone here though, Shasta is having to do the most talking, since she is translating for both sides.

"I came here many years ago. All of us demons fled our homeland which was ravaged by famine. With little food and cramped space, we were at sea for weeks. I won't say exactly what had become of us, but as time passed, fewer and fewer of us remained on the boats we set out from. Not long from when I landed here, we were beset by a storm, and the rope which tied our boat to the others snapped. In the storm's wake, the others were thrown from the boat, and I was the only one to arrive here on the island. Thankfully, the food here was easy to catch and plentiful, so I replenished my strength, and eventually gained the ability to summon more of my kind. I was young when I was forced to flee my homeland, so I wasn't fully accustomed to our culture, which is probably why I lived differently than the other demons. Within the culture, I can say that most considered it honorable to eat those you defeat, although I disagree."

"Fascinating, so you were an outlier yourself. Although that doesn't fully explain your rapid development here on the island. What has caused you to develop a society in this form so quickly?"

"I can't take credit for that, Zakarus here is the reason we've come so far. When we met him, we were living in little more than stick huts, subsisting day by day."

Elora turns to face me after Shasta translates, "So, how exactly did you bring about this rapid development?"

Well, this is awkward, I suppose I'll have to phrase things interestingly. I didn't mind sharing with Zaka and Zeb that I have memories from a past life, but letting that out of the bag here might be detrimental.

"Well, I get these vivid ideas and designs in my head and follow through with them. There are more than I can work on at any point though, so we're always busy. I'm thankful that we have an increasing number of individuals capable of handling more and more of the work that needs done though. In the few years we've been here, we've finally got some windmills up, which is where we're milling flour and making paper. I'd like to get a few more up and going in the next year, to help with more productions of goods. Felt and wool, for example, would be useful soon when we get more bargas in our herds. There are a lot of gaps in the details that I have to figure out along the way though."

"That's quite the unique situation, although you seem to be doing good with your knowledge. What are your end goals?"

My end goals? I haven't really thought of that in a long time. Years ago, my goal was just to survive. Then it was making life safe and easier. Now? I'm not as sure as to what it might be. "I don't know exactly, but I think continuing to improve our quality of life and productivity is first. Our land consists of a handful of islands. To be safe, we need to be well developed to discourage countries like Rathland from interfering with us. Ideally, I'd just be free to really discover details of how reality works. Magic fascinates me, and there are lots of details about how things work that I have no idea about, but I'd like to."

"Yes, well, we all do like solving mysteries... If you find anything interesting, we might be interested."

"I'm always more than happy to take in someone who's able to help us in exchange for free access to what we're doing. We already have a dwarf here who does blacksmithing, and we would always appreciate experts in other fields."

"I see, well, I might just see if we have anyone interested in a short stint here on this island. I do presume here is where you are talking about?"

"Yes, here is where I'm talking about. We're currently not taking unskilled labor, so if you plan on sending someone, I was serious about them needing to be skilled in some field, and we already have a smith. Outside of that though, what will it cost to get some of those plants that eat dead matter? Preferably both some for eating, and the spores to grow new ones with?"

"Hmmm, I suppose we can discuss those now. We're always looking for salt, we don't need as much as the other races, but it is a nice seasoning for food. We also have certain metal products we could use, but we'll also need them made for us, as we don't do much smithing of our own. We do have some smiths, but it's much less common. They'd be pretty basic things though, swords, arrowheads, bolts, that sort of stuff."

"Yes, we can probably arrange for both of those for trade. It sounds like it'll be quite the long trip for you though, will it be two years or one before you return?"

"I believe that someone representing us should return next year. I'll be staying at the Dwarven Island for a few weeks before I return to my homeland, mostly for appearance reasons. If in those few weeks we can get those trade goods shipped to our island, that would make things work. Do you want some of each kind of our plants?"

"Yes, a few of each of the plants that break down dead organic matter would be ideal. How much will that run us?"

"Well, all things considered... Two barrels of salt... a thousand arrowheads... two dozen swords of our design, which I can produce a rough draft of... and four hundred bolts? Does that work for you?"

Its steep, but considering they're handling the shipping, its probably worth it, although I'll have to help smelt the metal for a lot of it.

"As long as you're alright with cast arrowheads and bolts, it should be possible. If not, we'll need to come up with some other agreement."

"Cast should be fine. Any other discussions today for us?"

"I'd love to hear details about other nations, but I'm afraid our translator is probably getting exhausted handling all this, so we should call it for today."

"Very well. I'll look forward to our future talks."

After Elora left the room, Shasta let out a long sigh. There are dozens of papers covered in writing scattered around her.

"I knew going into this it was going to be a lot of work translating all this, but could you at least let us take a break in the middle next time? That was too exhausting."

"I'm just impressed that you managed to handle all that so readily. As compensation, I'd like to send you back to your island with a bunch of blank paper."

"Well, I was just doing my job, but having spare paper will definitely make some of my work easier. We have to be pretty conservative with our materials on the other island, so having spare paper of my own will be nice..."

"Then please, take it. I'll make an airtight stone box you can take back with you, and you can just break it apart when you get there. That should protect the paper from any water damage on the ship at least, but humidity on your island might end up being an issue long term. Oh. Before I forget, how are the two goblins doing at learning dwarvish?"

"Ah. Well. They're learning. They aren't quite at the level where I'd send them on their way, at least not for record keeping. They've gotten pretty good at speaking though, if you'd like them to come back."

"No, I think I'd rather them get their writing down to a good level. What do I owe you for another year of training?"

"The same as last year should suffice. Even more paper will probably improve the rate they learn at too."

I can't tell if she's using it as an excuse, or if it will actually help, but we'll have plenty of extra paper, so it won't actually hurt me to send it along with her.

"Alright, we'll get it prepared. I'll talk with the trader later today to get all our other details sorted out. Thanks for your help."

[Vol.4] Ch.30 Shifting Attitudes

Later that day, I sat down with the merchant to handle our trade requests. First, we traded some excess salt and fish, followed by the amount of ingots necessary to pay for another year of tutelage for the goblins learning to write in dwarvish. Then I let Karsh and his family again make certain requests for goods from their homeland. Now that they're quite settled in, I think I should probably talk with them about what their plans are for their children. Do they intend to send them back to their homeland when they get old enough to work, or would they rather work here? I'd be more than willing to provide a workspace for them if any of them takes interest in anything.

After Karsh's family's requests were made, I added in more waterproofing materials, an order for whatever material they use for fermentation for making alcohol, and a request for another 6 bargas, one of which is to be a breeding male. Hopefully, with that number, plus what we breed, we should be able to limit ourselves to only requesting one or two male bargas each year moving forward, and that's just to keep genetic diversity within the herds.

Speaking of which, the second generation of bargas have nearly matured, by this summer it should be time to butcher the males and re-sort the females. Which means we'll get to make our first pass at leather from bargas, and that's also the time when you normally sheer their wool, so we'll get another big batch of wool to work with for processing. It'll be nice to improve the quality of the clothes in the village through those methods. After seeing Elora wearing her high quality clothing, I've realized that the fact that we wear ramshackle clothing probably leaves a bad impression on dignitaries, let alone anyone who might want to immigrate.

I still need to talk with Shasta about any immigrant applications for this year, but first, I want to hear from the merchant about rumors or attitudes on the continent about us. The same three categories seem to be popular, although the ratio of them occurring and a bit of their nature has changed somewhat.

There still seem to be quite a few people who consider us to be some hostile force, but the rumors of us building up force to invade seem to have died down. It's just conjecture, but my guess is that after a year with us not actually invading, people's concerns are slowly waning. It's unlikely they'll immediately change their overall feelings, but the level of concern should continue reducing as long as we don't actually do anything violent.

The rumors about us living on a paradise have shifted somewhat. It's no longer considered that everything here is great in those rumors, instead, it's just that we're sitting on a huge mineral and crystal deposit. It sounds like rumors have spread that we were the ones who provided the crystal similar to ParTor that now sits within the coastal mountains of the dwarven country. Since they installed that, we haven't had any new eagles arrive, so sending one there seems to have been the right choice. Of course, I can't discount that the rumors becoming more realistic might be why Rathland has taken notice of us. Well, that and the metal we've been shipping out are likely instigating factors.

The final category, that we're backwards savages, seems to be relatively unchanged, although the number who seem to believe that have diminished somewhat. Likely due to the fact we're trading goods that require some amount of skill to use or make. It's hard to call someone backwards savages when they've been shipping you high quality metal, or when they're clearly ordering waterproofing materials for construction.

I thanked the merchant for the information, and told him I'd have a gift of paper for him tomorrow prepared in the same way as Shasta's paper. Considering how full the day has been, I figured I'd handle the immigration work with Shasta tomorrow, rather than dealing with that today. Instead, I'll get the airtight paper crates prepared from stone for her and the merchant.

Considering these are stone crates, I should probably size them smaller than I initially thought. It will mean more crates, but weight wise, it'll be more manageable given our low quality carts. I know I wanted to wait and see if that goblin could improve the cart design on his own, but I think it might be worth encouraging him to improve it and let him ask me questions if he has any.

There are a number of improvements which would make large scaling hauling more efficient, which I'm sure the construction group would appreciate. We're on an island with a finite amount of land and food, so we really do need to work smarter not harder, even if we aren't anywhere near the actual maximum population we can handle.

In the morning, I handled immigration questions with Shasta in the few hours before everyone set out. There were a few humans who's backgrounds looked fine, but with how Rathland is behaving, I'm worried about potential spies or saboteurs sneaking on, so I declined the humans. Plus, they've got a separate language, so it would require another whole difficult integration process. At least with new dwarves, I know that Karsh's family can communicate with them, so they wouldn't be completely isolated.

Speaking of dwarves, we do have a few immigrants that I've decided to accept the immigration requests of. The first is a young man and his wife. His name is Arat Kunkak, and he grew up as a rancher of bargas. He's eloped with his wife, Maka, who was an apprentice baker. Apparently, his father was one of the people our merchant acquired bargas from, so he should recognize some of them, and the merchant did verify he met him before. Neither of their parents approved of their relationship, so they eloped, and given he had heard of us, thought he might be able to move where their parents wouldn't be able to stop them. If it was just him, I'd probably decline, but I've wanted to get baking going so them as a package is worth bringing in.

The second that I've approved is actually a unique case where I've decided to accept them despite them not immigrating permanently. Kao Ostark vouched for their sincerity though, so I figured I shouldn't just snub them. His name is Konkur Begik, and he's a mineralogy researcher. He intends to move here with his family for between three and ten years to do research on the mineralogy of the island. He's apparently already spent a year doing some work on Kao's island, but would prefer to work on our island due to the minerals he knows are present here. All the information will be available to us first, but he would like to share his findings when he returns to the Capitol after his stint here.

He intends to be fully cooperative, and is bringing his family with him as evidence of that, and he's apparently been working with Shasta and the two goblins I sent to try to learn the demon language. His wife, Canta, works as his assistant in his research, and he has two young kids. I'd be worried about potential issues with data related to our country getting out at some point in the future, but given we're already trading high quality metal out of the country, his knowledge is probably more useful than detrimental. We might have more minerals that I don't actually know about which could be useful.

Plus, I'd like to have someone who's got a desire for research to start recording data and information so we can be making more effective moves. For instance, he might have better methods for selecting mining locations, so I don't need to be the one digging random mines trying to find new resources.

A third individual I've decided to accept is a bit of an oddball according to Shasta. He's a single male dwarf of middle age named Boggs Pakof, and he's apparently both a chef and a fisherdwarf. It seems he's been moving from village to village looking for the best fishing locations and flavors. I almost rejected his application on the premise that he'd probably move away after a year or two, but seeing how dwarves fish might be beneficial. Plus he's a chef, so we might learn some techniques for preparing fish from him. which could improve things here even after he leaves.

I'll just have to be a little more strict with him about what we'll be providing him with for housing if he doesn't intend to stay for a long time. Karsh's family already paid back their debt for their house thanks to his labor, but considering we already have a surplus of fishergoblins here, it'll be harder for him to pay us back. That is, unless he can show us a new fishing technique that we could utilize to expand our fishing operations from beyond the artificial tidepool.

There were still a few other applicants that were rejected, but they were surplus labor or of dubious background that I didn't want to invite to our island. With that taken care of, Shasta, the merchant, Elora, and the Baron of Compfur set off along the road to return to Kao's island, where they'll go their separate ways from there. I wish I'd gotten more time to ask Elora questions about the world, but if they eventually do send someone to live among us, then I can ask them.

[Vol.4] Ch.31 Winter Work

While Shasta made the eight day round trip to Kao's island to pick up the immigrants, Karsh and I worked on getting all the metal smithed into the various metal items to send to Elora in exchange for their fungal crops. Unfortunately, we hadn't quite filled the order by the time Shasta returned. With the road on our island, her trip is much shorter than it was when Karsh first moved here, which overall is nice, but means we had less time than we needed to fill the order. I'll probably ask her to stay for two or three days until we fill the order before she returns.

That said, I had my hands full in the evening when she arrived introducing myself to the new dwarves. I decided to bring Karsh along to the meeting as well, considering he's become quite skilled in both the demon language and dwarvish. Just like with Karsh's family, these immigrants will also be staying in the inn until their houses are built. Thinking about it, I should probably request the construction team make some form of new temporary housing for immigrants. The inn is nice, but it's not really supposed to be used for long term living.

After introductions, I gave the immigrants the same instructions about how things run here that I gave to Karsh. They'll get an initial stipend, and I'll let them go into debt to have a house built, however, they'll be working with one of the construction teams, rather than myself for house designs. Since Shasta is staying for a few days now, she'll be able to work as an in between for communication as needed.

Since each of them also has some form of skill they're useful for, I also talked to them individually about what sort of buildings might be useful to them for their craft. Arat is content to handle our existing fields of bargas, but his wife Maka will eventually need a bakery, which I'm excited to have constructed in the village.

Boggs said he doesn't need any particular workshop for fishing, but he'd like to wait on a house until he scopes out the island for fishing spots. He said he'll likely just have a simple house here in town, but he'd like permission to make a few shelters on the island in any interesting fishing spots he finds, which sounds fair to me. Although he did say he might want some specialty cookware at some point in the future, after he's gotten a taste for the fish and plants we have around.

As for Konkur, his demon language is pretty broken, but honestly, the fact he can handle it at all is already a blessing. He'll probably settle into it pretty well in a month or two of being immersed here. For his work, he wants a small building which he'll use for research. It'll have a few small rooms for different activities and studies, and he'll also need multiple tools and some other equipment, so there will be a bit of a process to getting him settled in.

After three more days of work, we gathered up all the trade goods to send to the Elloetta territory through Elora and sent them back with Shasta. The construction teams have already gotten to work on building the new dwarven homes, and honestly, they'll be done with the first two pretty soon. Boggs's home is being left until after some workshops are done, as he's already ventured off into the wilderness with the fishing equipment he brought with him. He had four fishing poles that were all attached to a large backpack when I saw him leaving town, so it'll probably be a while before he returns.

I at least showed him to the market and how we're currently fishing before he left. He seemed disappointed that there wasn't much sport involved in how we caught fish when he saw the tidepools, so we quickly returned to town. He tried a few of the different fish in the market, but seemed adamant that he wanted to go off to find fishing points around the island, so I let him go.

Since we still have quite some time until the snow melts on the mountain, I can't actually get any of our current ore to give to Konkur as a sample, but there are still other rocks around the island that he can start analyzing once a construction crew gets his research lab made. I myself am planning on spending a good chunk of winter trying to make efficiency improvements around the city. Like I mentioned before, the carts that the goblin came up with were basically just replicas of the track carts, and there are better ways to make carts for use on a road. I'm sure there are other inefficiencies that have built up which won't take too much time to correct as well.

This is all intermittent with running the academy, as it seems like in a month or two we're going to have all the goblins moved to the new part of the city, and one of the construction crews will start building new housing. After talking with Zeb a little bit, it sounds like some of the central walled area is going to be repurposed for summoning more imps at a time. Right now, Zaka has one area underground where he can currently summon imps, and most days he does so, a new goblin results after a day or so. However, the full capacity that Zaka could actually handle is about four times as much. Rather than making it all in one area, it seems better to have a whole specialty area for summoning them, with less need for doing all this as a guarded function.

The whole thing sounds intricate, but I told Zeb I'd let him have full reign of construction, so I'm leaving it to him. We do still want to get a final keep built in the village at some point, but that's being pushed back for now, as it'll require a lot of construction plans. It seems like the current plan is to move the smokehouse that is adjacent to the first pavilion, and then build the keep over where the pavilion is. After all, currently the pavilion has multiple basement levels and our emergency escape tunnel entrances. So building out over that would probably be the most effective. Plus the pavilion is close to the stream, so building a moat to surround it should be easy as well.

Through the remaining winter months, I worked on a few different projects around the village. We've already reached the eleventh of the new year, and the snow has started to melt.

I did a few things over the winter. First, I worked with Karsh and the cart goblin to get better wagons made, with proper axles and bushings, and wooden wheels, which has made them much more effective overall on roads. Once Konkur's research lab was built, I worked with him some on gathering rock samples for him to research on occasion as well.

We added four new tools to the village's repertoire. Two are useful for handling swamp beets, which were already somewhat easy to manage by hand, but we added in a tool that helps cut the stalks, and a second one that helps uproot the whole thing when it's harvest time. I won't know exactly how much it'll improve the farmers lives, but I expect it'll speed them up somewhat. Then we added hatchets and machetes, which are useful for the goblins who are handling forest management.

They've done a good job so far of really making the forests around the village manageable, but they've been spending a lot of time coming back to the village to get either an axe or a stone blade for handling thick underbrush in places where they've made dirt paths, so these tools should make it so they don't need to return to the village as often, as they're small enough to be carried around with them.

I also checked in on the paper mill to make sure everything was still running smoothly, and honestly, they're churning out way more paper than I expected. I've made a small warehouse next to the paper mill where they store their excess. It's made to be fairly closed off, and has a few windows for light. I've also made another desiccant dehumidifier that sits in that warehouse. Ultimately, I'd like to get a stone shaping goblin to make crates that we close up with paper while in that warehouse, so that the humidity is low in the crate. Then we could actually ship the extra paper out. Even without that, once the paper is in a crate, it can be stored anywhere, since the crates are airtight, so we'll see how that goes over.

Three weeks ago, Zaka started summoning again as the construction teams had started building out new housing in the new portion of the city, so in another five weeks, I'll start the first training at the academy. The lecture hall should be able to handle about 80 individuals, so I'm hoping that they don't get too zealous about expanding the population. Ultimately, they'll have to slow down to expand food and industry, so this should be fine for some time.

I also started talking with the various craftsgoblins about doing a career day at the academy every so often where they'll come in to talk with the new goblins about their jobs. What I plan on doing for the academy for now is take two weeks every two months, and educate all the new goblins at that point. Some will be more knowledgeable than others already due to having lived in the village for some time, but that should overall be fine, as most of what I plan on teaching is the basics of our various industries, evolution, levels, and societal functions like our marketplace and currency.

[Vol.4] Ch.32 Basic Mineralogy

I've decided to spend a bit of time working with Konkur to gain some insight into the mineralogy of the world and how he's studying it. For the first month or so of his time here, he was collecting samples from various locations. I only recently took the time to enter his lab, and I was surprised to see many shelves all of which were stocked with various rocks with paper labels. All of it appeared to be written in dwarvish, which means I can't read it.

I took the opportunity to offer up some labor to him in exchange for helping me learn some dwarvish, and explaining what exactly he's working on here, to which he promptly accepted. The basic information that he had was pretty much what I suspected. The island is volcanic in nature, but this volcano seems to have been dormant for quite some time, since he hasn't found any evidence so far of recent eruptions. Kao's island seems to be much older, and is heavily eroded, but this one still seems relatively young comparatively. The other two islands between it and here are progressively more eroded with shallower peaks. However, there doesn't seem to visually be another island in the chain.

That doesn't mean there isn't another island, just that it might be further away. From high enough up, you can see one of the other islands, so Konkur suspects that this is the last island in the chain given the current evidence. Within the dwarven kingdom, particular dormant volcanos are where mana crystals can be found, as such he says we're quite lucky to have them forming here. Other than that though, there are quite a few differences in the volcanic composition of our island versus the volcanoes he's used to seeing.

It's somewhat difficult to actually communicate some of the details between us, as not only is he not fluent in the demon language, but details such as named ores and compositions are basically unintelligible. He can point to a rock and say something, and then describe it, but without a proper version of that word in the demon language, or the context for the word, it's difficult to grasp at the underlying information.

Despite this, I was able to at least get the gist of the situation. Our rocks here are of a slightly different composition when observed carefully, as compared to volcanic rocks from the dwarven kingdom. Many of the samples he has in his lab are actually ones that he brought with him, and through those I at least got a basic understanding of some of the differences. There are a few samples he brought with him that are at least somewhat similar to our rocks, but ours are still noticeably different in many areas.

For one, our samples are pretty dense by comparison to a lot of his samples. Some of our samples also have small bubbles within them, which I had seen myself. If you get deep enough, those bubbles don't even stay small sometimes. That behavior is linked to crystal growth according to Konkur, but the exact mechanism isn't fully understood by the dwarves yet. I figured I wouldn't fully volunteer that I know a method to make those same crystals. Right now, that information is still a pretty well-kept secret. People from the mainland seem to think we merely have a motherlode of gigantic crystals under our island, and that's how we delivered one to the dwarves, and I'm fine to keep the information misunderstood for now.

Over the next few days, I'm going to bring Konkur up the mountain to my cave, along with a few goblins, and I'm going mining. I plan on gathering more of our valuable ore for Karsh to make into ingots, along with providing a few samples for Konkur. Then I'll sample rocks around the ore, along with rocks around the native copper, and deeper in the cave, so that he can have a sample of all the different kinds of minerals I've found so far.

The mining and sampling expedition went well over the course of five days. I recovered enough ore to replace what we used all last year including trade. Ultimately, with access to both crystal recharging and smart use of stone shaping, freeing large amounts of ore is pretty easy. I brought along a team of ten goblins to haul ore for me, and honestly, they struggled to keep up with my pace.

I asked Konkur what he thought about how we extracted ore on the last day, and his response seemed to mirror what I came to understand through my conversations with Shasta a few years ago. He said, "It's a bit unorthodox, although its definitely better than how the humans do it. I'm sure you're aware that many dwarves can magically cut blocks from stone, and that's no different for ore. It seems like whatever you're doing is more flexible, but uses more mana. For this task, it's worse than our techniques, but considering humans break rock by thermal shock and physical force, this is better than them by a mile. Of course, we couldn't hope to be as flexible with our stone crafts as your abilities seem to provide, so there does seem to be a tradeoff."

I decided to further pursue the issue, "I also have a bit of an odd ability, which is a bit hard to explain, but it basically lets me sense differences in stone materials." To demonstrate, I used a half power tectonic sense on a section of ore near where I'd met an edge of the ore deposit before. "About seven feet into the wall here, this ore deposit ends. I've used it to find bubble crystal pockets in the past, and also to detect native copper deposits."

"There are some miners who have an ability that isn't quite identical, but has a similar function for us dwarves. Some dwarves have an ability that lets them detect how far it is until there is a major change in stone or mineral composition within a straight line. This limit is about fifty feet, but that's plenty in most cases. It's fairly cheap to use too, for those who have it." He then walks up to the wall I just touched, and briefly after says, "Yup, about seven feet back, there is some change there."

"Does it tell you any other information, other than if there is a change in composition?"

"A bit, but it's a little murky. I can at least tell if it's a gas, a liquid, or a solid that resulted in the composition change. Just enough to prevent accidents, I suppose. It also only returns the first thing detected. There have been some accidents that have occurred in the past when there were two very close compositional changes."

"Well, the way mine works is it spreads through the whole material based on how much mana I give it. So it's sort of a sphere shape. It took me a lot of training to actually understand what sorts of differences I was looking at though. I made special training cubes so I could understand details. Even now, that half powered usage left me with a very slight headache that's only just getting better now. I'm a little interested in something you said though. You said it goes in a line. Do you know where the line originates, or is it a bit wider than an actual line?"

"Well, it is not actually just a line. It's about the size of my palm." He says, holding his hand up to demonstrate how big the area is. "Straight from the palm, oriented along the center of the palm, which needs to be in contact with the surface. If it's too jagged and I can't get good contact, then it doesn't work right. That said, I could use it hundreds of times without running out of mana, so I suppose that's an upside in comparison to yours, plus I don't get headaches."

"Yeah, the headaches can be a bit of a pain. It's just because there is so much information at once. Sensory overload. Although I've slowly gotten more resistant to it. So I suppose with enough training I could get over that drawback, but it's not really worth it, I don't use it that much, and rarely at that high of a power."

"Well, I'll keep those things in mind in case I need to borrow your abilities for anything in the future."

"Oh! Remind me when we're back in town that I wanted to ask you about your opinion on a few artificial minerals I've made using the same ability I use to mine."

"Then I suppose we should hurry up and finish all the sample collecting up here so I can see exactly what 'artificial minerals' means."

[Vol.4] Ch.33 Glassmaking

Although we said we were going to hurry back to look at artificial minerals, we still did our due diligence and finished collecting samples from all the areas along the way back down the mountain from the cave. By the time we got back, it was late enough that we agreed to wait until the next day for me to unveil the artificial minerals.

So, that night, I made a sample of the three artificial minerals I'd made in the past. Lightstone, darkstone, and the reddish-brown stone that I found near the entrance to the cave. Now, there might actually be examples of these minerals that he knows about, but I manually refined them with stone shaping, and in fact, I still use lightstone occasionally for things that I need exceptional durability and weight properties, but still want to use stone for.

The next day, when I brought those samples over, Konkur determined that he'd need to do a lot of experiments to determine the exact properties of these stones. For good measure, I showed him the process by which I refine the minerals, and he was quite impressed stating, "This is the sort of tradeoff I mentioned when I made the comment yesterday when I compared how you mine with how dwarves mine. We're quite good at bulk excavation, but detail work like this using magic is impossible. The idea of trying to do something like this manually would be impossible as far as I'm concerned."

It seems that there is already some form of established Mohs hardness scale here, although its not called that and the scale goes to a value of 16 instead of 10. Diamond is still at the top at 16 though, so it seems like the whole scale is just shifted around. On this scale, pure Quartz crystals are an 11, making lightstone, at just over 10, actually quite hard. Darkstone, by comparison, falls at a bit over 5, making it fairly soft. The reddish-brown stone was at a 6, also fairly soft. I already had a bit of an intuitive understanding of this, but getting the actual tested numbers on this was quite useful.

He did a few other basic checks on the minerals, such as density checks and basic stress tests. Similar to what I'd found, lightstone had a lower density than the other two, and seemed to have better resistance to stresses and impacts. According to Konkur, "It has quite a few desirable properties, and is on par with some very high quality building materials. It's too bad it's on an island, so exporting it would be very impractical."

With a handful of new samples to research, I left Konkur to study those for a few days while I would go work on other projects.

One project that I had thought we might neglect doing before, which I've now decided we should actually get a facility made for is glass production. It doesn't need to be a large facility, but getting it all organized in one place, and getting a stone shaping goblin to work on it might be useful. A lot of the various facilities, let alone the houses, would benefit from having transparent glass, so I think it'll be useful. For the past six days, I've been finishing up the glass making area, minus the machines it'll need.

I hadn't gone into much detail before as to the exact process I went into to make the glass, since I sort of improvised certain tools to achieve the desired results. Now though, I'll need to actually make the right tools for the job. The area I've been making will be quite similar to Karsh's smelting workshop, except a lot of the areas that would normally be used for handling metal will be replaced with corresponding tools for handling glass.

I'd like for there to be glass blowing tools and other quality shaping tools available, as proper glassware is essential to preventing contamination when working with pure materials. In a perfect world, I'd even be able to make a glass vacuum chamber so I can better observe the decay of crystals, and the process of growing them. Of course, that level of precision and material science is still a long ways away from what we can produce right now.

To aid in production, the glassmaking workshop will also get their own stone crushers, which will ultimately be sized such that it should make very fine sand grains. Ultimately, what I'd found was that lightstone is a good base for making glass. Just crushing it technically wasn't enough though. I also fluidized it to separate the different density grains. Manually, this involved an improvised pan, and I operated it like you would for gold panning. Unfortunately, quartz isn't that much more dense than the other particles in the lightstone, so it took quite a lot of effort to remove it.

Manually doing this with water and a pan takes quite some time, and I'd much rather make the two machines necessary to process this in bulk instead. The first is a particle sieve, with various mesh sizes stacked from largest to smallest. By pouring the ground up lightstone through the sieve and maintaining vibration in it, all the particles will be sorted according to the size of the mesh they can pour through. For these meshes I'll need more wire to make them big enough to handle larger bulk processing.

Also, due to the very small density differences in the particles, I'll need to make these meshes precise from one mesh to the next. Probably less than 5% difference in particle volume, meaning a little less than 2% difference in particle radius. Doing this by hand would be impossible unassisted, but there is a pretty space intensive way to manage it. By using a simple lever arm and a slide, and extending it much further than the edge of the mesh, what might have been a hundredth of an inch difference at the edge of the mesh can instead be an inch or more at the end of the arm.

Of course to achieve this, I'll need an exceptionally long lever arm, at least 100 times the radius of the mesh, or more depending on exactly how fine I want the mesh to be. Initially, I thought I might just build it in the open, then tear it down when I made the meshes, but considering how they'll be used, they'll probably need replacement every so often. Building it underground is an option, but we'd also need pretty good light to work with. I'm currently thinking about building the facility deep in the cave, and lighting it using crystals.

The crystals don't produce that much light on their own, but if I pack enough of them into the walls, I could probably light the area pretty well. Plus, only two areas actually need to be lit. The area where the meshes are made, and then the far end of a wide cone where the end of the lever arm sits. The in between area doesn't actually need much lighting, and you won't be reading any measurements or building there.

Once the mesh process is done, the second step is to then put all the similarly sized particles into a large vibrating tube, so that the particles separate themselves out by density. This, comparatively, is much simpler, just needing some gears to drive vibration in the tube. Then, quartz sand can be collected from the separated bed to be used for making glass. The other mineral sands might actually be useful too, depending on their compositions. Feldspar is useful as a flux for some glass making as an example, but without further testing, it would be hard to determine what materials we have.

Thankfully, we now have a mineralogist here on the island, and I'm guessing getting access to this equipment would probably be a pretty useful boon to him as well, since it helps you separate out compositional materials from rocks. Hopefully, he'll be able to also determine some useful properties of those components. As I go to begin the work of digging out the room in the cave on the mountain, I'll need to be cognizant of time, as in about three weeks, I have my first classes at the academy to teach.

[Vol.4] Ch.34 Class Schedule

I ended up spending 2 days inspecting the rock dams before I actually went up to the mountain. While a few needed repairs or changes, it was significantly fewer than last year. Given that the goblins working on the project had built even more dams, I considered it a success. The few that did need repairs or changes were in peculiar locations where the normal behavior of the stream had changed so much from it's initial state that the need for changes was only apparent because of the currently increased water flow due to snow melt and the spring rainy season. For most of the dams, the goblins who were with me at the time even made a comment that it needed repairs before I said anything.

Over the two years they've worked on this project, our valley has been pretty much fully handled. While they'll still have to do maintenance here, I've encouraged them to use the tunnel into the next valley over, and start building rock dams there as well. Before we started putting these rocks dams in, the water in the stream would be quite muddy during springtime, but now it's running almost clear, and isn't nearly as turbulent. I've also noticed that we have significantly less debris flowing down the stream, which should mean the main dam will be much easier to clean over the years from here on out.

As we get more goblins and we start to need more water and food, it might be worth considering further terraforming the island with terraces higher up the slope. While we're taking up quite a bit of the valley right now, there is still plenty more space to go before we need to start considering a practice like this. Like up near the cave where I built a few terraces though, it would increase the usable land on the island, which at some point will be necessary if we keep growing our population.

I started the mesh construction room within the large open area of the cave, not too far from where I have all the crystal growth apparatuses. I chose an area that already had a long tunnel in it, so that I wouldn't have to carve quite as much stone out to make the full room.

I thought about other methods to improve the accuracy and precision of manufacturing while I worked on carving out the initial room. Gear ratios are often used for similar purposes. A caliper, for instance, uses this principle to make tiny changes in distance readable by the human eye. The main issue that occurs with developing a caliper, or other precision instrument in this scenario is a lack of initial precision.

If the gears within a caliper are not incredibly precise, you'll end up with more error than the measurement tool because the gears don't mesh perfectly. Essentially, you want the simplest possible machine so that your source of error is negligible for manufacturing. Which is why this entire project is based on a simple lever arm and sliding pivot.

Any error introduced in the use of this machine should all be in the same direction, which for most purposes means it's non-existent. It shouldn't be too hard to modify the work area here to make other precision devises in the future too. For instance, if I need precision gears or other mechanical components, this will help with exact measurements. It might seem like overkill, but in many ways it's a shortcut around the normal incremental increases in precision that would come about through small improvements in technology.

Either way, after 18 days of work, I'd gotten a large portion of the room hollowed out. I've been carefully cutting the stone into an arch shape to help prevent cave-ins. Honestly, given the sheer size of the room, if I had to do this without magic, it would have caved in already. At the furthest point, the room is going to be 150 feet long and curve a total of 75 feet, in a cone from the opening of the room. That area is a 15 by 15 foot square, which then continues into the cone.

With magic, the stone can be easily cut from the wall or ceiling without causing impact damage, which would potentially lead to a cascade towards collapse. I'd say I'm about half-way done cutting stone, which has now started to pile up in the cavern. I'm going to be in the city for a few weeks running the academy though, so I'll have to set up some hauling jobs to bring the stone down so that it's available for the construction crew to use.

I gave myself three days of extra time when I returned to the village before the first academy class began. Although I had a pretty good plan worked out for how the classes would go, I wanted to actually get the whole thing planned out. I figured it would probably be best to start with the very basics of our town.

Day one will begin with Zaka, Zeb, and myself. This would just be a basic overview of how things currently run in town. Zaka handles disputes, and summons new citizens. Zeb handles all the new construction projects. I handle new projects until I find someone suitable to handle those projects full time. There are other important people in town to know as well, though their specialties are less interacted with, so they'll be listed off shortly after. Individuals like Karsh, and the head of the city guard.

On day two, I'll give them a rundown on city hall, currency, and the various government services that we have. I intend to actually take a full day handling these to give them a good understanding of money, and how to estimate their living costs. I'd like for them to be fairly financially literate, as it'll help them long term.

After we've covered currency and finances, on day three I plan on covering the basics of what we've discovered as far as evolution and prestige are concerned. What we know so far about gaining levels, and ways that they as individuals can focus their lives towards areas they're interested in, and how that will benefit them long term. I plan on also driving home the importance of proper ecological concern while dealing with this topic. It would be easy for an individual to get the wrong idea and cut down a whole forest to level up, or to drive the ground birds to extinction because of the same notion.

Day four will be a history lesson. I'll cover the major events that have occurred here on the island since Zaka arrived. Letting the goblins know how things used to be, and how far we've come. Not only will this hopefully inspire them to make things even better here, but also help them avoid making some of the same mistakes that others made.

The fifth day I intend to cover all the various industries that we currently have available in town. From clothing and woodworking, to papermaking and blacksmithing. I also intend to give them an idea of some of the future industries I'm planning in the near future. Such as glassmaking and felt manufacturing.

The sixth day will be a bit of a shorter day, where I'll explain to them that I'm planning on collecting info on abilities and magic that they gather as they prestige and evolve, along with details related to their circumstances that lead to their ability, and of course, the pay for the info. As for the days that I intend to collect that info, for now it'll be on the consecutive seventh days when I'm running classes. So tomorrow would be the first day, and then seven days from that. After which it'll be another six weeks before I run another set of academy classes, and collect the data again.

We'll then take a break for one day and I'll be available to gather new info on prestiges during that day off. When we return, the next six days will be filled with the various different career tutors I've gotten to agree to coming in to explain their work. I plan on doing two different trades a day, starting with fishergoblins. Then, at the end of that week, I'll once again be available to gather info on prestige and evolution.

Overall, I don't know if each day will actually take all that long, but I like the idea of spreading it out over the course of two weeks. It gives us some growing room as more information gets added into the learning curriculum as well. Eventually, someone else will be taking over this job, and they'll be able to collect the prestige and evolution data on more days than I can. I'm sure I'll have to modify the curriculum moving forward after I experience the first class, as it's unlikely I'll have gotten everything right the first time.

[Vol.4] Ch.35 A New Coin

All in all, I had about forty new goblins to teach at the academy. As it turned out, I had to modify my curriculum after the first week was finished. I've decided to merge the sixth day with the third day, so that all the evolution and prestige info is on one day. I then moved day five to day six as it's the last day before we have the different trade jobs come in to demonstrate, and it was covering those trades as an overview.

Then, day four will be extended to also go through day five. I figured with only about a decade worth of history it would take a day at most, but as it turns out, the goblins have a lot of questions, and there have been quite a few events of importance that have occurred. Considering this was the first trial week, I'd say it went pretty well overall, but there was obviously room for improvement.

I didn't have anyone stop in today to talk about evolution or abilities. That was to be somewhat expected however, as only the new goblins know about that offering right now. Others might have heard of it, but aren't sure if it's open to them as well. It technically is open to anyone to share info with me, but I'm not advertising that fact yet. I wanted this first time running the academy to be fairly free for me to focus on improvements of the actual academy, rather than also having to worry about recordkeeping.

When we get close to the next academic cycle in about seven weeks, I'll have info posted up at city hall related to it, so others know they can participate.

The second week at the academy went quite well. The goblins seemed more keen to take on new jobs and to do something with their lives after having listened to the tales told by the older goblins, hobgoblins, and Karsh who all showed up for their trade presentations. Overall, I think that with our growing population, and the differences between development of demons compared to other races, this academy which can double function as a record keeping facility will work well.

Ultimately, we go through periods of rapid population growth followed by periods of no growth at all. By having the teaching role be dual purpose, it hopefully will help with job security for whomever is in charge of running the facility. I'd hate for their full time job to be teaching new goblins, only for us to go three years without expanding our population at all, and then we lose that skilled individual to another field. Plus, they're also supposed to teach the goblins about their own evolution and skills, so having them collect that data is actually related to their teaching job.

Either way, I finished up my work here, and went back up the mountain to finish work on the new room and then the precision lever. An added benefit that this lever arm provides is that it'll be a solid object, which means that if I use any precision tool in the future on one end, it'll still multiply that precision moving down the arm. The whole thing will essentially function as a pantograph for drawing, except it won't be completely free hand for obvious reasons.

I'll also need to get some rails and wheels made that I can secure to the rod that will act as the lever arm, as I'll need it to have very little friction when I'm rotating it. I'll also need a lock at the far end to prevent further rotation, and a pivot for the central axis of rotation. I'll also need to start artificially embedding crystals in the room to provide the light that I wanted. Larger crystals seem to produce a higher intensity of light, so I'm hoping I have enough of them for embedding. Otherwise I'll have to resume exploratory mining for crystal pockets.

After 20 days of work, I finished excavating the room where the giant lever arm will go. After another four days of embedding crystals, I realized I'd need more to light it the way I intended to. Basically, I'm short on the largest size crystals for the end of the room, and for the square front of the room. For the intermediate distance in the room, I should have enough medium sized crystals to give it enough of a glow on the floor that I don't need to worry about walking. Which means I'm going to be expanding the old exploratory shaft that also conveniently starts at the bottom of this cavern.

Before I dedicate some time to that though, I figured it would be a good idea to start minting the second batch of coins. We don't need it yet, but if our population continues to grow at this rate, then I want to be ready for it. Plus, I think we actually need to introduce a higher value coin.

For our current society, the coins are essentially fiat currency. They're worth money because we say they're worth a certain amount. We charge a flat amount for access to certain resources, and pay a certain amount for individuals to do jobs, setting the value of currency. Dwarven money by comparison seems to actually be valued based on the material used to make it. They seem to have a few different kinds of metal they use, and their coins are sized differently to indicate value. If we had access to more kinds of metal, I'd be all for that system, but lacking that, fiat will have to do.

For the new coin, I intend to make a new coin that is larger and thicker than all the existing coins, and make it out of our steel-like metal. I'm thinking that I'll put a picture of an ingot on one side of it, and a rough picture of our island as if it was viewed from above on the other side. Since all our coins have a hole in the center, the center of this view, the mountain and the peak will be missing, which is actually the only place that I can't view from above. I'm planning on setting this coin to be worth 10 of the other steel coin.

I hadn't quite expected that the goblins would be into wealth building, but for a while a few of them seemed like they'd force me to make more coins sooner than now. Thankfully, once the clothing and coin keeping fad died down, the goblins who had made a fortune slowly started to deplete said fortunes, and I didn't end up needing to do any emergency minting.

With an increase in the size of our society, there will also end up being a higher concentration of wealth in a few individuals, which means a higher maximum wealth. Which is why I'll need that larger coin. Each individual only needs so many of the smallest coins. It's inconvenient to keep an extreme number of them on hand, even if you're a merchant. So while the number of our copper coins necessary for our society scales linearly with population, the actual maximum wealth scales at an exponential rate. At least according to economic theory. The exponent might be low, but it's still exponential.

Which means that if the population quadruples, the total wealth held by all the goblins will be greater than four times the value, and that total will be primarily concentrated in a handful of individuals. If we only had the smallest two coins, we'd need to mint an ungodly number of coins. Instead, we'll simply print a bigger coin representing a larger value. It's also a bit of a deterrent against theft.

If a goblin has only been a laborer their whole life, only working on occasion, and they suddenly tried to exchange the largest coin, which is worth 2500 meals, that would be suspicious. Even more-so if one of those coins was reported missing. I'm not necessarily advocating for stratifying our society, but it does provide certain stability benefits by designing the system around it's inevitable existence.

I'll spend a few days collecting some native copper, then I'll return to the city and try to get Karsh to assist me in minting some new coins. I previously had some of the goblins help me with the task, but honestly Karsh will be much more effective than they are.

After four days, I'd gathered enough copper to mint an estimated twenty thousand coins, distributed more in the larger of the two copper coins two to one. Enough to easily refill the vault I'd made and still have more that I'll need to sort. I then returned to the village and convinced Karsh to take a few days to come with me on the mountain to mint new coins. Much like the two goblins, I promised him some extra money in exchange for his silence. He said that it was unnecessary as I'd already provided them so much when it came to trade with the dwarven kingdom, but I insisted he take the pay to make his 'silence' official.

He and I then returned up the mountain, hauling as many ingots of our steel metal up with us as we could carry. I accessed my vault, and pulled the minting machines out, closing and hiding the vault behind me, then brought them up to mint coins with Karsh. For the next five days, all we did was mint coins. At the end of it, I paid Karsh two of the smaller steel coins as payment, and once he left, I spent an extra day reorganizing the vault.

The next day, I returned to the village with a cart full of coins, and repeated the process I've done in the past, where we carefully escorted all the coins to Zaka's house for safe storage and later distribution. For now, I only brought down five of the larger steel coins. I made 100, but the technical value of that is more than the entire existing economy, so those are being kept hidden away in the vault for now.

[Vol.4] Ch.36 Calendar

When I returned to the city with the coins, I realized it was only another ten days until I had to start running the academy again for two weeks. There was already quite a bit of stockpiled stone down in the cavern that needed to be hauled out, but I figured that adding some more into the mix wouldn't be a bad idea. We've finally reached the point of the year where we can get a handful of goblins working in the reservoir quarrying out new stone so we can start expanding our reservoir again.

I also asked around to see if anyone had seen Boggs, the fisherdwarf. He had apparently stopped back into the city a few times, and I just happened to miss him as he only stayed for a day or two while here. This summer, when I'm working in the village getting our felt industry up and running, I'll have to keep a close eye out for him. He's supposedly been fishing for almost five months now, but I haven't heard a word about any of his findings.

It's not like he's being a drain on our society, but we also built him a hut, and invited him to our island. I'd really like to at least gain a little bit of info from him, otherwise it would have been better not to let him in at all. I mean he isn't even interacting with the other dwarves.

I thought about this issue repeatedly while back up on the mountain for seven days expanding the exploratory tunnel and harvesting the four new crystal bubbles that I found in the rocks while I mined. If Boggs is keeping himself this busy, surely the fishing must be good, right?

I went to set up the notice at city hall related to collecting evolution and prestige information, and I realized that I have a bit of a problem. When I talk to others, I usually just say how many days until whatever event we need. I've internally been keeping a calendar, but I just realized that the goblins aren't keeping calendars themselves. I'm not actually sure that my internal calendar is the best for here either.

I decided to consult with the dwarves related to how their calendar works, and they use a 5-6-13 calendar. By that I mean they have five days to a week, six weeks in a month, and thirteen months in a year. This is fairly reasonable. I've noticed myself that there is nearly exactly 30 days between the solar eclipses with the great moon, and 13 months in the year, where the solar eclipse occurs at a slightly different time of day each month, until after thirteen months, it's back at it's starting point. The seasons also cycle on that thirteen month system.

From here on, I'll be switching to the dwarvish calendar, as it's more functional here than my internal calendar. The best way for me to start implementing it is to install a large version of the calendar nearby the job posting board at city hall. I'll have two months listed side by side, then a 5x6 grid with dates underneath each month name placard. There will also be an indicator to show which day it is, and the month placard will be interchangeable.

This way the goblins can see the current month, and the next month. I'll also put small holes into the calendar dates where pre-shaped pins can be inserted. I'll make different shaped pin heads, which can be used to indicate a particular event. Then that same symbol can be put on the job contracts related to it, so individuals can track what day in the future certain jobs might occur.

I still can't believe that we haven't been using a calendar as a society. It's quite useful for a lot of different reasons, so I'm glad that I'm at least getting to it now. Of course, I'm going to have to have Konkur write their month's names in dwarvish to use as the plate up above it. Since no one else speaks dwarvish, I'll also put a symbol and a marking on the plate to indicate season and month. For example, three water drops for the rainy season, then a single star to indicate the first month. I'll use a sun for summer, which is also our dry season, three wavy lines for fall, which is when we get more overcast days and wind, and then a snowy mountaintop for winter, when our mountain gets snow. By the last month of the year, we'll have 13 stars, indicating the 13th month.

I finished up with the new calendar and pins the day before I started running classes at the academy. I can only hope that it makes sense to the goblins after a few days of seeing how things work. Of course, I explained how the calendar works to Zata and Kita, the goblins in charge of handling the job board and handing out jobs to goblins. Not only are they in charge of updating the calendar, but they're also the most likely to face the brunt of the questions related to it.

I've noticed that there are even more new goblins this cycle as compared to last cycle, and I'm guessing it has to do with the fact that the new summoning facility was completed underground within the central wall. Zeb seems to have a good understanding of the necessity to not waste space, as the above ground portion is designed to function as a new city guard facility. The previous central guard facility functioned as the jail as well. While it will still function as such, this new facility is designed with more administration in mind, along with some new storage areas. These are obvious many barricades away from the underground portion where the imps are to be summoned.

The underground portion is divided into mini summoning pits, complete with their own bars so that Zaka can summon directly inside the pit without actually having any risk to the imps escaping. All the pit's designed to have very thick walls, and no hiding spots. Zeb seems a little concerned about what might happen if another imp like me were to be summoned, and figured out how to sneak out of here. I'm a little less worried about that, and am more worried about the idea of an imp like me being torn limb from limb, but I've left the design to him, so I suppose I'll try not to think about that.

Ultimately, there are four pits that can hold about fifteen imps each with reasonable space. The only way in and out of those pits is also oriented towards the only stairwell in and out of this subterranean area, sort of like the prison was, so that you can't actually get out without someone seeing something. Before, I had found the act of making goblins a little violent, but this is really pathological. Again, I don't know that I should speak out though. Our biology is significantly different than humans or dwarves, so the biological drive for protection of young is just different I suppose.

This new schedule of classes ended up running a bit more smoothly than the previous one, despite having a little over fifty goblins in it this time. I've decided to ask the construction teams to please slow down how many new houses they build such that we get to at most thirty goblins a cycle for a while. I'm a little worried about the percentage of the population that is new, and how that tends to lead to deviancy in beliefs. The academy is supposed to help with that issue, but we've basically introduced 15% of our entire population in the last four months.

Plus, I'm sure they have other construction projects they could work on to help improve our island. With more goblins likely to pick up stone shaping this year as we still have goblins breaking rock in the reservoir, it's also not a bad idea to come up with some new large scale projects that could be worked on. I'll think on that issue while I work on some of my projects between now and the next cycle of academy classes.

As for how the reporting on evolution and prestiges went, it was a bit of a mixed bag. I promised pay for information about circumstances that had led to evolution and prestige, but I hadn't been very clear about what I was looking for, so I ended up basically wasting most of my day listening to the repeated tales of goblins as to how they had prestiged once, and gotten nothing out of it after having lived in the village for a few months after they first became a goblin. Not exactly useful information. I still payed them all the same, but I'll need to be more precise about what exact info I'm looking for, and that I'll be paying differently based on if it's new information, or old information.

Basically, if the information doesn't give me any new insights, I'll pay them the smallest coin moving forward, and if they have new information, I'll pay them more depending on how valuable the insight they provide is. This might lead to some missed information, but at least it won't lead to an absurd amount of wasted time. It wasn't all for naught though. There were a few interesting things that I learned that I'll be detailing out.

[Vol.4] Ch.37 Traits and Spells

Of the interesting information that I gleaned, there were a few abilities that I hadn't recorded before. One I've dubbed 'Manavore' and seems to allow a supplement of the user's diet with mana. There were two different individuals who showed up who had this perk, and both of them had similar stories that likely lead to gaining it. They were both individuals who had been purposefully skipping meals occasionally to save money so that they could enjoy using the bathhouse more frequently. I can't say that I approve of their life choices, but basically, they seem to have found a way to literally sustain themselves off trips to our bathhouse, which functions as a giant mana battery, so I've decided to let the fact they're skipping meals to save money slide.

That opens up some definite possibilities for reducing our necessary food income though. There does seem to be a passive mana recharge rate that everyone experiences, and if you aren't using your mana anyway, then this would be a way to use that existing resource further. Of course, it won't be a fun experience partially starving yourself just to gain the trait, but it's something to consider setting a program up for in the future.

The next new trait I've named 'Thick Hide'. It basically does what the name implies, granting thicker skin which provides resistance to a lot of simple attacks. The goblin that gained it was one of the city guards who would spar with the other guards a lot. He would choose different sparing partners to fight with, and as a result he seems to have been the only one to gain the ability. It sounds like a lot of glancing blows and other minor injuries granted him this ability.

The last fully new trait I learned about I've named 'Water Resistance'. I honestly couldn't come up with a better name for it, but it seems to reduce the negative effects you experience by spending large amounts of time in and around water. Many of the fishergoblins have gained it. Those with it don't experience water swelling from spending long periods of time wet, and don't get blisters from spending too long exposed to salt water. Considering the fishergoblins are the ones with it, it seems apparent that spending long periods of time in and around water is probably the cause of it.

There was a spell which I had failed to name before, but I was at least aware of. I'm calling it 'Meteor Shot'. It's the high powered throw that some of the goblins have learned which lets them throw their spears with extreme power. The ones who have it either gained it during the lizard siege or the dwarven siege. It also seems pretty apparent as to what actions leads to it being unlocked. Lots of throwing things with intent to kill.

As for other traits, quite a few goblins have picked up the carnivore trait. It seems to be that eating fish all the time lead to this. According to them, all the fishes taste better to them after gaining the trait, and they don't need to eat as much of it to feel full. It's another option that seems to reduce our overall food needs, however it does restrict them to a diet consisting mostly of meat, which has its own drawbacks.

I also gained a small insight into gaining levels. Trees and fish obviously give levels, and I've suspected that basically all living things provide some amount of levels when they're killed, especially large things. Data collected during this reporting cycle seems to support this, as it seems like even the farmers gain levels faster than the laborers. It's not that fast, but the yield in levels seems to be proportional to the length of time the plants have been growing for.

I've started to suspect that the reason for this is likely rooted in the fact that we seem to gain levels passively over time as a natural function. If that's true, then those same levels are probably released upon death, or at least a portion of them are. This is what results in old things like trees giving a decent chunk of levels, but fast growing plants don't give much. More data will be needed to confirm, but I'm going to be operating with this hypothesis moving forward.

I've also decided to shift the schedule around for the academy, given our new calendar. The next set of classes, and all classes moving forward, will be on the first of even numbered months, which means there is a three month period in winter to spring where we don't have classes, but that should be fine. We shouldn't be summoning that many goblins over winter when we don't have crops growing. The next time I'm back in the city, I'll need to shift my focus a bit to felt and leather production, but before that, I have a mesh making room to finish.

After spending another seven days expanding the exploratory tunnel to find more crystals, I then took another five days getting all the crystals embedded in the room to provide as much light as I wanted in the space. The next step is getting the metal items I needed made, like rollers and wire. I'll also start filtering lightstone to use as the full lever arm and sliding rails for the device.

I'd been thinking of construction projects that the construction teams could work on while I've been doing my own work. Obviously, first they can finish the last two layers of the artificial tide pool, which would maximize the total fish we would have available from that area. Then, I actually have an interesting project for them which I'll leave up to Zeb to figure out how to actually implement.

The glass project I'm working on is only as good as how much of the float vine we can actually harvest. So I'd like for there to be multiple pathways down to the ocean at low tide where individuals could go down to cut the float vine for harvest. There was quite a lot of it, but it's a little ways from the shore, and only somewhat accessible at low tide, which means it is a bit difficult to actually harvest. So I'll give Zeb those criteria and see what he comes up with. I'd suspect that we'll probably just end up with spaced out stairs going down into the water at low tide, but he might come up with a better idea.

Between waiting for the metal to get made, assembling the whole lever mechanism, and fine tuning the whole apparatus, I ended up taking twenty days, which means I don't actually have time to make any meshes before the next cycle of classes. That also means it'll probably be a few months before I resume work on it.

One of the two construction crews began work on expanding the artificial tide pools, and Zeb said he'd look into something to help with harvesting the float vines. They're also planning on expanding some of the fields for growing crops, which means they'll be felling more forest. That will probably lead to them having more stoneshaping goblins, as there are a handful who have been working in the reservoir for a few months now.

If they keep up the construction pace, they'll probably need to expand the fields to the edge of the valley, at which point I might advise them to terraform the valley edge into terraces to help us use our available land more effectively. It might also be worth considering digging a new tunnel down by the artificial tide pool through the ridge and into the neighboring valley. That area isn't nearly as well shaped for any current expansion projects, but hypothetically we could terraform that area to have any number of new features that would help us in the long term.

An artificial dock and bay for ships would obviously improve the rate of shipping, but I'm not certain that we need that much of an improvement. I'd almost rather get a second large bay artificially made to allow more fish harvesting, or some other productive use of that land, as we already have a functional harbor.

This next cycle of academy classes went pretty smoothly as I was only dealing with about twenty goblins. I also didn't have to deal with nearly as many reports coming in from goblins about how they evolved or prestiged. There were some interesting reports that indicated that the guards were finally getting more prestiges thanks to splitting some of the harvesting of fish with the fishergoblins.

I also finally ran into Boggs while he was in town, and he seemed quite happy with his fishing. Apparently, in some of the places he's been fishing, he's been hauling in some very large fish. The kinds that don't tend to end up trapped in our artificial tide pools. Those fish, according to him, are quite tasty, and worth a decent chunk of levels, if you can manage to get them to shore and kill them.

Unfortunately, at the time I ran into him, he was just getting ready to leave again, and I was on my way to one of the classes, so I didn't get to ask as many questions as I would have liked. I asked him to please find me next time he's in town however, as I want to hear in more detail about his fishing expeditions.

[Vol.4] Ch.38 Gone Fishing

The season is finally upon us. The bargas' wool is ready for shearing, and the young male bargas have reached enough maturity for slaughter. Thankfully, I'm not completely flying blind on the slaughter portion of this, since we now have Arat living here and working as a rancher. I expect he'll also be a lot better at shearing them than I was, which hopefully will result in better yields.

Ultimately, I expect we'll have a significantly larger amount of wool this year as compared to last year, and that should mean I have enough wool on hand for us to start felt production in earnest. For the time being, I intend to just train a goblin in the manual machines that I made and the procedure I used to make the felt from before. In the future, if we have enough bargas, then I'd like to get a textile mill set up to reduce the manual labor and increase our output significantly. For now though, the volume is so low that the manual labor is already more than enough to handle all our current wool production.

Since we had gotten a lot of the leatherworking process set up long ago, back when there were still lizards on the island, getting it all cleaned up and ready to use again only took three days until that was ready to begin. By that point, Arat has already started the butchering process for the male bargas that we'd decided to butcher.

Ultimately, the leather making process takes about two months from start to finish, but has a lot of hands-off time while you wait for the hides to tan and cure. So after those three days, we were pretty much set for some downtime on leathermaking before I have to show the goblin the next step. For this cycle, we're doing a bit of an experiment with different wood and plant mixtures for the leathermaking process. It will be useful to us down the road to know the best materials we have available to ourselves for leathermaking.

At that point, he started taking a bit of time each day showing me how to properly shear the remaining bargas to get their wool without upsetting the animals themselves. As a consequence, after another eight days, I'd sheared our herds of bargas. We'd acquired a pretty decent amount of wool. I paid Arat for his help, along with pay for the actual materials we acquired. I'm splitting those earnings to some degree with the two other goblins who also work on the ranch. Arat and them will have to decide how they'll be splitting what they end up earning from the bargas meat on their own.

The construction crew that is still working building new housing in town is taking a short break to build the new smokehouse, which is going to be larger than the old one, and located closer to the marketplace. It will still be located inside the inner wall though, as the smoked meats are more valuable than any raw meats in emergency situations.

I spent another eighteen days working with the goblin who makes clothes from plant fibers, along with a few new goblins who were interested in the felt making process and the ability to make clothes from it. I had to get some new scissors made by Karsh to handle cutting through felt material, but outside of that, it wasn't too hard to teach the goblins how I processed the wool before in order to make felt using the hand operated machines I'd already made.

I also gave them some insight into how to vary the thickness of the felt and some general improvements in the process that might benefit them down the road. Ultimately, outside of new clothes, there are a few useful purposes for felt, like blankets, backpacks, and sleeping bags that all can have their own purposes. We got a decent amount of wool, and expect to have even more next summer, but it's not nearly enough for everyone to have felt clothes, so it'll be expensive for some time until our herds expand more.

The whole process also ran through the next cycle at the academy, but thankfully we had much fewer new goblins this time, so I had extra time at the end of each day to help guide the felt making process. Just as I was finishing up with the goblins working with the felt, Boggs returned again, so I took a day to get as much info from him as I could. He fishes in what I consider to be a more proper fishing method, with a rod and line. Well, with multiple rods and lots of different lines and lures. When he stops back in town like this, it's usually to get new hooks from Karsh. I was a little confused where he got the money from, but he's been trading dwarven coin for it.

I'm not a huge fan of this under the table dealing in currency, but I double checked with Karsh, and he's trading well over market value and he's also getting some of our currency back after the exchanges. However, I told Boggs that the exchange of dwarven currency for goods isn't going to be allowed moving forward, but if he provides me with information on his fishing, then I'll pay him enough to handle his costs, which are minimal, and his house which again, is minimal. He agreed, so I gathered more info from him to catch up on all the fishing he's done so far on the island.

He let me look at his fishing rods, and it seems like it should be possible for us to replicate the rods he's using to some degree, including the reel. I'd be a little concerned with our ability to produce fishing line, but his line doesn't look like it's particularly special, and he said that his is made from a plant that they grow on the human continent for its plant fibers. In theory, we could make our own line from the fine fibers of some of the vines that grow here, if we use them correctly. His line is pretty thick already, and since he apparently enjoys catching large sea fish, we might be in the clear to replicate that ourselves.

He also said that of all the places he's fished, there are two spots that he particularly enjoys fishing on the island. One is near the ocean on the craggy part of the island, just beyond the next valley. There, there is a rock jetty and a cliff that isn't too tall that he can fish off of during high tide. Then, on the opposite side of the island from there, he's found a decent area that also juts out into the ocean near low tide that he can fish for a few hours before the tide comes back in. He's hauled in a few fairly large fish according to him, but a fisherman's word is only as good as the fish he can actually show you, so I'm not holding my breath on the actual sizes he gave me.

Even if the sizes are a bit smaller though, we're still talking sea life that is as big as I am. Which I do have some reason to believe exists. I did have to help kill that large eel-like creature before after all. So if it's anything like that, then I could see there being some large fish. In theory, that also means that we could artificially make our own fishing jetty going off from our artificial tide pool where fishing could occur. It's a little extra food, which might not actually mean much, but it's actually a very good source of levels, as it sounds like a lot of these large fishes have lived for a considerable amount of time and also carnivorously eat other fish, furthering their own levels.

That's definitely something that I'll have to get the construction crew to consider making. It's definitely a different kind of project for them, however, as a large amount of it is underwater. They will need to consider the fact that it has to also function as habitat for the fish, so making it entirely out of fused stone won't be great. However, given the fact we have extreme storms occasionally, it might be worth fusing central pillars of stone, and then backfilling boulders around that. Which would make it a bit of a hybrid between a pier and a jetty. Ultimately, I think having a highest point elevated walkway, and a few tiers of walkway down from that for the various tidal heights might be beneficial to the usability of the space as a fishing pier.

Of course, it would be significantly easier to just lob boulders out to sea and let them settle. Perhaps fusing some of the boulders slightly once they've landed to make them more stable would be enough, and then you could overlay the flat walkways on top, and hope that a severe storm doesn't wipe the whole thing out. That's probably the most viable option. Especially since we had that one goblin evolve into the gorilla demon about a year ago. He'd probably be singlehandedly capable of moving sizeable boulders out to throw into the sea.

[Vol.4] Ch.39 Fishing Jetty

I decided to bring up the idea of the fishing jetty to Zeb as a large construction project for them to consider making. It should also be able to coincide with the need for access to the float vine that grows out from the island. This project on its own will require significant amounts of stone, as the underwater slope moving out to sea is by no means shallow. That's probably good though, as the population has started growing, we've actually been having issues keeping all of them employed. This project should keep a significant number of laborers busy hauling stone from excavation locations for some time.

As for where the excavated stone can come from, we've got four good locations for getting a significant amount of stone. First, I'd like to have a second tunnel dug to the neighboring valley down by the artificial tide pool bay. For now the tunnel wouldn't have much benefit, but in the future it would give us further access to the next valley over for development, which we'll probably need within a few years time anyway, so getting it down now saves us the effort later when we would need it done.

The second location is another tunnel, this time closer to our city, going to the second valley, ultimately exiting not far from the destroyed village of the exiled goblins. With three large tunnels connecting the two valleys, that should really allow both valleys to function together well without having too long of travel times between locations.

The third location is the tried and true reservoir excavation project. Over the years, the reservoir has been expanded further and further, but that's been a boon overall. If we continue to expand it, it should continue to help smooth out our water flow rates between seasons, and further help manage our water demands.

The fourth location, should it be necessary, is to continue digging the escape tunnels from under the city. The reason this is the last on the list is just due to the difficulty and speed at which stone would be excavated compared to the other locations. Due to the size and length of the tunnel, the hauling of stone from the tunnel would be significantly slower than the other options, but it might be potentially worth it to resume this excavation in case an emergency situation arises again.

After two days of deliberation, Zeb agreed to assign one of the construction teams to start work on the fishing jetty. As part of the project though, I have to go and clear the float vine that is growing where the jetty is going to be constructed, so that it isn't wasted. Considering I want the jetty to stretch out about 1500 feet into the ocean, there will be a lot of float vines to cut down. I will need a lot of them for glass making though, so it's more of an inconvenience than a problem.

The second construction team will also work on the project, albeit indirectly. Since we plan on getting two new tunnels dug to the next valley, they'll work on building roads to the two tunnel locations, to aid in stone hauling. One goblin from each team will also be dedicated to digging the escape tunnel as well, which should start providing stone for the road constructions. Since more trees will be cut in the road digging process, the goblins that are manually breaking stone in the reservoir will be brought along to help elevate them to stone shaping goblins. Zeb thinks that once there are about four more stone shaping goblins, he'll form a third construction team and reorganize the existing teams.

According to him, a few of the goblins are probably close to becoming lesser earth demons. That itself at least provides them with larger mana pools, which should improve their productivity. It also seems to grant access to improved stone shaping, which would drastically improve their construction speed. As it stands, a goblin with stone shaping is about half as productive as a lesser earth demon, which itself is a quarter as productive as a lesser earth demon with improved stone shaping.

I worked at harvesting the float vines for twelve days, until I had to stop because the nearest float vines were too far underwater for me to properly harvest. That, and I had a bit of a frightening sighting of a very large fish while I was headed out to harvest more float vines. Most of the fish I've seen here have had horizontal tails, and while this one was also horizontal, unlike the others it was bifurcated. That, and it was almost twice as long as I am tall, with an exceptionally large mouth.

On one hand, I'm glad, because it means that the fishing jetty will almost certainly actually give us a new source of levels. On the other hand, it obviously makes this whole ocean-related endeavor way more dangerous than I had previously expected. I've taken the opportunity to warn Zeb about the potential threats during construction, just in case.

I've also started the process of turning the float vines into soda ash. I've actually gained a couple of levels from harvesting the float vines as well, which has been a nice bonus. It isn't quite as much as I'd get from an equal amount of trees, but it's more than many plants give, so they're probably many years old based on my working hypothesis for how levels work.

<MYTHIC LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 43
HP: 2319/2319
MP: 1308/1308
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands

The construction crew started building out the jetty right after I stopped harvesting the float vines, and after ten days, they'd made quite the progress. The location that I decided to have it built is just next to where our stream now exits to the ocean. Previously, we'd redirected it, so that it would no longer drain into the artificial tide pools for sanitation reasons. Following that logic, I figured it would be good to also put the jetty between where the tide pools and new stream exit meet the ocean. We'll just want to put an indicator that fishing shouldn't be done directly on that side of the jetty for a few hundred feet for the same sanitation reasons.

They're piling the chunks of rock into the water, and while they do, the stone shaping goblins are taking turns diving under the water and fusing the various piled stones together in decently sized contact areas. They've also started building the highest walkway, so that they can more easily haul more stones further out to continue building with. They've already gotten about sixty feet built, although their pace is slowing down as the depth of the water continues to increase further from the shore.

They've also built a stairwell down to the ocean floor on both the left and right hand side at their current length, which should make harvesting more float vine easier. So I'll probably resume harvesting it soon, as the jetty is quickly catching up to where I cut it down to before.

While they were building the jetty, I was working with the leatherworking goblin on the next steps in the leather production as well as starting to tinker with a design for fishing rods. The jetty should be functional even before it reaches it's maximum distance. I have even more evidence of that thanks to having seen that massive fish within the float vine fields somewhat close to shore.

In the remaining twenty-three days until what would be next set of academy classes I carefully cut more of the float vine fields down that were in the way of the jetty, worked on the leather process, helped with some of the felt designs, and made it further in designing a fishing rod. Boggs hasn't returned since I've seen him last, so I haven't been able to introduce him to our now over one hundred foot long jetty. It'll probably take some time for the fishing to actually be good from the jetty though, since it's new, and the fish are probably quite wary of the new construction.

The construction crew also finished the tunnel down by the bay, which anyone can now walk through to reach the other valley, along with where it meets the ocean. This tunnel also had some water leaking from it, although it's a lot less water than the first tunnel had. I suspect that distance to ocean probably plays some role in how much water the rock holds, although that is nothing more than a guess.

The new roads to both this tunnel, and the location for the next tunnel are complete, so I don't expect there to be much of a slow down for jetty construction, although I do suspect that there will be many more goblins doing hauling jobs now that the distance that the rock has to travel is much higher.

We won't actually be having the academy classes this cycle, as there haven't been new goblins summoned. Both construction crews were busy with other projects, so no housing was made. The construction department added two new members, which wasn't quite enough to warrant the creation of the third crew yet as well. I'm thinking about recruiting some of the goblins that we want to get stone shaping to help cut down some of the float vine to get them to the point of prestige. That should also give me valuable insight into just how effective regular goblins would be at harvesting the float vines, since long term, others would be in charge of it rather than me.

[Vol.4] Ch.40 Float Vine Harvesting

The first construction crew worked on extending the jetty for another twenty-eight days before they nearly caught up to where the float vines were cut to. Their progress continued to slow due to both the distance that the rocks needed to be hauled now, and the added depth of the water requiring them to use more rocks for every foot of distance the jetty went out to the ocean.

The second construction crew also finished getting the road and second tunnel built, and has resumed building residences in the city, which means I'll be running classes at the academy again soon enough. In the time while the construction crew was working, I took nine days to go manage things at the paper mill. The desiccant was getting pretty close to needing to be recharged in their storage area so I did that. Then I decided on making a standardized box size for each of the different paper sizes we have.

I figured that it'll actually be easier for all parties if the stone boxes are mostly completed already and the mill workers can just load them up and put a lid on them. Any boxes still in the storage area would then need to be sealed with stone shaping and could then be moved to a different warehouse, since they'll no longer need to be stored with desiccant as the boxes would be air tight after being sealed.

I made about a dozen boxes that hold about 100 sheets of paper each for the various paper sizes and filled most of them. I then sealed and hauled them off to the village where they can later be opened to get access to the paper stored inside. For good measure, I made another forty of each box size while leaving the lids off in the mill's storage area. I then informed the workers as to how many sheets to store in each of the boxes before they put lid on them.

Once that was done, I was starting to clear some more forest areas to make room for more bargas herds when Boggs returned again from fishing somewhere on the island. His condition was quite bad, however. He had makeshift bandages wrapped around various parts of his body, which were soaked with dried blood.

When I asked him what happened, he said that he had a run in with a dangerous catch that had shot bone spines into him as he attempted to pull it up from the ocean. Once the spines had gotten embedded into him, he noticed that the areas started to go numb, so he released his rod with the caught creature and immediately started removing the spines from his afflicted arm and leg.

He said that once he finally got them all out, the numbness had spread through a decent portion of his body, and he was worried that would be the end for him. He laid there for hours, unable to feel almost anything and unable to move his limbs, worried his heart would stop at any minute, but it beat faintly the whole time, until he slowly started to regain feeling.

He didn't seem that upset by the injuries themselves though, instead he seemed more frustrated by the loss of his fishing rod that the beast had taken with it back into the ocean. So I decided to take the time working with him to try to get our fishing rod designs finalized so that he could take one with him. He'll be hanging around the village for a few weeks while he heals back up. The jetty needed me for harvesting more float vines, so I left Boggs with the test rods and let him know who all would be helpful to him for getting things like fishing line made.

Karsh had been functioning as the translator between Boggs and I while we were in the village, so I paid him some coins for his help and then some more as advanced payment for helping Boggs work with other goblins in the village for his fishing equipment. Karsh is also to make sure that Boggs tells me all the changes to our fishing rod designs before he leaves the village, so I can make sure that we can make more of them.

Having Boggs fishing like this has turned into quite the informational boon. Knowing what things can be caught around our island, and knowing the dangerous ones means that we can more safely allow fishing off the jetty for large sea life, so I'll probably consider his debts paid once he gets the fishing rods figured out.

I got a few of the goblins to help me with harvesting float vines. It didn't go that well. They can't hold their breath nearly as long as I can. They could at least harvest the very closest float vines, but even after I had them spend seven days practicing holding their breath and maneuvering underwater they didn't improve much. I also tried having one of the hobgoblin fishergoblins that had water resistance try as well as one that didn't have water resistance.

The water resistant one did seem to be able spend a noticeably longer time underwater, but he was both higher level and higher prestige than the other hobgoblin, so I can't rule out that it could have been related to that instead. I can't justify pulling more hobgoblins away from their jobs for now, especially as we've already harvested quite a bit of float vines, so the remaining float vines are getting a bit far for even the hobgoblins. I myself could still go about twice the distance that the two groups had already harvested without running into oxygen issues. I hadn't checked previously how long I could hold my own breath, but I knew it was quite long. After a few tests, I determined it was about fifteen minutes.

If I get a chance, I'd like to have Zeb give it a try. If and when a new lesser earth demon comes about, I'd like to have them also try just for informational purposes. I suspect that different species of demon probably have different lung capacities, but I can't rule out that levels and prestige also play a role in the matter. The next time that the jetty catches up to where I've cut float vine to, I'll have to be more picky about which goblins I have help me so that I can start to determine these differences.

I could also just have them hold their breath underwater to test it outright, but with all this other work going on around me it doesn't seem like a good time to just be pulling individuals from their work to see how long they can hold their breath. Once I actually do need to have others harvest float vine in my place, I'll go through the experiments because I'll have a good justification for it then.

After the seven days of work that I had the goblins do, then the two days of working with some hobgoblins, I myself worked for another nine days to get the rest of the float vines harvested that were in the way of the jetty. At least as much of it as I could, as there is still some ahead of it. However, it looks like we're reaching the edge of where the float vine grows. The depth of the water looks like it might be too deep for more to grow a little further out, as I think I can see open ocean about thirty feet from where I've harvested float vine so far. The good news is that the deeper the water has gotten, the taller the individual float vines have been, which means much more biomass for converting to soda ash.

Even after all that time Boggs still wasn't fully recovered, although he was almost there. Some of the spines ended up digging in pretty deep into his leg in some places and that was what was taking so long to heal. He made a comment about how on the mainland he could have paid for a healer to help him recover much faster, but we don't have one here.

I noticed before when we first ran into the party that was traveling with Shasta that individuals could heal others with magic. We haven't unlocked any healing powers that would be useable on others here on the island, but it seems like at least some people on the mainland have that ability. He'll just have to heal the old fashioned way I suppose. I did inform Boggs that once he gets the new fishing rods figured out, he can probably fish on the partially completed jetty while he's healing, since there should be individuals around to help him if there is an emergency.

He seemed to appreciate the gesture at least. He's been working with the rope-making goblin to try to come up with a good substitute for his fishing line, and he thinks that they're at least getting close to a viable solution. I certainly hope that they are, as they've spent a lot of time working on the problem. Their issue seems to be that the plants available here on the island aren't quite the right durability, and that the lines tend to go bad sooner than Boggs would like.

I suggested that they could use copper wire, and Boggs gave me a weird look, but said he'd give it a try. After a two days of making wire, Boggs gave it a try, and I see why he gave me the look. The wire is too stiff to properly use. I'd heard of people using wire fishing line on earth, but in retrospect it was probably used from a boat where you could just lower the wire into the water rather than needing to cast it out.

After that failure, I told Boggs he's welcome to have plenty of replacement line made of lower quality if he needs it, and that we'd look into getting whatever plant imported to grow for fiber materials in a few months when the merchant arrives.

[Vol.4] Ch.41 Mangalloy

For the remaining eleven days until I start classes tomorrow, I decided to check in on all the various dwarves who have moved to the village and see how things are going with them, save for Boggs who I've been working with recently. It had been a while since I'd interacted with a few of them, so I figured it would be good to check how they've been settling in.

Karsh's family is doing well, and it seems like they've been getting along well with Konkur's family. Since they both have young kids, it seems that Karsh's wife, Rishi, and Konkur's wife, Canta, have been trading off childcare duties with each other alongside handling something resembling education for their children, which I'm glad to hear. I would have been worried if their childrens' future was in some way being sacrificed for their parents' work. If Arat and Maka decide to have children, I hope that those kids can also find a good education within our country.

Arat has obviously been busy helping with the bargas herds, and while we haven't quite had our next harvest yet to make flour for baked goods, Maka's bakery is completed. So despite the fact we don't have any leavening agent, I hope that she has a few treats to make. They seem pretty content with their life, and although they haven't quite paid back their new house, I suspect they will get it paid back before winter once Maka is working.

I had worked with Konkur earlier in the year, and left him to his own devices for a number of months. He had a bit of interesting information that he's figured out while he's been working on the various samples I gave him. First, he did a few different things with the steel ore that we had gathered to try to determine its composition. Between magnetic separation using some lodestone he brought along with him and some flux based tests, he says he's at least somewhat sure of the composition of our metal.

Unfortunately for me, the words he uses are useless by themselves, but they at least give me a pretty decent idea. He said that our steel is about 87% iron, based on the magnetic recovery of particles. The word for the second metal he recovered has no meaning to me in dwarvish or demon, but he refers to it as bonifus gok. For context, gok in dwarvish means iron. Konkur said that bonifus gok is frequently found near iron deposits, or in some amount mixed in with them, but usually in either much higher percentages or much lower percentages than what was within this ore.

The dwarves themselves apply a small amount of bonifus gok to iron when they're steel smelting because it seems to improve durability and corrosion resistance to their metals. Which leads me to my final conclusion based on the color of oxidation from before along with various properties of our steel alloy, bonifus gok is most likely manganese. We've managed to stumble upon an incredibly unlikely ore deposit which just so happens to have iron and manganese at a ratio within the range of mangalloy, or Hadfield steel.

As far as I'm aware, no deposits on earth were ever found with the two metals occurring at a close enough ratio to produce that particular alloy. It's incredibly unlikely, to the degree that I'd suspect any other ore deposits we find even on this island won't contain it in quite the right quantities to reproduce naturally. Thinking about it long term, I hope that other deposits that we find at least have close to the amount of manganese so that we're able to still produce the mangalloy in the amounts we'd like to. To do so, we'll also need to get our hands on some magnets. The issue with that is that magnetic properties outside of lodestone are actually a relatively advanced technology, and without electricity, we're pretty stuck on that front.

I'm also not confident that the manganese ore dust will actually have that different of a density compared to the iron dust, which means I can't just use the same process I want to for glass making. Ultimately, this is quite the problem. If I can at least come up with a way to generate a decent amount of electrical current, I could in theory make some permanent magnets, and that would be the end of the issue. I don't, however, have that, and it'd be a long process to make such a thing, especially given the fact we don't currently have magnets.

The issue being that the process of making somewhat powerful permanent magnets requires already strong magnetic currents and precise control of the cooling of the material that will become a magnet. While I don't doubt my ability to actually produce one given enough time, that same issue of time is actually the problem. Just trading for the right metals to make something like an AlNiCo magnet would be difficult. Aluminum is especially difficult, and I'd likely need to trade for the ore and make the whole aluminum refining process myself. This is ignoring the possibility of producing stronger 'rare earth' magnets, which would be even more impossible given the world's current technology.

Electricity generation would be quite the difficult process to start as well, although I do at least see a path towards making a basic amount of useful electricity. Something as complicated as making an entire electrical grid is far beyond my own abilities however, let alone our current technology. Well, that's something I'll just have to think on for some time, and hope that our existing ore supply sustains us long enough to solve the problem.

While I was thinking through this process, Konkur had been describing some of the intricacies of our island's minerals, which was lost on me. I did get at least some of the basics though. I was already aware that we were a volcanic island, but it seems like we're a bit unique compared to the volcanoes he's familiar with, but we do match the island that Kao Ostark controls within our island chain. The rock composition is quite unique, and doesn't seem to match with his current understanding of what volcanoes produce, but I think I understand why.

It's very likely that our island chain is formed by a mantle hotspot. Considering our distance from the mainland and the fact that the island closest to the mainland is much flatter than our own island leads me to believe that tectonics weren't the cause for our vulcanism. That means the reason our rocks would seem so out of place is that they're likely basaltic, or some other similar dense oceanic rock. Not all the rocks on the island are basalt obviously, and in fact, it seems like only a slim majority of them are based on Konkur's estimates.

That also explains why I need to refine rocks to produce lightstone and glass. If lightstone is lighter in weight and tougher than the darkstone component, it's likely silicon dioxide. Further evidence of this is that it can be used to make glass. Darkstone then, by further deduction is probably the remaining other metal oxides in extremely fine grains. I'd be hard pressed to make lightstone from just any rock on the island though. Much of the rock is so uniform in color that I couldn't just produce lightstone from it with magic. Silicon dioxide occurs in higher concentrations in continental rock rather than oceanic rock, providing me further evidence to reinforce the hotspot theory.

The rocks which I can't easily separate are probably the true basaltic rocks. The two rocks that I've been using, rocks from inside the cave, which seem to have a larger grain size, and the reddish rock with a higher percentage of white grains have been my lightstone source. Those rocks are clearly rarer, and likely involved some unique eruptions in the past to produce them. Unfortunately, the combination of so many metal oxides in a single material makes it hard for us to extract any of the individual metals. Under modern earth conditions, it wouldn't even be worth it to extract the metals, as better metal sources would be available elsewhere on the planet.

We, however, do not quite have that privilege. If we need metals and can't find more metal ore deposits, we'd be stuck trading other lower value goods for them, and while salt and fish are plentiful on our island, the idea of having a permanently agrarian society that trades for what little metal we can get doesn't quite sit right with me. If Taiwan can have a thriving first world economy despite it's lack of natural resources, there should be no reason that we can't also have this. How, exactly, we actually achieve this is something I'll have to think on for some time though.

[Vol.4] Ch.42 Framed!

The classes at the academy went off without a hitch given the lower number of goblins I was teaching. I did gather some very useful information about the nature of prestige and evolution that I wasn't expecting. I hadn't really been thinking about the fact that the goblins wouldn't really know what they should consider useful or non-useful information, so it ended up taking this long to gain a key insight that I honestly should have been asking them about.

The open secret was about how goblins become hobgoblins. Namely, they reach a prestige one level above mythic, and then when they max that out, they feel as though they cannot prestige again, but are instead offered the ability to evolve into a hobgoblin. I found this out after probing a hobgoblin who recently evolved for more information about their evolution, and the details leading up to it. I rewarded them handsomely for their time and information since I asked a lot of questions to get to the truth of the matter.

Everything considered, this may be the highest level attainable overall in prestige, or it could be just the highest level for goblins. For now, I'm calling it the Apex prestige. After Zeb and I did a little bit of testing before, I believe that the words and phrases used internally for describing things are basically consciously or unconsciously named, so by giving it this name to myself, I'll get some more insight if I choose to prestige again next time if my status reflects the term Apex.

I went around and double-checked with other hobgoblins after this, and they seemed to be in agreement; you reach Apex, then you get to become a hobgoblin. I find this a little odd though, since I know that some other evolutions can occur at other prestige levels as well. I'm thinking there is some other principle at work, leading to the specific situation of the goblin to hobgoblin transition. They do look somewhat similar to each other as well after all...

After I finished running the academy and collecting data, it was time for me to harvest the last of the float vines that were in the way of the fishing jetty we've been building. Getting the remaining float vines ended up taking the full remaining sixteen days of the month, taking us into the first day of winter.

I also got to try some of Maka's flatbreads that she made, which I'd say were quite the success. A while ago Rishi had tried her hand at making flatbread, but I suppose having someone with training in baking really does make a difference. Since we put a request in for the material for brewing alcohol, I'm hoping that it might also function as a leavening agent, plus I'm sure the dwarves will appreciate us having alcohol available for them. That is, if my intuition is correct.

We're also waiting on a handful of other supplies, like waterproofing agent and more bargas. I've been glad to see that the felt has slowly been finding use, so getting our herds up to acceptable levels should be quite beneficial for us. As for the waterproofing agent, its mostly for more windmills. We don't need them yet, but having more automation will require a power source, and while we could attempt to jumpstart into electricity, for most of what we need that would be overkill, and actually quite taxing on our current economy to develop. Instead, we can rapidly increment our production using plain mechanical power for a while, until our economy is large enough that it doesn't actually break the bank to try and master electricity.

After six more days, an event occurred that probably brought us the nearest to extinction on this island that we've experienced so far. Kao Ostark arrived with Shasta, three ships, and a meaningfully large army which I estimated to be about one thousand dwarves in size. I was initially quite panicked. However, he simply marched up to our gates, and demanded to speak with me, so of course I obliged him.

I barely got to ask him what was going on, when I received a demand, "Have all available dwarves brought out to him for questioning, no further information would be given until he's met with them."

This was... frightening to say the least. So I hurriedly had every dwarf, to the child, brought out to Kao. He then hurriedly brought them off to the rear of the army, and for literal hours, that was the situation. Kao separated the dwarves one at a time and discussed something in dwarvish while protected by an army of over one thousand, keeping me, and any of the dwarves he wasn't currently talking to from hearing anything directly.

After he'd talked with all the dwarves, including the children, he returned with them and Shasta to the city gates. What was said next confused me.

"You're being framed."

"Being framed for what?" I asked. It was a simple reply, but I was confused. Framed for doing bad things to the dwarves on the island? Surely it would be an overreaction to bring this many troops if that was the case. I suppose if Kao thought it violated our military agreement in some way then it might make sense...

"We can't talk about it in the open here, I'll send my troops back, save for the most trusted commanders among them. Then we can discuss matters."

So, I waited as the dwarven army was commanded and marched back on the road the way they came from until only Kao, Shasta, and four other dwarves remained.

I offered for us to use the meeting room in city hall, and after a short debate, Kao agreed. I hurriedly fetched Zeb and Zaka, since whatever was happening seemed important.

After we had gathered in the meeting room, Kao spoke, and Shasta translated, "Initially I thought meeting here would potentially be a problem in case information leaked, but given the situation, if information leaks here it probably won't matter, as you'll probably inform everyone on the island of the situation anyway. If you want us to move location after I tell you what is happening, simply say so, and we'll find somewhere more private."

I simply nodded along, and then gave my assent to continue.

"As of about two months ago, a strange pirate ship has been raiding trade routes within the inland sea between the main continents. While it hasn't been particularly successful, it's managed to avoid capture and has sunk a few vessels. Do you have any ideas as to why this would be relevant to the current situation?"

As Shasta translates, I notice Kao is intently studying our faces. So I try to drive my brain into overdrive, why would it be relevant? It doesn't seem like either Zeb or Zaka have any clue either...

Not wanting the silence to go on for to long, I respond with my best guess, "Is it because it disrupts the trade routes and supply lines for both this island and your island?"

Kao seems to relax, but also seems a little disappointed.

"No, if that were the case, I wouldn't have needed to bring the army over. That ship seems to be using steam cannons, much like your own. Worse for your case, it seems that the ship is at least partially, if not completely, manned by demons. I'm sure this is enough to give you an idea of what I meant when I said you're being framed. Additionally, merchants have vouched that you've been buying waterproofing materials."

Everything started to click in place. If we were suddenly out committing piracy, of course someone who we're in a tentative military alliance would become hostile, especially if we were potentially attacking them directly. Why steam cannons though, or rather, how would they know to use them?

I sit for a few moments and mull over the information... Then I remember, it was a year ago now, when Rathland's Baron was visiting, there was a shady figure looking over our steam cannons at night. Although I suppose it could have been the elves as well, but I doubt that.

"A year ago now, when Rathland's representative was here, I noticed a shady figure observing our steam cannons at night, but they escaped before I could see who it was."

"Then things are becoming quite clear. Rathland has also been trying to invoke the ancient defensive pacts to rally other nations to gather their armies to march upon this island and wipe you out, using the piracy as a pretext. Word takes time to spread, and armies take even longer. I'm not sure how many nations will join their cause given the unusual circumstances, but you'll probably have until next winter before they attack. Given our military agreement, we'll help in any way we can."

Kao finishes the statement with a grimace. It's obvious that he's also concerned about the potential asymmetry in firepower. Every time we've fought in the past, it's been on short notice. This time, we have an entire year to prepare for the potentiality of war with known assailants. This time, we'll be ready.

[Vol.4] Ch.43 Battle Plans

"Then we should begin a strategy meeting now, as long as that is ok with you." I say.

The dwarves briefly discuss the idea and then give consent to begin.

"I'm thinking that despite the numerical disadvantage, we do have other advantages that we should play into. First, we have the advantage of secrecy and information. The other side's plan is at least partially understood, whereas our plans should be easy to keep hidden. Second, we're a mountainous volcanic island. That means that they first have to get here across the water, which can be taken advantage of, then also siege the beaches, and finally, actually find us in the forests and cliffs. The third advantage is pretty simple, but we're playing on our home turf so we inherently should have some informational advantage while fighting."

After Shasta translates for me, Kao sits in deep thought for a few minutes, as does everyone else. Eventually, Kao is the first to speak up.

"I can't deny that this island would be easier to defend than mine, but I'm not willing to simply throw my island away, and potentially give the other side a staging grounds for attacking here."

"What of the other two islands between here and your island? Could they not also be staging grounds?"

"They could, but it'd take extra work, and I don't know that for an army of that size, it would be feasible to spend that long on those islands. The only reason mine works is because it is already set up to send and receive ships."

We all sit for another minute thinking about this problem, before an idea comes to me.

"What if we removed that as an option for them?"

"How would you intend to do that? I'm not going to sabotage all my own infrastructure, they could just repair it."

"We don't need to sabotage it, we simply need to make it unfavorable for them to want to use it. What if you pretend to stay neutral in the conflict. Say that 'Given the circumstances, you won't aid us, but given your military agreements, it would be dishonorable to assist them.' It would be even more effective if they believe your armies could attack them back home, especially if their armies are already out here."

"It could work, but it'd require that I send my troops home, in order to play up to the fact that we're not participating in the conflict on either side."

"Is it possible to relay false information related to where your troops are?"

"Perhaps. Though I'd need to think for a moment..."

Kao pauses in thought for a few minutes before giving an idea.

"It'd be risky, but if we only send back half of the troops, I think I could pull the wool over the eyes of any spies. What I'd do is send all the boats back, but only half the troops, and have the full boats unload at my normal unloading location at one of our coastal cities. The almost empty boats would go to some of my more remote garrisons and appear to be unloading and reloading cargo, but would actually be smuggling most of the garrison onto the ship. Then those ships would go and unload the garrison in the normal location. Then I'd have to shuffle my troops around, which I'd want to do anyway to appear to be positioning for a counter attack should Rathland decide to attack me."

"Pardon if this is rude, but what if you have spies within those garrisons, among your own men, or the men here? A conspiracy is quite hard to keep secret, after all."

"Well, most of the men won't know. I'll simply tell the men that we'll be staging our return to different locations, then half the ships, when out of eyesight of the others, will return here, rather than the mainland. They'll unload the men here, then return to do the cargo run. The individuals at the garrisons will simply be told they're moving assignment in preparation for the upcoming potentiality of conflict, but that we're concerned about their relocation information being leaked, so they need to be tight lipped. Anyone who leaks information will be lead to think its because we're attempting to stay neutral. The only people in on the conspiracy are in this room now. Though, to keep up the appearance, I'll have to be one of the individuals to leave."

"Then who would lead your troops?"

Kao nods to two of the other dwarves he brought with him.

"Atatuk Ostark will return with Karta Debroik, and they'll lead my troops in my absence."

I raised an eyebrow, "A relative?"

"No relation, recall how we gain our names..." Shasta replies without translating.

Oh. Right. Their last names are for the location they were born. Wait. I hadn't thought of this before but then would any dwarves born here bear the last name Kembora? I shake my head to drive the thought away, now isn't the time to be thinking of matters like this.

"Alright, so a portion of your men will return. Would it be possible to smuggle extra supplies to the island, or purchase them without too much hassle? I'm mainly concerned with explosives, gunpowder preferably. Part of the strategy I'm starting to think about involves the concept of 'defense in depth'. Fallback position upon fallback position to retreat to, each time attempting to take minimal losses while frustrating our opponent and bleeding them dry of resources. They can't afford to spend weeks or months fighting here, they won't have the food to supply a large army easily here."

"It might be a double edged sword to directly acquire additional gunpowder. If countries that are thinking about staying neutral see you buying a bunch of gunpowder, they might reconsider their neutrality."

"What if we only bought the sulfur?"

"It'd be a bit less risky, but there would still be some risk."

"Before we do that then, I'd like to consult with Konkur. Given these islands are volcanic, I'd expect that there are sulfur deposits somewhere, but I haven't found any. If we can find that, then we can make our own gunpowder. If Konkur has insight, then I'd rather not risk it."

"A wise decision. Given the already large disparity in combat force sizes, any extra enemies could prove fatal."

"Moving to the next topic, I am looking to get some historical information from you, if you know of it. Do you know why you can travel to these islands in winter only?"

"Why, I cannot say, but when the eagles first came here in winter a few years ago, and we sent an expeditionary force out, it was expected to be eaten by leviathans. Surprisingly, they returned back to inform us that your group was here, and you'd taken hostages. We gathered troops to set out, and by then it was late spring. One of the four ships was eaten by a leviathan, so we turned back. We then waited, biding our time to try again if any eagles set out. Sure enough, next year another did, and so we followed. We've since determined that in winter, for whatever reason, the leviathans don't seem to be located between here and the mainland."

"Is there any historical reason or accounts of people trying to sail out this way during winter and being fine?"

"If they did, it would have been a long, long time ago. Everyone knows, or I suppose knew, that the waters outside the continents were deadly. There are tales of attempted expeditions setting out in the early days of the demon invasions, but they never returned."

"This is just a hunch, but there are a few too many coincidences for me to believe that it isn't connected, I think that the large crystals like ParTor are the reason for the leviathans not being present in winter, although the exact mechanism and why it is only in winter, I'm unsure of. In the year before the first eagles travelled was when I completed the first large crystal and installed it within our village. If that is the reason the leviathans don't seem to show up, then I'm suggesting that we actually move both the new crystal on this island and the one we presented you with deep underground, avoiding as much contact with the ground as possible during the eighth month of next year, and leaving them there through winter. I'm hoping that we can maybe use the leviathans to our advantage and cull part of the ships before they even arrive."

"An interesting proposal. How certain are you that this will work in some way?"

"Better than 50%, but not by much. It's just something that we can try that might increase our odds of winning, so I want to try it. Then, come spring time, if we succeed on this island, we'll install the crystal again as can you on the mainland. If we fail, well, you'll be free to do as you please with it, I suppose."

"Well, that sounds like it would probably be worth the risk then. Are there any other conceptual things we should discuss, or should we start the actual detailed planning process now?"

"I think we can start with the detailed planning now."

[Vol.4] Ch.44 Final Plans

The detailed meeting took about half of the day to complete. Many of the finer details were left to be planned later, but, to prevent any extra suspicion among his soldiers, Kao called the meeting to an end so that his group could return in a timely manner. Kao said that we should expect his troops to return in a little over three weeks, and that he'll also give the go ahead for the Elven emissary, who has been waiting on their island, to travel to our island. He had apparently held up any traffic until he could verify the situation, which seemed reasonable to me.

After the dwarves left, Zeb, Zaka, and I started discussions of what we should do right now. We decided that, until the merchant leaves, we shouldn't inform the populace of the situation, so as to reduce any chances of information leaking. Once both the merchant and Elven emissary leave, then we'll begin the process of converting to a war economy. Given the level of threat we're going up against, I agreed with Zaka that relying on our economy in it's current state simply won't work.

When the time comes, we'll be suspending money, rationing food, and everyone will be working non-stop to make sure we have as many defenses prepared as possible. Before then though, we'll still be doing things behind the scenes to start preparations for the war economy. First, I'm going to set aside a large area to become a niter bed. There, I'll have goblins combine potash, manure, urine, and soil in order to get the saltpeter for gunpowder. That process takes months to complete however, so we need to start it now. I can't say for certain it'll work, but given that I've seen cannons on ships, I'm assuming they aren't just mining saltpeter from the earth.

Thankfully, everyone in the village is used to me making weird requests, so this shouldn't stand out too much. After that, I'll be taking a period of time to go make a second vault in the mountain where goblins can store their existing coins as well as where we'll hide our giant crystal when we remove it from the bathhouse.

The fishing jetty project is going to be put on hold and work is going to be diverted to building a last batch of apartment-style buildings before we stop summoning completely. Although we could expand our forces, low level goblins are basically useless outside of their ability to haul things and they'll require food. Given we'll already be having about 500 additional dwarf soldiers stationed on the island, we're going to already be having some food issues.

We've decided that Zaka should spend some time with Boggs, as odd as that sounds. His goal should be to learn fishing using what primitive forms we have access to. Ultimately, that will be a source of both food and extra levels we wouldn't have otherwise. Having Zaka reach a high level before next year could be incredibly valuable for combat, as he's likely the physically strongest individual we have, in addition to his access to fire magic.

We'll also be putting a few other tasks up on the task board for the time being for things which we'll need. We want a few more forests cleared around the village where we can grow more of the dwarven crops, to not only expand our food supply, but also to increase the overall levels of individuals in the city, and expand our vision range from the walls. We'll also be putting in requests related to building more salt evaporation ponds. Salt is very helpful as a preservative, and once the time comes and the invasion begins, we'll need preserved food to sustain ourselves.

I'll also be making the request to Konkur about helping us find sulfur on the island. If not on this island, then we'll potentially need to send an expedition to the next two islands in an attempt to find it.

After 14 days, both the merchant and the Elven emissary arrived. I was pleased to see that it was Elora who arrived, and she seems to have brought the various fungi that we requested. We've also received everything we requested from the merchant, including the fermentation agent. Leave it to the dwarves to be ahead of the technological curve on that one.

Historically, it wasn't until the enlightenment that the actual cause of fermentation was figured out, and many batches of alcohol went bad because it was basically left up to chance what would break down fruits and grains. We'll also have to see if it's useful as a leavening agent or not at some point.

I kept our interactions short with both parties, requesting a repeat delivery with the merchant of more waterproofing supplies, bargas, and a decent chunk of dwarven coin. I felt bad about requesting things to be delivered next year, but if he's smart he won't actually try to travel here next year when it seems like we're going to be invaded by a massive force. To pay for our trade, I gave him a large number of crates of paper.

As for Elora, she gave me the warnings that I'd already heard from Kao related to the potential for invasion. She said she couldn't promise that no Elven matriarch would join, but she thought it unlikely that any would, though she also said we should expect at least one dark elf tribe to join. This was the first I'd heard of dark elves, but apparently, they're a more tribal race of elves which live in the darkness of the great forest floor. They're wandering hunters, and if any join in, we should be aware that they're highly skilled trackers and are very competent at forest and jungle fighting, though they'll be few in number.

Elora also shared my belief that Rathland was likely trying to frame us. She said, given our size, she doubts any of the other major human kingdoms will join in, as we likely won't be perceived as much of a threat. She then wished us the best of luck, and said that if we somehow manage to survive the upcoming war, she'll be in touch. I sent her off with another handful of crates of paper as a gift.

Two days later, we made the general announcement about the upcoming battle, and the wartime economy shift. There was a very grave mood that fell over the village after the news was given. Considering we're dealing with an existential threat, everyone at least understood the reason why normal job handling was being suspended, and why food would be rationed.

We were brutally honest about the odds involved, which made a lot of individuals worried. I also mentioned that I believed it would be possible for us to win, if we work hard. In order to do so though, everyone needs to work together. I informed them that we'll have dwarven soldiers joining us on this endeavor, which seemed to help improve their moods somewhat.

Moving forward though, individuals will be working more than they have in the past few years. Fishergoblins won't just be fishing for a few hours, then selling their goods. Some will be processing fish, and others will be moved to other jobs for part of the day. The paper mill will be shut down as well. Basically everyone is going to be working more than before.

We have plenty of work to do to get the island ready, so we'll need every hour we can get from everyone. Though that doesn't mean that all the work will be manual labor. Some will be gaining levels through fishing if we can get enough rods made. We'll have Boggs and other skilled individuals fish all day, and other goblins will be around to help kill large fish, so that everyone nearby gets the experience.

We'll focus our work in and around the city first, since after the eighth month of next year, we will no longer have the bathhouse to provide us with unlimited mana. This also means the battle of the city next time is going to be much harder than the last time, although we do have more walls and weapons this time.

We'll also be having some of the dwarves run training drills to get individuals trained up on various techniques. I'm also hoping that this training will potentially unlock combat related abilities that some of the lower prestige goblins could gain before next year. If things go well, I'm hoping that the youngest goblins will prestige a few times before the actual fighting begins, and that we can get more of the high level goblins to evolve into hobgoblins.

[Vol.4] Ch.45 The Battle for Kembora Part 1

The air raid sirens were the signal everyone had been anticipating for the past few weeks. We had an entire year to practice and prepare our defenses, and the eerie sound of the sirens coming from the mountain now are indicating that soon the battle will be upon us. At three evenly spaced locations on the mountain, a few hundred feet below the cloud layer, we had built watch posts, each equipped with a simple telescope. Every fifteen minutes for the past few weeks, someone has scanned the horizon for signs of ships. Now, on the fourth day of the twelfth month, our enemy approaches.

It's far too early for those of us closer to the shoreline to spot any ships. It will probably be at least half of a day before we're able to spot the ships from down here. This was expected though. The sirens are there to ensure everyone is ready when the time comes to actually repel the invasion. I'm currently on the beach where the merchants and dwarves would normally land for trade, as it is the closest location to the mainland, and also the easiest location for a landing on our island.

We managed to find sulfur a short distance underground at a location on this island, but we were still limited by how much saltpeter we could make, leaving us with a slightly limited supply of gunpowder. To compensate, we've got one-time-use steam cannons stationed at various locations, specially designed to be usable even without magic. Along this beach alone, there are twenty steam cannons.

The air raid siren signals a start point for various countdowns until it is time to light fires under those steam cannon boilers. The main use for the steam cannons is area control. Some are loaded with a significant amount of grapeshot, a few others are loaded with particularly large shells made of darkstone to use for sinking either landing vessels or targeting a particularly hardy individual. These are all stationed behind pitfalls and barricades along the beach to make attempts to invade further on the beach difficult at best.

To protect our valuable gunpowder, bunkers have been dug out of the rock faces that face out over the sea. Inside those bunkers are one of our best bets for actual defense of the island, long distance artillery pieces. Five of them, to be precise. One stationed in a bunker in a cliff the left side of this beach, another in a cliff on the right, a third stationed in the cliff separating the two valleys near the city, the fourth in the craggy terrain opposite the side of the island with the road, and the fifth in the craggy terrain with the road.

The process of actually making these five pieces took almost half of a year of work from myself along with two military blacksmiths that were part of Kao's troops. The cat's out of the bag on this one, and I'm sure in the next few years rifled artillery is going to take off. Perhaps fortunately, without industrial scale tools, the ability to mass produce them is non-existent. I spent five months developing them and working on fine tuning until we actually had a working model. Each individual cannon after that took those two blacksmiths a month to make with extra assistance, nevermind the testing that had to be done to ensure they'd each work as expected.

However, in our particular situation they should prove vital. After the first artillery piece was made, I began training crews on operating, aiming, and maintaining these cannons. Each bunker is manned by an eight individual team, although you could operate it minimally with four. The artillery are breach loaded with pre-measured shells, armed and operated with a fuse. Since we don't have, and couldn't find, any lead we're using our next densest material, copper, for the shells. Each shell weighs in at twenty pounds, and each bunker has forty shells. They're accurate enough to hit a ship at about a mile away consistently and with enough accuracy to hit it close to the water line with a high enough angle that the exiting shell will be underwater.

The entire goal of those artillery pieces is not only to sink ships, but also to keep the ships from coming in closer and potentially providing a platform that either mages or their own cannons could use for taking over the beach once they decide to properly invade. In a perfect world we'd have more shells, but even having this many should provide us with a decent advantage before the battle even starts. Even if the men successfully bail from the ship, their supplies will sink with it, leaving the army heavily undersupplied.

The actual entrance to these bunkers are hundreds of feet away from the bunkers themselves, tunneled through rock and hidden away. Climbing up into any of the bunkers would also prove incredibly difficult, as they've all be strategically modified to make climbing up to them nearly impossible. The opening for the artillery would also prove small enough that squeezing through would likely leave an invader so vulnerable that the individuals inside would easily kill any would-be intruder.

On this beach, we've also fortified ourselves further. The old fort that the dwarves built prior has been rebuilt and improved. It's now a stone fort with ten ballista facing the beach, then four on each of the other walls. I'm here setting up the final parts of the fort's hidden use. To make the absolute most of this defensive position, fifty individuals have been selected or volunteered to defend this fort until the bitter end. Before I leave, I'll be sealing one of the two entrances with stone, and the other entrance will be reinforced behind me as I leave. Ideally, we completely hold them off, and those fifty live, but I'm not leaving that up to chance.

Outside the fort, we have another fifty individuals here on this beach, meaning we have a little less than 10% of our forces here. The reason for this is that we didn't want to leave other parts of the island vulnerable. The artificial tide pool area and the neighboring valley's area meeting the ocean each have sixty individuals. Outside of those locations, we identified three other locations where a landing could potentially happen with a sizable force, and we've stationed fifty individuals at each of those as well.

Behind all these locations is a secondary line of defense a few hundred yards back manned by thirty individuals each, designed to allow our own forces to retreat if overwhelmed, allowing us to escape with minimal losses to live on and fight in phase two of the defense. Phase two involves repeated fallback points and hit and run tactics designed to whittle down their armies. Smaller smooth bore cannons, taken from one of the dwarven ships, are hidden in small ambush locations throughout the island in small pillboxes hidden in their surroundings. The goal here is to fire grapeshot once or twice into groups of soldiers, then retreat. The area surrounding each pillbox is also littered with pitfall traps and small holes designed to injure and maim anyone who attempts to recklessly charge towards the cannon. A large portion of these ambush locations are concentrated overlooking the road, as that is the most likely place their army will try to move across the island.

Navigating the island with an army that size and not using the road would take more than a week, which plays to our advantage. If they decide to not follow the road, then hopefully we've sunk enough of their ships that their supplies are running dangerously low for the remainder of the army. Especially if my surprise for stage one works out. This puts our opponent on a clock, weakening them the longer they fight. Each successive defensive fallback that we use delaying their victory and sapping their strength until the scales tilt in our favor.

Stage three of our defense is defending our double walled city, and it's new citadel in the center. If the defenses fall until it's just the citadel remaining, the emergency escape tunnel will be used to evacuate as many personnel as possible to move on to stage four. There, we've got two options, neither of which is particularly good for us long term, but must be done to survive. For now, I won't say what those options are, as the idea of executing them worries me.

Finally, if we still must fight from here, stage five involves a slightly different variation on stage two, utilizing a network of underground tunnels to hit and run attack on any small parties separated from their main army. From this, we have only one option left. We'll separate our force, twenty of the remaining individuals including Zaka and myself will retreat deep underground into a hidden bunker. There we have stored enough food and water to last two months. While we wait those two months, the rest of the individuals on the island will continue attempting guerilla warfare. Our goal will be to wait out some of the remaining forces leaving, and attempt a final attack to reclaim the island. If we can reclaim it, then we can probably rebuild and re-establish ourselves over the next year to attempt a second defense with a few hundred individuals the following year, albeit weaker than we were the first time.

For now though, we're waiting on the beginning of stage one. Once the ships become visible, the fighting is going to start, and it probably won't stop for quite some time.

[Vol.4] Ch.46 The Battle for Kembora Part 2

As the morning dragged into mid-afternoon, all the boilers for cannons had been started, and I finished up all my checks in the fort on the beach. Any moment we should start spotting the ships on the horizon. In fact, I'd bet that the artillery embedded in the cliff can already see them. I started pacing along the beach double checking our defenses. I was anxious, as were most of the goblin troops. The dwarven troops were more battle experienced, and even if they were anxious, they didn't show it.

They trained the goblins and hobgoblins on our island for months, but that didn't mean that we were actually a well-practiced army. It just meant that we would fair much better than if we hadn't trained. I'd carefully discussed potential problems with our defense with the dwarven commanders, asking about any potential for long-range magic or the potential for their own long-range cannons. While there is a chance we might have to deal with some long-range magic. Other than our rifled cannons, they didn't know of any long-range cannons. As for magic, it seems like there won't be much of it, if it happens.

Long-range magic comes in two types apparently. Magic that allows you to propel existing materials long ranges, and magic that in itself is long-range. I've seen weak versions of the first type within the goblin population with the goblins who can magically throw items farther and faster than normal, which we've utilized for spear throwing. This first type uses a lot less mana than the second type, but has drawbacks in that you need to have something to throw, and you have to deal with recoil. Since you would need to deal with recoil, the ranges for anyone using that magic from a ship would make it unlikely that they could actually cause more harm with that than just firing their regular cannons.

The second type falls in a category similar to Zaka's fireball, or my improved earth spike, but much further range. Those spells consume a lot of mana, and very few individuals have that sort of magic. The dwarves estimated that at most five individuals invading would have that kind of magic, and they'd at most use it once or twice each before needing to recover their mana, which would likely take hours. Even then, the range wouldn't be as far as our rifled artillery. We should be more concerned with them using it to explode a path in our defenses on the beach through which to invade as they make landfall.

I checked my stats, trying to refocus myself on the rapidly approaching battle. I managed to squeeze some time in for fishing and tree cutting over the last year to get myself in a more battle ready condition.

<MYTHIC LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 76
HP: 3144/3144
MP: 1635/1635
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands

I'm pulled back to reality as I hear some shouting. I look up to the horizon and spot the tops of a few ships' masts. I watch over a few minutes as more and more masts come over the horizon. After not much longer, their masts come into full view, along with the ships themselves. I start counting once it seems like no more are coming.

1, 2, 3, … 70, 71, 72.

72 Ships in total here. I hope that's all of them, but I get the feeling that there are more, but they aren't visible from here. If I had a force this comparatively large, I'd split it up to try to overwhelm any potential defense. With 72 ships here, that would be somewhere between 7,000 and 50,000 soldiers, depending on the actual size of the ships, and how tightly they've packed the soldiers in. From this distance, it's hard to gauge the size, but I can at least tell that some ships are bigger than others because they have more masts. Which means we're probably looking at something closer to the middle of that range. Maybe 15,000 to 30,000 soldiers.

Even if they know that we actually have 500 dwarves here in addition to our own force, a force of their size would already be large enough that splitting it would be worth it, which tells me that this force is probably already split, and the question comes down to how split they are.

I watch impatiently as they continue moving in toward this beach. The only reprieve I have in my anxiety is that we should get the first shot in, rather than the other way around. The artillery was given specific targeting orders. It's hard to sink a large ship with a single shot, so they're supposed to try to sink smaller vessels first, with the exception of anything that seems like a flagship. If it looks like there are very important people on a ship, then fire into it repeatedly.

With the exception of any command ships, there is another reason for targeting smaller ships first. They can anchor closer to shore safely, which means less distance in row boats or other landing craft before soldiers actually make landfall. If we sink the small ships, we make any future logistics work they want to do on the island in the next few weeks that much more frustrating.

After watching them approach for about thirty minutes, they were close enough that it would be worth it to use one of the small, simple telescopes I made. Three telescopes were with the early warning watch groups up on the mountain who sounded the alarm earlier. I have one, Zaka has another, and there are two spares, one in the new fortress in the middle of the city, and the other stashed away in the secret bunker. Making well-shaped glass for even simple functional telescopes wasn't easy, but even Galileo recognized the military importance of the discovery as soon as he made his first one.

Looking at the incoming ships, over half of them were flying the same flag, but among the remaining ships, there were nine different flags. It's just a guess, but the majority flag is probably Rathland's. There is also a very clear flagship, larger than all the rest of the ships in the fleet by a noticeable amount. Pointed forward off it's bow is a large, metal head of some unknown beast with it's mouth open.

I study the bow, interested in the design. Whatever it is, it has a flowing mane, long fangs, a pair of wide-set ears, a snub nose, and four eyes. As it approaches closer though, I can spot something else. In the monster's mouth appears to be an exceptionally large and circular metallic circle. A cannon. Though it's quite a bit larger than a normal cannon. People have used a lot of different sized cannonballs on earth, and if I use the dwarven cannons as a gauge for the size of this cannon, I'd say it fires a cannonball that would weigh at least eighty pounds if it was solid metal.

My concern, however, is that it would be entirely impractical to fire a cannonball that heavy. What's more likely, and a little more terrifying, is if they have fused charges inside a cannonball shell of that size. If that's the case, then they don't need to directly hit their target for shrapnel to kill personnel. The bunkers on the cliffs should be fine given their design and altitude compared to the ships, but we'd be in trouble if that ship can fire on us here on the beach. I signal to three goblins designated as runners, and I have two have them relay to the two artillery bunkers that the artillery are to focus on sinking that flagship if it fires the main cannon on it's front at any point, even if they have to aim a little further than normal, or if they occasionally miss.

The third runner's job is to go to a rear base where there are more runners, and make sure the other artillery pieces and bases on the island know what I've spotted here, and understand how to handle it if they see any more. If it never fires, it might just be an intimidating design meant to make enemies afraid, which is why I said only fire on it if it started firing that cannon. If it's just for design, then there is no point in wasting shells that could more easily sink other ships.

After another twenty minutes, my worries were confirmed as the ships got close. The first shot wasn't fired by us, but by the flagship. The mouth of the beast erupted in a mix of smoke and fire, then the smoke... dissipated?

No, that wasn't smoke, it was steam. I didn't have much more time to think though, as off to one side of the beach a little further back than our defenses, closer to the forest line, I heard a thud followed by an explosion, then smaller thuds as shrapnel rained down through the area.

I assessed the damage from where I stood using the telescope. No one seemed injured as it missed us by a decent amount, but some of the shrapnel seemed pretty big, and was thrown far enough that if someone was unfortunate to be in it's flight path they'd be injured or worse. The flagship was still a little more than a mile out by my estimate. I was glad that I'd sent the runners to the bunkers.

Fortunately for us, the bunkers flanked either side of the invading fleet. Within three seconds of each other, the two artillery pieces fired. One missed the flagship, and the other hit, but only did some damage to the deck. Though from what I could make out, it looks like it surprised the individuals on the ship who were frantically running about.

The flagship was fired upon a second and third time by both artillery cannons in the next minute. Thanks to their design, reloading, aiming, and firing could be done relatively quickly by a skilled crew. Two more misses, one more glancing blow, and a singular better hit that penetrated a lower part of the hull.

Given there was steam from the cannon's mouth, I expected it to take longer for them to fire it again, but I was caught off guard. Another blast of fire and steam came from the monster's mouth, and again, I heard a thud. This time, closer to our defenses. As it exploded, I heard someone yell out in pain.

Damnit! Time to adapt our plan slightly. It'd still be at least twenty minutes before we need to worry about any landfall. I give the order to move the injured individual back to the fallback line, and then have the goblins take shelter in the trenches meant to slow down our opponents until the signal is given to return back to our defensive implements.

Another salvo from our artillery. This time, both hit more solidly, both into the hull of the ship near the water line. A few more of those, or a lucky shot, and the flagship should be down. The only issue is that this is buying time for the other ships to get closer to shore. I'd much rather have had the artillery sink a few small ships by now, but we can't afford to deal with artillery shelling us. We need that flagship down.

[Vol.4] Ch.47 The Battle for Kembora Part 3

Our artillery fire off another pair of shots at the flagship, landing one decent hit, and missing the second completely. The flagship fires another blast back at our beach. The shrapnel from the explosion pierces one of our pre-boiled steam cannons causing it to also rupture, sending even more shrapnel flying. Thankfully, the rupture propels the majority of that boiler upward and outward towards the ocean and avoids causing any extra damage.

Our artillery fired off a salvo at the flagship again, poking two more holes through the hull below the waterline. This flagship has now eaten 12 of our eighty shells that were to be used in the defense of this beach, not only that, but it's bought the rest of the fleet more time to get in landing range.

Just as I'm starting to run new emergency plans through my head to try to adapt our defense in light of potentially needing to retreat, we get a lucky break. Our artillery fire another salvo, and I see the flagship lurch sideways and begin to turn away from both me and the beach. I can't tell exactly what happened, but my guess is that part of it's hull broke enough that the ship is going to sink, it's possible that a munitions cache exploded.

Seeing that we are likely freed from the oppressive fire of their flagship's forward cannon, I order our troops to repair as much of the damage as they can in the next ten minutes, and return to defensive positions. It'll still be at least fifteen minutes before those ships get close enough that we would need to potentially worry about any landings and cannon fire.

As I watch our defenses start to regroup, I see the flagship is sinking deeper into the water. Looking through my telescope, I see individuals bailing ship. It's a bit less than a mile to land from where they are, so they could theoretically make it to shore by swimming, although they'll be exhausted. I'd much prefer if they drowned personally, but I'll settle for them being exhausted as part of this fight. Plus they'll be without equipment, since they'll actually need to swim to shore. Of course, with magic being an option, I'd expect some will be able to fight back, and that some might even have some swimming or water related magic or traits.

Our artillery are a little out of sync with each other now as they fire, but given the closer distance they have to their targets now, they're actually quite accurate in their shots. They're accurately shooting, and sinking, the smallest ships that have pulled ahead on the landing invasion. Ultimately, we need to stop the smallest ships so they can't ground themselves close enough to fight us easily.

Compared to the flagship, their smallest ships sink in a single, well placed hit. As our artillery continues to fire, the water gets flooded with more soldiers attempting to swim to shore, and their fleet has to navigate the still sinking wrecks that have started to block their path to the beach.

They do seem to have realized what we're attempting to do though. They've started to reorganize their fleet now that they know where we're firing from. They've started maneuvering their smaller ships towards the center of the fleet, protecting them with the hulls of the larger ships as they attempt to make it closer to land.

Their ships are now only about three-quarters of a mile out from landfall. Including the flagship, we've sunk eleven vessels. Much further, and their own cannons will be able to easily rain cannonballs on us if they so choose. We're positioned back on the beach by nearly a half-mile. I suspect that the larger of the ships will probably turn to broadside us soon. I doubt that those shots will be explosive shells though.

We have built our defenses with earthen mounds to make general cannonball fire ineffective, the problem with the flagship's cannon was it's exceptionally large explosive blast. It meant that we were getting hit from behind by shrapnel. All of our defenses are designed to allow us to fall back easily, which also means we're generally less defended from that direction, which is why that cannon was so important to take out. We can hide behind our earthen defensive mounds with embedded steam cannons and ballista when it comes to smaller cannon fire without much concern.

Almost on cue, some of the largest of the ships have begun turning broadside while at sea, and started to fire towards our defenses, including our bunkers with the artillery. By this point, our artillery is probably through about a third of their ammo. It'd be a tragedy if the bunkers fail, but they've been carefully designed to make them as resilient as possible to impact damage, so I suspect they'll at least survive until they've fired all their shells. Speaking of, they've sunk twenty vessels in total now.

Make that twenty-one. They've started to have to fire upon the medium sized vessels that are attempting to protect the smallest vessels on their way to the shore, and that most recent shot must have hit a munitions arsenal on that ship because a large amount of it just blew apart. Those are the kinds of hits we're hoping for. Most of those sailors and soldiers are as good as dead.

Unfortunately, we don't have a good way for one crew to inform the other of this discovered weak point, but they have each been trained to pay attention and attempt to hit the ships in those locations if they spot them. It can be hard to properly hit a ship with that degree of accuracy, but at least narrowing down where you know you can land a critical hit should make it a little easier to actually do so as they get closer.

On the beach however, we're dealing with cannonball rain. Given some of the traps we've set on the beach, carpeting the area with cannonballs might actually be safer terrain for their landing parties. I've already seen a few of the hidden spiked pitfalls collapse due to a cannonball hitting the false ground covering them.

The cannonballs are actually doing a better job of destroying the defenses we put down that were meant to be more of an annoyance than a kill trap. Sharpened wooden caltrops that had been laid out are occasionally getting obliterated by cannonballs, making the beach a little bit more maneuverable for the inevitable landing parties.

The landing fleet has made it to a half-mile from shore now, putting them a little over a mile away from myself. Some of the medium ships have now also turned broadside to fire their cannons at us. It's really annoying, but we haven't sustained any losses from the cannon fire so far. Every cannon shot they use now means they'll have less available to potentially use during a siege of our city if they decide to haul the cannons ashore for that in the future.

The artillery has sunk about two-thirds of their small ships now, and they're getting closer to running out of ammo. I would guess they have between ten and fifteen shots left in each bunker. Luck seems to be on our side though, as the tide change started about two hours ago, so the water level is receding. The enemy probably planned it this way, such that they could get their ships close to landing, then let the tide go out to ground them enough to unload. What they probably don't expect is that we've buried hardened spikes of wood within the beach all the way out to the low tide mark.

What they probably expected was that they'd fight a difficult fight, then take the beach and be able to use their smallest ships to make the landing easier. I honestly half-expected them to retreat by now given the amount of vessels we've been sinking. Though I suppose with so many soldiers being forced to swim to shore, they might be thinking in terms of sunk cost. If they continue and take the beach, many of those men might live. If they retreat, they're as good as dead. Given that one of said ships appeared to be a flagship, there was probably more than one important person on that ship, although I suspect they've probably already been helped aboard a different vessel by now.

Unluckily, or perhaps luckily, for the soldiers trapped in the water they're swimming slower than the ships around them, so they'll arrive ashore after the worst of the battle is fought. If we manage to stop them here, that means at best they'll be political prisoners, and at worst, dead. I don't think I'll take that many prisoners this time. Given the sheer numbers of individuals and the relative size of armies and the power of individuals with magic, I figure it's impossible to keep a large number of prisoners effectively, so we'll have to kill them...

After a few more shells are fired from our artillery, they stop firing. We've sunk what we can with what we had. All but four of the small ships are derelict at sea too far from shore to be useful. Overall, 33 of the original 72 ships have been sunk. As I expected, the smallest ships are still headed straight for land. They're close enough that I can see them starting to get all their weapons and armor on in preparation for attempting their landing.

Once it starts to become clear to the other ships that our artillery has stopped firing, more of their remaining ships start to maneuver back towards land. I can see that they do, in fact, have some rowboats on their decks, which will probably be used shortly. My hope is that we've disrupted their initial landing enough that it'll give us an advantage with the proper battle that's about to begin.

[Vol.4] Ch.48 The Battle for Kembora Part 4

If there is one upside to the fact that the attempted landing is going to happen imminently, it's that the invading fleet has halted their cannon fire. Smooth bore cannons aren't really accurate enough to avoid friendly fire at these ranges, so at least we won't be dealing with getting shelled while we're fighting their troops.

That said, their four smallest ships are now at the point where they're running aground. These ships have a slightly wider shape, and seem to be specifically shaped to let them run in more shallow water than the larger ships. They seem like a mix between a caravel and a viking longship. The water where they've grounded themselves is about four feet in depth, meaning that their soldiers will be able to walk to land, albeit with some difficulty. As I'm thinking this, ropes fall over the sides of the ship, and men dressed in armor begin to dismount.

They're still too far for us to properly hit them with most of our defensive implements, but it's still worth trying to aim some of the ballistae from the front-most positions to attempt to hit them. The way we've layered our beach defense, we can run extra ammo forward as needed, wood is cheap after all, but we keep most of the reserves of ammo further back, so that our own weapons aren't turned against us as we cede ground.

Each of the small ships unloads about sixty men, who begin trekking through the water towards us. Unfortunately for them, they're realizing just how difficult we've made that trek, as they're being forced to navigate hardened wooden spikes in the water. Even without the spikes, it'd be an exhausting trip up to land, but with them, they're forced to slowly turn and crawl over the spikes, making the path even more exhausting and slow.

From further out, rowboats begin coming to shore as well. Overall, it seems like well over fifty rowboats are making their way to shore. They're different sizes, but the average rowboat has twenty soldiers, so we're looking at over a thousand soldiers who are going to be coming to shore soon. Through my telescope, I can see there are still many more soldiers further out at sea in their ships. Around a third of the rowboats are also headed further along the coast where our defenses are fewer, but the terrain is much rockier and harder to unload in.

Ultimately, if we're forced to focus on the main invading force here continuously, they can make a few trips with the rowboats to the rougher terrain and flank us given enough time. On some level, I feel for them attempting to invade a beach like this. During WWII, taking Normandy during D-Day required an extreme amount of human sacrifice to claim the beachhead. When you factor in the technology level of this invasion, and the fact that we're fighting with an informational edge, rather than the other way around, and it's honestly quite a bad deal for them.

On the other hand, they've got significantly more troops than we do, which swings the scales to a level that makes it hard for me to make any predictions about the outcome. All I can say for sure is that we sank most of the smaller vessels which would have made their invasion much easier. At some point, we'll also be dealing with those unarmed soldiers who bailed from their sinking ships as well, as they swim to shore. Ultimately, this is going to get messy.

From where I sit using the telescope, I can see that the ballistae have taken out a few of the soldiers marching through our waters on their way to dry land. As they get closer, their speed increases due to the water becoming more shallow, while at the same time, our ballistae find it easier to aim at them.

As the first of the soldiers make it out of the water and onto the beach, the first of our steam cannons fire grapeshot at them. I watch as three men fall, and the rest continue charging forward. Of the nearly 250 men who dismounted from the small ships, about twenty have died so far. Considering we've only sustained one injury so far, that's pretty good. Never mind how many men have potentialy died at sea.

As more of them start to make it onto more solid ground, the first of them fires off their own fireball attack towards one of our defensive positions, but given our cover, it is ineffective. It seemed similar to Zaka's fireball, flying through the air in a straight line, then bursting when it hit a surface. Well, I can't exactly blame them for at least trying something. Until now, they've been receiving ranged harassment from our side, I'd also want to fire back myself in their situation.

Unfortunately for him, he stood still to aim his fireball, which resulted in him being shot by a ballista through his upper leg. He's not dead now, but without medical treatment soon, he'll die. As more of their soldiers make it to the beach, the distance between us and them has continued to shrink. Our first layer of defense is built about 100 yards back from the high tide mark, and the tide has been receding for a few hours now, so they have a little less than a quarter mile distance to close between us and them.

Some of their soldiers exhibit some unique magics I haven't seen before. A few dash forward at about four times the normal running speed for a human. Unfortunately for some of them, that means they're now the priority targets for some of the ballistae on the fort, as well as some of our defenses. More than half of the thirty or so who dashed forward in this way died before they even got to within a hundred yards of us. Of the remaining fifteen or so, nine fell into pitfall traps. At the very least they were injured enough they didn't climb out, although I suspect they're as good as dead. The remaining six had to slow down thanks to the large wooden barricades that were set up. As they moved to maneuver around some of the barricades, or through ones broken by cannon fire, they were killed before they could actually reach our defensive line.

However, the remainder of the force was gaining ground during that maneuver. A second steam cannon fired grapeshot into a clustered group, bringing down another six individuals. More ballistae fired from the fort and other parts of beach, and brought down more soldiers. Ultimately, we want to keep them from getting close, due to the unpredictability of magic attacks. The row boats are beginning to approach as well. Within a few minutes, the first of them will make it to dry land, resulting in thousands more combatants.

A little more than half of the initial landing group now remains. Despite their best efforts, they're forced to form groups if they want to pass through the wooden barricaded areas of the beach. They attempted to go through one at a time, but quickly realized that would just result in them dying to ballistae. Instead, as a group attempted to pass through a gap, a steam cannon unleashed more grapeshot onto that group, resulting in all seven of those attempting to pass through dying or being maimed.

In the first line of defense on the beach, we have six steam cannons, and we've now used three. Once all six are used, we'll start contemplating falling back to the next line of defense, where another six are located. The remaining three on this layer are loaded with single shells meant to shoot at those rowboats as they approach, so they should be firing soon.

As if on cue, one of the steam cannons fires off towards one of the row boats, compromising it's hull at about the same distance as the small ships had parked, forcing the twenty or so individuals inside to begin the slower trek towards land, abandoning any additional equipment they might have had in the rowboat.

As the remnants of the initial landing parties got closer to our defenses, a few used new magic types. One created a defensive wall in front of themselves, which quickly collapsed as it was made of the same sand as the beach. It did eat a single ballista shot though, so it wasn't completely useless. A few individuals surprised us with powerful leaps, allowing them to clear some of our barricades. Of those individuals, about half died on landing by falling into hidden spike traps as they repeatedly attempted to hop barriers. The remainder were focused on by balistae in order to bring them down.

Ultimately, the initial landing party didn't make it past our first line of defense. Which wasn't a surprise. Outside of some unseen magic, we have about 100 individuals in a heavily defended position. They only numbered 250 at most. That isn't enough to claim victory, and they didn't really have a choice in the matter, other than to simply hide on their ship and wait for all the rowboats to land. Honestly, that was what they should have done.

My guess is that once their flagship was sunk, the fleet had fractured in command somewhat, and most of the commanders operated on whatever their pre-existing plan was, which likely involved all the small ships landing at once and invading. Given that only a handful of small ships actually remained, they attempted the attack anyway, and this was the result.

They did do one thing for the invaders though. They no longer need to deal with our steam cannons on the front row. The three anti-personnel steam cannons are now spent. I give the word to our defensive line, we've done what we set out to do on this line. "Fire the remainder of your ballista shots, fire the two steam cannons to sink some row boats, then destroy your ballistae and retreat to the next defensive line."

[Vol.4] Ch.49 The Battle for Kembora Part 5

After a few minutes, all the remaining ballistae on the first line of defense had been fired and then destroyed. Shortly after we retreated back about 100 yards to the next defensive line. The second defensive line consisted of five steam cannons armed with grapeshot, one armed with a large shell for a particularly tough target, and another fifteen ballistae. Between the first line and the second line were more barricades and hidden pitfalls. Given that many of the hidden pitfalls on the first line had already been collapsed, it made sense for us to retreat early to re-bolster our defenses.

Most of the rowboats had already dropped off their soldiers and were returning to their ships to pick up another round of soldiers. Some soldiers had been dropped off in the rough terrain further away from the beach, and were beginning to form their own groups. Most of that terrain, in addition to being very rocky and difficult to walk in, had also been booby trapped, so they should experience an even harder time navigating from the rocky portions to anywhere safe.

The first landing group from the smaller ships had about 250 soldiers, now we're facing more than four times that, which means we're very likely to be overrun as the battle progresses. That said, our entire goal of this defense has been to simply exhaust as many enemy soldiers as we can while losing as few of our own troops as possible. Outside of an enemy retreat, we were never expecting to actually win at this point in the island's defense.

With that in mind, we continue using our ballistae to slowly take down individuals at a distance. This time though, it seems they are more prepared with a proper plan. While some more heavily armored individuals move forward, individuals in the back are beginning to dismantle the defenses and barricades meant to slow them down. As for the armored individuals, there are a few who are leading the way who have large shields which are holding up to direct fire from the ballistae.

Thankfully, our defensive line is fairly spread out, which means we can still shoot from the sides, allowing us to still take some of them down. The first major issue came as one of them proceeded to barrel through one of our barricades. Given the size of their tower shield and heavy armor, I'm assuming they used some kind of magic to empower themselves. Thankfully, we still had the steam cannon with the single large shell in it. They might have heavy armor and a large shield, but even that couldn't hold up to a direct shot from a cannon. The shield and the man had a hole blown through his center, and he crumpled.

For ten minutes, this battle went on. We'd pick off individuals with our ballistae, and occasionally a shot would go out from one of the steam cannons, cutting down a handful of individuals. We suffered our first casualty as a particularly powerful individual sprinted and magically leapt forward through a lot of our defenses, and when they finally arrived at where a goblin was, they threw a knife fast enough that I assume it too was magically empowered, killing the goblin before anyone else could react. I was near enough to get to him before he moved on to another target, and although a knife was aimed at my neck, it grazed my shoulder as I dodged before impaling him from below with an earth spike.

As the threat from their army grew, I called for the next retreat. We'd used all our steam cannons on that row and many of the barricades and pitfalls had been destroyed or triggered, so staying at that line was going to get more hazardous. In addition, many of the rowboats have made it back to their ships, so the enemy is going to be getting reinforcements soon.

Our last defensive line on the beach consists of eight steam cannons, two of which are loaded with large single shells, another twenty ballistae on the ground, and the fort, which has fifty individuals inside it and fifteen ballistae on the wall facing the beach. The fort also features a moat and has burning oil ready to be poured over the gate if anyone dares to step too close.

Behind this last line there are still more pitfall traps, and after almost a half of a mile there is a small defensive position designed to help us retreat the remainder of our non-fort forces once it becomes clear that we've lost the beach. As of right now though, we've killed nearly five-hundred invaders, and I expect we'll be able to get at least another five-hundred before we call the retreat.

As the fight drags on, thanks to the proximity to the fort itself, we're having an easier time defending ourselves from the invaders initially. Unfortunately, as the minutes drag on, it gets more and more difficult as the previous defenses are dismantled, and a new, fresh batch of soldiers begin landing on the beach. I've also noticed that some of the soldiers who had abandoned their sinking ships have started to arrive on shore now. They're unarmored, so some of the ballistae in the fort take long range shots at them, and a few get hit.

This last line of defense holds better than the first two, but not by that much more. We're able to take out about three hundred soldiers before it becomes obvious that those of us not in the fort are in danger if we stay much longer, so I give the order to disable the ballistae, and carry the remainder of our ballistae ammo with us on our retreat. From here on out, it's basically up to the fort to deal as much damage as it can. The enemy would be foolish to attempt to chase us while we retreat, as they'd be exposing their backs to the fort's elevated ballistae attacks, so we are able to retreat without suffering any extra losses.

From our next defensive position, I begin organizing the next part of our strategy. The injured are to take the carefully plotted route between defensive positions all the way back to the city. It's unlikely they'll get ambushed, given our own defenses are designed around ambushes scattered about on the island. The majority of the rest of the fighters are to form three-man-squads and take up ambush positions around the beach that we've prepared. The goal of these spots is to prevent the enemy from scouting and expanding their influence beyond the beach for the next few days.

We want to make them feel like they need to build up their forces and properly organize before they can leave. Eventually, they'll overrun the fort, and likely turn it into their own defensive position. If we ambush them any time they leave the beach, they'll likely want to have a safe location on land to use for treating their wounded, and that fort would be the best bet for them. Which is exactly what we're hoping for.

We've purposefully made the fort in such a way that they'll find it useful for a force their size. Sure, it's useful for our fifty or so troops inside it, but we've sized the fort for nearly three times as many active personnel, with plenty of space for stockpiling supplies and keeping troops. We're even sacrificing those fifty troops to make sure that the enemy doesn't suspect anything.

I had a bit of an idea after remembering how Konkur described how the dwarven version of tectonic sense works. For them, they just detect when there is a change in material, and maybe a little information about the material. The floor of the fort is a few inches of stone. Under that would normally be sand, given where it's located. If you used a tectonic sense like ability, it'd even appear to be sand, even if you were really skilled at using it. It's a grainy material after all.

It's powdered sulfur though. Under that, in the center, is gunpowder. All the remaining gunpowder that we had, after we'd run out of time to machine it into any other usable ammo. Under that is more stone and a fuse leading to a buried tunnel. The explosion won't be that big, as there is at most a ton of gunpowder. What it will do though is blast the floor and throw about ten tons of finely powdered sulfur up into the air. When we know what's about to happen, we're going to prepare a burning ballista shot to fly into the powder cloud if it doesn't ignite on it's own.

That'll cause a deflagration, burning most of the oxygen in the nearby area, and replacing it with sulfur dioxide gas, which is heavier than air, which will settle back into the fort, and flow outward over the beach area. I'm not sure the exact concentrations that will occur, but given the amount of sulfur we've prepared, it should be pretty bad. Sulfur dioxide gas is toxic in high concentrations and an extremely potent irritant in lower concentrations. Many individuals suffer severe breathing issues for weeks when exposed to high concentrations of the gas.

This is technically chemical warfare, but I'm not aware of any Geneva conventions here. In fact, way before modern warfare, burning sulfur would sometimes be lobbed into fortresses during sieges to irritate the defenders. Likewise, tunnels that were being dug into forts would sometimes be flooded with sulfur dioxide to kill the tunnel diggers. It's not the most potent of toxic gases, and most individuals survive exposure to it, if they don't suffocate or breathe it for hours and hours on end.

We're not using it to directly kill though. We're using it to weaken their forces further. They won't have weeks to wait and recover in order to fight. Their supplies are already probably thinner than they'd like thanks to us sinking their ships. I can't discount healing magic potentially speeding their recovery, but if everyone is experiencing symptoms, it'd still take quite some time to properly heal their entire army.

We've already moved all our bargas up to the cave area, where they're likely moved inside by now. We've also culled a significant portion of the ground birds on the island on purpose. This army is going to be fighting with what food they have on them. So are we, except we've hidden our food caches, and made sure that every location we're fighting in only has enough for a few days of our own forces.

In the next few hours, the fort is going to fall, and then we'll patiently wait and watch through the night from a safe distance with the telescope, watching and waiting for them to unload more of their troops and supplies. If they decide to use the fort themselves, it'll prove extremely beneficial for us.

[Vol.4] Ch.50 The Battle for Kembora Part 6

I'm pleasantly surprised to see our fort actually hold out longer than I expected it to. I expected it to fall fairly quickly to the overwhelming size of the enemy force, but as things ended up working out, the enemy force took some time to properly land. It took a little over ten minutes for each round trip of the row boats, which meant that it ended up taking almost three hours for all the enemy troops to make landfall.

It seems the enemy had made a second miscalculation based on the previous layout of the island when they scouted us two years ago. Save for the handful of initial landing individuals who had the ability to jump exceptionally high, there haven't been any others who showed up with the ability to potentially siege a fort. That doesn't mean they didn't have individuals who could kill our forces though. There were plenty of ranged attacks and magic, but it wasn't particularly effective.

My guess is that their fort fighting individuals were probably sent to the other side of the island to land and attack, since our city has walls as well. They probably weren't expecting us to have built a large fort on this side of the island, which resulted in them receiving worse casualties than they expected. Through the fighting, many individuals attempted to simply pass around the fort, and continue their attacks further up the beach, and into the surrounding trees.

A few of those individuals fell prey to pitfall traps, and others were killed by hit and run attacks from concealed locations. Ultimately, with much of their force preoccupied with the fort, it was difficult to properly mount an attack further out. With their backs to the fort, many also easily fell to the ballistae mounted high up on the fort walls.

Eventually, it seems some commanders from their side had had enough, and they began a proper, full force attack meant to simply overwhelm the fortress, and break into it. Some individuals felled nearby trees which were fashioned quickly into makeshift ladders for scaling the walls, while magic users bombarded the top of the wall to prevent counter attacks.

The initial few ladders had burning oil dumped down them at the cost of the individual's life who poured it. After a few more cycles of that, the fort fell. I estimate that the enemy lost about a thousand men in that siege itself. The fact they chose to directly assault the fort tells me a lot more info about both our current position and our enemy's.

There are three reasons they would directly storm the fort, rather than simply moving past it. The first reason is that they're concerned about their ability to unload supplies elsewhere on the island, and the fort's existence would result in so many casualties over time that the losses of just storming it are likely less than they would receive by attempting to ignore it. The second potential reason is that they're here to exterminate us. I think that's at least a partial motivator, but even if that is the case, they could still sidestep the fort for a time, and siege it later to kill it's occupants. The third reason plays into the first reason a bit, and that is that they're on a clock with their own supplies, and the time it would take to properly siege the fort is time they don't have, for one reason or another.

In actuality, I expect that a combination of all three reasons were the motivators for their decision to storm the fort. Looking at it that way, our current plan to stall them out is probably our best bet. Long sieges are won and lost on logistics. Normally, a sieging force has the advantage in logistics, because they aren't surrounded. Our battle plan is essentially to flip that advantage to ourselves.

The Dwarven island has probably acted by now as well. Now that the majority of the enemy force has long since left that island, they'll be negotiating with any mercenary ships that might arrive there with supplies in an attempt to confuse and stall them as long as possible. They'll either lie about the arrival of opposing ships, or even go so far as to make vague threats about counterattacks on the supply ships themselves should they refuse to turn around.

Will this turn all the ships around? Probably not. Will some of the supply ships at least be stalled for some time? Probably. With a single supply route suddenly disrupted, we have the supply advantage naturally. We've stockpiled and hidden our supplies away to outlast our opponent.

Their problems will get worse as we continue as well. They started to repurpose our old fort for their own headquarters. After their successful capturing of the fort, the rowboats began bringing crates of supplies to the shore. They've already begun hauling their supply crates into the fort, and stationed many of their own troops in and around the fort. As more organized scouting parties set out, we've had to fall back quite far as we've continued losing ground to our opponent in little skirmishes. We haven't lost any troops in the skirmishes, as we've purposefully retreated each time after inflicting some casualties on the enemy side.

It's more than just inflicting casualties though, it's also causing paranoia. Like both the Japanese defenses of many of their islands during WWII, and the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam war, we're slowly traumatizing opposing troops with the sheer amount of hidden traps and casualties being inflicted on their side. Within a few days, I suspect their troops will be thoroughly traumatized, and looking for enemies around every tree, slowing their progress even more.

If their troops were hardened veterans with years of military experience, then they'd probably know that their best bet is to simply march forward quickly as a large group, and clear a whole area as fast as possible. From discussions with Kao's military advisors, I've learned that most of the human armies aren't that. In fact, the majority of their soldiers probably don't even have combat magic, and likely have non-combat classes, like farmer. The handful of individuals who we saw earlier in the fighting who had used magic were individuals with combat classes, and even then, there weren't that many of them.

So when the conscripted farmers encounter the constant specter of death, their instincts won't allow them to properly sacrifice the few for the many. The correct move is to sacrifice a handful of your weakest soldiers to the traps, and keep up the pressure so we don't have time to retreat and set up more traps and ambushes, despite the rough terrain and pre-set traps. Those farmers likely won't follow an order to march to their death though, and will desert the army and retreat if they suspect that's what they're being asked to do. Meaning that if they want to execute that strategy, they'll be sacrificing their well-trained soldiers to our traps, which is likely a much worse option for them than simply slowing their advance.

From my understanding, combat classed individuals either work for the military, or as adventurers. Those handful in the military work full time as standing army soldiers, and are well trained. They're also considered a somewhat valuable asset to a country, given their relative strength compared to individuals who don't have combat oriented magic. Unless the situation is desperate, the invading force will probably try to preserve those individuals as much as they can, especially after blundering the numbers that they did during their botched invasion of the beach.

As day turned to night, the enemy has set up their own defenses on the beach, and finished unloading their ships. Torches are staked throughout the beach and fort, making any sort of sneak attack impossible from our side. However, it also makes it very easy to see what they're doing from a distance with our telescope.

They've regrouped their forces, and after the sun had set, their scouting parties stopped their attacks. Ultimately, trying to maneuver through booby trapped territory at night would have been a blunder on their part, even more so given the recently gathering cloud cover, so they made the right choice from a normal strategic perspective.

Many of their troops are set up in camps around the fort, but there are quite a few camps set up further away. From what I can tell, they have their own flags on some of their tents, with the largest force occupying the fort and surrounding territory. That flag matches the flagship from earlier today, so I suspect that is Rathland's flag.

What we're about to do is honestly quite evil by many standards, but history is written by the victors. Either we'll be the winners, or we'll be evil, which many consider us to be anyway since we're demons. As the night progresses, most of the enemy troops have fallen asleep. I'll give them a few hours to reach a deep sleep, then give the order.

As we reach the middle of the night, I give the signal, and a goblin begins the half-mile trek down our cramped hidden tunnel to ignite the fuse. We've timed things out once before this. As soon as that goblin goes down the tunnel, we'll haul our ballistae to the range necessary, and prepare to shoot it into the explosion. The enemy has set up lots of torches, so we probably won't need to ignite it ourselves, but it'd be foolish to leave that up to chance at this point.

As we execute the plan, I find myself holding my breath as we reach the point where the explosion should occur. The ballista has been moved up, and they've ignited the bolt already. An alarm sounds from one of the slightly closer camps as someone has probably spotted our ballista with it's flaming bolt.

Less than a minute passes and chaos is unleashed on the unsuspecting enemy troops. A loud blast can be heard from the fort, and some stone is thrown up over the walls. Seconds later, the ballista bolt flies out as a bright light shooting through the sky towards the fort. Within a moment, an eerie blue flame rises from everywhere within the fort walls, and climbs quickly into the sky, followed by a loud whooshing sound. With that our soldiers with the ballista retreat into the night, and I watch the scene unfold on the beach from a safe distance through my telescope...

[Vol.4] Ch.51 Chemical Attack Aftermath

The explosion woke up all the sleeping enemy troops. Many individuals are scrambling to find the enemy and prepare to fight. Those who were closer to the fort are making their way into the fort to try to help anyone harmed in the explosion. Although they might save some people in the fort, the entire inside of the fort is probably full of sulfur dioxide gas. Anyone going in to save others is going to be affected by it.

After a few minutes, it becomes clear that there isn't any further attack happening from our side, and it looks like those near the fort are now very aware that there is some form of toxin in the area. Everyone is retreating as far from the fort as they can. There seem to be a lot of individuals covering their mouths and noses, and a lot of individuals are coughing. Sulfur dioxide is quite pungent, so they're surely aware of the poison in the air. Depending on their backgrounds, some might even recognize the smell.

A few individuals have already collapsed close to the fort. In retrospect, without immediate modern medical treatment, sulfur dioxide is more deadly than I initially estimated. In the modern day, with modern medical equipment, you can help individuals survive the deadly and long lasting pulmonary edema. Honestly, even if they have a bunch of magic healers, they'll likely lose a lot of individuals to that alone. Depending on how their healing magic works, the pulmonary edema might return over and over after being healed, meaning they'll be highly limited in who they can save.

Unfortunately for us, it seems like their leadership wasn't actually in the fort, but they were nearby. I'm only guessing based on watching individuals giving orders though. It seems like most of their command structure seems to be intact, although quite a few of them seem to be suffering from some amount of coughing.

As they gathered more and more people on the furthest edge of the beach, more individuals started to succumb to coughing fits and collapse. It really is quite the gruesome scene, it seems like a third of the forces were affected in some way, although only about a fifth of those seem severely afflicted. I watched carefully, looking for more information on how their army handles injuries. It's clear they have a few individuals with healing magic, but not all of the healing magic seemed to work the same way. Initially a few individuals seemed to be treated, and they stopped coughing, and were able to get back on their feet, only to start coughing again within minutes.

The medical treatment shifted after that, as they moved to commanders first, and started a longer magical process on them. After they were treated, I no longer saw any of them have their cough recur. However, less than half of the healers seemed capable of that process. Those who couldn't focused first on temporary treatment for other individuals. I couldn't discern what criteria they chose for who they temporarily treated. Though they only had a few hundred healers, so they were fighting a severely uphill battle.

Of those who were able to do the more complex and permanent treatment only about a quarter were able to repeat that treatment again immediately. I'm assuming that it drains a significant amount of mana, and they are now waiting for their mana to recharge to try to cure others. I scan the beach to see what other individuals are doing.

It seems like most are on guard and seem to be fueled by adrenaline. Almost no one has returned to sleep, and given how much coughing is going on, I doubt they will. I tried to keep my eye out for any of the potential dark elves that I was warned about, but don't spot any. Everyone on the beach appears to be human.

As I'm looking, I feel a small drop of water land on me. Looking upwards, the clouds have gotten darker, and it seems like it's starting to rain. That's actually some good luck for us. The enemy will be relieved from breathing in more sulfur dioxide, which is a little bit of a break for them, but something worse is going to happen to them as a result.

It's only been about forty minutes since the explosion and deflagration. Given the nearly non-existent wind in this bay and the density of sulfur dioxide, it has only slowly dissipated by diffusion into the rest of the bay area. That means that the fort should still be heavily laden with the stuff. As the rain falls, it will mix with the sulfur dioxide. On earth, in faint amounts in the upper atmosphere, sulfur dioxide was one of the causes of acid rain.

When sulfur dioxide mixes with water, it forms sulfurous acid, and a portion of that further converts to sulfuric acid with any extra oxygen. It's very bad news for the fish in the bay, who are going to experience a mass dying event. It's even worse news for the enemy army, who spent the better part of the evening moving supplies into the fort. All those supplies are about to get a heavy dose of acid. Unless they somehow packaged everything in watertight containers, I expect the damage to their supplies will be quite severe.

I noticed one interesting thing before I left to retreat to my next position. They seemed to be moving the very ill individuals into small pods, and assigning higher ranking individuals to watch over them. Initially, this confused me. Why assign captains and commanders to watch over the individuals who were basically being left for dead?

Then it hit me. When we killed the eagles, the individuals who were closest to the eagles got the most levels. I hadn't really thought to check if you actually had to kill the creatures, or if them dying by any means was enough to gain levels. Further, Shasta had talked extensively about leveling sickness before. I hadn't asked before, but I'm starting to infer that higher level individuals within the humanoid races have a harder time leveling as they reach higher levels. Their commanders are probably seasoned veterans, and can potentially handle absorbing all that experience without actually gaining so many levels that they get leveling sickness. They're essentially recycling the levels of their dying.

That's good to know. It means their strongest individuals are probably going to be ridiculously strong. With that knowledge in mind, I began retreating from my viewing perch. My next job is to retreat back to the city. There are a lot of our troops setting up even more traps and ambushes between here and there, but I'm not supposed to risk myself in those skirmishes, as it's important I'm available for adapting our plans if the city needs it.

There is some concern that the enemy will potentially be sieging the city already. We don't know if this landing contained all of the soldiers or not, although I doubted it was. If they have other landing sites, not all of them were likely defended. Lack of infrastructure in other parts of the island would make landing with even a medium sized army a bad choice in most places. The time and effort it would take to navigate the island would make it unlikely that anything more than small strike forces landed anywhere that we didn't have the road.

Which means that my own trip back to the city is actually somewhat dangerous, as I could run into a moderately sized force between here and the city. We left approximately five-hundred soldiers in the city, half our fighting force, to defend it. Even if a landing happened near the city with an army of equal size to the one we fought on the beach, they should hold out for a few days minimum with our tiered defenses, which is enough time for me to make it back.

[Vol.4] Ch.52 A Confusing Encounter

The first few hours of my return trip went well. I wanted to reach one of our hidden safehouses far enough from the beach that sleep would be relatively safe. Perhaps it was because it was nighttime, but I didn't run into any problems as I travelled. This particular safehouse is a hidden underground chamber with small holes for air that is large enough to allow seven individuals to sleep within it. There are five of us in this particular safehouse tonight. We've put many of these safehouses around the island so we have places to hide and rest while engaging in our guerilla tactics.

The next day, I began the second part of my trek back to the city. The first part of my trip was uneventful, which was relieving. I'd have been very worried if, that close to the beach, I had spotted any major evidence of fighting. As the afternoon turned to evening though, I had to slow my travel pace and start moving more cautiously. The reason being that I noticed a few of our traps had been triggered in places, and there was the occasional dead human soldier.

As nightfall came, I had a short distance left to travel to reach a safehouse. As I entered the safehouse, I saw a few injured goblins, and we exchanged information. It sounds like around eighteen ships landed on this part of the island, after a handful got sunk by the coastal artillery.

Their landing crews were spread out more than ours though, and it sounds as though they've spotted some dark elves. The dark elves have managed to avoid any of the traps and have even injured a few of our goblins that were waiting for ambushes, although the dark elves haven't killed any goblins. I personally find that a little odd, but it sounds like most of the situations involved the goblins escaping by running through more traps despite having been injured.

The groups that landed on this side only partially consolidated their forces. Around two thousand formed an army and have began marching along the road to clear any traps directly along it, while another two thousand formed smaller groups and have been attempting to clear out the nearby forest of any of our ambushes and traps. Ultimately, this was within our expectations. Both ends of both tunnels have been rigged with a small amount of explosives to facilitate a collapse once any army enters into them, even if it costs a few individuals their lives to set them off.

Tomorrow, my trek continues off the road after a few hours. I'll be crossing into the city's valley much higher up than either tunnel. I'll be using our secret escape tunnel to enter into the city, and getting there sometime in the late evening. I gave the goblins here as much info as I could on the army that landed on the beach, so they could be more prepared for the coming weeks before I went to sleep. Despite a few of the goblins here being injured, their mood improved when I told them that the beach plan to poison the opposing force seemed to have worked.

As I made my way up towards the point where I was going to enter the forest and start off road travel, I ran into an enemy scout party. A group of ten individuals carefully checking the sides of the road for any sort of traps. We spotted each other at about the same time, and I darted into the forest. I recalled that there were a few different traps not that far away, so I baited the scouting party to follow me.

Given how easily I was actually evading them, I assumed they weren't that powerful. My assumption turned out to be only partially true. As I baited them into the first pitfall trap, one fell in and was maimed, and at the same time I positioned myself opposite the pit to them, I activated an improved earth spike and impaled another two before darting off further into the forest.

A powerful magic flew out, chasing me, and I ducked to the ground on instinct. As I hit the ground, a tree that was in front of me was cut clean through at a slight angle, and began to fall. Whatever that was, it had some serious cutting power. Given my surprise at their power, I decided to run with intent to lose them, rather than bait them again, and lost them after a short time. I realized I still have that bad habit of assuming individual's power is easily estimated based on peripheral actions. Just because someone isn't good at tracking or running doesn't mean they don't have a trick up their sleeve, especially with magic existing.

As I travelled through the forest, I was more cautious as I climbed the tall hill separating the two valleys. Darkness was only a few hours away, and the sun was slowly making it's way to the horizon. As I nearly reached the top of the hill, I suddenly felt someone tap on my shoulder.

I was terrified. I hadn't noticed a presence. I jumped forward and turned to face whoever tapped me. In front of me was an elf, albeit with dark skin. They had their finger held over their mouth in a shushing gesture. I carefully eyed them up, ready to earth spike at a moments notice.

We stood there for a few moments, silently. They then pointed towards the top of the hill, but gestured to stay quiet. My mind was whirring along trying to process the surreal situation. If they'd wanted to kill me, they probably could have before. If this is a trap though, their intent would have to be to capture me alive then. So I should be prepared to fight and run if necessary at a moments notice. I carefully followed them up the hill, still tense as the situation unfolded.

As I reached the top of the hill, quite the sight stretched before me. A camp of nearly a thousand individuals stretched before me at the bottom of the hill. Around a quarter of the camp seemed to be made up of dark elves, and the rest were humans. Judging from their equipment, it seems like this group is supposed to form some kind of scouting base. They seem to be fairly lightly armed, but dressed well for forest travel. It seems like this is where they've set up a base for attempting to break down our guerrilla attacks.

It's not a bad location for it honestly. It's only about two hours from both roads if you're unfamiliar with the terrain, and less if you're following a good route. Which lets them easily keep an eye on the surroundings of both of these roads with skilled scouting parties. I'm not sure how many of our ambush parties might have been lost in the area already to this strategy.

More importantly, I'm not entirely certain why this dark elf is showing me this. They gesture to stay where I am, and they start heading towards the camp. I watch cautiously. If I notice even the smallest change in behavior in the camp, I'll run.

After nearly half of an hour, the dark elf returns, and hands me a letter which is sealed with the same symbol that adorned the trade goods we got from the Elloetta Matriarch when Elora had returned a year ago. I opened it, and although I couldn't read it, I could at least tell it was written in the dwarven language. I tucked the letter away and looked back at the dark elf, and they looked at me, expectantly.

I waited a few moments, and gestured that I intended to go around the camp. They seemed to get the gist of the situation, and started guiding me in a roundabout route around the camp. They led the way, and diffused a few situations where other scouting parties nearly spotted me. Eventually, I made it far enough, and we split up.

Although I lost a bit more time today than I expected, I did gain a mysterious letter and some potentially valuable information moving forward. I made my way through the hidden tunnel back to the city, and arrived a while after nightfall...

[Vol.4] Ch.53 Elloetta’s Aid

The city was not in good shape. The outer wall had already been breached, but that was somewhat expected. The outer wall is so much larger than the inner wall, so it's harder to prevent a single concentrated attack from causing a successful breach. From what I gathered, there seems to have been a few individuals with good siege magics, which also made the whole ordeal a bit more difficult.

The city itself was left with about half of our total combat forces, or a little less than five hundred soldiers. They've suffered about 5% casualties in the past few days, which is definitely not what I wanted to hear. Though from what I gathered, many of those casualties were due to sacrificial attacks to take down the enemy soldiers with siege magics, so it might not be as bad as it sounds.

Among those taken down, there were individuals who could basically liquify stone and a few who could cause an explosive blast at a moderate distance. A few of the explosive blasters are still alive, but as far as anyone is aware, the ones who broke through the first wall by liquifying the stone, thus making a gap, are all dead.

With a much smaller area to defend now, with only the inner wall and citadel left, the defense has returned to our favor for the time being. The enemy started out with about 8000 troops, and have lost around a thousand, a catastrophic amount for a normal battle. However, they probably also expect to receive more reinforcements from the rest of the island over time. My guess is that a few commanders are looking to earn points among their superiors by having already captured the outer wall, which is why they were willing to take as many casualties as they did so early.

The enemy apparently made land fall around the artificial tide pools, which we decommissioned about a month ago. We had stockpiled plenty of preserved foods, and didn't want the enemy to have an easy source of protein, so all the pools were made to drain away, and all the trapping barriers were removed.

After getting the gist of the situation, I went to go find Zeb and Zaka, along with one of the dwarven commanders and a translator so we could read the letter I received from the dark elves. Once everyone was gathered, the dwarven commander began to read.

"This letter is intended for the leadership fighting for the defense of Kembora. If you aren't strategic leadership, and you're reading this letter, please deliver it to whomever is your commander, and have them pass it on to the top level.

This letter should have been delivered by a dark elf. In short, dark elves frequently work as mercenaries, but that doesn't mean they can't be paid off. We've fronted the money to pay the particular group that is working with the humans off. They'll only functionally work as necessary for the humans as to not draw suspicion, but if an opportunity arises to turn a major battle, they'll switch sides. This may not be much, but I hope that this at least affords you some opening. Additionally, they'll be providing false information where possible to misinform Rathland. The dark elves number about 250, but they're quite elite individually. We can discuss financial repayment later, if you survive the attack.

As further advice, Rathland's leadership structure is pretty strict. If you manage to take out their commanders, I'd expect the remaining troops will retreat. Until then though, they're quite stubborn, as Rathland not only punishes deserters, but their families as well. The threat Rathland poses to their neighbors is enough reason for most of them to also stay and fight with them as long as Rathland's leadership wills it, which is all the more reason to remove Rathland's leadership first.

When this letter was written, it does seem that a bit over 100,000 troops are being amassed to fight you. I'll do what I can to keep other nations from joining their cause.

Best of Luck,

Elloetta"

After the dwarven commander finished reading the letter, and the translator in the room gave us the translation, we all looked at each other.

"It's definitely better than nothing." The dwarven commander stated.

"Well, it's too bad they weren't there on the beach. Honestly, that would have been a good opportunity for them..." I respond.

As I observe the room, it's clear the mood is quite grave. I mean, of course it would be. We're facing an absolutely overwhelming force, even this news doesn't change that by much. It does give us another out though, and that's really all we can hope for.

After we read the letter, I informed everyone about everything I'd seen at the beach, as well as info on the scouting base I saw. The news of how things went at the beach seemed to improve the mood more than the letter did.

Ultimately, discussion turned to our next stages of action. For now, we're holding our own within the second wall of the city. The enemy has moved back enough that we can't really hit them with siege weapons. Which means they're probably waiting for backup to arrive. I doubt they're expecting their backup to be as worn out as it will be though.

Similar to the situation with the fort at the beach, we have plans for a retreat from the city as well. Ultimately, we're sacrificing everything to have a chance at victory. Once an enemy army arrives, we'll gauge how well we can hold them off. Once things seem bad, we'll retreat to our citadel. From there, we'll begin evacuations for all but about fifty troops through the secret escape route. At the same time, a handful of soldiers will be taking the sewer route out towards the beach.

Once the majority of the army is out, we'll be sealing and hiding the actual escape tunnel. Our intention is to misdirect the enemy towards the beach instead of up the mountain. We spent a lot of time hiding the dam and reservoir on the mountain. We built large pillars within the reservoir, and then capped it off with stone, then dirt. We also built up some degree of natural looking rockface on the front side. Unless you know what you're looking at, you probably wouldn't assume it's a reservoir anymore.

Beyond that, the area around it is boobytrapped far more than anywhere else, and we've dedicated over one hundred personnel to the area. Their goal is to bait enemies away from the dam, rather than towards it. Ultimately, we had to do a lot of work moving the road further from the reservoir to prevent accidental discovery. We've also slowly been filling the reservoir all year. At this point, it's nearly full.

I've modified the city's water infrastructure, so if everything else goes according to plan the inlets to the city can handle significantly more water than the outlets right now. Once the enemy takes the city and gets comfortable, like they did with the fort on the beach, we'll release all the water in the dam, and flood the place. Ultimately, this will probably do more damage to morale and supplies than it will to individuals, but considering all our other attacks have also targeted exactly morale and supplies more than personnel, I'm hoping it proves effective. If this also opens up the opportunity for the dark elves to capture enemy leadership, all the better.

Having reached an agreement that we'll wait here until the enemy makes their next move, I swiftly fell asleep.

After all the excitement I experienced at the start of the war, this slow siege has felt like every day passes at a snails pace. For a week now we've been holed up waiting for the enemy to do something. It seems that the enemies' supplies that this side of the island have are in much better condition than the supplies that the other side of the island was left with. I was starting to worry that I might have misjudged the situation, and that they would, in fact, starve us out, but as of today, a significantly large army, likely from the beach, has arrived.

The new army's condition is quite poor. Their supplies seem limited, and their morale and condition isn't good. It's very clear that our strategy is taking a toll on their average soldier. They spent today reorganizing, and it seems like tomorrow they'll make their move on the second wall. Our double wall structure seems to be discouraging them from attempting to make any siege engines of their own, as maneuvering them through the outer city would be too difficult.

Given the qualities of the wood on the island, I know first hand that without metal reinforcement, you can't make reasonable siege weapons either, so we don't need to worry about any trebuchets attacking us. Soon, the next stage of our defense commences.

[Vol.4] Ch.54 Turning Tides

The enemy moved after two days of reorganization. From what I could tell using the telescope, they spent most of their time getting the new soldiers into better shape. Many of the soldiers are still suffering from a cough, and it seems like we did a pretty good job of damaging their supplies. Unfortunately for us, their numbers are still insanely larger than ours.

As their attack began, it became apparent just how overwhelming their strength is. I was hoping we could hold them off from reaching our citadel for at least a few hours. Instead, I found myself calling for the retreat to the citadel within twenty minutes, and from there, we sounded the final retreat through the secret tunnel nearly immediately.

They threw their full force at us from the start, with their mages capable of sieging us mixed in among the rest of their troops indistinguishably. This shock tactic played well for them, as we barely had any time to react to their strongest individuals before we began suffering under their magic.

Not that we didn't get them back to some degree. As soon as their siege individuals were identified, we threw as much force at them as we could, but given their army numbered in the tens of thousands, it was just too overwhelming. We managed to kill another thousand or so of their troops as we retreated thanks to our defensive siege weapons.

Thankfully, the retreat went well. It seems like the enemy didn't find our actual escape route. We monitored the tunnel through the rest of the day, and didn't see any indication that they found it. From further up in the valley, using a telescope, it does seem like the enemy bought our feint that we escaped back towards the beach using the sewers. We dug a few extra tunnels in that route as well, just to make it seem more believable.

The main enemy force seems wary of occupying our city though. Likely due to the damage they suffered on the beach with the fort. From up here, it's clear they're carefully searching every house and building to make sure we haven't hidden explosives or any other dangerous materials inside that we'd potentially use to sabotage them. We sealed the secret tunnel off for quite some distance behind us as we retreated, so it'd take quite the extensive mapping and digging effort for it to look any different than a sewer tunnel to someone using something like tectonic sense, so I hope that their attempt at finding anything hidden doesn't reveal it.

I'm hoping that after they don't find anything immediately amiss, they'll take to using our city as another base of operations. Ultimately, with an army of their size, they would need to spend a significant amount of labor to make a large enough camp for a long term base. They could attempt a staged retreat, where they send a large number of soldiers home, and wait for more ships to take the rest of their soldiers home too, that would be acceptable for us as well, since it would reduce the occupying army size considerably.

Ultimately, we're waiting to see what they do next while we continue our guerilla warfare on the enemy. As of right now I estimate we've directly and indirectly killed about seven thousand enemies while suffering a bit over one hundred casualties ourselves. Not record breaking, but definitely within the range of historic victories. That is, if we are to actually win.

As a few days dragged by, I think the enemy realized the predicament they were in. Without enough supplies to properly support their massive army, and a decent chunk of the army suffering from a persistent cough, they maneuvered a large number of their ships to the city's side of the island, and sent back about two thirds of their troops packed in half of the ships. It looked like they sent the remaining troops back with only enough food to make the return trip, and nothing extra. Almost all of the flags save for Rathland and two others seem to be leaving the island. I presume they consider they've contributed enough that Rathland would have a hard time strong arming them into staying further.

The enemy has also started using the city as a base of operations, but only the outer ring. They haven't moved anything into the central area, and are generally avoiding it. I noticed that the dark elves are still present, but are remaining in the scouting base rather than the city, but the other scouting parties have largely consolidated with the remaining army in the city.

Overall, the city is a good strategic base for a large army. It has central access to our roads, warehouses, walls, houses, cooking areas, and fresh water. Almost everything you could want. We've decided that we'll attempt to use the dark elves to turn the tide again now that a large number of the enemy have left on ships. We're currently sending two contingents of about one hundred and fifty troops out in an attempt to get the enemy to split their army out of the city. One is headed toward the craggy section of road, and the other is going to go the long way around the city to be spotted closer to the artificial tide pools, but headed toward the other valley.

Our goal is to appear to be moving our forces away from this valley, as if to set up more traps and fight in even more difficult terrain. Ultimately, that's exactly what those troops will do when they get to where they're going, but we're hoping to take extra advantage of our movement. The enemy currently has around fifteen-thousand troops left in the city by my estimates, give or take a few thousand. If they send out more than half their troops, we'll release the water in the reservoir on the city in an attempt to catch their leadership off guard.

After two days, both the contingents seem to have been spotted, and the enemy has sent out their own groups. Luck seems to be on our side yet again, as they've sent out about three-quarters of their total force. Judging from the size of their groups, I don't expect that all the soldiers are focused on going after our two contingents though. If I had to guess, some are headed to their ships for logistic reasons, and others are likely going to split off and fan out in an attempt to clear a larger portion of the island of all our traps.

So, without further ado, we started opening all the valves in the dam, releasing a massive torrent of water. Just the bottom valve would have been enough to slowly flood the city with the reservoir as full as it is. With that Zeb, Zaka, the dwarven commanders, myself, and most of our elite troops totaling about one hundred individuals made our way down to attempt an ambush.

There are still a few thousand enemy troops, so it's not like we're safe in what we're doing, but if the dark elves also catch on, then we can potentially end the war now. If we can capture and kill most of their leadership and retake the city, then we can attempt to negotiate a surrender.

As we reached the city, the water level was already rapidly rising within the walls. Outside the city walls, water was running around the city and making the area exceptionally muddy. It seems as though the dark elves picked up on our potential ploy as we ran into a few of them on the way here, and they seem to be gathering their forces.

Quite a few of the enemy troops were positioned up on the city walls, away from the water. Those troops are actually trapped currently though. As the water level continues to rise in the city wall, many of their troops spill out of the city through the gates while those on the wall are stuck, unable to get out through the crowds and rising water. As more chaos takes root, we watch from our ambush position, looking for the enemy commanders.

A few commanders are on the walls, but most are spilling out from the walls making their way further from the city to escape the flood waters. Among the soldiers on the wall, I recognize at least one important looking individual, the Baron we met before. Among those on the ground though, there is one individual who stands out considerably compared to others.

It's very obvious from the way the soldiers around them are behaving that they're important. They look relatively young, but look like they can handle themselves well. We've caught most of the enemies off guard, with most individuals not having any armor or weapons. Fifteen of the soldiers around this individual are fully equipped, however.

As our group began our ambush on the important looking individual, the dark elves also began their betrayal. Perhaps thanks to the fact they used to be allies with the humans, they know who the majority of the enemy commanders are, and a few enemy individuals die immediately from magic and precision arrow strikes.

As we get closer to our target, it becomes apparent that the soldiers around them are quite skilled, as they've already picked up on the situation and have identified not only our attack, but the dark elf betrayal. They form a protective circle around our target, and we prepare ourselves for a tough fight.

[Vol.4] Ch.55 Terrifying Presence

As we charge in, more and more of the nearby enemy soldiers realize what's happening. Unfortunately for them, most of them are unarmed. Many of the combatants turn and run from our force, causing even more chaos on the battlefield, which works as excellent cover, preventing more of the enemy from interfering in our attack.

I wasn't wrong in my assessment of the suited up soldiers, everything isn't going perfectly. One soldier fires off one of those powerful cutting attacks I saw before, and cleaves through about a dozen of our attack force, and about an equal number of their own chaotically retreating soldiers.

As we get closer, a few of our hobgoblins magically launch javelins at the soldiers with incredible force. Every javelin that flies forward is nearly instantly met by a mud and stone wall magically placed between us and the soldiers, stopping all the javelins. As we round the wall, the first of our side that comes around the wall on either side are instantly killed. A few die in a powerful fireball, and a few others are cut down by multiple rapid sword strikes.

Despite bringing our more elite forces, we're still losing numbers quite quickly, almost exclusively to this small group of soldiers. We're still a little over a hundred feet from the walls, but that doesn't stop them from firing arrows at us. I'm thankful that the wall is actually pretty packed thanks to the flooding happening in the city, so their archers are having trouble, and they've run out of ammo for our ballistae, because the ammo was stored at ground level.

The water outside the city has reached ankle deep as our force meets with our target. Despite our initial losses, as we finally got into melee range, things started going our way. In this fight, for once in this conflict, we're the side with superior numbers. The first two casualties of their fifteen come in short succession. The first dies to a coordinated attack by three of our hobgoblins working as a single fighting unit with steel spears. Their target managed to deflect two of the three spears using their shield and sword at the same time, but the third strike hit them in the neck. They didn't go down immediately, but within a few moments, they'd been struck a few more times, and succumbed to their injuries.

The second one to fall died in a one on one with Zaka. Zaka seems to have gotten quite used to his new troll body, and has adopted some... questionable tactics. As his enemy thrust their short sword at him, he purposefully drove their sword into his own arm, grabbed their hand and yanked them in towards himself, pulling them off balance. With his other hand, he gripped their face and cast a point blank fireball, incinerating their head. After that display, a bunch of onlookers who were unsure about fighting turned tail and ran.

After that, I made my way into the fray and found my own target. A soldier in heavy metal armor who was successfully fending off four dwarves using some sort of speed enhancement magic or ability. Thanks to the fact my improved earth spike shoots three spikes out, instead of one, I got in range as the dwarves kept the soldier distracted, and from three sides I drove the earth spikes up in to them. To their credit, they twisted in a way to immediately avoid any serious injury, but their dodge threw them off balance, allowing a dwarf to land a more devastating strike into one of their legs, after which the other three dwarves were able to land blows bringing them down.

I still have the mana for three more improved earth spikes, so I change targets. A few more soldiers died, and the person they are defending is now open to attack. Ultimately, we don't want to kill them, but capture them. So I move in as the dwarves I was just fighting with also move in.

We're caught off guard by an attack from our target. They slam their foot into the water, and the ground in front of them raises and falls in a fast moving wave towards us. Mud and water splashes up, blocking our view for a moment. Before we can react, two of the dwarves have been cleaved in half by the individual. It seems we underestimated their combat ability because they were being guarded so heavily.

As the two dwarves' bodies collapse, I reflexively throw earth spikes out, and the individual leaps up and back, dodging the spikes. Before they land, they send out one of those cutting attacks, lining up both me and a dwarf. I dodged, but the dwarf had their arm severed at the shoulder as they slipped in the mud while attempting to dodge.

Ok, this is bad. I have no idea how long this individual can keep this up, or if they have any other tricks up their sleeve. I don't doubt we can capture them, but the question now is how many of our numbers are going to be sacrificed for it. I don't have much time to think about that though, as he sends another wave of mud and water at us. This time we react by diving backwards, and dodge his follow up attack.

That doesn't mean we aren't still able to be hit. He sends another magic cutting attack at the last dwarf with me. The dwarf fails to fully dodge the attack, and I'm left in a one-on-one for the moment. My target shouts something, and the remaining soldiers that are fighting with him let out a roar and their fighting breaks out even more desperately. More spells fly out wildly from both sides as the fighting becomes more intense around me.

At this point, my goal is just to survive until more fighters on my side can make it in to this central area to fight. I'm forced to use an emergency defensive measure as the individual charges me with a magically enhanced rush attack. I place my hand on my leather armor and expend about 100 mana on tectonic sense.

As his sword hits my armor, I'm thrown backwards by the force of the blow, but his sword shatters. Only a few of us have the ability to use this leather armor in this way. As part of the tanning process, it was treated specifically with the bark water from the trees here, and then again retreated with it twice in the leather making process. That resulted in the mana hardening properties from the tree being embedded in the armor. For the next five minutes or so, the leather should remain as hard and rigid as steel. That's why my armor is shaped differently than a lot of other soldier's leather.

He seems shocked by what happened to the sword, and jumps back again. He shouts something, and a new sword gets tossed from somewhere into the area where we are fighting. I'd like to know where the sword came from, but I can't take my eyes off him, or I risk another lighting fast attack hitting me.

Thankfully, that whole event bought me a few moments to catch my breath. He does another mud wave move blocking my vision briefly. I retreat backwards as it approaches, trying to give myself as much space to dodge whatever attack follows. The wave starts to lose momentum, and another cutting blast flies through the wave itself, and I dive to the ground to dodge it.

As I'm on the ground, in the mud and water, I can see him dashing towards me with that enhanced speed again. Thankfully, I don't need to be standing to use earth spike, and I put up three defensive spikes right in front of me, forcing him to leap and overshoot me, giving me time to get to my feet again.

This time, he has to suddenly dodge as a fireball flies past him. From nearby, I see Zaka has made it into the central area here. His arm that had the sword embedded in it already looks like it has clotted and looks like a day old wound. His regenerative capabilities are really terrifying. Combined with his over eight foot stature now he's quite the terrifying presence.

It seems like more of the soldiers are falling and they're now failing to keep our stronger soldiers from forcing their way into this central fight. I don't know if our enemy's plan is just to take as many of us down with them as they can, or if they expect to escape. It doesn't change our goal though.

Another mud wave flies toward Zaka, and from this angle, I can see more of what's happening. The individual runs behind the wave, and readies themself to either use their sword or fire magic through the center of the wave itself, since they can't seem to see through it either. I start to move in towards it, but I'm not nearly as fast as the individual.

Zaka's fighting style is hard to adapt to if you haven't fought it before though. Rather than fight defensively, he willingly lets himself get injured to gain advantage in combat. Rather than dodge the wave, he throws himself through it. The individual reflexively brings their sword up at Zaka's arm which is coming down in a powerful swing.

The individual ends up going down to one knee due to the power of the swing, but cleaves Zaka's arm completely off at the elbow. I just get in range to use improved earth spike, aiming all three of the spikes at their legs. They manage to stumble backwards onto their back, rather than having their legs impaled, though the force of the spikes still causes them to spin in the mud and water and lose control of their sword.

Zaka doesn't seem to care about his cleaved arm, and throws his entire body onto our target in the mud. He takes his injured, but complete arm, and forcibly brings it down on our target's shins, and I hear a sickening crack. Our target moves their hand and fires off another cutting magic attack, severing Zaka's other arm.

Zaka, now armless continues using his body to hold our target down. Our target seems intent on fighting until the end. I use the last of my mana to earth spike through their forearms, severing them at the elbow. With their arms severed, and their legs broken, I tell Zaka to get off them, and I pick them up, and shout to make a path to our soldiers.

The target wriggles and struggles, making it hard to carry them, but it seems that without their arms and legs, they aren't able to actually put magic into their resistance. Despite losing both his arms, Zaka is still completely lucid. Troll vitality really is terrifying. As we attempt to carry off our target, a few of the remaining soldiers make last ditch attempts to stop us, but that only results in them getting cut down as they turn their attention away from individuals they are currently fighting.

As we retreat off the battlefield, I notice that most of the unarmed enemy troops have retreated far away from us now. There are quite a few other soldiers who are dead in the area, and it looks like we lost about half of the forces we came here with. The enemy seemed to fare much worse though, with lots of soldiers dead in the area.

After a short while, we've made it to relative safety, and join up with the dark elves.

[Vol.4] Ch.56 King Besmond III

Once we join up with the dark elves, we have some dwarves who can use healing magic begin to treat our captives. Most of them were severely injured, so the last thing we wanted was them potentially dying and losing us our leverage. While the dark elves captured four individuals, our side only captured our one target.

As our captives were treated, I started talking with the dwarven leadership and a representative of the dark elves to get a better grasp of our current situation. The dark elves said they took out thirteen other leaders in the enemy forces and captured four of the more valuable individuals who were unarmed at the time of our ambush.

The next bit of information was probably the most surprising gift we could have asked to receive. We captured their king. Not in the sense of a chess metaphor either. We literally captured the king of Rathland, Besmond III. He's a relatively young man, and appears to be in his late twenties or early thirties. That's basically the best bargaining chip we could ask for. Though I do question how good of a king he can actually be considering that only a handful of elite troops actually tried to protect him during our ambush.

More importantly though, we now need to arrange for some form of negotiation with whatever is left of the enemy leadership. Ideally, we get them to retreat in exchange for releasing some of the hostages after they leave. Though I'm not so sure we'll have an easy time with that. For today, we'll retreat high up the mountain to a few hidden locations to recuperate while we wait to hear how badly the rest of the troops who ran interference fared. Hopefully we can get some information out of our captives while we have them as well.

Later that night, I have a few dark elves and dwarfs with me while I attempt to get information from our captives. Ultimately, I don't intend to resort to torture because they may be bargaining chips in the near future, but they need to believe that we're willing to torture them if we want to pressure them to release information to us. So I spent some time stone shaping some torture devices like a device called "The Rack" which is a table that uses leverage to slowly pull people apart, an iron maiden, and a bunch of scary looking tools.

We brought in individuals one by one, questioned and threatened them, and then when we felt we got enough information, got the next one and swapped them out. The leaders that the dark elves captured provided us some degree of tactical information like troop numbers and strategies that the enemy was employing, but most of that information the dark elves had already provided us earlier in the day. Ultimately, having a large amount of the enemy scouting force defect to our side provided us with as much, if not more information than the captured captains provided.

Last came their King. We decided to bring him to a different room. Regardless of our feelings on the matter, even the threat of torturing their king might cause a lot of problems down the line. To some degree, this is a negotiation in and of itself. King Besmond himself could technically call off the invasion, but considering the situation, we can't just parade him out to tell the enemy to retreat. They simply outnumber us too much, and could attempt something desperate. If the King died, then we wouldn't have the bargaining chip anymore.

So although I wish this could be the only negotiation we would have to do, in actuality, I'll have to negotiate with the enemy army's active leadership at some point in the near future. Regardless of any of that, I wanted to actually start our conversation off in a way that wouldn't harm our relations any further. Rathland may be our enemy, but smart politics is avoiding war, not engaging in it.

As he was situated at the table across from me, the first thing that I thought to do was actually apologize, "I am sorry about your arms and legs. I hope you have some way to heal them. War is war though, and I would have preferred if we had been left alone."

"I suppose war is war. Rathland has many healers capable of repairing my limbs, though I do not appreciate that I'll need to ask them to do so. There is one problem with your statement though, we cannot simply 'leave you alone' after you technically started the war, it would be a smear on Rathland's pride." The King responds.

"You say we started the war, but as far as we know, we haven't engaged in a single warlike action, unless you mean declining your offer to become slaves to your country on no real legal standing."

The King chuckles before responding, "No, not that offer, though I would have found it amusing if you had accepted. That was simply a free political bargain. If no offer was likely to be accepted, given your existing political ties, we simply insisted on a 'deal' that was most favorable to us. If you were foolish enough to accept that, then I wouldn't even have to feel bad, since you'd be too politically naïve to understand the consequences of your choice. No, the actions I'm referring to are your piracy within our seas. Rathland could honestly care less about this small island. We have bigger political aims, and you seemed harmless. Then you started active piracy within our sovereign waters. What did you expect?"

"Look, we can drop the act. Both of us know that we weren't the ones committing piracy, and you aren't going to suddenly convince the dwarves that we are actually the bad guys. Kao Ostark personally verified that we weren't the source of the demon pirates. Though I'll admit it's great cover for your side of the story. It sounds like most countries already see demons as a purely evil force, so it was easy to break any image that we were different by staging a piracy attack."

The King's face gets serious and he stares at me for a few moments, then evaluates the dwarves in the room as well. "Yet only our closest allies actually took up the call of the oldest treaties related to defense from demons. I had thought it was because the other countries considered you too small a threat to mobilize everything. I think we both might be playing to someone else's tune here."

The King looks at me like he expects me to complete his thought. When I don't, he sighs, "Maybe you are too politically naïve after all. Rathland has very little to gain from this attack. An island in a non-valuable location that we can only get an unknown, but likely small number of resources from, and can only access in winter? Why bother wasting this much effort on claiming it? We're primarily a maritime nation, we're no strangers to the difficulty of landing operations, though I'll admit yours had some surprises for us. Likewise, what do you have to gain from piracy when it was fairly obvious before that you were managing your own affairs well enough, you likely wouldn't even be able to sell the stolen goods. We chocked it up to the irrationality of demons based on prior encounters, but having met you directly now I doubt that's the case, though again you seem naïve. No, a third party seems to be pulling the strings."

I think on it for a while. This does make sense, if what he's saying is true. "Then you'd have no trouble with a full retreat, so both of us can preserve our forces to manage this unseen threat?"

"Well, obviously I'm a captive, have been injured, and I have no evidence of the third party, and I'd have a hard time convincing any other country of that notion. The public evidence is quite hard to go against. I'd need some kind of victory to take home. Running a country as a King doesn't mean I don't have to answer to the public or nobility, especially after the losses we've already incurred."

It's my turn to sigh. I can't really disagree with his assessment of his own country, but I can't back down on this either. I'm not going to give them enough to consider it any form of victory. Which means I'd have to send them back with a defeat. "I'm afraid those terms won't work for us, for similar reasons. I hope that whoever we negotiate with from your side is willing to back down."

"Well, unless he's dead, you'll probably be negotiating with my Chancellor, The Baron of Compfur, Darius. Considering he was my political teacher, I doubt his opinion will be much different."

With that, our conversation seemed to be over. The King was taken back to his prisoner accommodations, and I went to sleep. It seems like I'll have to deal with The Baron of Compfur again, I'm not looking forward to that.

[Vol.4] Ch.57 Castelet Marionnettes

By the morning, a few information reports came in related to the troops that we had sent out as a distraction. While they successfully drew away enemy troops, it also resulted in pretty bad losses due the sheer size of the enemy armies and the lack of a significant amount of already prepared traps. A little over one hundred troops were killed on our side. After that, a few dark elves were sent out to deliver a letter to the enemy to schedule a meetup to discuss prisoner exchange demands. We really want these negotiations to go through, otherwise we'll soon be resorting to hiding in our bunkers to wait out our enemies.

Two days later the time for the meeting arrived. Myself and one of the dwarf commanders were the representatives for our side, along with an entourage of thirty soldiers. The enemy's representative was, in fact, Darius, The Baron of Compfur. He was accompanied by his own group of thirty soldiers. The meeting location was in the ruins of the village that was destroyed during the dwarven invasion years ago. Although the area was in disrepair and overgrown, some of the buildings were still intact.

The negotiating parties and a small number of soldiers from each side entered one of the most intact buildings in the rundown town to begin the negotiations. The Baron started the conversation before we could, and surprisingly he spoke in the demon language. Something no one from our side was expecting.

"Alright, lets get these negotiations over with, so we can both leave with what we want," he said. When the translator got ready to translate, The Baron shook his head to stop. "I'd rather this conversation not be overheard by anyone potentially listening in from my own side, so I'd prefer if we kept this to the demon tongue." He pauses then speaks in Dwarvish, "I apologize if this is inconvenient, but I hope you can trust your compatriot to keep you informed afterward, I'd rather this conversation only be heard between me and him."

The dwarven commander sighs and sits back in his chair, "Alright, but we obviously reserve the right to start talking about anything on the spot if we feel it's necessary."

The Baron replies in Dwarvish again, "Of course, that's fair enough, though I'd ask your translator also leave the room. You can summon him back at any time you want." He pauses again and waits for the dwarven commander to relieve the translator temporarily, and then he resumes talking in the demon language now, "So, as I was saying before, lets keep these negotiations brief, and we can both leave with what we want."

I eye him up suspiciously, "Forgive me if I'm not necessarily willing to keep this particularly brief. There are many questions that have come up recently, and you speaking demon isn't particularly comforting related to that information. Normally, in a situation like this, we'd ask for reparations for the damages done to the island, but I'm not foolish enough to think we can win if your country truly wanted to wipe us out. Instead, we'll settle for a full withdrawal from our island, and a formal verbal proclamation that you recognize our sovereignty."

He lets out a long sigh, "Well, those are some demands. Lets discuss what I want, and then see if we can meet somewhere in the middle."

"I imagine you want us to release your King and the four commanders we captured. They're all alive, in case you were wondering."

"Yes, well, that is probably what you'd think. Really though, capturing our King at this stage has put me in quite the predicament. Yes, I suppose I would want you to release our King and commanders to our custody. However, I want it done in a particular way. See, I'd much rather the King perish. You can think on that information on your own time. It's unfortunate he didn't perish in either of your initial attacks, either the sinking of our dreadnaught, or in your interesting surprise at the beach fort. Had he died then, I could have signaled a general retreat, and we'd be done with it."

"Hold up, why do you want the King dead? I mean, I can imagine reasons, but it makes it hard to trust someone who says they plan on committing regicide to hold their promise of retreat. If you tell me why though, then I can hold on to that secret as a guarantee of security."

"Clever, I'll give you a deeper secret than that as a guarantee, that should satisfy you. Well, it's been a long plan, one dating back to Besmond I, the current King's grandfather. Nearly twenty years ago, Rathland was a small nation ruled by an old King. Eventually a demon invasion came, and thanks to our skilled soldiers, Rathland was left relatively unharmed while our neighbors suffered heavily. Besmond II and myself were close friends and I convinced him that, for the security of all the neighboring countries, they should exist under our leadership, rather than their own leaders, who had lead them to such devastation. Besmond I disagreed, and believed we should simply send aid to our neighbors.

"So Besmond II committed regicide and, not long after, many neighboring nations fell. I found myself in the position of chancellor. Besmond II was frequently on the battlefield, but entrusted his heir and only son, Besmond III to me for his courtly training. Besmond II eventually grew content after having captured the most mismanaged of our neighbors, and returned after ten some years at war. By then, Besmond III had become a man. I raised him on more ambitious ideals than his father. Further conquest was the goal.

"Soon, the father was once again killed by the son, and Besmond III lead the armies of Rathland further, expanding our territory to new heights. Still retaining my position as chancellor, I played both sides. The anti-war nobles found me verbally supporting them but their plans would never quite materialize thanks to the strong military central powers of Rathland's crown, all the while I encouraged Besmond III to go further. Ultimately, Besmond III has no heirs, having spent most of his time on the battlefield, and having only sired three daughters. I have, in recent years, gotten somewhat desperate as Besmond III has somehow managed to survive wild war after wild war. Should he die, I have more than enough support to claim control of Rathland for myself, along with a few thousand fully loyal troops of my own here with me on this island.

"We have an interesting opportunity presented to us, you and I. You see, on the way here, well over a dozen ships were completely wiped out by Leviathans. So I propose that we send most of our side's troops home, along with all four of the commanders you have captured, save for the king. Myself and one-thousand men will remain for an extra two weeks, at such point you will release the king to us. Since two weeks is the transit time back to the mainland, surely you're probably aware our logistics have been quite severely hampered by your efforts, so simply keeping our troops at sea for two weeks to ambush you again would mean they'd likely have to starve themselves to pull it off.

"Then, I'll organize the few remaining ships such that the king's loyalists will all be on his ship with him. At sea we'll sink the King's ship, then claim a Leviathan sunk his ship, and that your side was honorable in returning him. We'll remain for a few days in the area to make sure him and his crew are dead, claiming we were searching for the king when we return.

"Before you get ahead of yourself and think about immediately blackmailing me with the secret I've given you, know that no soldier here will care. The troops I've brought with me are loyalists. The reason for speaking in demon isn't for my troops, but to keep the dwarves and any potential dark elves from the direct information. After the King's unfortunate death, though, then your story would probably hold some water. Before it, however, only Besmond III himself would potentially believe you, but he's currently a captive and not in charge of the military.

"If you release the four commanders tomorrow, then I'll have the vast majority of our troops retreat, and the rest of us will relocate back to the original landing beach. At that point, the majority of the troops remaining will be my own loyalists, and Besmond III knowing anything wouldn't matter much, other than us having to kill him on your territory, and leaving you to clean up that mess after we tell our population that you killed him rather than returning him to us. If you don't release the four commanders by tomorrow though, then we'll begin burning all the forests and attempting to flush you out properly.

"I'll send loyalist troops up the mountain to the scouting fort that the dark elves were using to pick the commanders up. If they're spouting any nonsense about how I'm a traitor, or the King is there, or any other oddities happen, then we'll simply kill them directly and claim you did it. A demon's word against my own, I wonder who's would win..."

As the Baron speaks, his physical performance doesn't actually match what he's saying, and I realize after a short while it's so that no one else in the room would realize anything other than an animated negotiation was currently happening.

"I see, so we've all just been dancing on the palm of your hand. I take it you've always known that we weren't the pirates too?"

"Honestly, it took a lot of effort to keep Besmond III himself from realizing it, though I did raise him to be quite prideful, so it wasn't that hard to convince him that you were all just mad demons and your illogical action was just like a starving animal biting someone attempting to feed it.

"The steam cannons were quite ingenious, though. I hope you appreciated our own version. I had our head alchemical researcher study the design, and they came up with their own design utilizing the blood of Rathgores, a creature that breathes fire that our country takes it's name from, to allow for rapid firing through mana infusement. Of course, now that design sits at the bottom of your own bay..."

"Well, I suppose we don't have that much of a choice, considering how forceful you are in your demands, but I do have two additional demands. The allegations that we were the pirates has done quite a bit of damage to our reputation, as I imagine you are aware. I'd also like for you to make a public announcement that after your invasion, you found no evidence that we were behind the piracy. To quote yourself as to why, 'A demon's word against my own, I wonder who's would win...'. Second, although reparations to us would likely be unpalatable, especially after the King perishes in transit, both the dwarves and us will need some degree of recompense for our losses. Especially after you publicly state that we weren't the pirates. I believe that is the current justification for the war, after all."

The Baron lets out a chuckle, "Fine, I'll do that as well as part of our formal recognition of your sovereignty. Though don't expect it to be a large sum, and it'll probably take years before we can actually pay you, as I'll need to solidify my power in Rathland first. Any complaints?"

I think on it for a while and reach out to shake hands, "No, if everything goes as you plan, then I suppose we can agree on those terms."

The Baron shakes my hand, "Pleasure doing business with you." He turns to the dwarf commander with me and says something in Dwarvish before giving a brief bow and leaving.

After the humans leave, I talk with the dwarf commander through our translator. I leave out the actual details of the negotiation, but tell him the agreed upon terms, and what our demands are. When I make it back up to our fort, I'll want to inform both Zeb and Zaka about the full details though, in case I'm killed in some kind of betrayal, then we'll at least still have the blackmail bargaining chip.

[Vol.4] Ch.58 Power Struggle

Although we didn't have much time to execute on the plan, I managed to make it work out. I informed Zeb and Zaka of the full details, including the Baron's secret. Then, in the early morning hours, we moved the commanders down to scouting base for the handoff. Honestly, if the Baron had planned to use this as an opportunity for an extra ambush, it wouldn't have been a bad idea.

We had safety concerns given we were transporting prisoners who knew where we were keeping the king, so after the commanders were out of where we were keeping them, everyone had to relocate to even further hiding spots. Thankfully, that ended up being unnecessary, as the enemy only picked up the prisoners, then left. I was running on only a few hours of sleep, so I was happy to finally get some sleep after retreating to a hiding spot.

Within a few days, the majority of the enemy troops had left the island, matching the agreement we made during negotiations. We had to send out a lot of individual scouts to inform as many of our hiding soldiers as possible about the temporary ceasefire. For good measure, and to keep tensions from escalating again, we sent a handful of our own troops as an escort for the enemy as they moved back to the beach on the far side of the island. We didn't move back into the city right away though. We decided it would be wise to carefully re-explore the city, just in case any soldiers left a parting gift.

I was also at a loss as to how the dark elves were going to get back to the mainland. They had ridden over in other countries' ships, so they didn't have ships of their own, but when I brought it up, they said they had sent a message, and that they expect some ships to be picking them up not long after the remnants of the Rathland military would be leaving.

I was intrigued as to how they sent a message over such a long distance, but was slightly disappointed that it was done by using a courier bird. Though I was glad to hear that the bird itself used magic to fly at extremely fast speeds. According to the dark elf, it can travel from one continent to the next in a day, so they suspect the message was received on the same day it was sent. For good measure, they even sent three of the birds to ensure the message got through.

I was surprised I hadn't seen them using the birds, or for that matter, I haven't seen one yet. The dark elf told me that they keep them hidden and secret because of their rarity and value. Even their allies aren't shown them unless absolutely necessary. I checked the info the dark elf gave me with a dwarven soldier and commander, and both agreed that they'd heard of their use, and the commander said that Kao has supposedly seen one before.

Since we had some time until the ships arrived and we needed to do the prisoner exchange, I told Zaka and Zeb to stay at the city with the other injured and a handful of soldiers who were in better condition to start securing it, and making sure that everything was safe before beginning repairs. As for myself, I'll be going with the dark elves, a handful of our soldiers, and a bunch of the dwarven soldiers as an escort to bring King Besmond III to the Baron of Compfur, Darius.

As the day of the handoff finally arrived, I found myself feeling somewhat apprehensive. I basically haven't talked with King Besmond III since we basically agreed to hand him off to be executed. I'm sure there was information to be gained from interacting with him, but it felt wrong to try to squeeze more info out of him. Practically speaking I knew I should, but on the other hand, a small part of me was worried that if I ended up empathizing with him that I would have trouble handing him over. It's one thing to kill someone on a battlefield, but it's an entirely different thing to sell their life for your own.

Though I came to regret not keeping a closer eye on King Besmond III and his mental state. When the time finally came for the handoff, it was mid morning, and not long after handing him over to Darius, a physical fight broke out and escalated to a full battle. I was taken aback, and we retreated to the edge of the beach. I suspect that King Besmond III came to the same conclusion as I did about who probably orchestrated this whole war, and realized the predicament he was in.

Either way, the loyalists are outnumbered three to one, and King Besmond III is still a quadriplegic, so I don't expect the battle to last very long. I'm not, however, looking forward to the cleanup. I suspect we're going to be left with the task of disposing of the bodies and covering up the whole event.

As the battle raged on, the King's forces took up positions within the abandoned fort, turning the battle into a protracted endeavor. Just as I was starting to wonder just how long the battle would potentially go on for, I spotted three ships coming toward the beach from the horizon. I suspected that the ships were here to pick up the dark elves.

As the ships got closer, I recognized the flag to be the same symbol that marked Elloetta's goods and letter. As the new ships got closer, the fighting parties on the beach seemed to call a temporary cease-fire until they figured out what was going on. The ships parked some distance from the battle, and approximately one hundred elves disembarked from the ships. The dark elves started travelling towards the ships, and I assumed that would be the end of it.

Darius started shouting something, and there was a brief back and forth between him and King Besmond III from inside the fort. That, however, was cut short by an extreme amount of magic obliterating nearly half of Darius's forces in an artificially amplified wave of water from the ocean from which hundreds of spikes of ice spurted out stabbing through individual soldiers.

It happened so quickly that I nearly missed it, but the dark elves were now forming a vanguard in front of the elves from Elloetta. I stayed as far away from all of this as I could with the dwarves and my small number of hobgoblins. Whatever is happening now, I don't want any part in it.

The two human forces on the beach reacted and Darius's forces retreated into the fort, joining with King Besmond III's forces. However, that didn't delay the elves by much. Their magic was simply on a different scale, and made me realize that, although I thought our defenses were pretty solid, against some unknowns they were far too inadequate.

Another magically enhanced wave towered at least ten feet over the top of the twenty foot walls of the fort, filling the inside with a large amount of water. The gates, which had been hastily repaired by King Besmond III's forces were blown open, and soldiers were washed out by the water. While they were being carried out by the water, they too were skewered by ice.

Between more ice and water magic, all the human forces were wiped out within less than forty minutes. A total massacre. Only two elves and seven dark elves died from the ordeal. A handful of powerful soldiers from the human side managed land lethal blows in the end. I was hesitant to reveal ourselves, but then a powerful, yet soft, voice called out.

"Representative of Kembora and those with you. I know you have watched what has transpired. I merely wish to speak, feel free to send some away with knowledge of what has happened if you fear for your life. I am not here to harm you, though there are things that must be discussed immediately."

[Vol.4] Ch.59 Demands

Heeding the warning, I sent a handful of messengers to return to the rest of our army. If all goes well, then we'll return in one piece and the original messengers will have been pointless, but if things go south I want to make sure the rest of the army has adequate time to hide. After the messengers had their message and had left our location, I stepped out with the remainder of our forces that were over here.

As we approached, the scene was clearly very gruesome and contrasted heavily with the graceful appearance of the elves. Once I was close enough, I noticed Elora was among the elves, though she wasn't the one standing at the forefront. I wasn't sure exactly what to expect, but one thing was clear. Under no circumstances do I want to make an enemy of the elves in front of me. King Besmond III and the Baron's forces may have been weakened from weeks on the island, but the ease by which they were defeated was terrifying.

An elegant, but elderly looking female elf stepped forward when we were very close and spoke fluently in the demon language, "I am the elven matriarch, Elloetta. I know not what deal you may have struck with Rathland, so I apologize if we may have caused you some losses now, but we could not turn down such an opportunity to deal with such a problematic nation. As long as we can come to an agreement as to what has transpired today, you have nothing to fear."

Despite how calm and friendly her tone appeared, the hostility in her words was apparent. I had already decided that we should try to be friendly, but I now had the feeling that if we couldn't reach an agreement, no amount of hiding on the island would save us. "I'm sure we can come to an agreement. Do you already have something in mind as a cover story, or would you prefer to hear my opinion?"

"We do have something in mind already, but hearing another option can't hurt. Go on, you may speak your mind."

"The Baron of Compfur had initially planned to kill The King at sea and sink his ship, claiming a leviathan killed him. He was then going to exonerate us of the piracy claims which started the war once he gained power. I don't see why the leviathan story couldn't be adapted to having wiped out all their ships, rather than just The King's, other than needing someone to have seen the event. Their army apparently had already suffered attacks by leviathans on their way here so the story is believable. I mean no offense, but depending on your reputation, your side could potentially have been witness, though it might lead to some questions..."

Elloetta watches me with curiosity as I speak before responding, "With some adaptations, that could work. We would need to sink their ships far away from here, but it would be less likely to raise suspicions in general. Though we'd ask that you load their bodies into their ships for us. As for exonerating you of piracy, we'll see to some of that. Rathland itself is very likely to devolve into civil war and collapse after the loss of both their King and their next most competent politician, so you shouldn't need to worry about them seeking any form of vengeance."

There are so many questions I have, but I'm honestly terrified to ask them, but I decide to open with one smaller one to test the waters, "I don't mean to pry, and you can refuse to answer, but all of this has been a little confusing. Why did you kill both King Besmond III and the Baron?"

Elloetta lets out a sigh which makes me very nervous but she starts speaking after, "It's well known that Elves, especially High Elves, live for a very long time, and our reproduction cycles are very slow. Among most nations in the world, we take on the role of advisors, archivists, or researchers. The country we work in gains living memory of events far beyond their normal lifespan, and we gain peaceful leverage. Due to our longevity, we High Elves become quite individually powerful, but when we only reproduce once every twenty years, a single loss is devastating. If a human nation, which is capable of quickly replenishing it's numbers, were to remove all their Elven advisors, and begin taking over their neighbors, you could surely see our concern."

I got the feeling that wasn't the full story, but I was glad that I wasn't just killed on the spot for prying. "I understand. Given our reproductive speed, we'll also aim to stay on your good side, though trouble always seems to find us. Excuse me for asking this, but as I understand it, there are other Elven Matriarchs, why are you explicitly the one to intervene here? Wouldn't it be in all their interests to work towards this goal?"

Another sigh from Elloetta, though this one doesn't seem to be directed at me, "More than half of the other Matriarchs are more concerned with staying isolated. In my opinion, they don't fully grasp the threat we're under. Most of them live in more central regions of our continent, isolated from danger. Of the rest of us, we've divvied up the human countries as to whom we advise, so we don't step on each other's toes too much. Which is all the more reason when Rathland began on their path that we needed to act. It would be a problem if a nation we were supposed to oversee suddenly began attacking nations that were the domain of other Matriarchs."

I got the feeling from Elloetta's attitude that I should stop my line of questioning. "Alright, so outside of moving the bodies onto their ships, is there anything else we need to do? We have a lot of losses ourselves, and a lot of repairs we need to do."

"Ah, there are a few matters to discuss. First, a matter of payment for the dark elves. They are mercenaries for hire after all, and although they're partial towards working with us high elves, we still must pay. Given everything that has transpired, I feel a fifty-fifty split of their cost is fair, Elora will stay here after we've left to discuss the details. Second, Elora will be staying here for at least a year. As I've mentioned, we prefer to have someone working in countries of note. She'll act as both our diplomat, and whatever role you wish to put her in for work. Third, as Rathland is technically our concern, as they devolve into civil war there may be individuals who seek asylum. Given Rathland's notoriety with both it's close and far neighbors, we may ask that you take some of those refugees in, at least temporarily."

That's a lot to take in. I have no idea exactly how expensive the Dark Elves were. I don't necessarily mind Elora staying, although I'm not fond of how pushy this all is becoming. Finally, suddenly we're being forced to take in refugees? I'm not in a position to simply refuse, but I'll need some clarifications.

"Given how devastated our economy is, it may be some time before we can provide any form of payment for the dark elves' services. Also, taking in refugees on short notice will be impossible. We'll need at least a year to demilitarize and recover from the war before we can even consider taking in refugees. Also, are these refugees elves, or citizens of Rathland? How many would we expect to have to take in?"

"Then we'll front the payment to the dark elves and Elora will handle the negotiations of repayment to us. As for the refugees, given the time of year with which travel is possible to this island, it wouldn't likely be until next winter that you would be receiving any. They'd be human refugees. Individuals who are somewhat valuable, but who would be in danger staying on the continent as war breaks out. I wouldn't expect more than fifty that we'd feel the need to send this far away."

This is all going to be a pain in the ass, but I'm not honestly able to refuse. Unlike with Kao, where I felt I had some leverage, we're more cornered and overwhelmed, and their 'demands' aren't that much of a challenge of our sovereignty. "Alright. Is there anything else we need to discuss, or should we start cleaning up the bodies?"

"That is all that we need to discuss, Elora will handle more details moving forward. You may go do what you will."

With that, the majority of the elves returned to their ships, though a few stayed to captain the human ships which will eventually get sunk further out once they're loaded with all the bodies. Elora returned to us as we finished loading the bodies into the ships. With that, the elves sailed away, leaving us with the job of fixing our island up, and there is a lot of work to do.

[Vol.5] Ch.1 Reconstruction

The reconstruction process has been going well, though we aren't rebuilding everything to be exactly the same as it used to be. We started the repairs by rebuilding our artificial tide pools, and moving on from that to other necessary functions. After almost a year, we've gotten a lot of things back to the way they used to be, but we've maintained all our new defensive structures, and even expanded them to some degree. Elora insists that they aren't necessary, and that we won't be invaded immediately come winter, but we don't want to risk it.

I wish I could say that I had the freedom to work on interesting projects, but I was stuck working multiple jobs all year. Ultimately, we lost nearly half of our total population to the war, and so I had to increase the frequency of classes to keep up with the summoning of new population. In addition to that, many of our more complicated structures required repairs, and due to our initially reduced work force, I found myself being responsible for repairing a lot of that.

We still had a large retinue of dwarven soldiers on the island, so we at least had some amount of menial labor available. We reinstalled our crystal after the elves left, so this winter I suspect the trip to the mainland will be safe again. Until then, we'll have to continue to support the dwarven army.

Since I had the go ahead to put Elora to work, I had her begin working as an archivist for us. Given her fluency in a number of languages, though she initially lacked the ability to speak in the demon language, we had her begin recording things in dwarvish. There were a lot of records that had been neglected over the years, and many of them were now lost to time because the individual who had remembered them died during the war.

As such, Elora's first, and ongoing task, was to begin taking records of all the various historical events, followed by governmental records, and then, if there was any time left, the slow translation of all my previous recorded works from English on stone tablets to paper records in dwarvish. I still kept my original records in stone, in case anything happened to the paper records, but having a copy of many of my notes in dwarvish seemed prudent.

I also had Elora take a day each month where she'd be at the academy, teaching the basics of written and spoken dwarvish to anyone who wanted to learn it. Ultimately, she's filling the role currently that I had previously hoped that the two goblins we sent with Shasta would fill. Though they'll still be useful for us when they return. After everything that happened, I'd rather not rely too heavily on Elora.

I also took the time to return everyone's money from the vault that we stored it in, though quite a few individuals were no longer around to claim their money or goods. Their goods, I decided, would be distributed among the veteran survivors of the war, but their money would simply be collected. Considering all the demons on the island can trace their 'ancestry' back to Zaka equally, I didn't see any reason to distribute the money in the same way. The only reason goods were distributed is that the other two options of reselling them or destroying them didn't seem as fair.

During the war, many individuals gained levels, and I was no exception. It wasn't long after the war's conclusion that I reached level cap again.

<MYTHIC LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 100
HP: 3744/3744
MP: 1872/1872
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands

I was torn on what to select when I got the option to either evolve or prestige. On one hand, we just had a war and evolution would have allowed me to be more prepared if we suddenly had another one. On the other hand, I felt like I wouldn't get the opportunity to see the next prestige level if I don't take it here, given the ever slowing rate I've been gaining levels at.

As for my options that were presented at the time...

Available Traits:
Improved Endurance: Increases the amount of strenuous activity you can do at one time.
Heightened Reflexes: Shortens reaction time and allows for incredibly fast, albeit reflexive, dodging ability.
Heightened Strength: Greatly increases muscle mass and by extension strength.
Partial Sleep: User remains semi-conscious while asleep, allowing the performance of basic tasks. User requires a few extra hours of overall sleep to compensate.
Infuse Mana: Spell. Allows the direct and controlled infusion of mana into a surface. Variable Cost.

Available Species:
Ogre
Lava Demon

After I saw my options, I realized my decision was even harder than I thought it would be. I had another available species, and a few new traits that I was interested in. Partial Sleep seems incredibly useful, as it would drastically increase my productivity from physical activities, while Infuse Mana would likely open up many new avenues of research into materials that I previously was using tectonic sense to utilize. Of course, the other trait options were nice as well, improving my overall physical abilities isn't to be scoffed at.

Given that I've had many times in the past where I've had to do large amounts of menial labor, and how often that labor is tied to advancing technologies, I felt that partial sleep was probably the way to go. Infuse Mana was hard to pass on, but it is an unknown as to whether it is actually more useful than tectonic sense, or if tectonic sense will work for all cases where infuse mana would be useful.

Ultimately, I decided on prestiging and taking Partial Sleep.

<APEX LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 0
HP: 1369/1369
MP: 1079/1079
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance, Partial Sleep
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands, Pulverize

After I awoke from my prestige, I was surprised to see I had gained a new magic. I recalled that when I first became a lesser earth demon, I gained earth spike for free, so I was a little intrigued by what the new magic did.

Pulverize: Spell. Converts designated cubic volume of stone into fine sand instantaneously. Costs 100 mana per cubic foot.

I've manually performed this task many times in the past using stone shape, but that process is somewhat slow due to needing to mentally control the pulverization. This seems like a quick and easy variant. I'm a little intrigued as to why I got this for free at this point, but regardless, it will be quite useful. Unfortunately, it was somewhat redundant with the mechanical pulverizers that I made previously.

I did end up getting a lot of use from the partial sleep trait though, as I was able to do simple stone shaping work while partially asleep. It was quite the odd sensation, almost like lucid dreaming. I did find it slightly inconvenient that I ended up needing to be in that state for an extra three hours, meaning about half my day would be spent in the partially asleep state. Though that was easily made up for by the amount of extra work I got done.

Plus, if it came down to it, I could easily fully awaken from the state if I suddenly needed all my mental capacity, I'd just need to resume sleeping after whatever pressing matter required my attention. My new wakefulness took some getting used to for others in the city though, as I'd often initially get asked questions when I was trying to sleep which would require me fully waking up to actually answer properly.

I took some of my time in my partial sleep state to build a memorial to everyone who lost their lives defending Kembora. I made a large obelisk where names were eventually carved for all the individuals who died. I also relocated the old, smaller memorial that I made years ago to be located next to the obelisk.

Among those we lost, there were a few familiar names. Zata, the personable goblin that worked in city hall, Boggs, the fisherdwarf, and Karta Debroik, one of the dwarven commanders. When we were training the army, I was surprised that Boggs had wanted to participate, but he'd insisted that with his high level, even though he didn't have any combat skills, he'd be useful. According to some of the goblins, he decided to participate due to our complete mobilization. It didn't sit right with him that when even our goblins who were craftsman were being drafted and trained up, he'd just sit idly by only helping them gain levels through deep sea fishing.

This was a notion that most of the other dwarves didn't share. Most of them have families though, so I understand their reluctance to fight. Boggs was always an enigmatic individual, so I suppose I shouldn't have been that surprised that he participated in the fighting. I've decided that we'll name the fishing jetty in his honor once it is completed.

[Vol.5] Ch.2 Safety in Numbers

We all waited with baited breath for the first two weeks of winter until the first news from the outside world finally made it's way to us. Initially, we became very apprehensive when we saw fifteen ships approaching the island, but after we recognized the ships as being part of Kao's fleet, we became relieved.

Kao, Shasta, and a handful of other military personnel arrived to both pick up the dwarven soldiers as well as get first hand accounts of what happened in the war here. After we gave the full rundown over the course of a few days, Kao seemed quite keen on working with the dwarves who I had tasked with helping to make the rifled artillery. While they're too difficult to make to be useful on a ship, as singular defensive weapons, they can be incredibly powerful, so I'm not surprised at his interest in them.

We got a rundown on what had been happening throughout the rest of the world from them as well. A little over a week after the enemy troops had shipped out to attack us last year, it sounds like the handful of elven ships set off from an area not far from Rathland. A week later, a few ships from one of the neighboring countries returned and reported that the bulk of their fleet was attacked by leviathans. While Kao wasn't able to verify the exact numbers, it sounds like over ten ships were destroyed in the first encounter with leviathans alone, and that had convinced that country's commander that the whole attack should be called off and re-evaluated.

The news that the fleet was attacked by leviathans seemed to spread like wildfire through the mainland. In fact, according to Kao, it seemed to spread faster than should have been possible. Regardless of that fact, Rathland itself devolved into civil war within a week, with four different factions vying for control. Kao said that the uprisings themselves were quite weak, and could have easily been crushed by Rathland's central military, or their neighbor's military, had they been present, but rumors had begun to circulate already that the King and Baron's ship was eaten by a leviathan, so many people felt the need to back one of these new factions instead.

When we tried to line the timelines up though, these rumors came a full month before anything had happened to the King or Baron, and in fact, this all began happening almost a week before the invasion of our island even started. Things continued to devolve over the following weeks until the bulk of the military returned home.

At that point, though they were currently lacking their leader, they began to stomp out the rebellious factions who had spread the lies that the King and Baron had died. Though only a little over two more weeks later, the Elven Matriarch Elloetta would announce that she had seen both King Besmond III and The Baron of Compfur's ships being destroyed by leviathans. Between herself and the elves with her, they had managed to keep a leviathan from destroying their own ship, at the cost of a significant amount of mana.

Of course, that was just the story they had told everyone. While less than half of the Rathland military believed that story, with winter coming to an end, and with no evidence of either the King or Baron returning, the military itself split into factions, and the civil war began again after only a month.

A month later, Elloetta personally asked Kao to temporarily take in a few refugees that she eventually wanted to take refuge on our island instead. Kao agreed for a small fee after hearing we had already agreed to take them in, which we verified today when asked. I'm a little frustrated by the whole ordeal, because it feels like we're a country in name only at this point, but I suppose in some ways that is true. We're still simply too small to not just get trampled over by all the other big players, though we did prove that we can at least make it incredibly painful to fight us directly.

It seems like great lengths were taken on the mainland to make it seem like we hadn't really defeated Rathland, but instead that Rathland had simply fallen prey to bad luck and poor planning. They set out to attack us, only to be badly damaged by leviathans, lose their leadership, and then have their country fall into civil war. According to Shasta, very little of what happened in the war actually seemed to make it to the mainland as news, other than our use of "unique" tactics and weapons.

In fact, it sounds like many of the rumors seemed to say our military tactics were quite behind and that we had merely gotten lucky in our war. I'm not entirely sure if this is being said by those who participated to help save face, or if someone else is purposefully saying these things, but either way, I suppose it is probably good to be underestimated when it comes to war.

Another interesting series of events were what happened on Kao's island while we were being attacked. They had left minimal personnel there to stop Rathland from using it as a base of operations while simultaneously later using it to drive away any resupply ships. Well, a few resupply ships did show up, and they kept them stalled and preoccupied right up until from high up in a watchtower, with the aid of a telescope we provided, they spotted the majority of the retreating army from after we made our bargain with The Baron.

With a few hours of extra lead time before all those ships would actually arrive, they shooed all the resupply ships off their island within an hour, saying they were welcome to do as they pleased. Once the resupply ships left, the dwarves sunk five of their own vessels off shore, and then moved all their supplies from their fort into a large bunker to hide.

The retreating forces and resupply ships soon realized that the dwarves had played them as fools, but when they returned to the island a few hours later, it looked like all the dwarves had packed up and left the island. Kao said that judging from the rumors he heard from the returning army, the army had every intention to sink any dwarven vessels they ran into during their retreat, so hiding had probably saved quite a few lives as most dwarven ships are generally slower than human ships. This was all at the cost of those ships, which the dwarves on the island then had to spend considerable effort recovering valuables, such as cannons, from.

We hadn't even thought of that, but honestly, we should attempt our own salvage missions. There are a considerable number of shipwrecks around our island now, and some are even in relatively shallow waters. I'll think on how exactly we'll attempt to recover those later. For now, we have more pressing issues to take care of, like dealing with our new refugees.

The refugees that we're supposed to take in are currently staying on the mainland with Kao, but he wants us to take them this winter. There are thirty-two in total. They seem to have been members of one of the factions that started up the civil war shortly after the army left, which makes me think that Elloetta probably had been planning something like this for a while, and now we're hiding away her political pawns. Well, as long as they don't cause problems and help contribute to the country, it should be fine. I never said I wouldn't lock them in prison indefinitely if they didn't behave, after all.

Considering our population has mostly recovered, though there is a bit of a level disparity between the new summons and those who survived the war, I was hoping to transition back to a peacetime economy fully. Then, I'd like to start some more academic pursuits, considering my level has reset again. Though before that, I'll need to collect the two goblins that I sent off with Shasta, and have them start working with Elora on recordkeeping.

After that, I've got a lot of trade I'd like to conduct, if the merchant makes it back this year. If not, then we'll have to make do for another year. Some of our bargas survived the war, as we butchered quite a few just before, though a few of the remainder got quite sickly while being kept underground for almost a month. We still have a surplus of paper, as that was one of the trade goods I squirrelled away in an underground vault to be used after the war, though the paper mill isn't quite fully repaired yet.

We used the rest of our deposit of Hadfield steel up before the war, so now we're actively looking for more iron deposits that we can use around the island. We still have some copper deposits that we're aware of, but ultimately, we might actually need to find a good way to recover the metal from all those sunken ships to supplant our current lack of metal.

For security purposes, I also want to think about ways we can expand our food supply to increase our population even further. Currently, we have a population of about 600 demons, a little over a dozen dwarves, and one elf. I think that our current food supply, if fully utilized, could probably support almost three times that. Between our crop fields, underground mushroom farms, the artificial tide pools, and the partially completed fishing jetty, we have a decent number of sources of food. However, I'd like us to be able to support more than ten times our current population, rather than just three.

First, Zeb and Zaka will need to actually expand our population to be closer to our limit. Then we'll be able to utilize the larger labor force to properly expand into the next valley over. There we have access to some more fresh water, where more fields can be grown, and a second artificial tide pool could potentially be dug out. That one won't have a natural bay to start from though, so the amount of labor required would be significant. Though I imagine it would be worth it as the food returns from the tide pools are quite significant for the low labor required to operate them.

Ultimately, I want us to have a larger population because I want to have more security in case we're attacked again, and also so that we can dedicate a number of individuals to becoming part of a standing army. During our last war, we spent a considerable amount of effort and energy building all sorts of defensive structures on relatively short notice. If instead we had a hundred soldiers who were dedicated to building more defensive structures and planning defensive stratagems year round, we'd probably have had much better chances overall.

[Vol.5] Ch.3 Rathland’s Refugees

After fifteen days, Shasta returned with the refugees and the two goblins who had been taught the dwarven language. I spent three days interviewing all the refugees with the help of Shasta as a translator. Of the thirty-two refugees, six have decent reasons for being here as refugees under Elloetta's guidance, and the remainder are direct family members of those six.

One was a political leader named Lucian Armand who started spreading the rumors of The King and Baron's death at sea over a month before it could have happened. As far as I could tell from the conversation I had with him, he was a pawn for Elloetta. He had kept up some amount of connections with the elves even after the majority of Rathland's political elite had cut ties with them. He had gotten multiple 'tips' from elves that The King and Baron had died at sea right away, and so he had acted on that information in a way that he believed would stabilize his region in Rathland. Needless to say, what it really resulted in was civil war breaking out far in advance of any actual problems occurring for Rathland's actual leadership.

As the civil war dragged on, his region was slowly taken over, and he fled the country with his wife, mother-in-law, and five kids, two of which are adults. The principality that is now in control of the region has a bounty out for his family, and Elloetta wants to keep them hidden. Although Lucian wouldn't reveal the exact details of the bargain he struck with Elloetta, the basics of the situation are that Elloetta seems concerned about some information getting out if he were to end up captured back on the continent. I'll keep that in mind when I talk to Elora about settling our debt to the dark elves.

Although Lucian may not be the best example of a political leader, given how things turned out for him, I'm sure that he still has valuable skills when it comes to managing large numbers of people. I'll likely set him to work in city hall, though he won't have any direct power. Much like Elora, I'd like to get some goblins to work with them and learn their skills. Managing and deciding on longer term jobs and planning for crop income and taxes aren't easy to do year over year. Until now our city has been small enough that we simply have a food surplus. We've also only recently started delegating certain expansion work out via Zeb. Ideally, Lucian will be able to fill the role of planning out certain needs like new marketplaces and workshops before we need them rather than after.

The second of the refugees of note was a harbormaster from Lucian's territory. From what I gathered from him, he neglected to report when elven ships used the harbor he oversaw, in exchange for a kickback from the elves. From his testimony I'm starting to form an idea as to who exactly the elves wanted to move so far away from the mainland. He also fled with his family. Despite the fact he's clearly willing to accept bribes, if we decide to attempt to build a full fledged harbor, it will be nice to have him around for information.

The next three refugees further reinforced that the refugees were elven collaborators. All were individuals in Lucian's territory who collaborated with the elves in some way or another that either directly or indirectly caused the civil war to break out earlier than it would have due to information spread by the elves. Two were merchants who traded with the elves and gave them rides on carriages across Rathland's territory. The last of the three ran a particularly large inn that multiple elves used as a base of operations while they stayed in Rathland.

Ultimately, of these five, Lucian was the last to flee. For the rest of them, elves came fairly early into the civil war and encouraged them to flee the country for their safety. There were other individuals who were also warned to flee, and those that didn't heed the warning ended up dying in one way or another. From the stories that were told, most of the incidents sound like brutal interactions with local authorities, but based on the evidence, I can't rule out that the elves themselves were just silencing participants in their conspiracy. Though I'm not sure why they wouldn't just kill all their co-conspirators if that was the case. I'll think on that theory and keep an eye out for any other clues that might lead me one way or another.

Before Shasta brought in the last of the refugees, I was given multiple documents related to them and she gave me a briefing on what Kao's group could figure out about them. The person in question is currently going by the name Tiberius Lysandre, but it was clear in the documents that this wasn't their name before. Unlike the other individuals who are here of their own free will to some degree, Tiberius was kidnapped initially before agreeing to come here.

That was somewhat unsettling information when it was revealed. We aren't looking to become a criminal state, and even hosting the individuals we have now could be seen as an unfriendly act towards the human countries who want them back. Kao's group was paid a hefty sum not to look into who Tiberius actually was, but I was paid no such fee, so I decided to pry.

From the conversation we had, it was clear that Tiberius was some form of magical researcher in Rathland. Further, they seemed to be an integral part of designing the steam cannon that was featured in the ship that Rathland used to attack us. As the conversation went on, it sounds like Rathland reverse engineered an initial steam cannon from "the demon's pirate ship" once they captured it, and then modified it to use Rathgore blood as a faster firing device.

I had assumed that the person who I saw studying our steam cannons a few years ago in the middle of the night had already studied the blood powered cannon as well, but from what Tiberius says, things don't line up for that. I am impressed that on relatively short notice they seemed to convergently come up with the idea of using certain kinds of blood to boil liquid and create a steam powered cannon like ours. That technology was born from necessity for us, and once we had the means to make gunpowder, it started to go obsolete in light of rifled cannons and mundane cartridges.

Tiberius wasn't too happy by news that we had forgone the magical research in favor of rifled artillery though. He agreed to come here and hide his identity because he believed that there was insight into magical technologies that we have and he wanted to continue his research into it. Apparently, the reason he's hiding his identity is that his actual name is well enough known that there is a decent chance it would be recognized and would cause problems for all parties involved if word got out that he was here.

Well, I've wanted to start research into magic for some time, but I've personally found myself lacking the time or jumping off point to do so. Tiberius coming here might be a good starting point for that, although his moral compass seems a bit dubious. More than that though, from what information Tiberius gave us, I think I've started to get a good picture of what happened in the past few years, and I think I need to have a word with Elora.

If my hunch is correct, it seems like all of the events that have happened in the past few years can probably be blamed on the elves. While it isn't impossible that Rathland made the demon pirate ship, I'm starting to suspect that the elves may have done it as a method for goading Rathland into war with us. I don't have any direct proof, and probably couldn't even prove it in a convincing way, but I might be able to at least use the information to get our debt removed if I use these refugees as bargaining chips.

I'm thinking Elloetta moved all these particular refugees here so that everyone related to why Rathland collapsed as a country is in one location with dubious reputation. At this point, if word got out that all these individuals who seemingly had a hand in the collapse of Rathland were found on our island, most people would assume we were behind the whole event, rather than the elves. We could, however, threaten to immediately ship them back to the mainland and let them testify that the elves were behind the whole thing, and that would cause political turmoil, which is probably why Elloetta left Elora to keep an eye on us.

That works two ways though, and I intend to use it. Sure, it might upset the elves somewhat if we do so, and I am still afraid of them, but if both us and Kao were used as pawns just so Elloetta could get rid of Rathland, then I don't exactly see it as fair that we're also paying them money after having so many individuals die. To what degree Kao is aware of the situation, I'm not sure, but I suspect that he has his own suspicions.

[Vol.5] Ch.4 Lab Space

Negotiating with Elora to get our debt reduced was only partially successful, and it was very stressful. She made it clear that what I was doing was treading a very fine line between negotiating and threatening. I responded that what they had done was treading a fine line between helping and extortion. The back and forth continued behind closed doors until it was agreed that we'd only have to pay half of the cost previously agreed upon, meaning a quarter of the total cost.

Thankfully, we also should be able to pay it back in the form of paper, though we'll have to make almost an entire ton of paper as payment. Considering it took us quite some time before we actually restarted paper production, we'll be paying some now from our reserves, and then the rest next year, when our production should be fully back on line.

I've started changing gears away from rebuilding the city, as most of that has been completed. I've been working with Zaka some to help facilitate using Lucian for some of the governmental roles that none of us want to do. That has been it's own problem though, as Lucian currently doesn't speak either the demon language, nor the dwarven one. As a result, he's been forced to work alongside Elora who speaks both human and dwarven, and has been getting much better at the demon language in the last few months.

I also have to deal with Tiberius who seemed heavily disappointed with the condition of our city. I can only guess that he believed we were some kind of metropolis with technologies beyond his imagination. Though the fact we can grow giant crystals seems to have intrigued him enough that he stopped causing a fuss when I finally showed him the bathhouse. For good measure, he's being escorted everywhere he goes, to make sure that he doesn't do anything rash. He seems like the type that would break the crystal just to see what happens.

Since we found a sulfur deposit on the island, I'm very keen on attempting to find more ore deposits. Volcanic sulfur deposits are usually a decent indicator for lead, silver, and copper. We've already found native copper, but copper sulfide, lead sulfide, and silver sulfide are easy ores to refine to get their respective metals. Lead is especially of interest, because we could make lead acid batteries, as well as using some of the lead for ammunition.

After conversing with Lucian some, although paper is a nice export, more countries are willing to trade in metal, and it tends to be more stable as a commodity so he recommended expending some more effort in attempting to discover new metal deposits. So I've asked Konkur if he'd take charge of a small workforce to find more mineral deposits on the island. I'm pulling two stone shaping goblins off the construction force and setting up a recurring job for four goblins to help this group with exploratory mining. If they find anything of value, we'll probably make a separate dedicated mining force at that point.

After ten days, Tiberius came to me with a few questions, and also wanted to do an experiment. I was a little frustrated because it was the middle of the night, and I was in my semi-conscious state cutting stone from an area that will become the basement of an apartment building. So I fully woke up so I could answer his questions.

The first question he asked was what animal's blood we used in place of rathgore blood for our blood powered steam cannons. I felt like a bit of a monster when I said that we had used Zaka's blood for our magic steam cannons. This didn't seem to bother Tiberius at all, which disturbed me somewhat. When I asked how they gathered the rathgore blood for their cannons, he said they captured them alive, then exsanguinated them to collect all their blood. He didn't seem the least bit concerned what that practice might do to the rathgore population as a whole either. I made a mental note that under no circumstances is Tiberius allowed to have any free authority on the island, because he's likely to cause some unrecoverable problem if left to his own devices.

His second question was how I made the crystal. I refused to answer him under the premise of it being a national secret. He immediately followed up by asking if I could make more if he had any ideas for experiments. I was hesitant, but told him that I could if I determined the experiment worthy of it. That prospect led him to telling me about an experiment idea he wanted to try, which I immediately shot down.

He wanted to take one of these large crystals and shatter it. Despite telling him what I experienced when I broke a medium sized crystal, he insisted on wanting to trying to break a large crystal. I promptly told him that I would not participate in that, nor provide him with a crystal to attempt it with. A moderate sized crystal could potentially be arranged as a compromise, but that would be the most I was willing to do, and he'd have to wait a significant amount of time for that, as making the crystals takes a significant amount of effort and time.

After having that idea shot down, he had a second experimental idea which I was less resistant to, though it did disturb me somewhat after remembering that I myself did blood testing. He wanted to collect blood from all the different magic-using life on the island. To which I told him that I wouldn't let him buy blood off the goblins. He was welcome to collect blood from any of the sea life though, if he wanted to test it. Considering we know of a few kinds of fish that are somewhat dangerous thanks to magic, I told him that he could work with the fishergoblins on that, though his best odds are going to be at catching them off the incomplete jetty. I also told him that while he can start with blood, I suspect that for some of the fishes, it might not actually be that blood is the best source of magic.

My reasoning for this are my own hands. More specifically, thermal hands. It's isolated to only my hands, and I suspect that there is something physiological that is the drive for that. Ultimately, I offered to give him a hand by using tectonic sense to drive mana into whatever he wanted. To which he asked if he could dunk the organs in the bathhouse water to infuse them with mana instead.

Thinking back on it, that's not actually that bad of an idea, though I don't want the bathhouse to be ruined. I myself first figured out about all of this thanks to trying to find a decent conductor for mana years ago when I first was working with the giant crystals. So, I told Tiberius that I'd compromise with him. I'd help him set up a research lab a little ways away from the city, and then we can attempt to get him some crystals to work with there.

I don't feel great about having him outside the city where it will be harder to keep an eye on him, but as long as we have someone checking in every day, it should be fine. Ultimately, it's probably safer for the rest of the city to have him further away as well, despite the risks. I recalled when I first brought a giant crystal down to the city and caused all the giant lizards on the island to siege the village, and decided that it's best to have some distance between new experiments and the general populace.

I spent six days working on lab space before the merchant finally returned to our island. It had been two years, but they brought our trade goods that we had requested previously. That said, a lot has changed, and although we had many things we wanted to trade for, we were lacking in trade goods of our own to send this time, so we ended up not getting many trade requests made. I hope next year, despite what we'll have to send to the elves, we'll have a surplus that we can trade with.

The lab itself is actually going to take some time to build. Due to the nature of smaller crystals, I'm digging a deep underground chamber to hopefully allow medium sized crystals to exist within it, though transporting them to this location will require some problem solving, though it should be doable.

After I get the underground chamber built, I plan on having a decently large facility above ground as well, though most of it will be empty for now. That will leave plenty of room for various experimental setups if I have any of my own experiments I want to run. Though Tiberius will be using the lab for now, I plan on using it myself, along with having any future dangerous experiments ran here too.

[Vol.5] Ch.5 Well Water

I continued working on the lab space for another twenty-six days until I finally completed the shell of the space. The facility is built into the hills bordering the side of the valley with no roads currently. While I worked, I spent some time cutting trees down along a trail that led here, so we have the beginnings of a road at least, though I imagine it will be some time before a proper road is built.

The facility itself is quite large with the first floor forming a large U shape, and the much smaller second floor resting against the hillside. The first floor's insides are still empty with structural pillars supporting a large empty hall, it's nearly 30,000 square feet in size, and towers twenty five feet tall. It would be easy to confuse it with a massive warehouse given how empty it is. It's partially built into the hillside, which provided the stone from which it was built. The small second floor, which stands only 15 feet tall internally and with a square footage of 4,000, rests atop the back of the building, built into the hill as well, causing the roof to run directly into the hillside.

Beyond this part of the facility though is an eight foot wide stairwell headed diagonally down, aimed deep under the tallest part of the hills surrounding the valley. There, nearly 100 feet down, I have another space. This space is 10 feet tall, and 50 feet on either side. The whole place had to have it's walls reinforced with stone shaping, to prevent aquifer water from leaking in. This aquifer is a bit below ground, so I'm considering building a well here in the future so water will be easier to access here.

In the future, the underground space can be expanded as needed, but for now I figure it should work for any immediate experiments. Some of the medium sized crystals that I grew in the past could make it closer to the surface than this without breaking, so if we come up with a good way to move crystals here, I think this should function as a decent testing space for them.

I have an idea that I can try related to transporting the crystals over the surface which will hopefully prove fruitful, otherwise, I might have to consider digging a hidden chamber where I can grow more crystals over here, as I know I can transport chambers with deteriorated crystals and regrow them. Though none of that matters until the snow melts, which is still a few weeks away.

I can't quite get a read on whether Tiberius likes the space or not. Sometimes it seems like he's excited by all the possibilities for experiments, and other times he seems overwhelmed and disappointed by the lack of anything being in the space already. The whole facility isn't just for him though. The first floor of the building is divided into five roughly equal sized sections, of which I let Tiberius pick one to use.

I shouldn't have been surprised when he picked the section adjacent to the stairwell headed into the basement. It makes sense given he'll be using the facility more than anyone else. He already has made multiple requests for many different tools and machines for me to make for him, to which I told him to pick carefully, because he's only getting a few of them. I'm not about to become someone's lab assistant. If he wants many different tools, then he needs to pay someone to make them, or start showing valuable results.

The initial tools he wanted for doing blood testing experiments were easy enough to make, so I spent five days making all the various containers for blood, and the apparatus he requested for partially submerging crystals into said blood. While I worked, I advised him to haul plenty of water to the lab space, since I hadn't dug the well yet, and working with blood without any water sounds like it's asking for trouble.

Despite my advice, Tiberius only hauled a small amount here, though it seems he's much more brains than brawn, because he did seem exhausted by the endeavor. I've decided to dig the well sooner rather than later to provide water here, as I'm concerned about health conditions in the area if I don't.

Even the health conditions wouldn't have been quite enough, but I decided I wanted to work on a project that would require some problem solving and could be of some benefit moving forward. This isn't going to just be a manually operated well, I'm hoping to make a wind-powered water well. Prior to gaining access to leather, this would be an exceptional pain to make, but with leather, it should be possible to make decently functioning check valves by which a small windmill can pump water to the surface. If I can get this working, it potentially opens up the construction of more wells, giving us access to deeper fresh water reserves in locations where getting water might otherwise be hard.

One of the biggest challenges with this project will actually be getting the metal to make the pump rod. I intend to have the rod be a steel core with a thin surface coating of lightstone, to help with both rigidity and waterproofing. However, as I've mentioned before, we'll actually need to do some scavenging to get our hands on more iron. Fortunately, I shouldn't need to go diving into sunken ships just yet, because we still have a decent amount of iron on hand thanks to the cannonballs that were fired at us on the far beach.

I shouldn't need that much iron for this project, so I'll just take a wagon to the far side of the island, and load it up with as many cannonballs as I can haul back, and that should be more than enough for this project.

As it turns out, when you don't need to sleep, the round trip to the far beach, including the couple hours picking up cannonballs, only takes a little over three days. Considering how many cannonballs were left buried in the sand, I've decided to put in a request for a few more goblins with wagons to go haul cannonballs back to the city. We'll have good uses for the iron once it's turned into steel, but the cannonballs themselves are cast iron or worse, so they'll need to be reprocessed to remove some of the carbon to make them into higher quality metal.

While I wait for Karsh to reprocess the iron, I'm going to start digging the well. Ultimately, it's going to be a real pain to hand dig the well, then close it up with a pipe so that it works for pumping water, but I don't have a great way to drill down the fifty feet to the aquifer in that area without just digging myself into the hole. I can cut a pipe with stone shaping, but removing the stone would be difficult, and ensuring that it's properly sealed would be hard too if I can't see it.

Once Karsh finishes the initial iron reprocessing, I'll give him instructions for the mechanical gearing, bearings, and valves that I'll need made for the well pump. The windmill to drive this pump will be much smaller than the windmills by the sea, so it shouldn't be quite as complicated to actually assemble.

Digging the well and having Karsh make the parts I requested took nine days in total. I cut a ladder into the wall of the well, and made a harness on my back for hauling rocks as I dug the well. When I reached about thirty-five feet deep, water started to trickle in very slowly from the walls, so I started the process of turning this into an automatic water well.

First, I used my new magic, pulverize, on the floor to create a decently large area of sand in the floor of the well. Then I assembled the pump cylinder with it's leather and steel check valves. I then got a large piece of rope, and draped it down the well with a weight where I wanted my water pipe to be located. Then I slowly worked my way along the rope, stone shaping a pipe around the rope, so I could know that the pipe was relatively straight.

Once I reached the bottom, I dug into the sand where the pipe would connect with the pump cylinder, and after doing multiple measurements, I attached the cylinder and buried it back in the sand. I still need to have Karsh make the actual pump rod, but I need to know the exact length I needed before it can be made. For that I'll also need to build the windmill that will sit on top, as well as it's pipe. I want it to run into a holding tank, so the actual exit from the well should be a little higher up to accommodate that.

Once I get everything hooked up, I can seal the sandy portion of the well off completely, and then I'll make some kind of removable cover for the top of the well to keep anyone from falling in. I don't want to completely seal it though, as the leather in the plunger check valves should be replaced if the flow rate slows down, which is likely to happen at least once a year, if not more frequently than that.

[Vol.5] Ch.6 Mana Drain

After eight more days of work, I finished building the prototype windmill for the well, and had Karsh help shape a straight steel rod of the necessary size for the pump. The snow started melting on the mountain half-way through my work, which then resulted in nagging from Tiberius that I should go brave the remaining snow to get him crystals. I retorted that if he had simply hauled enough water to the lab in the first place, I wouldn't have felt the need to build this well first, so he'll have to wait until I finish my project. Never mind the fact that I wouldn't actually travel up through the snow, even if most of it is melted. That's just asking to get buried in an avalanche or mudslide.

For now the plan is just to get the well working, but with the way I've set it up, I can install different diameter pipes to get data on the most efficient way to draw water out of the well, including potential data to reduce overall wear and tear on the check valves. Though to do that properly I'll need someone to record the actual data for total flow rate from the pump in various wind conditions, and I don't plan on being the one to do that. I have other tasks to complete that don't involve working at the lab, so for now the idea of optimizing this well is just something for someone to do in the future.

Though it took some small changes, getting the well functioning and building the water tank with an overflow valve only took three more days of work and one day of monitoring to make sure it didn't break. I didn't have much lightstone left over from the work I was doing previously, and I used the remainder of it coating the pump rod to finish the windmill.

Though the wind isn't constant, over the course of a day it seems like it averages about 50 gallons an hour, which is more than enough to satisfy a significant amount of water needs for drinking for any future wells we might dig. Here though, that water will largely be used if we need it for experiments.

Given the sheer excess of water flow from the well, I've installed a shut off on the windmill itself which locks the fan in place. This way we don't waste water, or wear out the check valves more than necessary. With that completed, I've started getting ready to travel back up the mountain to grow a moderately sized crystal. Before I do that though, I want to run the test to see if I can transport them over the surface, and see how long that might work for.

For the experiment I plan on distilling some of the toxin I discovered years ago which burns mana. If I submerge the crystal in that solution, I suspect that it may, at least temporarily, prevent crystals which are submerged from overcharging and breaking. If that experiment fails, then there isn't a good reason for me to stay up on the mountain to grow a medium crystal.

After another six days, the snow had melted completely, and I felt comfortable heading up to the cave. In the six days while I waited, I started helping with extending the fishing jetty again. At my suggestion, the construction crew had started to dig out a new quarry area that will eventually become a new artificial tide pool in the other valley as a source for construction stone, as well as a place for more goblins to manually break rocks in an attempt to gain access to stone shaping. So I spent my half-asleep time cutting and hauling stone from that quarry, and then during my wakeful time worked on the jetty, since I didn't particularly want to be diving in the water while half-asleep.

On the sixth day, I made the trip up the mountain, but took a detour for a few hours collecting the plants that produced the mana-burning toxin. Once I was confident that I had enough to do a basic test, I completed the trip up the mountain and got to work distilling the toxin from the plants, and building a chamber that would hold some crystals suspended in the center of the liquid.

The next day, I began my test. I selected a number of similarly sized large crystals, and suspended one in the chamber within the cave after draining its mana, surrounded it with the liquid, then hauled the chamber to the surface. For this particular test, I've left the top of the chamber open so I can easily observe what happens inside.

As I traveled closer to the surface the crystal still started to glow more than before, which had me initially concerned. One of my hopes was that the toxin worked as a mana insulator as it would absorb the ambient mana before it could be used. The experiment wasn't a failure though. Despite the crystal starting to glow, it halted at a certain point well below the point where the crystal would shatter. Thanks to some impurities in the water, I could also tell that some form of convection was also occurring within the liquid itself. I couldn't tell the source of the convection, but I'm assuming it's the crystal.

Over the course of six hours, the crystal steadily grew brighter and brighter until it finally cracked and started to deteriorate. As it deteriorated, the black flakes sunk to the bottom of the surrounding fluid, and gas bubbled off the crystal and out into the atmosphere. My first test could be considered a success, but not a perfect one. Six hours is cutting it close for transporting a crystal all the way to the lab, and there are still too many variables to determine the effect that different crystal size or toxin concentration might cause. I have a few more experiments I'll try to get a better idea of what will need done.

I spent another five days doing various tests until I was confident in some basic predictions. I only used very similarly sized crystals for my tests, to remove that as a variable, though I can't discount that they might have caused minor fluctuations. I tried running the experiment at night, changing the total volume of the liquid with the dissolved toxin, and both increasing and decreasing its concentration. What I found was that the length of time it took for the crystals to break was fairly straightforward.

I found a few useful pieces of data. The time it takes for the crystal to break seems to vary linearly with the volume of liquid present. If I double the volume while keeping the concentration the same, it takes twice as long for the crystal to break. The same is true for concentration, but only to a point. If I dilute the concentration too much, the property begins to disappear, and by the time it's seven times as dilute as what I prepared initially, it no longer is capable of preventing the crystal from breaking. On the other end of the spectrum, if I concentrate it down to five times the concentration, the liquid becomes very viscous after a short while of being on the surface, and the crystal breaks quite early.

Based on those observations, I hypothesize that the convection I observed before is strong enough to allow reasonable mixing of the fluid for even moderately large volumes. When the concentration is too low, convection slows too much and the capacity of the fluid is too low to prevent the crystals I've chosen from breaking. When the concentration is too high, the fluid becomes too viscous and slows convection, preventing the majority of the fluid from being useful.

Finally, at night I observed that the crystals take about 30% longer to break, which seems consistent with my findings on how quickly I regenerate mana between day and night. The last test I want to do before making a slightly larger crystal to test with is to test a crystal during the solar eclipse which will occur two days from now. During eclipses, we normally get significantly less mana, almost a 90% reduction, so I feel like that is a good check to make.

During the eclipse, I ran four tests simultaneously, since the eclipses only happen once a month. The eclipse itself lasts about eight hours, which is a significant part of a day. During it, I ran the first test again, a test with a tenth the volume of liquid, a fifth the volume of liquid, and half the volume of liquid.

All of the tests except the smallest volume ran past the eclipse, and then broke at different points afterwards. The one-tenth volume test broke at the four hour mark, which was a little earlier than I expected, but I can potentially attribute to their general affinity for drawing in mana. The one-fifth volume broke about thirty minutes after the eclipse ended, and the half and full volume ones ran for about two and five hours after the eclipse ended respectively.

With this new information at hand, I estimate that I can get about six times the duration on the surface for a submerged crystal by transporting it during an eclipse. I imagine that if I was willing to wait a few months until the eclipses start occurring when it is nighttime on the island, I'd be able to get even more duration from the liquid. As it stands, the largest natural crystals can easily make the trip to the new lab during an eclipse, but the lab itself isn't quite deep enough to prevent them from breaking at that depth, so I'll need to grow slightly larger crystals. As long as those crystals don't behave too differently, we should be able to transport them during an eclipse following their completion.

[Vol.5] Ch.7 Procurement

For the first half of the month, I spent time growing a larger crystal to test how crystal size affects the effectiveness of the mana draining liquid. I ran a few tests with smaller crystals, and had interesting results, which warranted growing a larger crystal for further extrapolation. With smaller crystals, the length of time it took for them to break generally increased, until you reached about the medium size of the natural crystals. Beyond that point, I had to increase the concentration of the mana draining liquid to keep them from breaking as soon as they reached the surface. Even then, I couldn't use much smaller crystals, as they didn't have enough energy to drive the convection current in the liquid.

This would imply that increasing the crystal size should decrease how long it takes for the crystal to break, except I know that as their size grows and they're in air, it takes them longer to break on the surface, up until the point where they don't break at all. Which means I need more data points to attempt to fully understand what effect increasing crystal size has on the whole operation. I'd expect that regardless, adding the liquid will only increase the time it takes for a crystal to break, but how much each effect contributes to the duration is completely unknown. Which is why I have a grown crystal now, which is is twice the height of the natural crystals I initially tested.

Some basic math seems to indicate that for a crystal which is twice as tall or eight times the volume, you need four times the volume of liquid to keep it on the surface for the same amount of time. In other words, the volume of liquid needed increases with the square of the height of a crystal, but with a caveat that you do gain some amount of extra time on the surface without breaking based on how long the crystal would normally take to break while on the surface.

Given some rough estimates, I think if I make a container to go onto a cart for most of the trip, then get the strongest in the village to help haul the container the rest of the way from the village to the lab, we can probably transport a 3 foot crystal during the eclipse after next. I'll need time to grow the crystal so I'll miss the next eclipse, unfortunately.

On another hand, I'm debating offering up a low paid job for some of the members of the construction crew to help me with growing the crystal. In the past, a few months of working with crystals when close to reaching the level cap has granted access to mana affinity, which over the life of a demon can contribute a significant amount to their total mana pool. I wouldn't really need help with growing the crystal, since I can work 24 hours a day, but it seems wise to help some goblins gain access to a rare trait, so I'll ask Zeb to send his lowest prestige stone shaping goblins who are closest to their next prestige.

If I have them helping, I can probably actually operate three apparatuses at the same time with a surplus of the crystal material being made, so I can make a few crystals in the smaller two apparatuses in parallel so the next time I go to grow crystals it won't take as long. Normally, getting enough crystal material would be the bottleneck, but I can't really operate the apparatuses while half asleep. I can, however, keep extending our exploratory tunnels to find more crystal bubbles during that time, which should provide us with more than enough crystal material, as long as I keep finding them at the same rate I did in the past.

Of the goblins Zeb was in charge of, only two fit the criteria that I gave for mana affinity. Having the extra set of hands during the day is nice though. They trade off on making charcoal from wood that I collect at night, and processing the vacuum containers that I make while working with the apparatuses for growing crystals. I'm basically doing the work of four people, while together they're doing one person's work, but that's fine. They're very low prestige after all, and I've lived many years and gained a lot of abilities and stats. One of the two goblins did prestige in the last few days, and gained mana affinity, so even if the other one doesn't get it, I don't feel like it's been a waste having them here.

I'm almost done growing the 3 foot crystal, and we're now four days from the eclipse. I've also grown four 1 foot crystals, and two 2 foot crystals. In the future, I can use these as seeds for future larger crystals. I've also extended the exploratory mine tunnel a significant distance. Although it's only anecdotal, it does feel like I've started to find fewer crystal bubbles as I've gotten further from the original cave. That said, I could always make branching paths from the existing tunnel to stay closer to the cave, and I expect I'd continue finding a lot of the crystals. In other words, I don't think I'm close to depleting the supply of the crystals any time soon.

I finished the crystal and the container with a day to spare, and got Zaka and two hobgoblins to agree to help me move the heavy crystal container during the eclipse tomorrow. I also informed Konkur that yesterday I ran into a new rock layer in the exploratory tunnel. I brought him some samples. Within that layer, I also didn't find any immediate crystal pockets, so I suspect that I won't find any within that layer, but I can't say for certain.

It is nice having someone else that I can trust the new rock discovery to, rather than trying to figure out if it has any usefulness myself. Though I might end up working with him after I transport the crystal if it seems like that rock is valuable in any way. After I get the crystal set up for Tiberius, I won't have any projects of my own that I'll be working on anyway, so it might be useful for me to assist them if it speeds up the development of a new resource.

Early in the morning, the eclipse began. Overnight I drained the crystal of it's mana, and then moved it into the large container before moving it on a cart to begin the process of bringing it down the mountain. With the help of the two goblins, we were able to transfer it from one cart to the next, and get the container down to the city after six hours of work. We had about an hour and a half of eclipse left to transport the container from the city to the lab, and about two and a half hours after that before we risked the crystal breaking. I planned everything to give us about thirty minutes of leeway.

If I planned for more leeway, then the container would become excessively heavy, making the transport process more difficult, and would slow us down even more. There might have been a size a little smaller, or a little bigger which would have been better, but this seemed to be a good estimate, so I went with it. If we waited four months, a majority of the eclipse would happen at night, and I could have shrunk the container drastically, but considering we could make it work as is, I figured we should go for it.

Ultimately, we made it to the basement with about ten minutes to spare. I hadn't done a trial run, and the path was a bit more difficult for Zaka and the hobgoblins than I expected. There still isn't an actual road to the lab, and there are tree stumps scattered about in the path, so hauling a large object which obscured vision was tricky. I made a mental note that if the lab shows any results, I should ask Zeb to build a road with a cart rail to it, which would make these sort of tasks significantly easier.

After I unloaded the crystal from its carrying container and into the tank that Tiberius wanted me to make for him, I noticed that he had already filled a few of the holding containers I made for him with blood. He had almost two months to procure it, so I'm not surprised he has some, I just hope that it is, in fact, fish blood. At this depth, it'll take a little bit of time for the crystal to charge up all the way, so all of us returned to the city, since there wasn't much else to do at the lab.

[Vol.5] Ch.8 Fishy Research

The next day, I decided to stop in and talk with Konkur to see if he had any information on the rock samples I delivered to him. I had initially planned for it to be a short stop, as I didn't expect that much information before I went to the lab to see what sort of tests Tiberius was planning on conducting. Instead, I ended up having a long discussion. The gist of the situation is that the rock that the tunnel ran into is generally associated with hydrothermal veins of ore. At least, that tends to be the case back in the dwarven country.

The issue is finding the veins, if they exist at all. For the most part, they form in vertical spires, where high pressure water forced it's way through the rock carrying dissolved minerals. Occasionally those spires will break rock horizontally, and form deposits in that direction as well, but it's much less frequent. So I basically spent a decent amount of time discussing whether it was worth having his team dig the exploratory tunnel further, which would allow either him or myself to use our different detection abilities to try to find any potential ore deposits.

We both agreed that it would be a good use for his small team, which had been expanding the tunnel I built part of the way up the mountain, though that hadn't yielded any results yet. One of the issues with mining in the cave is its distance to the city. Ultimately, our discussion centered around how his team would operate up there. The distance is too great for it to be reasonable for them to go there and return every day. The cave buildings at the entrance that I built include a number of guest rooms, which I volunteered they could use for some time.

When I'm up there with a few goblins, I usually bring a bit of preserved fish, then go harvest spuds and lion root to supplement the rest of our diet. I'm not sure that this would be viable for a larger group to operate long term, however. So after some discussion, we decided that a six-four schedule would be best. They'd spend six days up the mountain, bringing all the food they'd need with them, then be back for four days. The four days include the few hours of travel both up and down the mountain though, so it's closer to a seven-three when you factor in the travel time.

We've agreed that they can consider today day one of their four days in the city, so they'll be heading up the mountain after that. I've also agreed to travel up with them for their first cycle on the mountain, where I plan on helping them expand some of the facilities to make things more comfortable for them in the long term, while showing them around the area, since I'm most familiar with it. I'm glad I oversized the water collection pool on the terrace all those years ago now, since it seems like it's going to get some use.

In the meantime before they go, I'm going to spend a bit of time observing what Tiberius is up to. Despite everything, I'm still somewhat worried about giving him access to a 3 foot tall crystal. I know first hand that they can give quite the burn if you're low on mana and decide to manipulate them. A 3 foot crystal is small enough that I don't think I need to be concerned with a dangerous mana burst if it breaks at least.

I observed some interesting tests going on from Tiberius over the three days I watched him. The way things were set up in the lab, the crystal sat in a chamber, partially submerged in water. The submerged portion was then connected through a few pipes full of water to small baths surrounding the crystal. The water in the bottom half was then sealed to prevent it from mixing with anything poured into the top half of the container, which would directly contact the crystal.

He performed a few different tests while I was there. One of the tests involved pouring blood into the top half of the crystal container, to see what affect the excess mana would have. Interestingly, about half the samples of blood did something perceivable. One crackled with electricity, causing us to duck as electrical energy arced along its surface for a number of minutes. Another violently splashed itself, hurling bits of blood about. The cleanup from that test was a real pain. Others had subtle results like partial congealing or bubbling. The whole time Tiberius was taking notes in what I assume is the human language he speaks.

On the third day, before we went to the lab, he had me help haul some large fish on the way there. Once in the lab, he went about dissecting the fish, and then submerging different parts into the water baths which were connected to the crystal. I only saw a few results, but it seems like some specialty organs do exist in some of the fish which reacted when submerged in the mana rich water. Ultimately, I feel safe leaving him to study this for a while. There are plenty more experiments that can be run along this mindset, and there are plenty of fish that he hasn't caught and run tests on which will extend the testing time drastically.

Over the course of the six days that I was on the mountain with Konkur's team, I ended up building multiple new facilities for them. Ultimately, the rooms that I had made previously were very small, and though goblins in the past have put up with them, I've also been here every time they were used in the past. So I set about digging a new mining barracks. The rooms are a little bigger, and there is a central kitchen and storage space, reminiscent of the apartment buildings in the city.

There are also more rooms than there are people here currently. Though it's presumptuous to assume we will hit some kind of ore, if we do, I don't want to have to scramble to making housing for more goblins. They also didn't find any ore deposits so far, but I'm not surprised, they haven't actually made that much progress tunneling.

I forget sometimes just how much faster I tunnel with improved stone shaping compared to regular goblins. Though they are going faster than they would otherwise thanks to the crystals in the cavern. I'm honestly hoping that the stone shaping goblins on the team get mana affinity thanks to how much they're interacting with the mana crystals.

One thing that we hadn't anticipated, mostly because I've just been storing it in the cave storage area, is the amount of rock that could be shipped down the mountain to be used on other construction projects. After discussing with Konkur, we're going to add shipping rock down the mountain as part of the return trip day. It'll likely end up taking all day, rather than only part of it, but it should be manageable.

An unfortunate quality of the new kind of rock we've brought back is that is fractures easily. This property is probably why it more easily develops hydrothermal ore veins, but also means it's actually not very useful for us for solid construction. One use that it does have, however, is filling the inner section of the jetty as we build it. I still want to encase it with a more durable rock, but we can fill the bulk of the mass with this rock, and I don't expect much issue.

The downside for us is that we have to haul all that rock from the uphill part of the city, where the rail ends, to the jetty. It's not that big of a problem, but it's more work than the mine exploration crew can do in their three days in the city. So I've put a few jobs up in city hall to haul the stone to the artificial tide pool area, and hopefully they'll have hauled all of it by the next time they haul stone down the mountain.

I've personally spent these three days checking in on Tiberius. He's tested a few more fishes, but our lack of a shared language has been a barrier to sharing information. I could tell, at least, that there didn't seem to be any major breakthroughs. He's done some interesting tests by mixing different fishes' blood, and submerged organs from some of the fishes in their blood while exposed to the crystal. He's seen some interesting results from that.

He gave me a demonstration from the fish that had the electric blood. By submerging an organ from it's head in the blood with the crystal, he could direct the static discharge forward from a particular section of the organ. I had to scold him on safety protocols though, as his hands had minor burns where electric jolts had burned them. I'd expect him to at least wear leather gloves when doing something like that, if not use tongs. I'm really starting to think I need to find a goblin with some good common sense to work as his lab assistant slash safety reminder.

[Vol.5] Ch.9 Gypsum

After another six days on the mountain, we found something, that in some ways was a disappointment, but in other ways was a good find. We struck a vein of material, though I wouldn't call it ore. It seems to be gypsum, at least from what I can tell from Konkur's description. We have little use for gypsum here on the island thanks to stone shaping, but it can be useful for some agricultural practices, or perhaps allowing non-stone shaping goblins the ability to make castings of things via plaster.

Unfortunately, gypsum is pretty common throughout the world according to Konkur. It's used by many countries for construction, but unlike earth where construction materials were relatively expensive, gypsum seems to be much less valuable than decent wood. I think the reason for this is probably magic enhanced mining techniques. On earth, prior to machine powered mining, materials like gypsum were fairly expensive because they were labor intensive. With many of the races having access to some form of cutting stone via magic though, mining is much easier, which is probably why it isn't as expensive, if I had to guess.

Either way, the gypsum basically goes for twice the value of a nicely made wooden barrel that it would fill. Which isn't nothing, but it's not that valuable. That said, fish only goes for about double that rate, so I won't be too picky, and will gladly ship excess gypsum off in exchange for things that we actually need.

I initially thought we might just ignore this vein of material, and keep searching for some other deposit, but Konkur told me that mining out this vein would be a good idea, as there is a decent chance we'll find other, more valuable, ores within the vein of gypsum. Which is why I considered what to do with the excess we'd mine. He said that while gypsum itself may not be that valuable, it's frequently found around metal ores of copper and lead, so it wasn't a complete loss. It also indicates that this layer of rock does have at least one hydrothermal deposit, so it could hold more.

Unfortunately, the gypsum isn't really valuable enough for me to try to recruit an entire second goblin mining team to increase our rate of extraction, so for the time being Konkur and his team can continue mining the gypsum in an attempt to find more valuable ores. We still have some of the native copper deposit I found before, so I'm really hoping that if they find an ore deposit, it's not a copper ore, as we already have easier accessed reserves of that which we aren't utilizing.

If we find lead, that opens up a few new avenues of materials and processes that we could utilize. Lead would be invaluable for making sulfuric acid, which would open up chemically processed paper, rather than mechanically processed. The gypsum would also be useful as an additive to said paper, converting it to a much more valuable product. Chemically processed paper is quite involved, and would be somewhat hazardous to make, but the quality of paper produced is significantly higher than its mechanically processed alternative. I'd imagine it would fetch a much better price as a luxury good.

After talking with Konkur, I realized that I need to start working on a way to recover all the iron sunk off our coast. All the cannonballs and cannons on the ships we sank are a decent source, and there are literal tons of iron sunk out there, in addition to any other valuables that might have sunk on those ships. The reason being that the kind of ores that are found in those hydrothermal veins generally don't include viable iron ores.

It sounds like they frequently include pyrite though, so if push came to shove, we could potentially process the pyrite into iron, but it generally isn't very high yield, and requires a lot of work to make viable iron. That said, recovering items from those sunken ships is also going to be resource intensive, so it would probably be worth it to process pyrite if we find it.

What I've been doing for the past seven days is working on a design for a barge with stabilizers. If we can make a barge with winches on a crane, we might be able to use that to pull up metal materials from our bays. I'm thankful that we still have a lot of leftover waterproofing materials since we stopped making windmills when the threat of war came about which we could now use for making this ship. If things go well with this ship, then we might consider attempting to make a fishing trawler or similar fishing vessel for catching fish further out from the island.

Right now I'm just using scale models in a tank to approximate the stability of the potential vessel when hauling up large cannons or bundles of cannonballs. If I can get everything working well here, the next step will be hiring some of the fishergoblins who have gained water resistance to actually do the diving to attach the cables. We'll also need an individual who has the ability to use a heavy tool and magic to smash open the waterlogged hulls of the ships to expose their innards, allowing us to actually recover the iron from them.

I'm hoping that the magic for throwing things with high force works underwater, and we can just have a hobgoblin hurl a large piece of darkstone at the ship will break some of the hull. Ultimately, if that doesn't work, a handsaw might need to be used, and careful cutting would need done to avoid reinforced sections. If there are metal reinforcements that they can't handle, then the hope would be that by attaching cable around the reinforced bit, we can break the part off of the ship.

The actual process of ship-making isn't well known to me, though I hope that the harbormaster we acquired has some idea of the process, and we can fill in the gaps for the rest of the process. Since wood is a surplus for us, I plan on having the stabilizers not be waterproofed, and just made of bound wood. They'll need replacing every so often, but that's currently much cheaper for us than the waterproofing materials are.

I'm calling it a barge, but it's technically a self-propelled barge, and I intend to have a dual paddle wheel design powered by a steam engine. We've had the technology to build steam engines for some time now, but we haven't had a great use for them. The island has a bit too much slope for viable surface powered steam engines. We could, in theory, use it for industrial purposes, but our only source of fuel for them is wood and charcoal, which seems like a waste compared to wind power. This, on the other hand, is actually a viable use for a steam engine. We need the barge to be maneuverable around our coastline.

I spent nineteen days working with the harbormaster, I was able to get the gist of ship waterproofing, and started the process of assembling the barge. I needed a lot of help from Karsh with metal working for things like nails as we built the ship in two layers of overlapping wood, with some waterproofing spread between them. Then the outside will again have waterproofing spread over it. I hired a goblin carpenter and two other goblins to help in the assembly process. We basically used as large of pieces of wood as we could, sliced from the centers of trees to reduce the chances of leaks.

The entire barge is planned to be about 30 feet wide and 120 feet long, making it a monster of a ship, though the design is fairly simple. We'll have six potential locations for the stabilizing arms to be attached. Two off either side, and one on the front and back. Before I build the crane though, I want to get the paddle wheels and steam engine designed and built. The reason being that I want to design the crane to weigh approximately the same amount as the steam engine, to keep the barge's front and back weight similar.

There is a lot of work that needs done for the ship though, so I'll be busy for some time working with Karsh to get the rest of the necessary components ready. I've also identified a sunken ship not far from our incomplete jetty which I plan to use for testing with some hobgoblins to see how easy recovery is actually going to be. I have my fingers crossed that we won't have too many issues.

[Vol.5] Ch.10 Salvage

Work proceeded steadily on making the barge and its components. A basic steam engine is actually fairly easy to make, though we had to use more of our dwindling iron to make a large portion of it. While I worked with Karsh on that during the days, I spent the evenings making copper wires to make into cable. After thirteen days of work, the steam engine was pretty much complete, including our testing and adjustments to make sure it worked. I also had made enough copper cabling to attempt my first tests to see if I could use the copper cable to pull materials from the ocean using a winch. So, at the far end of the jetty, I set up a winch made of stone as a trial, and wound the copper cabling around it. For this first test, I'm going to see if I can recover anything from the nearby shipwreck.

The first day I just explored the shipwreck a little at a time. I'm glad that I can hold my breath for a significant amount of time, but even then, searching a shipwreck is dangerous. It'd be easy to get stuck and simply run out of air and die. There was some good news for my test, in that a portion of the ship had broken, exposing a few cannons facing the jetty. It looks like when the ship hit the seafloor, it had damaged some of the hull's integrity, which caused the failure in addition to whatever damage was done by our artillery.

So, on the second day, I dragged cable behind me, and tied it off to a cannon. The cannon is embedded in a wooden cart, and that looks like it had been lashed to the ship wall which was now broken away. In a perfect world, I'd remove the cannon from the wood cart securing it first, but the wood had swollen due to being submerged in water for so long, making it hard to work with.

So, I tied the cable down as best I could, and returned to the winch. I didn't expect success from this trial, but I wanted to get a feel for a few things. First, if the cable would easily snap or not. The answer to that ended up being no, but it would snap. The cable snapped after turning the winch for a bit less than a minute.

While disheartening, when I went to go see what had happened, I was pleasantly surprised. The cannon had, in fact, moved. It had been pulled out of the ship, and as it fell, it lodged itself firmly between the collapsed wall of the ship, and the remaining hull. As I had continued to turn the winch, it had sheered the cable at where I had tied the cable to itself. I gathered what copper I could from the canon, and returned to the jetty.

The good news is that it seems like the cable was at least capable of dragging the cannon. The bad news is I can't really tell if it can lift one. If the cannon hadn't gotten wedged in wreckage, I would have liked to recover this cannon, then set up a test rigging to see if the cable could lift it vertically on land. So, I'll need to either recover a different cannon, or free this one to try again.

Thankfully, it seems like a decent time to see if any of the hobgoblins with water resistance can break the ship hull. If they can, we might be able to free the first cannon, and possibly some others for recovery.

There were exactly two fishergoblin hobgoblins who had served in the war with Rathland who had capabilities that I was looking for. They both have water resistance, heightened strength, improved endurance, and the improved throwing spell, meteor shot. What they found was that they could hurl cannonballs from the ship, while underwater, with enough force to shatter the soaked wood of the hull. Which honestly terrified me. They also could hold their breath even longer than I could, which was a good sign.

If more of the ships were very close to shore, I'd even say that the ship was a waste, and these two could just go out and gather cannonballs, but in actuality, even with how long they can hold their breath, many of the ships are much further from shore. So, we worked together for a bit to free the one cannon from before. Every so often it would get stuck on a rock or other object as I pulled it in, and they'd have to either move the rock, or work together to move the cannon, but we got it onto the jetty.

Between testing them, and the cannon, we spent two days getting it up on the jetty, and then I ended up having to have both the hobgoblins help me push the cannon off the jetty, and out of the way, where I could start testing cable for lifting the cannon. I intend to use the crane we've been designing here first, because the crane will also need to be capable of handling the weight of a cannon.

After eight days, Karsh and I got the crane set up to attempt to lift the cannon, and the cable snapped. While it was disappointing, it wasn't that surprising. I have a plan to fix this, though it's going to take some time to complete. First, I need more copper for cables. My plan is to make the cable a little thicker, and then use two winch drums instead of one. That make it a little easier for the hobgoblins to secure their cargo.

Normally, multiple lines on a single crane could be a problem, since you might accidentally tip what you're hauling, or the lines could get twisted. We're trying to bring up cannons though, which are long cylinders, so it might actually prove beneficial, as long as the operators keep a careful eye on what they're doing. This way they can winch one side up if it starts to tilt too much, and straighten the load, so it doesn't slip.

The biggest downside to attempting this is that I need to go up the mountain and mine more of our native copper deposit to manufacture the wire necessary. It'll be nice to check on the gypsum deposit though, and see how Konkur is handling that vein. I haven't really been keeping track of what they've been doing, so It'll be good to see exactly what quantity of material they've been extracting.

Konkur's team has been hauling a few tons of gypsum down a week, which has slowly been filling a warehouse up in town. Considering I plan on trading most of it away, I've started to think about making containers for it, like how we made containers for paper, and building a warehouse on the far side of the island, but I'm obviously nervous about theft happening. We'd need to have our trade post occupied, at least during the winter when ships come by, to prevent that. It'd save the traders a lot of trouble if they didn't have to travel all the way to the other side of the island.

Plus it would give us a good location to store some of these goods that we only plan on trading away, so they aren't slowly filling up our city's storage, which the goblins also rent out to store their own goods. I also have a feeling that our one merchant who comes by will be unable to actually haul away all the gypsum we'd like to trade in a year, so having a location to store the excess for future trade will be good. Depending on the profit margins, it might also allow the merchant to justify making multiple trips in a single season, since he can actively see the goods that we'd like to trade.

I've also been thinking about making a proper harbor for loading and unloading goods again. There are three places that we could do that in my current estimations. The far bay would be the easiest, as the terrain is naturally set up for it. If we build it there, in the long run we'll probably end up settling a second town on that side of the island for convenience sake. Plus, if we settled a second city there, it can be more easily fortified, which would help protect us from any future invasion, as the natural bay there would be fortified. An added boon over my previous estimations on the matter.

The second location is the other valley, where we're currently planning on making another artificial tide pool. This would prevent us from building the tide pool there, but it would be much closer to our existing city, though still far enough we'd want to keep people stationed there over winter to prevent any theft. I really don't want to build a harbor there, as it would be more convenient for the city to have access to that for food.

The third location would involve significant more work, and would involve terraforming the craggy terrain outside next to our valley into an artificial harbor. That would involve moving a lot of rock from the crags into the ocean, and engineering the whole area to be maneuverable. In an ideal world, that would actually be our best location, as it's a little closer than the other valley is, which means it would be fairly easy to manage from our city. Unfortunately, it'd take years of work with our current task force working around the clock to make that into a viable harbor.

Perhaps in the distant future, that could be a project we attempt, as a way to increase our own naval capabilities, but for now, I think building it in the far bay is our best bet. I'll talk to Zeb about the idea, and see what kind of projects he's currently working on, and see what he thinks of the idea. Though if I had to guess, it'll be on the backburner for a few years as we grow our city's population.

[Vol.5] Ch.11 Maiden Voyage

After having spent six days mining copper on the mountain, I spent an additional six days transporting it back to the city. When I returned I talked with Zeb about the idea of building a harbor on the far side of the island. As I suspected, they're busy right now with what we both agree is a more pressing matter of expanding the population, which will eventually lead to a larger work force, allowing projects like this to be more easily completed.

It has been nice that I've no longer been having to manage many aspects of the growing city, but it also has left me feeling somewhat disconnected from it. I see new housing go up, and many new goblins I've never seen before every time I go to work on a project for an extended period of time. Before, I was making a lot of the executive decisions for the daily operation for our city, but now I'm basically only handling foreign relations.

I shouldn't complain to much though, as handling all the little tasks is a pain I'd rather not have to think about, but maybe I should dedicate a week every year to check up on things, and make sure that the people I left in charge of different aspects of running things are doing a good job.

For now though, I have a salvage barge crane to work on. I've brought back significantly more copper than I should actually need, with the hope that if I get the barge working, I can produce a few spare cable spools for the hobgoblins who will run the salvage ship. If I can't get it working, then we'll just have more spare copper.

After eight days of smelting copper into thick wire to make into cable, I finally had enough to run the test to lift the cannon. While I worked on making the cable, I also worked with Karsh on designing a gearbox for operating the dual winches for the crane. Ultimately, those gears are one of the next most likely failure points for the process, so they're closer to toothed drums than gears per se.

The first and second tests with the new cable system were a success. I was able to hoist the cannon up and suspend it between the two cables. It also handled me pushing, jostling, and eventually jumping on it. This was to try to simulate the extra force that it might experience while being maneuvered onto the boat.

The third test, sadly, resulted in a failure of a component. The third test was rotating the crane head. The way the crane is supposed to operate, it'd pull objects up from the front of the barge, to try to keep the boat as stable as possible. Then, it would rotate and deposit the item in the center of the hull, keeping the ship generally balanced.

Unfortunately, the crane head sheered the overlapping metal to fall free when I attempted to stop the crane. This was my fault though, as I purposefully rotated the crane faster than it should have been rotated. We'll have to fix and replace any of the damaged metal, do some reinforcing in the failure points, and then make sure that all the goblins who work on the barge to operate it know that the crane needs to be moved very slowly, so that this doesn't happen.

If the crane head had fallen and dropped the cannon and itself on the boat, in all likelihood, the boat would fail and sink. Which is exactly the opposite of what we want it for.

After seventeen days of work fixing my mistake, double checking everything with the crane, assembling everything on the ship, then training parties on their roles on the ship, it was time for its first test drive. I had hired the two hobgoblins I ran the initial test with to function as the recovery team. Given the unique situation they'll be under, I've devised a bit of an impromptu diving aid for them.

Each one has a leather vest that has some things attached. Secured to the top of the vest are two containers made of lightstone and reinforced with copper, which are under a slight vacuum. I tested them myself at about 100 feet of depth without issue of them breaking or failing. Ultimately, they're flotation aids. On the bottom of the vest are darkstone weights which can be easily released, and provide extra weight beyond the buoyancy of the floats. The darkstone weights were very simple to stoneshape, and made a great use for the excess darkstone I get from making lightstone, so I really don't mind if they release the weights and leave them in the sea.

The sides of the ship have some ropes attached that the divers can also tie to themselves. Each vest has a slot for a knife as well, though they're lightstone knives, they'll cut most rope. The ship also has two thick nets for recovering cannonballs. Many of the downed ships likely have lots of unused cannonballs, so I paid the ropemaker and weaver to make two nets capable of hauling quite a few cannonballs. That should make recovery of cannonballs using the crane quite functional.

In fact, before we attempt to recover any cannons that aren't exposed, I've suggested that the two hobgoblins simply haul cannonballs out from sunken ships and put them in a net for recovery. Recovering cannons is much riskier for both the ship and the hobgoblins, though I advised that they keep a decent amount of the cannonballs to use for meteor shot later when they might return to recover the cannons at a later point.

Overall, the ship is manned by 18 demons. The two diving hobgoblins, two goblins and a hobgoblin who operate the steam engine, one goblin for each paddle wheel, three goblins and two hobgoblins who operate the crane and maneuver goods, four goblins who help maneuver collected goods as needed, a first mate hobgoblin, and a captain hobgoblin. On this particular voyage, we also have myself on board to observe and help teach all the roles to all the parties involved, though I've trained each group for at least a day now on their respective roles.

Due to the nature of this job, I had to pay all the parties pretty well to make up for both the difficulty and risk the job poses. About half of the ship's crew have water resistance, and those who don't have other things like improved endurance which I think will help them swim to shore if something were to happen.

We launched the ship five days ago, when the tide was at it's highest, and we could roll the ship on logs into the filled artificial tide pool area to float it out to the open water. The first day was pretty unproductive, as we ran various trials to make sure that everyone knew what they were doing. At the end of the day, we anchored a little ways from the jetty, and the crew used two rowboats which we had attached to either side of the ship to make it to the jetty to sleep for the night.

The next day we brought plenty of food with us to the ship, as the plan was to drive the barge to the far side of the island, where it could more safely be kept long term. On that side of the island, the sandy bay sees the water retreat a significant distance each day, so the barge can simply make it's way close to shore at high tide, drop it's anchor, and in a few hours, it'll be resting on dry land, and the contents of the ship can be unloaded using the crane.

Though I actually do need to do some construction to allow unloading cannons that way, if they stick to cannonballs for a while, I should be able to build what I have in mind. For now, the fort can work as a storage area and sleeping quarters for the demons operating the ship. We easily reached the far side of the island, though we ended up needing to do some work clearing a proper area to park the barge. There were still many remnants of the battle that was fought here, with spikes driven into the sand of the beach.

After a day of clearing an area for the barge to properly be anchored at, and a clear pathway to the fort, we were finally ready to do a proper salvage attempt.

[Vol.5] Ch12 Recycling

I accompanied the goblins for two days on test salvages, which went off without any problems. We only recovered cannonballs, and it was a relatively slow process, but I was pleased to see the process working. The hobgoblin divers had a close call with a relatively large fish approaching, and they had to hide for a minute in the downed ship to avoid it. For good measure, we waited half of an hour before resuming with salvage.

After I was confident that the goblins could continue recovering salvage on their own, I began the next projects I had in mind over here. For one of the projects, I intend to build up a stone road into the bay out to a low tide area. Admittedly, the road will cover with sand over time, so I'll need to place regular stone markers to indicate where the footing is underneath, so that it can be cleared when it needs to be used. This will be the path for bringing carts to the salvage boat to unload cannons if we recover them.

The other project was the plan for a warehouse on this side of the island. I plan on having a large portion of the warehouse be underground, and potentially hiding the underground portion, so that in the off chance it gets robbed, not all the goods will go missing. By making an underground portion, similar to other buildings I've made, I'll get the stone necessary to build the rest of the building, and in this case, also hopefully get enough stone to build out the stone road into the bay.

I've been slowly excavating an area next to the end of the existing road, just before the beach, to serve as the warehouse area. I've left the goblins to salvage on their own for five days, and they've been slowly recovering more and more cannonballs, and storing them in the fort on the beach. Unfortunately, due to mana restrictions, I haven't been able to work at the pace I'd like to, so I've only excavated about a fifth of the first basement level. While I waited for my mana to recover, I spent my time cleaning up the beach and bay of our fortifications. It'll take a lot longer than the few days I've been working at it to fully restore the beach, but I'm making noticeable progress.

Unfortunately, we have to head back to the city tomorrow, because our food supplies are starting to run low. On the return trip, we'll be bringing a few carts with us with food and fuel, and then returning with the carts full of salvaged metal after working for a while. I also intend to bring a few fishing poles back with us next trip. When the salvage ship is anchored and the diver hobgoblins are working, the majority of the goblins on the ship don't have much to do other than wait. Instead, they could be fishing off the back of the ship, as long as we establish rules for it for safety reasons.

After the two day journey back to town, I told the goblins they'd have five days to rest before we go back. Then they'll spend 15 days doing salvage before repeating the cycle. Their erratic work schedule is an unfortunate consequence of the distance they have to travel to work, similar to the mine exploration team, except the mine team doesn't have to travel for nearly as long to reach their worksite.

During the five days in town, I worked with the carpenter to get some more carts made, told Zeb about my warehouse and unloading road plans, and then checked in on Tiberius. I'd left him to his own devices for a few months, and I was really starting to worry about what might be happening in the lab.

What I found when I went to check on him were many odd contraptions that he'd haphazardly assembled from wood. It was a far cry from any of the workmanship that I'd produce from stone, but it seemed functional. Tiberius was nowhere to be found to explain what he was working on. In fact, thinking back on it, I hadn't seen him much at all even when I was working on the boat in town. I at least expected he'd have been on the fishing jetty a few times.

As for the devices in the lab, they all seemed to be amalgamations of fish parts, blood, and wood. I can at least guess what he's trying to do, but it's quite disturbing seeing it in action. There are some of the electrical direction organs centralized with other, unknown components connecting them via blood soaked wood to what looks like chambers for storing something in, though they're empty right now.

It really seems like he's trying to harness the electrical fish's abilities in some way. I was concerned enough about the fact I haven't seen him, mixed with his project, that I started asking around the city to see if anyone had seen him.

Almost no one had seen him, but after asking a few of the fishergoblins, I found out where he is. He's apparently convinced two fishergoblins, a hobgoblin and a regular goblin, to go with him to other fishing spots that they knew of to try to catch large fish. Those two goblins had heard of where Boggs would fish, and have been going on multi-week fishing expeditions with Tiberius.

Next time I see him, I'll have a few questions for him, but for now, I'm glad that it doesn't seem that he's died somewhere. Since the situation doesn't seem very urgent, I felt content to continue working on my own project while I left Tiberius to work on his.

While the goblins continued their salvage work, I continued building the warehouse and cleaning the beach. Given how long they were able to fish for during the day, the goblins were able to supplement a large part of their food requirements with fresh fish, which was a nice bonus.

After the fifteen days of working on the beach, I'd made good progress on the stone road into the water for the barge, and had started on the second basement level for the warehouse. The goblins had also recovered enough cannonballs to fill three carts for the return trip. They've salvaged four smaller ships that we sank, and also brought back a bunch of swords and armor which are filling two additional carts.

I think that if I keep working through the goblin's break time, I'll finish the warehouse and path after their next cycle of salvage. If I head back now though, I'll almost certainly need to come back a third time to finish it all, which seems impractical. We have an excess of preserved food, thanks to the amount of fresh fish that they caught while working, so I won't be short on that while I work.

I ended up cutting it pretty close, despite having a total of 24 days to work. The warehouse is fairly large, but I finished it literally the night before the salvage team planned to return to the city again. I did end up having to spend a day helping the goblins when they got the winches jammed on the crane while it was mid-lift of some cannonballs. It wasn't that hard of a fix, they just needed to release the cannonballs so that it was safe to start working with the winches, pull the cable up onto the ship, then respool it. The issue was that I had to be rowed out to the ship, and then work through the process with them, and be rowed back to shore again.

When it looked like I was close to finishing, the goblins had volunteered to work for an extra day or two if I needed it so that I could return with them. I took them up on their offer, but I really didn't want to be the cause for them delaying their break, so I was especially careful with my mana consumption to finish in time.

I also chatted with one of the hobgoblin divers while I was clearing portions of the beach while I waited for my mana to recharge one evening. Though it didn't seem to disturb the hobgoblin much, he said that he's seen well over twenty skeletons of humans underwater while he's been recovering materials. When I pressed him for how many 'well over twenty' was, he said he stopped counting at twenty, and that was part of the way through the first salvage cycle. I can only assume he's probably seen close to one hundred.

Ultimately, this time the haul is two and a half carts of cannonballs, and another cart and a half of armor and swords. All the materials are completely rusted from resting in sea water for almost a year now, but we're just recycling it anyway, so I don't mind. The downside is that we've probably lost a lot of the iron to the ocean in the form of rust flakes.

[Vol.5] Ch.13 Troublemaker

After returning to the city, I set up a handful of jobs to start moving both the gypsum and paper we have made for trade to the new warehouse on the other side of the island. I spent three days producing sealed shipping crates for both the paper and gypsum. This is required before either is able to actually be moved to the other side of the island. I made a significant number of spare crates which only need to be sealed in the future. Gypsum, like paper, has problems with being exposed to excessive moisture, so the spare crates should at least tide us over for a period of time, though I should really employ a goblin with stone shaping to make them occasionally if we're going to be shipping out so many materials in sealed containers.

As I discussed the new setup for trade good with Konkur, he gave me some good news. As they've gotten deeper into the deposit, they've started uncovering quartz. This reminded me that I was in the process of making a new precision tool before news of the war had broken out, and had completely forgotten it. Though, if we have quartz crystals available, then I don't see a reason to continue working on that project. The initial reason was so I could make very fine meshes for separation processes based on density, to separate out the quartz from higher density metal bearing fragments.

It might still be useful in the future, but for now, the quartz crystals themselves provide what we might want for glass. I've directed Konkur to preserve any quality quartz crystals, either in purity or in size or in uniqueness, but the rest can just be stored however to be processed later. He told me that was what he was already doing, which made me feel like I was being a little overbearing, so I apologized. He's already a skilled mineralogist, so I should have somewhat expected he would have a good grasp on the situation. He chuckled in response, and said it was fine, and it was good we were on the same page on the matter.

After getting everything squared away with our shipping plans, I decided to wait for Tiberius to return to actually get a good understanding of what he was working on, and perhaps provide insight if I thought of anything. Ultimately, he didn't return for another six days from when I started waiting, so I had to find things to keep myself occupied within the town.

I found a pretty good use for my pulverize ability. I've had mixed results in the past with trying to use stone shape on different materials, but I decided to try out pulverize on a few things, the first being soil. The soil here is interesting, it's fairly rich in nutrients, because of the volcanic history of the island, but it's also quite rocky. Pulverize seems to solve the latter half of the issue, as it seems to break down any chunks of rock into a sandy material within the soil. This honestly improves the soil quality drastically, and makes it a real shame that I'm the only individual with access to pulverize.

The second use of value is that it works on quartz crystals. I also realized in the process of working with the quartz that pulverize doesn't rely on the material being in contact, like stone shape does. Stone shape travels through an established path in the material to continue shaping and carving away at it. Pulverize seems to literally just pulverize all stone materials within the area in front of my hands of the size I designate. If there is air between me and the material, it still works. For the quartz, this mean I can take a whole pile of crystals, put them in a wooden crate, and shatter them into powder, which can be used for making glass.

So, I spent the six days by pulverizing quartz, then improving the quality of some of the fields around town when I ran out of low quality quartz to pulverize. Quartz would have been a real pain to pulverize due to its hardness, and it would have likely damaged our pulverizers over time, so getting it done this way is a real boon. With a few tons of quartz sand on hand, we should be able to retrofit a bunch of the buildings in town with glass windows.

When Tiberius finally arrived back to town, the goblin and hobgoblin who were with him were each carrying two large fish, which I recognized as the electric fishes. Ultimately, they hauled them all the way to the lab, and once there, told me that I owed them a significant sum of money for all their work.

That answered the first question that I had as to how Tiberius had convinced them to work for him. I had half a mind to tell them that I had promised no such thing, and just let them beat the crap out of Tiberius to take their frustrations out on him, but they do actually deserve pay for their work. The real person who needs reprimanding is the mad scientist making unreasonable promises.

I informed them that I wouldn't pay quite the sum they'd been promised, but we'd negotiate a fair pay for their work, and that Tiberius was in a lot of trouble for making promises like that without my express permission. I also realized from this whole debacle that as a society, we're operating quite heavily on trust, which given our small size is understandable, but we need to move to 'trust but verify' as the operational norm. This basically happened because I spent so long working on building the lab which Tiberius now uses, which made most people just assume that if he said I had offered something, then it was fine.

I'm thinking I'm going to need to come up with a wax seal, or special coin of some kind to be used when I have an indirect statement that needs relayed. Though the question at hand before that is exactly how I plan on punishing Tiberius. Regardless of the result of his experiment, this sort of behavior needs to be curbed. I can't have people operating in this way, at least until they've earned enough clout to actually support this sort of spending, like Zeb.

While I think about an appropriate punishment, I watch him work. Ultimately, the organs and blood won't last forever from these fish. I wouldn't want the goblin and hobgoblin's work to go to waste. It seems like Tiberius has gotten used to getting what he wants from these particular fish, and drains both the blood and harvests the organs from each in a few minutes.

I can't say I've been particularly sanitary in the past, but he's just hauling the organs in his bare hands down to the crystal room, and putting them on his improvised device. Once he gets everything positioned where he wants it, he mounts the device above the crystal, and begins filling the container with blood.

The blood starts arcing again, but this time, the arcing electricity starts coalescing and traveling up the device. It then arcs off wildly from the organs that he's aligned angled in a forward facing way. It's reminiscent of a tesla coil. While interesting, I'm honestly not sure if there is a great application for this sort of device. In essence, this is static discharge. I suppose if we wanted to make ozone, or electrically break ionic bonds it could be a way of using mana to achieve that goal. I have a few improvements that I could envision making to the device for those goals.

Tiberius seems disappointed that his experiment still didn't work in the way he wanted. He seems to have realized he's in trouble, and had been avoiding making any eye contact. He had the gall, however, to say he needs more of the electric fishes, in what broken demon language he speaks at least.

I decided then that the best course of action wasn't to punish him myself, but let Zaka decide on the punishment, that was the sort of role I envisioned Zaka filling within our society after all. I told Tiberius that before he can continue any of the work on whatever it is he's trying to make, he had to go before Zaka to submit for whatever punishment is deemed fair for his prior actions.

I ended up having to practically drag Tiberius the whole way from the lab back to the city. The whole time he was saying things like, "Just a little change, and it'll work!", "I'll get it to arc across the room, I just need a little more time!" and "I'm doing what you told me to do, why am I being punished?"

[Vol.5] Ch.14 Troublemaker(s)

"I need you to come up with a fitting punishment for what Tiberius has done." I plainly state to Zaka. I had to position myself between Tiberius and the door, as he kept trying to sneak out.

Zaka watches the situation and chuckles, "Well, he's certainly acting like he's guilty of something. What did he do?"

"He lied to some fishergoblins and said that I was going to pay them a significant sum of money to help him acquire certain fish."

Tiberius winces like a child despite his age at hearing my statement.

Zaka chuckles again, "Need he be punished? That does seem like something you'd do. Perhaps he simply assumed he had permission?"

"See, I needn't be punished! I've done nothing wrong!" Tiberius testifies as soon as he hears what Zaka says.

"Given the price you said you'd pay them, which is double what I've brought them down to, and that is already 50% more than I would have offered, I think you know that you've done a bad thing, which is why you're acting this way!"

"I only did what I needed to in order to continue my research. My research that YOU encouraged." He says, like he's trying to shift the blame onto me.

"Calm down, both of you. This doesn't seem as severe as you made it sound, Zak, but that doesn't mean it's nothing. I'm going to go talk to the two fishergoblins to hear their side of the story." Zaka rose from his throne, his figure standing at nearly twice our height. He strode past us, and out the door that I was previously blocking, but hastily moved away from as Zaka approached.

After almost an hour, Zaka returned.

"Though they both seemed disgruntled, both of the fishergoblins seemed to think the deal was 'too good to be true'. Some of the fault lies with them for falling for an obvious falsehood, though their punishment is already served, having worked for reduced pay." Zaka says, striding back to his overly large chair, which looks more like a throne to me right now.

"And what of Tiberius? We can't just have people telling other people we've promised things we haven't. There needs to be a punishment."

"Yes, well I suspect, to some degree, Tiberius did think he had freedom to use your money. At least I believe that is the case, based on the conversation I had with the fishergoblins." Zaka looks at Tiberius sternly, "Though make no mistake, in the future, you aren't to do this again. The punishment will be much more severe if you do."

Tiberius audibly gulps before responding quietly, "Yes, I understand."

"Though, yes, there will be a punishment, albeit a light one. Tiberius is going to work with the fishergoblins in the tide pools until he's earned the difference between what you paid the goblins, and what you would have liked to pay the goblins, so he can more accurately understand the value of labor in our country."

I have difficulty imagining Tiberius doing physical labor after how he hauled water to the lab, but if that's all that Zaka wants him to do, I suppose that's fine, though Tiberius himself looks like he's just been sentenced to death, rather than labor for about a month. He slinks out of Zaka's house, and I have a feeling that I'll have to drag him to the tide pools to actually complete his punishment.

As I thought about my previous plan to make a coin or seal, I realized that without literacy, there isn't even a good way to ensure that the correct message gets relayed, and the same situation would have probably occurred anyway. I did have another question to ask Zaka though. "What did the fishergoblins say that made you assume it was some kind of misunderstanding?"

"They said that he talked a lot about how he was doing research for the noble, Zak, for starters. I suspect where he came from, this was the norm for him, and he could just get funding as needed with no concerns, and that he has no concept of the value of work given that history. If you weren't so insistent that this was a problem, I probably would have only had him work for a week at the tide pools."

"I'm surprised you're as lax about this. I feel like this could be a major problem. Our society currently runs on trust. We live in a somewhat small community, so it's understandable, but as the population grows more and more, we're going to have issues relying on trust only."

"Well, a society without trust isn't a very good one to live in either. I don't think this was a particularly major incident, though it did highlight that goblins should recall that official jobs will be posted at the job board, not a random messenger. Even if it is one of the leaders who comes to ask."

As I thought about it somewhat, I suppose I understand what he means. The fishergoblins did sort of just let this happen to them, we do have official channels for these requests. Though it does beg another question. "Did it not seem that odd to them? The fishergoblins I mean?"

"Well, they had suspected the pay was really high comparatively, but let me ask you something instead. Was it any more odd than being asked to spend weeks away on a boat diving in the ocean to recover metal? Or perhaps breaking rock to build a pit, then hauling that rock to build a path into the sea? These seem more odd to me than being asked to catch a particular fish. Odd is the norm, and I recall we fought together a few years ago over the idea of allowing more such odd events to occur, rather than banishing you from our village." Zaka pauses and he lets out a bit of a sigh, "Though I do understand better now the concern that Kurg had all those years ago. I'd say many of his concerns have come to fruition even. We chose our path though, and we best stick to it, because straying from it now seems more dangerous than not."

After Zaka's speech, I felt somewhat foolish for thinking that Tiberius needed to be heavily punished. Sure, he's an outsider from another country, but in a way, so am I. As long as he doesn't do something like that again, it should be fine. Perhaps he honestly should be given a budget to work with already, so he knows what sort of funds he can use. I think it's reasonable to be watchful of any new individuals coming to our country, but I think that Zaka has a point too.

"Alright, I get your point, as long as we're being watchful of any problems I don't have any more complaints." I say, before trudging out of Zaka's house.

I did, in fact, have to drag Tiberius to the tide pools when it was time for him to start working the next day. Though I think he was surprised when he only had to work for a few hours. I'm sure he thought he'd be working out here all day with a fishing rod. The tide pool work is actually quite easy, so it's not that much of a punishment, though you do get quite a bit of leg work in because of the amount of stairs you have to use. Ultimately, the fishing time is limited to low tide for a few hours, and we get all the work done then.

After that, Tiberius was free to go work on what he wanted for a few hours until the second low tide late in the evening. I told him that he only needs to be at the tide pool once a day, but he can show up for both low tides if he wants, to reduce the amount of days he needs to work.

I've decided that I'll help Tiberius for a little bit when his punishment is finished. I may have been a bit too quick-tempered on the matter. I also feel partially responsible, since I didn't clearly tell Tiberius what his standing was, and I never did assign a goblin to function as a lab assistant to him.

While he works in the tide pools though, I've got a few projects I'd like to work on that I think could be valuable, though they're somewhat mundane. They also let me keep an eye on him, to make sure he doesn't slack off or try to get out of the work. Regardless of the situation, he does need to finish his punishment. I plan on continuing to expand the jetty, while also occasionally using pulverize to try to improve soil quality in more of the fields.

[Vol.5] Ch.15 The Fate of Rathland

The first ten days or so, I had to fetch Tiberius to make sure he arrived at the tide pools in time to properly work. After that though, I was surprised to see that he began going to the tide pools of his own accord, and seemed to be getting along well with the fishergoblins while he worked. In the meantime, I was hauling stone to build the jetty, and using pulverize on some of the fields. Some of the float vine had begun regrowing in the area around the jetty, so I spent some time harvesting that as well.

There is definitely a surplus of stone in the other valley where the new artificial tide pool area is being slowly dug out. I helped the construction teams with a problem that they had which I had solved years ago. The artificial tide pool they're excavating has started to fill with water slowly as they dig deeper and cover a wider area. They had been using goblins with buckets to clear the water out, but I had Karsh make a long screw pump using copper and steel that they can use to pump the water out. The pump is overly long right now and has to be supported, but eventually it will reach all the way to the bottom of the excavation area.

Unfortunately, Tiberius has been only doing one harvesting at the tide pools a day, which means that it has run into winter, so I'm actually going to be gone when he finishes his punishment. I've gathered a handful of individuals to come with me to the other side of the island to handle trade. I'm bringing along Elora to handle the payment we have to send to the elves, along with a handful of goblins to help haul things. We might end up staying there for a while, depending on when the elves and dwarf trader arrive, though they usually show up pretty early in winter.

The elves were the first ship to arrive, twelve days into winter. We'd only been on this side of the island for three days at that point. I was glad that I'd brought Elora along, so I didn't actually need to deal with the elves myself. Ultimately, we brought out literal tons of paper crates which they promptly loaded onto their ship before leaving. They didn't even end up staying the night. I wasn't sure if Elora would be staying or not, but it seems like she is staying. I'm not too keen on the fact that she seems to have received a bunch of different written documents which I can't read. I got a peek at some of them, but it's all in a language I don't recognize.

While we've been over here, I've continued cleaning the beach, this time with the help of a handful of goblins. Things have almost returned to their pre-war state, which is nice. When I have mana I've been using it to begin building a new inn building, larger than the other inns. We've been staying in the fort, and sharing it with the salvage crew. There is enough sleeping space, but I imagine everyone would prefer the extra privacy of an inn space.

The dwarven trader arrived eight days after the elves. First, we negotiated for a handful more bargas to be brought next year. I had previously wanted to be done with trading bargas, but we culled some of the herd before the war, and two of the original males haven't been very lively after having been trapped underground for almost a month during the war. They got a little fresh air each day at that time, but regardless, the experience seems to have traumatized them. We also traded for more waterproofing materials, as we used quite a bit making our salvage ship. I also traded for a handful of goods that the Rathland refugees and the dwarves asked for.

We ended up loading up the merchant's ship to capacity with gypsum in exchange. The merchant and his crew ended up also staying in the fort, which made the place pretty packed. We discussed a few different matters while he was here. He asked about our odd ship, and I explained how we were recovering materials from all the sunken ships from the war. Given how the ship was designed, he thought it was pretty convenient for loading and unloading in the natural bay. When they load and unload currently here, it involves loading a rowboat with one or two crates, rowing it out to the boat, and using ropes and pulleys to bring the goods onto the ship.

Given that we were only able to load about half our gypsum onto his ship before they were at capacity, he strongly encouraged that we start considering building a proper harbor for ships. Not many merchants are willing to load ships like they have been. Most merchants are willing to pay a fee to use a harbor equipped with proper loading and docking facilities, and won't actively go to places without a dock. Though we'd also need to have steady supplies of repeated goods year after year to properly attract most merchants. Most merchants prefer following a set trade path every year, rather than trading for random odds and ends.

He also gave us an update on the conditions going on in Rathland, something Elora 'wasn't in a position to discuss'. Well, I say in Rathland, but the country seems to have completely dissolved into six different nations. Four of which are still fighting for control of each other, and two of which have bowed out of the war, and have made peace with the others. This has caused an upset of existing trade practices across the various nations bordering the inland sea, and there is a lot of unease about how everything on the human continent is going to shake out.

Outside of Rathland, there are a lot of different rumors going around about our country. The general consensus doesn't seem to be animosity though. Things like, "Well, if the elves and dwarves both think they're all right, then it's probably fine.". Though there does seem to be an undercurrent of fear based on the fact we seem to have decimated Rathland to the point of non-existence, even if the official story is that most of the damage was done by leviathans and Rathland's own hubris. I suspect this undercurrent is part of the reason Elora didn't want to discuss the situation with us. Though I suspect that she's learned so much about the situation with Rathland's civil war that she's concerned about letting extra information leak is the primary reason.

After spending the evening discussing with the merchant, they set out in the morning. The rest of the group headed back to the city, but I've decided to stay for a week or two to finish building the inn. I don't like the idea of leaving it partially completed and exposed to the elements for an extended period of time.

After another twelve days of work, I finished the inn building, and told the salvage crew they could stay in it while they work. When I got back to town, Tiberius had finished his punishment work in the tide pools, so I went to find him. Ultimately, all the previous fish blood and organs had rotted, and had been cleaned up in the lab, though he wasn't there. When I heard that he was working with some fishergoblins again to catch more of the electric fish, I got a little nervous.

Thankfully, I found him on the extended jetty with the goblin and hobgoblin he worked with before. Thankfully, when I talked to them, it seemed that he had agreed to help them with work in the tide pool, and when they were free, they worked with him catching fish here, and they kept all the fish that weren't the electric fish.

Upon seeing a much more constructive relationship formed between Tiberius and the goblins, I thought that perhaps the 'punishment' Zaka assigned was more effective than I had anticipated. Zaka might be more effective as a leader than I had thought, and is probably why the country operates as smoothly as it does.

Considering how smoothly everything was going now with Tiberius, I felt much more comfortable with the idea of leaving him to his own devices over time, though I still wanted to help him with his current research. I told him that when he needed help making anything from stone or metal to reach out to me in the city. I'll be spending the next couple of weeks using pulverize on the fields around the city, so it should be easy enough for him to find me on any given day.

[Vol.5] Ch.16 Electricity Part 1

After a few days, Tiberius had me come help him in the lab with his project. He'd gathered two of the electric fish, and had a new design that he wanted to try using. I brought along some decently thick copper wire to use as well, given copper's conductivity. With stone shaping, it was very easy to make the shapes and designs that Tiberius had in mind for his device, and I gave him some input as well as we made it.

The concept is pretty straight forward, he was basically using the blood as both the generator and conductor. Then channeling it to the organs which seemingly direct the electric arc through the air. Knowing what I know about electricity though, electricity isn't like a rock, you don't just throw it through the air. You need to make a channel for it to arc through. So I'm guessing that the organ does something with mana to allow that. Either that, or the blood electricity is unrelated, and the organ just generates spontaneous electricity when stimulated with mana.

That idea was easy enough to test using tectonic sense, though I was a little afraid of getting electrocuted as a result. I used tectonic sense through one of the organs without much of the blood on it. I got a painful shock, but nothing like what I saw before when Tiberius was testing the device in the past. The electricity arced from one of the three prongs that protrude from one side of the organ, and arced sideways to my hand. It seems like it does generate some of the electricity itself, but perhaps not all of it, then it arced quickly to the ground through me.

I worked with Tiberius for a slight redesign of the device, using copper wires to direct the flow of electricity toward the organ. In his previous device, he had soaked wood in blood to act as a conductor. In the new device, I've stone-shaped out hollow rods which we've filled with the blood. Each rod has eight wires that run along the edges, touching the internal blood and extending out beyond both sides. One side grasps the electric organ, and the other side can be distributed through the blood pool when it's attached to the crystal.

Though a problem with both his old device and current one seem to be getting a lot of mana to the organ itself. I know some water and bloods make good mana conductors, but the issue of connecting that to a somewhat squishy organ is a problem. There are multiple ways to attempt to solve that problem, like encasing the organ in a container with the blood, but without knowing exactly how it functions, it's hard to say what might work. Even then, it's hard to say exactly what use this even has outside of experimentation purposes.

The main issue is that it's basically just static discharge, like lightning. There is a rapid and powerful arc that instantly dissipates destructively, so it's not even like we could use this to generate electricity in any useful way in the current form, but perhaps something valuable might come from it.

The first organ got fried by the electricity being conducted through the wires. It arced electricity dangerously around the rod for about ten seconds in half second bursts before the organ had become too charred to work anymore, and the electricity started just crackling all over the rod and surface of the blood until it died out.

If everything is working approximately how electricity on earth works, then the blood and organ are somehow generating an either negative or positive charge. Technically, it doesn't really matter which, because for all I know, everything has opposite electric charge here, and we're operating with positrons and antiprotons.

I did get an idea, though it heavily relies on the blood not being damaged or depleted over time. Currently, we keep cooking the blood to the point where the electric charge causes such powerful sparks that the blood stops working to generate the electric charge. So, what if we made many small chambers with a small amount of blood, and ran wire to each of them, then connected that wire to a strong ground? Could we get an electric differential that is somewhat stable?

Within this buried room, basically every surface acts as a ground, albeit a poor one. Which could be partially why there is so much trouble controlling the output from that organ, though I'd guess that it'd require quite the complex manipulation to get an organ to function with precision outside it's body.

So, I discussed the idea of installing a ground wire opposite the crystal in the room. Stone is generally very resistant to electrical flow, making it a poor ground, so I'll need to use quite a bit of copper to get enough surface area in contact with the ground to properly function as a grounding wire.

For the first iteration, I think I'll just insert some solid copper rods into the stone surface at regular intervals using stone shape, then tie them together with copper wire. At the very least, that should be the best ground in this room by a significant margin. While I work on getting the copper rods made and installed, I've given Tiberius some money to use to pay the fishergoblins to get more of the electric fishes.

After three days of setup, I've finished with installing the grounding rods, and made a testing bed for my idea. What I've made is essentially about three dozen thin tubes that run back towards the crystal, with a single copper wire running down their center. Those copper wires are then all connected to each other, and run over to the grounding wire.

Since the electricity should be running along the wire, rather than arcing through the air, we'll need a way to visualize if this is working. To do that, I've prepared a few different tests. I've got three separate coils of copper wire set up, with some lightstone sheathing to function as both an insulator, and to keep the wire in place. One of the coils surrounds a steel core, another has iron filings scattered around it, and the third has both. I have other pieces of iron around that I can use to check the magnetic effect, if there is any.

After Tiberius butchers the fish, we get some of the blood loaded into the chambers, starting the process. Initially things seemed pretty promising. The iron filings snapped into a magnetic grid, and even more-so around the iron core coil. Though I noticed that the filings didn't actually stop and settle. Less than ten seconds later, while bringing a piece of iron over to one of the coils, I could feel the heat radiating off the coils, and another ten seconds later, and the copper started to melt. A few seconds after that, the electricity started to crackle off the severed cable, arcing to the next part of the cable to the ground.

I was thankful that I made a quick disconnect in my design for the tubes, which allowed us to drain all the blood into a container that wasn't touching the crystal relatively quickly. On one hand, things were somewhat successful. The electricity did seem to flow from the blood to the ground through the path of least resistance. On the other hand, it fried the coils.

I was way more excited by the process than Tiberius was though. He seemed far more interested in the prospect of using the electricity as a directed weapon than for other purposes, so my little experiment probably seemed like a step in the opposite direction for him. After thinking for a while, I think I might have a guess as to what caused the coils to heat up like that.

The source of electricity is likely very unstable. I saw the iron filings continue to twitch through the experiment, which indicates that the magnetic fields were shifting repeatedly. So the coils were probably experiencing powerful eddy currents as the residual magnetic fields were driving opposite currents every time the electrical current shut off. If I had to guess, we've got something like a pulsed DC to neutral circuit.

What I'd need to fix that issue is an inductor actually capable of handling the voltage installed circuit, which means I'd need to make the inductor first. Before I run that test though, I should run a test again using the existing blood, but with a thick cable directly to the ground, and see just how long it seems to run before the blood no longer produces electricity. This would all be for naught if the blood only runs for ten minutes before it's fried, even with a ground.

To check that there is still electricity flowing, I'm going to put a small lever near the ground cable to work as a disconnect switch, to move the cable very slightly away from the ground, to hopefully see a spark connecting the two when I throw the switch. I'll do that at regular intervals and roughly gauge the size of the spark to determine if we're losing electrical potential or not over time.

[Vol.5] Ch.17 Electricity Part 2

I got things set up again to test for electricity, and initially checked for a spark every minute or so. After ten minutes, I started checking every five minutes, then every fifteen, and after a few hours, it seems like it had probably reduced in output by some amount, but the exact amount I couldn't tell. After half a day, it became apparent that a decent amount of the electrical capacity was gone. The decay seemed to be logarithmic in nature, so I imagine it would continue to generate electricity for a decent amount of time, albeit more and more weakly over time.

When Tiberius returned to the lab the next day, he wanted to resume his experiments, and I was taking the whole underground lab space for my tests, but I'd basically finished what I wanted to do for today. I want to make an inductor before I try this again. I can't make a small inductor for this though, as I'm basically attempting to smooth out static shocks. What I need is a fairly large iron core, which will be made of thin layers of iron separated by lightstone. I'll then wind thick copper wire around that core repeatedly, making sure there aren't any shorts in the copper wire, and coating them again in lightstone. Ultimately, I'm going to have a large round rod of lightstone with two thick copper wires coming out of it.

I expect I'll have to spend at least a few days working on that inductor to get it where I want it, so, to pre-empt any potential interruption, I left Tiberius with some more coins to use if he needs it for any research in the next week or two, though I doubt it will take me that long.

I ended up having to build an intermediate machine to help, namely, a roller. Thankfully, rollers are fairly simple so we only spent four days getting it working. Once we had the roller, making thin sheets of iron, while somewhat labor intensive, was fairly easy. Then we were able to sheer the sheets into the shapes I needed for making my iron core, which took another four days. Ultimately, this core is about ten inches in diameter and made of twenty-seven layers of iron separated by a small amount of lightstone, then sealed in a layer of lightstone, reaching a yard in length.

I then had Karsh's help with making the fairly thick copper wire that I wanted while I wound it around the iron core, using stone shaping as I went to insulate the copper. The previous wire I used was probably less than a sixteenth of an inch in diameter, so I've gone with one quarter inch wire for this project.

I wound 120 turns down the length of the yard-long core, then repeated the process back and forth down the length until I made the inductor 8 layers deep for 960 total turns. That took a total of two more days of work. This thing is heavy. So heavy, in fact, that I can't even lift it. I can roll it though, and thankfully, hobgoblins with heightened strength seem to be able to lift it with a bit of effort.

I'm going to have to be careful with running this thing though, as it might generate a decently powerful magnetic field in its charged state. I'll need to keep any magnetic materials relatively far from it, to prevent damage. The last thing I want is to have to rewind the whole thing to replace the lightstone insulation.

When I had the inductor hauled to the lab the next day, Tiberius seems to have been waiting for me to begin his next experiment. He had some new things he wanted made of stone, so I obliged him. I thought it was probably a step in the right direction that he wasn't just carving from wood and wasting materials from the fish to run a test so I wanted to reinforce that behavior, though I can't say for certain if that was his intention, or if he just thought he needed my more precise manufacturing with stone shaping to get the outcomes he wanted from his tests.

Though it still seemed for naught, as his tests still resulted in wild electric arcs coming off the organ until it was fried, and back tracked to the blood, then boiled it to the point of stopping the electricity again. I'm fairly confident that figuring out how exactly the fish's controlled arc can be weaponized is far beyond Tiberius, or anyone in the current state of the world. Biological engineering is just that hard to do. The only real way we can harness any of this is by harnessing secondary properties of organic matter.

We used the self boiling property of Zaka's blood, or in Tiberius's case, the rathgore, to make the cannons. I highly doubt that either the rathgore or Zaka actually boil their own blood when they direct a fireball somewhere. This is probably a result of the chaotic usage of random excess mana flooding their blood. Hypothetically, something like that could occur if they touched a powerful enough magic crystal directly though. I have a feeling that biological beings have some form of natural defense against that, but I could be wrong.

Likewise, I'm trying to harness just a bit of the excess electricity here to make some semi-permanent magnets, which would be the next step to making an actual semi-stable source of power. The blood itself isn't actually a stable source of power, and would require an extreme amount of the fishes to be killed to provide enough power to do anything useful. What I can use it for, however, is to make an electromagnet, which I can use to polarize some steel.

That steel won't remain magnetic forever, but I can use it to jumpstart a dynamo. By using a self-feeding stator coil, as long as I can give it a decent initial burst of power, I could then use a dynamo to generate some amount of stable electricity from our dam, for instance. The issue before now was that I had no real way to jumpstart that initial dynamo. We don't have enough types of metal on the island to make a battery, and permanent magnets have the same problem. Konkur has a lodestone, but it's field was a bit weak, and I'd hate to accidentally demagnetize it and not have the dynamo working at the same time.

Now, if the dynamo has to stop for some reason, then I'll just have to make a new temporary magnet to restart it. That means we'd have to kill another electric fish, but that's far easier for us to do than waiting for the trader to hopefully be able to find another lodestone.

As for why I've chosen to try to make a dynamo over an AC generator, there are quite a few contributing factors. First, we're on an island. One of the biggest advantages of alternating current is its ability to use transformers to allow long distance electrical distribution. We don't have especially long distances here on the island that we need to handle, meaning that advantage basically serves us no purpose.

The second reason is that direct current is generally safer than alternating current. The third reason is that direct current circuits are generally simpler and more useful than alternating current, which should lighten my work load considerably. The fourth reason is the ease of connecting multiple generators together. In direct current generators, you only have to deal with voltage and amperage, while in alternating current, you also need to synchronize the frequency of all the generators.

If some day someone decides to reinvent alternating current, and utilize it, I'm not going to resist, it has it's own benefits, but for us right now, it's significantly worse than direct current systems. One downside long-term to direct current generators is their maintenance is more frequent than alternating current generators, so as long as someone else is doing the work making the circuit converters for everything, I wouldn't mind.

The first trial run of the inductor was a success. Although the inductor ran fairly hot, it never failed, and never hot enough that I would be concerned. After the inductor, I was able to use smaller gauge wire in the same configuration as previously, and this time the wires seemed stable, as did the magnetic fields.

There was a small downside though. It did seem to be slightly more damaging to the blood itself, and I noticed that the power level seemed to decay about twice as quickly as before. My guess is that the load on the circuit is causing a higher buildup of charge in the blood, potentially accelerating its decay.

Twice as fast of decay isn't enough for me to be worried though, as I don't plan on needing to run it for that long to make some temporary magnets. Though before I do that, I want to make a small dynamo that I can insert the temporary magnet into to test with. Though I'm starting to feel like a criminal with all the different electrical discoveries I've been using at once. All these different devices were discovered by multiple people over a decently long chunk of time, and I'm basically bringing them into existence over the course of a single season here. Though I suppose a few of the things I brought into existence for the war could be classified similarly...

[Vol.5] Ch.18 Electricity Part 3

I spent four days making my two test dynamos, then one day testing them. Both use a hand crank to operate their rotor, but one uses magnets to generate power, while the other is a bit more complicated, using cumulative wiring for the field windings, meaning it's a self-powering generator that doesn't need magnets. The downside to that generator, as I've previously mentioned is that it needs an initial voltage to excite the field windings. Once it's operational though, as long as it keeps spinning it doesn't need an external power source.

I decided to test the magnet dynamo first. Any magnets I make are going to be pretty weak, and prone to losing their magnetic fields. While tectonic sense might be able to provide a jolt of electricity in combination with the blood from the electric fishes, which would allow a jumpstart for the dynamo, I'd rather not make the system dependent on me for that initial jolt. If we use crystals and the blood to magnetize some steel, and then use that to generate the small amount of energy necessary to start up the dynamo, that bypasses the need for myself to restart it. Ideally we'll find some lead, and we can make some sulfuric acid to make batteries that accomplish the same purpose without needing the crystals or the blood.

Getting everything set up, and then magnetizing the steel for the dynamo took a few hours, but once I did that, the dynamo ran fine, though not for very long. As I was afraid of, the magnetized steel lost its magnetic properties in less than a minute in the dynamo. I somewhat expected this result though. By running the magnetized steel in the dynamo, I'm basically constantly exposing it to opposing magnetic fields, which have the reverse effect of the process by which I made them magnetic to begin with.

I had two tests that I ran with the second dynamo. The first involved initializing it's power directly from the blood electric line, since I knew that was a stable source of power. As I began turning the dynamo, I could feel the electromagnets resisting me, and I used my free arm to disconnect the power source going into the dynamo. I had attached a coil to the output of the dynamo, which I nudged along some iron filings while I continued to turn the dynamo, to check for electric current on the output. The coil moved the iron filings, which I wasn't surprised about, considering I could literally feel the resistance in turning the rotor.

The second test with the second dynamo involved the tricky process of attempting to start it using the first dynamo. This took an hour to get set up, as I needed to make more magnets, then get all my wiring set up sufficiently so I could turn both dynamo hand cranks at the same time. Once everything was set up, I started turning both cranks at the same time, and although initially I was a little worried, it ended up starting fine.

Now that I know both of these work, I could continue with the whole process to make a large dynamo at our dam, but honestly, we don't have that much of a use for it. We likely will have uses for it in the future, but those could be years away, and I can't really justify spending the time to build a much larger dynamo and modifying the dam to power it without any immediate uses. I'd also need to wait quite a few months until after spring to really dig in to the project, considering the dam would need to be bypassed while I work, and spring is when the dam helps regulate the water the most.

We have a few things for which it could currently be used. For example, we could electrolyze water to get pure oxygen for bleaching the paper we make, but this seems like overkill for just that. We could also build a radio broadcaster, but we don't have that much of a use for it ourselves, though it would probably benefit the mainland a lot. I don't actually know if our planet has a stable enough ionosphere to really enable long distance radio communications either. If it doesn't, then the technology would probably just be stolen and utilized by other nations more effectively than we can use it. Additionally, other than copper, we're also currently quite metal poor, which limits our uses of electricity even further. For now, I am satisfied with the knowledge that I can make a large amount of electricity if we need it in the future.

Having finished working in the lab for the time being, I left Tiberius with a lump sum of money to use for project funding for a few months. I explicitly told him that he won't get any more funds until after the third month of the year, so he shouldn't spend them all at once. As for myself, I decided to check in on the status of the various things going on around the city.

The population continues to grow and more and more buildings are built through the city. I should talk with Zeb about building taller buildings potentially. Currently, most of the buildings are similar to the apartment style building I came up with, though there are occasional single domicile homes for the wealthier goblins, and family homes for the humans and dwarves. If we keep growing and expanding to the point I'd like us to, then it would probably be smart for us to start planning for that eventual population density, since it won't cost us much to do so.

I'd like to see some three or four story buildings, to increase our population density even more, though those buildings would need to be built away from our inner walls, so they don't obstruct the inner defenses too much. Land space is a valuable commodity on an island, so we should probably take it into account now as we continue to expand and develop. It looks like there are now three construction teams, and it seems like Zeb has gotten a few more workers with stone shaping skills.

That just means we're going to keep growing faster and faster. I wonder if Zaka can keep up. If he can't, then we're going to have to figure out how to get more goblins who can summon imps to expand our population. I have a bit of a theory as to how he gained that ability, and the fact that no other goblins seem to have gained it only reinforces it.

I think that Zaka's prior isolation on the island may have induced the ability. From what I've learned from the humanoids from the mainland, it seems like demons seem to grow like weeds unless you wipe them out completely. Which probably means that when you are isolated as a demon, you probably get the option to summon imps when you prestige. For a weak goblin, you might not even have the mana to do it, based on what I learned from Zaka, but the crystal cave provided him a source of mana to overcome that normal restriction.

I also had the opportunity to talk with Konkur about the condition of the vein they were mining. He said that the percentage of the vein that was gypsum was declining and the percentage of quartz was rising. He also kept a few high quality quartz samples for me to look at. While they were quite pure, I was a little disappointed by them, though that isn't Konkur's fault. They are nice samples, but I recall pictures from Earth of massive quartz crystals, so by comparison they just don't impress me much.

Though it's a good sign if the vein is continuing to change in composition. It means they might actually find more types of minerals if they keep going. Honestly, that might be what I go to work on next as a project. Before that though, I should pulverize the existing quartz, to improve its storage density. Since Zeb has three construction crews now, I should ask him to have them build a new warehouse facility along the road to the harbor, but close to the city. That way we can use it for intermediate storage before goods are transported over there.

[Vol.5] Ch.19 Crystal Clear

I realized after I looked at the quartz, that I hadn't asked him about the particulars of the quartz. On Earth, quartz crystal goes by many names depending on the color of the crystal. I had assumed, incorrectly, that it'd be the same here. That doesn't seem to be the case, as I'm looking at varying degrees of colored quartz, ranging from an off-yellow to clear to milky to violet. I'm not sure about what exact minerals cause the yellowish or milky colors, but violet quartz, or amethyst, is that color because of iron impurities.

I had initially planned on just pulverizing all the quartz, but now I might want to reconsider. The clear and milky quartz I feel should be fine to just pulverize to use for making glass, but the yellow and violet quartz I'm surprised are just tossed in here. Thinking about it, I don't actually think I've seen any jewels worn by anyone who's visited the island. I hadn't really realized that sort of thing was missing until just now. I suppose if they don't value the different kinds of quartz, then it makes sense why they don't have different words for them, they're all basically the same material.

After I sort them, I should talk with Konkur to try to understand why crystals don't seem to be considered valuable. They're already decently sorted, but there is some amount of mixing that has occurred. I presume they were just piled as they were mined, so similar crystals ended up together. That makes the process relatively easy, and I should only have to take a day or two to get them sorted. Then another day or so to pulverize the pure and milky ones.

After I finished handling the quartz, I made my way up the mountain, to talk to Konkur, and potentially start helping with excavating the vein. Normally, since it's winter, the mountain is completely snowed in, and we just avoid going up it. However, Konkur's team didn't want to just do nothing during the season, so they dug the snow out on the upper portion of the mountain, and made it up to the cave. Though it seems every week they have to spend an extra day of time just keeping the path clear on the way up and again on the way down, so they don't spend quite as much time mining as they would during other seasons.

I asked Konkur for more details about the quartz when I made it up the mountain, and why they didn't care what color it was. He said that different colors of quartz are useful for identifying what metals might be in excess in the area, so they do care like how the purple quartz indicated there is iron, and the yellowish cloudy quartz was due to sulfur. He said there are a few different yellow quartz causes, but it was fairly easy to determine that this was due to sulfur.

As I discussed further, I learned some interesting history of the relationship between crystals and the races on the mainland. It seems that, besides the mana crystals, there are a few crystals that have different effects when exposed to mana, but generally they aren't considered useful. Though crystals like gypsum and quartz don't have any really unique mana interactions, quartz seems to be mildly insulative to mana. I'm just going out on a limb here to guess why gemstones don't seem to be popular, but if some crystals interact dangerously with mana it might be enough reason to not wear one. If, for instance, a crystal could explode into shards when exposed to mana directly, it'd be dangerous to the wearer, and also might make anyone nearby nervous. It'd be like wearing a hand grenade as a fashion statement. Though that's just a guess.

He did list a few examples, though I couldn't really translate the dwarven name of most of the minerals to any sort of particular crystal image in my head based on his descriptions. Though one did stand out somewhat, and I suspect it was fluorite. That mineral seems to give off different effects on it's surface when it is different colors, which would mean different impurities seem to effect how it handles mana. Not many colors have affects, but one seems to emit heat. Another is simply considered "cursed", as people would die when exposed for too long. Though the "curse" definitely sounds a lot like cancer, which makes me very nervous about ionizing radiation being emitted.

This opened up a whole new concern again that I had in the past about what exactly mana is. I'd sort of put it in the back of my mind and forgot about it. On the surface, it's easy to just say, living things use mana, rocks seem to block mana, the suns produce it, and mana crystals can be used as a battery for it. The fact that most other chemistry seems normal seems to indicate that atoms haven't changed much, though the mana crystals are definitely new. The fact that they grow octahedrally isn't normal. I'm pretty sure the only earth crystals that were octahedrons didn't start that way, and only later formed octahedrons after being cleaved, though I don't know that for sure.

If that is the case, then there is something else going on that is new chemically, or maybe not chemically but magically. Mana is very weird, it can seemingly make both materials and energy, though I haven't seen any evidence of a reverse situation yet, where mana is made from either of the other two. I suppose it makes sense that if living creatures can utilize mana to make materials and energy, then there should be some natural occurring chemicals or materials that also do that.

I guess outside of organics, crystalline materials are sort of similar in their inclusion of unnatural atoms within a larger chain of other atoms. I asked Konkur if he knew of any "pure" crystals that produced effects when exposed to mana, but he didn't know what I meant by "pure". I tried to explain to him that the colors of crystals are due to tiny amounts of other materials trapped within the crystals, and the iron trapped in the quartz is what turned it purple, and that the clear form is the "pure" form, but that didn't help him answer the question, as he had no way of knowing what the pure form of the other crystals was.

It was unfortunate that he didn't know that, because I'm starting to suspect certain behaviors for mana that might help to not only explain more of how it works, but also allow us to utilize it better if we could figure it out. If, for instance, pure crystals don't produce any effects when exposed to mana, we could make certain assumptions about how mana behaves on a macro vs micro scale. Though Konkur did say that quartz seems to be mildly mana insulative, insulative effects aren't necessarily interactions, they could simply be deflective on an atomic level. For instance, if silicon tends to deflect mana in the general direction it received it at, then you'd get an apparently insulative property if mana behaves like a particle or a wave.

It'd be quite complicated to attempt to figure out exactly what is going on within the crystals though. I'd first need to determine the base crystalline material, then figure out what inclusions do what within that structure, and finally figure out how to grow those particular crystals. It could be incredibly valuable to do so, but it might also be dangerous, and it'd be quite complicated. I'm actually quite nervous about going the way of Marie Curie due to some of my experiments.

After the discussion, I left with more questions than answers about crystalline material alongside a realization that separating the amethyst was basically pointless because I won't be able to do anything special with it. Once melted down and reformed into glass, I doubt the amount of impurities will do much to color the glass even. Though it might make it slightly lower quality as a result.

The excavation team still had three days on the mountain before returning to the city, so I decided to observe the working mine and help with excavation until then. The mine's design was quite interesting. I'm assuming it's dwarven in origin. It consists of a spiral staircase going around the outside of a central hole. When I asked about it, it seems that as the vein gets wider lower down, they have to cut a new staircase at that width, and take out the upper staircase portions from the top to prevent collapse. Looking down from above, it just looks like a carved out cylinder surrounded by stairs that descend well over fifty feet.

The central width at this point is about twenty feet across, and features a treadwheel crane near the top to lift excavated material out of the hole. According to Konkur, they're going to need to do a bunch of non-excavation work soon, as the vein has started to slant at an increasing angle as they've gotten deeper. What they plan on doing is just continuing this spiral width until the vein is no longer within the area of the mine, then they'll dig horizontal shafts into the vein. After that portion is excavated, they'll lower the spiral again, and continue making horizontal shafts. Each time they do so though, the amount of non-vein material will increase. In dwarven mines, after a certain point, they would cut a new horizontal shaft into the mountain, lay new minecart lines, and begin the process again from the new depth.

Well, it all depends on whether or not ores are found I suppose. Right now they're still just excavating quartz and a small amount of gypsum. With my help, they excavated almost triple what they normally do, but it's still all quartz that's being excavated right now. Well, it's amethyst, and the color is becoming more vibrant, so I'm hoping that they'll run into an iron mineral soon. I'm going to return with them to the village for their break, to talk with Zeb about the various construction ideas I'd had before. Then I'll return to help with excavation when the mining team returns. I'll bring extra food with me next time so I can stay for a longer period of time to work.

[Vol.5] Ch.20 Teamwork

I talked with Zeb about the idea of building larger buildings in the city in order to increase population density. He seemed amenable to the idea, but also wasn't too sure about the stability of taller structures like that. We talked through best practices for structures of that height made of stone, including discussion of adding central pillars in the lower floor rooms to increase the general stability of the whole building.

He had his own worries of things to discuss with me though. For instance, many of the buildings they've built since the war have had to be built different than before the war. The reason being the number of higher prestige hobgoblins as compared to before. Demon biology is weird, and honestly, I hadn't put much thought into that problem. I'd experienced this myself when I went from an imp to a lesser earth demon, but it does make me think that we can't really have a singular housing size that will just work forever. On the other hand, forcing demons to move to a new community because they've evolved or prestiged beyond their current housing doesn't seem very fair either.

I'm not sure that there is a good solution that solves both problems at once though. For new goblins, any housing built for a high prestige hobgoblin would be far too large for them to live in reasonably. Currently they've just been moving into new housing if they completely outgrow their old housing, but there have been numerous complaints and people moving around a lot to try and find a new community. I hate the idea of forming a housing administration, but that might be the sort of bureaucratic overhead necessary to handle the issue.

The administration would handle two things in our current country. First, it'd assign housing to new goblins, and keep a record of where people live. Second, they'd help demons find new housing when they outgrow their old housing. Basically, I'd want them to have some short list of questions to get a feel for the type of community the demons want to be a part of, and point them in that general direction for where they should live next.

For example, if they're a fishergoblin, and they've recently become a hobgoblin, they may want to live near other fishergoblins, so they could be directed to appropriate housing for that want. That might help cut down on the current shuffling for housing that is happening. According to Zeb, when a hobgoblin picks a new apartment or house, most of the time, they're back in a few weeks, looking for a new one. This cycle repeats between one and three times depending on the individual before they settle on a new home.

The housing administration could also be in charge of taking census data. They'd need to do it initially anyway, but down the road, as the city becomes larger and larger, having a written record of our current population's situation every so often will be important to making decisions.

Outside of that issue, he had a second issue that I was able to quickly remedy. The problem started with the humans, but has since spread to the dwarves. During winter, like it is now, at night the temperature gets quite chilly on some nights in the city. The humans were the first to request windows to help keep the heat in their house while still allowing light in. Once the humans started complaining, the dwarves also wanted windows for the same reason. The easy solution to that is that I'd been pulverizing quartz already, so I just needed to show a few members of Zeb's team how to make glass from the quartz so they could make glass windows for him to use. In general, we should have enough quartz that he can use it for more than just the humans and dwarves, and I told him that he should plan future constructions to use glass windows, and that he might want to retrofit the old buildings with them as well.

So, I bargained with Zeb to get the warehouse built just outside town in exchange for taking some time to teach a few goblins on construction crews how to make glass. So, rather than helping the mining crew when they return up the mountain, I'll first be spending time teaching some goblins how to make glass. I'll just plan on returning up the mountain to mine on the next trip instead.

In the fourteen days I had until I planned on returning to the mine, I managed to teach the four goblins Zeb assigned the glass making process. They only needed to learn how to make panes, so only needing to teach that made it a little easier. Ultimately, they have quite a few tons worth of pulverized quartz to work with, though I don't know if we're excavating it faster than they can use it currently. If it was only for new constructions, I think that we're mining more quartz than we use, but if we include all the buildings that need retrofitting, I don't know if the stockpile will last through all of it. On the other hand, since I'm mining as well, we're probably producing significantly more quartz than we were before.

I've been working with the mining crew for six days now, and they're returning tomorrow morning while I intend to stay up here for the next ten days to keep working. I've also improved the overall work speed of miners beyond just myself. The way the mine is currently run, excavated minerals are hauled up via a crane out of the shaft. There, they are loaded into carts, and run up to the entrance of the cave. I added in a little extra slot on some of the carts and the crane where a crystal charging tray can be relatively safely inserted for transport. As the carts are run up to the entrance, a drained crystal tray is dropped off at the charging room, and on the return trip, a fully charged tray is brought to the mine.

Ultimately, this has saved an immense amount of time spent moving to and from the crystal charging room for replenishing mana. I did take a day of downtime expanding the room and doubling the number of trays though, due to the new expanded use. The miners productivity being somewhat slow before this is sort of my own fault though, as they didn't want to move the trays out of the charging room without my permission, and I only realized this was an issue after I asked one of the goblins to bring me a tray so I could recharge and keep working, and he seemed worried about potentially breaking something. I explained that they're not that delicate, and then came up with the improved system.

Honestly, with how deep this shaft is, I'd expect this will more than double the rate of mining, even without my help.

Well, the first four days were a bust after the miners left. As it turns out, without their help running the minerals and bringing me mana crystals, my rate of work isn't even a tenth what it is with them within the vein's mine. So after a single frustrating day, I spent three days working on other things, rather than being frustrated by my lack of individual progress.

Instead, I decided to start expanding the exploratory tunnel in a different direction from before by making a junction about half way through its length. Ultimately, I'm just doing this to get access to more mana crystals. We weren't particularly low on them, but it's a job I could do more quickly working solo than what I can do working in the new mine, so I at least felt like I was doing something of value.

When the miners came back, it felt good to return to working on the project I'd intended to work on. Moving forward, I'll only overstay compared to the rest of the mining team if there are other projects I want to work on, like growing crystals. When I work through the night thanks to my trait, it's not much of a slow down while the mining crew is here because in the morning they can just haul out everything I've cut, and I would make a single trip back up for food once in the night, and at that time I'd swap out some of the crystal trays before continuing work, after I ate and did some quartz pulverizing.

With me helping and the new crystal transport method, Konkur said that we're excavating nearly eight times the volume that they were before in a single six day stint. Though that's not necessarily good, because it means that they spend significantly longer hauling it down to the city, and he's worried about morale after I leave if the pace is too slow in comparison.

By his estimates though, we'll need to adjust to the horizontal cutting method after the next six day stint, which will also mean changing the way the staircases are cut. He said that if I just happen to stop helping after they switch excavation styles it'd be unlikely to affect morale, so I've committed to returning for the next six day mining stint, and then I'll stop assisting for a while. I'm just hopeful that with the new crystal tray method, they'll remain working quickly in comparison to before.

According to Konkur though, sometimes you'll get bursts of output from these veins if you happen upon a horizontal fracture full of crystals as you continue to mine them out, so I shouldn't be as pessimistic about it's output. Plus, it's still only producing quartz and some gypsum, so it's not exactly valuable.

[Vol.5] Ch.21 Expansion

After the next six-day stint, the mine had to switch to horizontal shafts, because the vein had deviated too far from the vertical shaft that was being dug. I agreed to stop directly helping with extraction for the sake of morale as well. Though I can still help with peripheral matters if I think it will improve the miners overall speed and effectiveness, but I don't currently have any projects like that in mind.

One of Zeb's teams finished building the new warehouse just outside the city, so now I can begin sorting goods that we'll eventually trade without worrying about accidental mix-ups happening. I also got the chance to talk with the crew doing salvage, and they'll haul one cart's worth of trade goods over to the other warehouse in addition to the food they haul for themselves whenever they're headed to the bay. While that won't result in everything being hauled over, it's labor that would have been wasted otherwise.

Speaking of Zeb, it seems like they've managed to retrofit the human and dwarf houses with windows, though now that it's spring, the evening temperatures will be a little warmer. The windows will at least keep the frequent rains out though, so I suppose that's a plus. Zeb also seems to have come up with a new design for an apartment for goblins that's four stories tall. It's quite impressive in comparison to most of the other buildings in town. I decided to look through it to see what the final design ended up as.

The first floor of this building doesn't seem to have any rooms for goblins to live in. Instead it boasts two large kitchen areas, a central dining area, and two moderately sized rooms that each had a table and a few chairs. Honestly, it's quite similar to a hotel's design as there are two stair wells on opposite sides of the building which go to different ends of a central hallway on each floor which is flanked by rooms. There are a total of twelve rooms on a floor, so the building houses 36 goblins in total. There are also 12 pillars which are about three feet in diameter that run up the height of the building to provide added stability in addition to extra thick walls.

I got a look at another building that he seems to be currently designing which is clearly sized for hobgoblins, it's still in its early stages so I can't tell much about what the final design will be, but it does seem to be another high density building based on it's size. If he tries to make it house just as many hobgoblins, the building would be significantly taller than the other one, so I hope he's not doing that.

I haven't been paying much attention to my level, and it barely has moved at all. I've done a bit of tree cutting and other work that normally gives me some levels, but even then it isn't much.

<APEX LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 7
HP: 1579/1579
MP: 1156/1156
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance, Partial Sleep
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands, Pulverize

Honestly, I'm thinking I'd like to gain some levels, though the number of trees I'd have to cut down would be astronomical to show any results. Though that would maybe be a good starting point. For a long while, we've been stockpiling salt and not trading it. The reason for this was to have a strategic stockpile in case we have another war. Though now that we've spent some time doing so, we can probably start trading some of it again, as we produce about ten times the amount that we use over the course of a year.

What I'm thinking about doing is felling a significant number of trees in the next valley over near the coast. Just beyond where we're digging out the new artificial tide pools, I'm thinking we should build more salt evaporation ponds. If I can finish that project before the summer, then they can be operational for a decent portion of the year where they're functional. Long term, salt could be a semi-stable commodity for us to trade if we build a port.

In thirty-six days, I'd cut down a considerable number of trees from the other valley to make room for even more salt evaporation ponds. As I worked, I thought about the idea of converting one or two of the ponds in the other valley into solar stills by essentially making a greenhouse over the pond to increase the rate of evaporation. Right now, the ponds are only effective for part of summer and fall when there isn't much rain, but building a greenhouse over the pond would make it effective year round, and we could increase the rate of evaporation even in other months. I don't want to attempt making one until we've got a good stockpile of quartz for glass in the city though. We don't need the salt immediately, and if we produce too much we won't even be able to trade it. After all, I'm already practically doubling our available production of salt by making all these new ponds.

<APEX LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 19
HP: 1939/1939
MP: 1288/1288
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance, Partial Sleep
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands, Pulverize

Though now that I've cut down the trees, we'll still have to remove stumps and roots, then dig out the ponds and waterways for ocean water. Honestly, I should take the time to build a proper road from the tunnel across this valley as well. We'll need it when the new artificial tide pool is made, and it'd speed up the hauling of all the various materials from this valley.

I already have about three dozen goblins processing the various trees I've cut down. Quality wood is being sent to the carpenter, where as the rest of the wood is being divided between paper making and charcoal production. The stumps and roots will similarly be divided up between paper and charcoal as they're removed.

Given our larger population, I mobilized even more goblins to help with the development in the area. An additional six goblins are helping dig the path for a new road, and another twelve are working on removing tree stumps and roots in the area where the salt evaporation ponds will go. The goblins processing the rest of the wood have made decent progress in the last sixteen days, and there are constant cart loads being hauled to various destinations.

I've been cutting stone from the new artificial tide pool construction to use for the new road in the meantime. Though I'll probably want to take a short break soon as its about time for me to check in on Tiberius, and I should check in on how the mining team has been doing and spend a day or two pulverizing more quartz if they have it.

I checked in on Tiberius first, which ended up taking about two days' time. The first day was spent waiting for him to return with some more fish to show me what he's been working on. He's seemingly given up on weaponizing the electric fish alone, which I'm not that surprised by. As I mentioned before, it's very hard to control electric arcs, and proper use of organs for something like this practically impossible at our current technologic level.

What he's done instead though actually does utilize the electric fish somewhat, albeit in a way that's somewhat different than I expected. There are quite a few kinds of fish around the island, and one shoots out spines made of bone as a defensive weapon. Those spines are embedded in a special muscle, or maybe it's proper to call it an organ? Either way, that organ contracts when electric current goes through it, which limply tosses whatever is embedded in it. However, if you apply mana at the same time, it properly propels the item inside it, albeit somewhat wildly.

What he's done is fashioned a barrel that can help guide and aim the projectile fired from the device, and by using the electric fishes blood as a conduit, it provides both the mana and electricity that causes the organ to propel the item out. So I suppose I need to retract my statement about utilizing organs, though many organs are going to be useless, this one seems somewhat useful, though you still need the ability to infuse mana into the liquid. The current prototype is somewhere between a gun and a crossbow. The projectile that is used needs to be somewhat long to be properly propelled by the organ, but it also needs a barrel to guide it. So maybe a mana powered blowgun is a better description?

Reloading it takes a bit of time, and I don't think it'd be easy to automate that process. It's about as simple to reload as a crossbow and I suspect it takes about as long, but it's much lower effort, so it has that going for it. I'm interested in what improvements he'll make to the design, so I left him with a bit more money than last time to continue his research for a few more months.

I then went and took three days pulverizing more quartz that had been mined. The mine has been producing less and less gypsum, and the quartz output has increased comparatively. They've also been producing more output since I let them use the crystal trays more effectively, so we've got quite the excess amount of quartz.

Zeb's prototype building was also completed, and I looked through it. This building is only three stories tall, but stands a little taller than the four story goblin building as each floor is taller to accommodate hobgoblins. The entry floor is similar to the other building, with two kitchens and rooms, but the two floors above each house ten hobgoblins, so the total population housed in the building is twenty.

His construction teams have built two more of his goblin high-rises and are working on another hobgoblin building to match the prototype. Zaka has been kept pretty busy with summoning, and I'm really starting to think we'll need to figure out how to get more demons capable of imp summoning if we want our population to increase any faster than it already is. That said, we're getting about two new goblins a day currently, so compared to the races from the mainland we're multiplying exponentially faster.

[Vol.5] Ch.22 Sea Wall

I continued working in the other valley with the various goblins I hired for sixteen days, until a storm hit. Once again, it rained heavily for three days with strong winds berating the island. Everyone hunkered down in the city, although some people occasionally would venture out despite the danger. That was how I heard that the water level had risen about half the distance between the city and the ocean during one of the three days of the storm.

By the end of it there was a lot of cleanup to do once again. Areas that had been partially submerged needed to be cleaned out and the windmills needed to be repaired. It seems like springtime here always runs the risk of one of these storms occurring. In all likelihood the storms are hurricanes or tropical storms with a storm surge associated with them. Which has me wondering if we should build some preventative measures into the beachfront.

We wouldn't have that much issue building up a sea wall to protect our infrastructure from all but the worst storms. Something like a twenty-five foot barrier that rises up between the tide pools and all the rest of the infrastructure should be doable. Some valves will be necessary for the salt evaporation ponds and the stream will need to have it's own barrier until it reaches that twenty-five foot height differential, but it'd help protect us against most of the powerful storms.

Three days after I started designing the new sea wall system, I got news that while the ship on the other side of the island didn't get blown away, it was heavily damaged, and would require repairs to the hull, crane, and steam engine. Unfortunately, there are other more pressing repairs to make before the necessary personnel are available for that work, so it'll probably be a few weeks before anyone can really tend to the ship properly. Thankfully, it sounds like they were able to pull the ship far enough ashore that it isn't of threat of being damaged further.

Cleaning up the damage from the storm near the city took ten days, and then the neighboring valley took another three. After that, the carpenters and a handful of other goblins began work repairing the ship while I focused on working on the crane and steam engine with Karsh. Getting the ship into working condition again took a total of fourteen additional days due to travel times and hauling broken parts from the far side of the island.

Considering the damage to the ship, it has increased my desire to build a proper port on the far side of the island so we could prevent damage like this from happening in the future. Before that though, getting the city's side of the island protected would save considerably more time and labor. While the initial cleanup was happening, I talked with Zeb through the general designs for a sea wall to help protect our island from future moderate storms. So when I went to go work on repairing the salvage ship, he had one of his construction teams begin work on the first of the sea walls.

It'll take a considerable amount of time and stone to build, since it reaches across the length of the valley, stands twenty-five feet tall, and needs to be sturdy enough to hold back the ocean. Ultimately, I settled on a design that consists of 45 degree slopes with intermittent stairs to allow crossing it more easily, with a six foot thick center region between the slopes. Since the sea wall needs to stretch across the nearly mile and a half width of the valley at the coast, a rough estimates tells me we'll need about six million cubic feet of stone to actually complete this project. Which, while daunting, isn't actually even as much stone as we'll carve out for the new artificial tide pool, and isn't even as much stone as we've cut from the reservoir.

Also, we aren't expecting to finish this wall any time soon. Even a partially completed wall will provide some protection against weaker storms. Though with more and more projects of this scale being considered and attempted, I'm starting to think about the need for another large crystal on the island.

Our current large crystal sits in the bathhouse of the city, allowing workers in the city to regenerate mana quickly. However, when work is being done an hour or more walk away from the city, it's usually not worth the effort to walk back to regenerate your mana, since you'll regenerate a decent portion of it during the walk. If, however, we had a second large crystal, one which we could use to set up a temporary bathhouse near worksites, we could increase our effectiveness drastically.

For example, our current construction stone demand is being met by carving out the new artificial tide pool, which is about two hours from the city. If we set up a temporary bathhouse over there, then stone cutting could be done continuously by fewer workers while still having a higher output productivity. Then later, that crystal could be relocated again to the far side of the island for building a port, or to a new quarry location.

Before I go do that though, I want to oversee and finish the salt evaporation ponds in the other valley, so they can be productive for the next few months as we enter summer.

With the help of a large taskforce of goblins, I was able to get the remainder of the work for the salt evaporation ponds done in twenty-seven days, though we didn't build the road. Unfortunately, some of the downed tree wood got washed away in the storm before it could be fully transported back to the city. The storm surge did uproot and wash away many of the smaller trunks though, so in some ways the storm sped up the construction progress.

While we were working, the eagle, which had been living on our island for a considerable number of years now, left in the direction of the mainland. A few of the dwarves said that it likely left to find a mate, and depending on the eagle's gender, it'll either return with it's mate or remain on the mainland. This behavior could be seen occasionally with eagles that had moved between the population near the capitol and the coast before.

While it would probably be best if the eagle doesn't return to our island, given the fact that we've basically had to appease it for a number of years, I think our population started to look on it similar to how the dwarves do. It had helped us through a number of invasions, though the sheer number of humans made the eagle's impact negligible. From what I gathered, the eagle did eat a few of them, but twenty to thirty barely made a difference, and the humans seemed to know better than to actually fight back once the eagle had snatched someone.

After the salt ponds were done, I did a last check around the city for any duties I needed to take care of before I go to work on making another surface viable crystal. Tiberius was still making progress and developments with his new weapon, so I left him with enough money to get him to winter to continue his research. I hired a few goblins to be assistants in my crystal growing process, though they'll travel and join up with the mining team for their actual employment schedule.

I'll have them heat the vacuum chambers of crystal material to bring to me while I operate the vacuum chambers. That sped up our progress considerably last time, and I don't have any reason to expect it won't do so again. Plus I have some good jumping off points thanks to the fact I operated multiple chambers last time, a trick I intend to repeat again this time.

At night, when they're asleep, and potentially on some of the days when the mining team is gone, I'll continue excavating new crystal bubbles to make sure that I have plenty of raw material.

I spent a good four months growing crystals on the mountain until I finished a six foot crystal. It's only twelve days until the eleventh month of the year now, which is when I consider winter to start. The eleventh month is when ships start arriving from the mainland and when we get snow usually.

In the time it took me to grow the six foot crystal, I grew a spare four-foot crystal, three two-foot crystals, and eight one-foot crystals, though I'm not going to tell Tiberius about them. I'd come back to the city with the miners every other trip they made, so I wasn't out of the loop on events, but every time I came back, it seemed like a new tall building had been completed, and more and more work was being done. There were a considerable number of new fields for crops throughout the valley, and the sea wall had about a foot of height completed.

[Vol.5] Ch.23 Wintertime Woes

I let Zeb know about my plan to build a temporary bathhouse over by the second artificial tidepool construction site. He gave me a cautionary warning that I should move the crystal somewhere else before springtime, on the off chance we have another major storm this year. I agreed that would be a good idea, so as I worked on the bathhouse, I started thinking about where I would build another bathhouse to make the crystal useful in springtime.

I had a lot of trouble deciding on a spot for the crystal in springtime. The four places I'd prefer to put it, the two valley coasts, the dam, and the harbor, are all at risk or not usable in spring. Ultimately, I couldn't really come up with a good new location for it to move during spring, but I did think of something that I figured might be nice. I recalled that the dwarven capitol had their bathhouse upstream from the waterways in their city. From the sound of things, it made the capitol a nicer place to live, so I spent a day carving out a small pool a hundred feet downstream from the dam, and I'll plan on submerging the crystal there in the spring, and letting the spring stream bring the mana through the city.

It probably won't have a huge impact on things, but considering the plants and animals in the city seemed to respond positively with the existence of the bathhouse, it might help our crop yields as the stream flows down through the valley. If it ends up being very useful, then I'll probably need to make another giant crystal and leave that one in the stream.

That said, the temporary bathhouse in the other valley only took four days to make, and I noticed a rapid increase in the rate that stone was able to be cut from the future tide pool over the following six days. With that done, the winter months are only a few days away, so I'm going to make sure everything is gathered up and moved to the other side of the island to the warehouse for trade, then I'll work on some more infrastructure over there to pass the time while we wait.

After four days in the city getting the most recent items ready for transport, myself and about fifteen goblins made the two day trip to the other side of the island while hauling goods. Once there, it was another sixteen days before our first visitor arrived. In that time, I built part of a second warehouse for storing trade goods. Ultimately, we're still producing more than we can trade with our one merchant, so we're going to build up a larger and larger stockpile unless we can entice more merchants to the island.

I'd start work on a harbor myself, but honestly it should only come after we've gotten sea walls built in the two valleys near our city. After that, our population will likely be large enough, and our goods output high enough, that building a port will be the next most productive large scale project, and we can then move the secondary crystal to this side of the island alongside a construction team to begin work. Until then, I'll just have to continue building out some of the other infrastructure, like warehouses.

The first visitor was the dwarven merchant, alongside Shasta. In recent years, Shasta's importance as a translator has gone down for interactions like this, as the merchant and I have picked up enough words of each other's languages to be effective at trade without her assistance. The merchant unloaded the goods we traded for last year, and then we began new negotiations for this year.

I negotiated with the merchant for a bunch of items, and requested a second trip to our island this winter at a discounted rate on our goods. We have a significant stockpile of gypsum, salt, and paper that is filling our warehouse, and even if we're selling it at a cheaper rate, it's better than it just sitting and doing nothing. In exchange, we're getting a bunch of new waterproofing supplies to more than replace what we used because of the storm, and then also importing some iron to help supplement what we're getting from salvage. Our iron demand has slowly been climbing alongside our population, as more individuals want steel tools and cookware.

After negotiations with the merchant concluded, Shasta had other things to discuss on behalf of Kao. In the last few years, it had become apparent that the large crystal we gave to Kao, which was installed in the mountains in his territory where the eagles are from, was increasing the productivity of the small communities nearby. Those communities have slowly been growing in population as dwarves migrated during the occasional bad season.

It wasn't just apparent to Kao though, as other dwarven groups have noticed the increased productivity, and eventually the cat was out of the bag that we provided a giant crystal that was the cause. Kao is keeping as much information from leaking as he can, but it sounds like other dwarven leaders are greedy for their own crystals. The Dwarven King isn't that interested, likely due to already having his own crystal, so we don't need to worry about any sort of grand invasion.

Shasta did warn, however, that we'll probably want to start considering producing the giant crystals to use for negotiations and trade with the other dwarven warlords. We don't need to worry about being invaded directly, but if another war were to occur, other dwarves might join in on the opposing side at the prospect of potential riches being won.

So, after thinking on it for a night, I decided on a potential solution. If Kao will help facilitate, for a fee of course, I'd like to run an auction on his island next year for a large crystal. To be upfront about the situation, I'll also inform the participants that the next auction will be three years after the first one, so they should plan accordingly. For fairness purposes, those who already have a crystal will be excluded from the auction.

Shasta told me that the idea would probably work out as long as we don't have another war in the next ten years or so. Though she wasn't able to make any promises as to Kao's willingness to participate in the ordeal. Since we want the auction to happen next year, rather than negotiating at a later date, I told her what we're willing to pay Kao to facilitate the events, even if we're overpaying.

I told her we'd be willing to give him a second crystal, to be paid a year after the first auction's success, and each following auction we'll give him a 5% cut of any trade goods or currency we receive for the auction. In exchange, it'd be up to him to promote the initial auction to the other dwarven factions, and get his island ready to receive such a retinue, including security to protect against any problems. Ultimately, by having it on his island, it should help prevent espionage and any potential trickery that might occur if the dwarves all travelled to our island for the crystals.

We'll plan on having the auction in the dead middle of winter, on the fifteenth day of the twelfth month. That gives us time to transport the crystal to his island, and time for the dwarven retinues to make their way there safely, and return safely to the mainland. Ultimately, I don't want to disrupt the power symmetry on the mainland, or make any enemies in the process, so I'm going to keep the crystal sizes to 6' and not go much larger. I don't want this to be perceived as any kind of threat to the Dwarven King's power, though propping up Kao in comparison to the other warlords might not be a bad idea. Perhaps the crystal I'll pay him with will be a bit larger, if he accepts.

All this being the case, I'm going to need to grow another crystal this year, so we have it available for the auction. If things don't work out, then we'll just have a third large crystal that we can use ourselves. I was quite hesitant in the past to doing something like this, but if we can negotiate defensive agreements as part of the exchange for these crystals, then it'll help us drastically reduce our risk of war.

If that was the end of our visitors this year, I'd have said that it was very successful, but unfortunately another ship from Elloetta arrived eleven days after the merchant left with Shasta. According to Elora, Elloetta overruled the lowered price negotiation, and challenged us to 'make enemies with the elves if that's what we choose to do'. I'm really not a fan of the way the elves are behaving, but Elora has been useful to us, so I suppose I can view this as payment for her services, though I'm not actually going to think of them favorably.

So, we ended up sending them off with even more trade goods. After the merchant returns near the end of winter, we'll have pretty much emptied our warehouse of goods on this side of the island. The whole process with the elves took a few days, because we had to send a messenger to fetch Elora, then have her calculate the value of what we sent, and write and sign a note attesting to her assessed value of the goods we sent. I had her sign an additional document for ourselves saying that with this the initial trade agreement was fulfilled, and that any additional requests made by Elloetta for goods would be classified as 'extortion' and we could use that document plus the blackmail we had tried to leverage before to cause some real problems for them.

[Vol.5] Ch.24 Seasons of Change

We continued to wait in the harbor area for another thirty-one days, until the merchant returned again. He had some of the goods we requested prepared, but most of it would wait until next year. Though we did once again fill his ship with all the agreed upon goods like gypsum, salt, and paper. In the time while we waited, I worked with the goblins I brought along to continue improving the infrastructure on this side of the island. As I would dig out the second warehouse's basement, the stone would be hauled off to build out the roads further along the bay.

After the merchant left again, we waited around for another ten days, just in case some other ships arrived. After that point though, we were fairly certain that no one else would arrive, so we packed up what traded goods we had acquired and headed back to the city. Quite a bit of the iron we requested was delivered, and I think we're going to need some more coins minted soon, so after I move the crystal for springtime, I'll probably return up the mountain to mint coins and start growing the crystal for the auction next year.

Once we got back to the city, we were only half a month from the first month of spring, so I got a few hobgoblins to help me move the crystal from the temporary bathhouse in the other valley all the way up to the stream, where I took a few days ensuring that even if the stream flooded the crystal wouldn't be damaged. I essentially made a pit with thick stone bars all around the crystal so water could flow through but even moderate debris wouldn't be able to interact with the crystal. That whole process took six days to complete.

The sea wall had already grown by another two feet with the help of the bathhouse in the area, and we're probably only a year or two out from having the second artificial tide pool finished at this rate. The city has been methodically clearing more and more forest and converting it to farmland as well. I did some quick mental math, and decided that it was time to plan out plots with the express purpose of growing trees on them for later harvest, given how reliant we are on wood for fuel.

We don't know exactly how long the trees take to grow to maturity, but the plan I have in mind involves setting aside one fairly large plot of land each year, in which we'll plant about one thousand trees in each plot, which will measure five hundred feet by two hundred feet, so each tree gets approximately 100 square feet of space. By repeating this every year until the trees are large enough to harvest, we can hopefully provide ourselves with a sustainable amount of wood each year. Though the goblins in charge of managing the existing forests and making dirt trails through them have been providing us with a decent amount of wood from ground clutter, which is technically sustainable as well.

These plots will be further from the city, part of the way up the mountain where growing other food is difficult due to the terrain. It might seem a bit odd to clear cut existing forest only to plant new trees in the area, but because it's a managed forest, rather than wild, the trees are grown a bit closer together. Also, since we're converting a large amount of the wood into furniture as well as charcoal, it's not like the wood itself is being wasted.

Getting everything set up for the wood plots took a little bit of time, since I needed to demarcate the actual locations for the plots. Then I had to get a handful of goblins to put in charge of the whole matter. By the time everything was done, it took nineteen days. That was fine though, because I did want to wait until the snow on the mountain had properly melted before I worked on minting coins.

The coin minting itself doesn't actually take that long, so things were planned out such that I'd bring the couple of goblins who've worked on coin minting with me in the past up the mountain the day before the miners returned down the mountain. Ultimately, I'm still trying to keep the coin minting process relatively obscure, so the secrecy is somewhat important. Then, we'll mint coins for a few days before bringing the new coins down the day before the miners return.

I'll spend the evenings mining more native copper for us to use for more coins, while during the day we'll all work to mint the various coins. We'll bring up some of the iron I traded for as well to mint the coins that previously were made from mangalloy. Honestly, given the usefulness of mangalloy, we might consider doing a trade in program for those coins, to replace them with plain iron, and buy them back at a small premium, just so we can have a small amount of the mangalloy available for certain hardened machinery. We'd probably only get a few ingots from the whole ordeal though, so it's hard to say if it would be worth it or not.

After another eight days, we had minted the coins and brought the new supply of them down to Zaka for distribution again. I mentioned before that we could really use a bank of some sort in the city, so Zaka wouldn't need to manage this process, but considering we're slowly depleting our metal supplies, I don't know if it'd be feasible to build a bank. Similar to the jail, we need a metal vault for storing the valuables, since there are dozens of individuals in the city who can treat stone like butter at any point in time. We could make it using copper, but given how soft copper is I don't think that'd be feasible unless we find something with which to alloy the copper.

Though, once the sea wall is completed, we could potentially alleviate our metal issue via trade by building a harbor on the far side of the island, and utilizing our existing quartz supply to make large solar greenhouses to greatly increase our salt production. We could drastically increase our trade output of salt, which we could then exchange for the metals we need, and as an added benefit generate some freshwater for us to use. All those plans are a few years out though, so for the springtime season, I'm going to continue growing large crystals for us to utilize for both trade and productivity.

Over the four months I spent growing crystals, I produced a six-and-a-half-foot crystal, and built up even more of a stockpile of the intermediate sizes. I ended up modifying the crystal growing lab area somewhat to accommodate a few things. First, I expanded out the crystal slag material storage area significantly. If we ever figure out exactly what gas is released by the crystals, and can isolate it again, then that slag can be useful to us once again.

Second, I dug out a new storage room where I can store all the intermediate crystals that we grow. That room is purposefully resealed in a way that makes it hard to notice, just in case someone were to attempt to steal some of our intermediates. That storage room currently houses nineteen one-foot crystals, eight two-foot crystals, and three four-foot crystals.

Due to the speed and volume at which the crystals grow in their chambers, it's much faster to produce the smaller crystal intermediates than the large ones because of the fixed rate at which the crystals actually grow. If, for some reason, I wanted to produce significantly more of the large crystals at a time, then I'd need to build more of the large crystal vats to do so. Though I don't know if I alone could operate any more of the vacuum chambers than I currently already operate at a time. With that though, we've made the crystal for the auction, should it actually occur. I doubt Kao will say no, but even if that's the case, then we can just use this ourselves.

I also talked with Konkur about a few things during the times where we both happened to be free while on the mountain. Firstly, we discussed just how much more crystal material I could reasonably expect from the stone layer where I've been extracting it. After doing some estimates, Konkur thinks I've probably extracted between 25 and 50 percent of the deposits from this area. Though he also said that it'd be reasonable to assume there are multiple other deposits like this buried in the mountain in other locations, so if this deposit runs out, we could probably find more.

Closer to the end of spring though, he had something else to discuss with me. His eldest child has reached the age of maturity for dwarves, which means that Konkur plans on returning to the dwarven continent this winter with his family. He isn't sure if he'll return or not either. If he does, it'll be at least a decade before he does, as that is when his youngest child would also reach the age of maturity. Our island doesn't have a lot of opportunities for jobs, let alone much of a dwarven population.

Ultimately, him leaving is actually going to be quite a loss for us in the knowledge department. I've picked up a few things here and there from him, and the goblins who've worked with him have learned quite a few mining techniques, so it's not like we've gained nothing, but losing his insight into what we can find and where will probably slow down things quite a bit.

[Vol.5] Ch.25 Coat of Arms?

I had planned to return to the city to move the crystal back to the temporary bathhouse by the sea, but as per Zaka's request, it's being left in the stream. Over spring, both the farmers and the fishergoblins noticed much better successes in their endeavors, and everyone who was drinking the stream water, even after boiling it, was feeling filled with energy, though it was probably just a small amount of excess mana. Based on the info I'd gained from talking with Shasta about Kao's territory, and the dwarven capitol, I'm not surprised. The reason their capitol is as successful as it is seems to be due to their massive crystal, ParTor.

So, despite everything, I'm moving the crystal I just made to the temporary bathhouse, and then I'll be headed back up the mountain again to grow another crystal to be presented in the auction. Though this has given me something to think about. I wouldn't be able to grow these large crystals without some amount of knowledge of crystal structures and vacuums, but I've really been neglecting magic technology research. Until now, I've basically been propelling us through the scientific tech tree, with a few magic tweaks thrown in here and there to shortcut some processes.

The first giant crystal was being used as a way for us to recharge our mana, and seemed to attract large animals, resulting in quite the bad initial experience, and some fear of messing with the technology further. I might have been a bit too conservative when it came to further crystal experiments. I'm still very worried about what would happen if you shattered a large crystal, but outside of the giant lizards and eagles, we haven't experienced any other problems from our crystal, and further, it sounds like the dwarven capitol generally doesn't experience problems from theirs either.

So the giant crystal, while a facsimile of something that occurs in nature, could be considered my first actual invention, though it still borrows a lot of concepts from earth knowledge. So maybe I should consider better integration methods for it into our society. For instance, I could grow an even larger crystal than our eight foot crystal in town just to check it's effects, though I'd hate to accidentally attract more eagles again. Though it would be nice to know if it proportionally affects our crop outputs and fish yields by making it larger, or if the size of it doesn't matter much to those factors.

Actually, as I'm thinking about it, outside of being hurt by directly touching those large crystals, mana itself is more like an easily convertible energy/mass source than it is it's own thing. Mana itself seems closer to a transmutation agent than it is to magic, at least as far as I can tell. In a way, it's sort of like light or electricity, though the differences are clear. It's somewhat like light in that it seems to be coming from the sun, life uses it for all sorts of processes, and lack of it doesn't kill you directly. It's somewhat like electricity in it's ability to flow through materials in non-linear ways, be converted into other useful things fairly easily, and that an overcharge will hurt or possibly kill you if you conduct it.

The issue really comes down to finding ways to utilize it. Life seems to have evolved plenty of ways to utilize it for it's own benefit, as sampled by pretty much everything I've interacted with, so there are clearly ways to use and convert it to do other things, and it seems to be universal as a power source. Evidence for it's universality follows from the fact that the same mana works for plants, fish, demons, and all of them work with mana from the crystals. Further, what Konkur told me about other crystals inducing certain effects on exposure to mana seems to further reinforce that idea.

Crystallography is starting to sound more and more interesting as a research topic, rather than continuing to pursue the biological harvest and use idea, but I won't be upset if Tiberius keeps it up. Though one thing I need to remember is that some of the crystals are incredibly dangerous, and from the sounds of the symptoms, produce deadly amounts of radiation. Though the flip side of that is that I could, in theory, produce something akin to magic powered furnaces powered by a large mana crystal. Then we wouldn't even need to cut trees down for smelting and cooking. Heck, we could even make a mana powered desalination plant if we could produce heat using crystals in a harvestable form.

Though all of this is just daydreaming, as I don't currently have the means to pursue any of this. Though it might be worth attempting to negotiate for some crystal samples as part of the auction next year. Then I can pursue the idea further. Which means I really do need to go make the crystal for auction.

Moving the new crystal to the temporary bathhouse, hiring goblins to help me grow the next crystal, and getting Tiberius set up with more funding took six days of time, then I returned up the mountain to grow another large crystal. The growth process took another three months and twenty-two days, but I've made another large crystal.

I stopped growing the 1 foot crystals, mostly because I've already got a decent number of them grown already. The storeroom now has fourteen one-foot crystals, eleven two-foot crystals, and five four-foot crystals. The resulting crystal for auction is once again six and a half feet tall.

In that time, the sea wall has gained a few more feet of height. At this point, it'd probably hold back a storm of the size we had last year. Well, as long as we manage to seal off the tunnel to the other valley before it floods us. Which means we should build a sea wall in that valley immediately after, so we won't need to close that valley off in case of storms.

At this point, though, we're only about two months from the potential auction date, which means I should probably get other things prepped for it. It's not my intent to just bring the crystal and be done with it. I need to dress the part, and put my best foot forward. So my intention is to get some fancy leather armor made, and pick a few higher level hobgoblins from our guard force to accompany me.

I also want to design a flag and emblem to represent our country. I'll need to consult with Zaka and Zeb, and arguably also Lucian and a dwarf, for design ideas. I'm thinking of reusing some of our coin designs for both, but again, Lucian and a dwarf each would probably have good feedback as to what the normal sort of designs are.

After that, I want to prep greeting gifts for the dwarven warlords. I'm thinking a crate each of paper and salt for each dwarf warlord will have to suffice, since we don't have other materials to offer. It's important to leave a decent first impression if I plan on doing these auctions repeatedly. If only one party is leaving with a large crystal, then I want to make sure that the other parties don't feel like they've gained nothing, even if it's a minimal gift.

I scheduled a meeting with Konkur, Lucian, Zaka, and Zeb to discuss the design of a flag and emblem for our country, though it took fourteen days for everyone's schedules to line up such that we could hold the meeting. I opened the meeting off by asking what sort of designs were used in the dwarven and human countries for flags and emblems.

In short, I realized that things are more similar to medieval times than modern when it comes to flags and emblems. Having a complicated coat-of-arms seems to be generally considered a sign of wealth and power by the humans and dwarves, though elves seem to enjoy using basic and simple designs. Considering what I've seen, I think that the elves might be on to the right strategy of having everyone underestimate them.

Then, despite Lucian and Konkur's opinion, I said we should probably go with something simple, under the pretense that we actually don't have the wealth and power necessary to easily reproduce a complicated coat-of-arms. It's only partially false though. For a repeatable emblem, we could, in theory, have an extremely complicated coat-of-arms without any issue thanks to stone shaping. For the flag though, we do actually lack good abilities to dye any fabric properly. So, I proposed a fairly simple design. A rectangle with a dark blue bottom half, a light blue top half, and a black triangle cutting up through the center from the bottom to the top.

It generally just represents the island in the ocean. I've seen a few different flowers around the island that are colored in both dark and light blues, and black is fairly easy to make with charcoal as a color, so I think that the clothmaking goblins can probably figure out how to make a flag with that design in the remaining month and a half. The emblem will then just be a simple triangle, which I verified with Lucian and Konkur that they weren't aware of anyone else using such a simple emblem. Though they were concerned that an emblem that simple might just be misinterpreted as an instructional marking on crates. Although, taking a page from the elves, it's probably for the best if people don't see us as a massive threat.

[Vol.5] Ch.26 Auction Part 1

After we settled on the design, I had to communicate that we wanted a flag made to the weaving goblins. Which, after a few hours of back and forth, they had a good idea of what needed to be done. With that done, it was up to me to make the stone gift crates for the dwarven warlords who would be showing up. Since we have no idea just how many will arrive, I'm going to prepare plenty, and if I have extra, I can always either bring them back, or, if there are enough, divide them up and give extras to all the dwarves.

I decided that, given the importance of the first impression, I'd make the crates with lightstone, and make our emblem out of darkstone on the crates. Though that did mean I had to take a bit of time making lightstone again. Ultimately, I made 80 crates over the course of twelve days, which means I have enough crates for fourty different emissaries. Half the crates have paper, and the other half have salt. Unfortunately, that does cut into our trade supply for next year quite deeply, but again, this is an investment in relations with the other dwarf warlords in the dwarven country.

Last time I had asked, which was many years ago now, the dwarven king had banned any demons coming to the dwarven mainland. So, if we want to change that, we'll need to convince enough of his military advisors that we should be allowed over. Thinking on the situation, this reminds me a bit of when Europe arrived in Japan and wanted to trade there. There are quite a few differences though in the dwarven mentality and their interactions with their neighbors. The dwarves seem much less isolationist than Japan was. I'm just hoping that it doesn't come to the same result, with the only way to properly open their borders being threat of military force, because I don't think I could do that. Perhaps after a few of the dwarves acquire large crystals, I'll gift the king an even larger crystal to try to improve our relations...

With the remaining twenty-three days until we went to the beach to await a ship to pick us up, I picked out the handful of hobgoblins that I wanted to accompany me on the trip. I had already decided that I'd bring one of the two goblins that had learned how to speak, read, and write dwarvish to assist in the whole endeavor. I also talked with Zaka, Zeb, the human harbormaster, Elora, and a particularly money savvy hobgoblin to handle trade with the merchant this year. I don't actually know if he stops on the dwarven island, or if I'll run into him this year, but I wanted to make sure we didn't miss out on what trade we could be doing.

A mere five days into the first month of winter, and a ship bearing Kao's flag arrived to pick us up to take us to his island. We took a day to load in all the goods and the crystal, and then set off for their island. Shasta was aboard the ship, so I was able to get filled in on what to expect at the auction.

First, I seem to have drastically overprepared for the meeting. There are six participating dwarven warlords. I prepared for up to forty. So, I decided that I'd triple the initial gift size to six total crates each. That means we're still only giving away half of the prepared gifts. Having extra on hand isn't a bad idea though, incase one or two more arrive unannounced.

Second, Kao didn't really appreciate the short notice of such an event, and wanted to let me know that he won't do something like this again for me. That doesn't mean we don't keep doing the auctions, just that I shouldn't go about asking him to coordinate the other warlords for other events. As an apology, I've decided that another ten crates of goods will be given to Kao for organizing the event, in addition to the crystal that I'll give him next year.

Third, as for the auction itself, given the small number of participants and the unique situation, Kao is finishing up a special location on the island for the auction to take place. The crystal will be centrally visible for the participants to see, though it will be behind glass. The auction will be done in dwarven coin, though I'm allowed to tack on certain other pre-requisites to participation if I want.

I had initially thought I'd just have them each try to offer and negotiate with me for goods in exchange for the crystal, but when I asked Shasta about that, she said that would be a very bad idea. If we had it done via goods, some of the participants might feel slighted personally by me if I choose one participant's goods over another's. As long as it's done in a single currency, then all the other participants can only blame the selection criteria, which is known in advance, and no one can feel like a partial decision was made. This way, they'll also be able to leave with the crystal, rather than waiting a year to prepare their goods.

That makes sense, but it unfortunately means I'll have to wait even longer to properly trade for what I want, since I'll just be receiving dwarven coin instead of actual goods. Though I'm glad that I can at least tack on a few pre-requisites to participation. Like I can request a defensive pact similar to what I have with Kao, which was part of my initial plan. Part of this endeavor's goals is to make allies after all.

Given what Shasta said about accidentally slighting the warlords though, I want to be cautious about adding other prerequisites to the auction. Unless I think of something in between when the auction happens and now, I don't think I'll add in anything other than a defensive pact.

This is the first time I've travelled away from our island and actually seen the other islands up close. Our trip brought us along each of the other islands in the island chain, so I was able to get a pretty decent look at what is technically our territory. The total sailing time was three days, with about an equal distance between each of the islands.

The first island that we passed, which is also the one that I could spot from the peak of our own island, was somewhat similar to our island, if a bit smaller and shorter. It seems like it has eroded and sunk compared to our island. Though after seeing it, it's probably actually better for living on than our island is. The valleys are wider and there are more of them, though the island seems to follow the same sort of biomes as ours does. The peak has a tiny bit of snow on it, the side facing our island seems to have rainforest like plants similar to ours, and the far side is also dry.

I brought along my telescope, since I thought we might pass the islands, and while I was looking at the island, I saw a giant lizard, though it did look a little different than what I remembered that the ones on our island looked like. This one has three bright blue stripes down it's back, and it seemed a little smaller than the ones on our island, thought that might just be an issue with my memory given my change in size since then. In either case, I'm somewhat relieved that it doesn't seem like they've gone completely extinct.

The second island was quite a bit shorter and more eroded. There wasn't any snow on the peak, if you could even call it a peak anymore. It was more of a generally raised section near the center, with a relatively shallow slope and sharp valleys going out to the sea. In fact, the whole island looks like it's mostly craggy terrain. This island is easily only a third of our island's size, and it seems like very little of it would be easily inhabited, mostly around the beaches. To make use of the majority of the island, it'd take years of terraforming to cut away at the crags. If we planned on doing that, we'd just as well make our own crags useful on our island first.

Then, we finally made it to Kao's island. Most of the terrain of this island seems usable, but the island itself is very small. It's probably about the same size as our island's valley that our city is in. There are beaches around a large portion of the island, and fifty or so feet back from that are cliffs that are also about fifty feet tall. As we came around the island, I spotted their outpost. Along a portion of the shoreline, a small stream flows down to the sea, and the cliffs in that area are significantly more sloped. Nestled along the stream on the cliff is a stone fort. Along the beach, they have a few stone piers going out to the sea.

We pulled up to one of the piers, but our boat was floating almost twenty feet too low to dock. Shasta informed me that you can only use this dock at high tide, at which point you unload everything, so we'll have to wait some time before we can actually unload. We could use the rowboats, similar to how we do it on our island, but it seems that it's significantly easier to just wait, so that's what they do here. If there are important matters to relay, then a rowboat could be used to get important personnel to shore quickly, but we aren't in a rush.

[Vol.5] Ch.27 Auction Part 2

We waited about five hours for the tide to rise enough for us to dock and unload everything from the ship to move to the fort. I kept an eye out to analyze how Kao designed his fort to compare it to our own defenses to see what I could learn. From what I know about this location though, it's considered an outpost more than a fort, which might mean that it's defenses are relatively simple as compared to their normal defenses.

As we approached, the first thing I noted is that this island is incredibly windswept. The wind was blowing even harder than it does on our island, and ours has an abundance of wind. There aren't any trees here, only tall grasses. I did notice a few birds I didn't recognize flying about, so I'm assuming that the whole ecosystem is a bit different on this island than on ours.

As we got close to the fort walls, I noticed a pair of large barrels coming from a defensive position that look very similar to the rifled artillery we built for our island's defense. Considering I had the help of some of Kao's military engineers through that endeavor, I figured this would happen. It's probably the beginning of the end of fortified defensive positions when it comes to war. Once those artillery get scaled up and go through a few design revisions, they'll be able to outrange any mage who might be in a fort.

Though, it may not be the end of forts if demons still present a recurring threat to people on the mainland. Forts will probably remain useful for that reason alone, let alone if they have dangerous beasts they need to protect themselves from. Though they'll probably have to adapt to new war strategies after those artillery become commonplace.

When we finally entered the fort, I noticed that the walls are a bit over ten feet thick, which was quite impressive. Unlike our walls, which are smooth, these walls are made from solid blocks of stone, with some form of mortar between them. The inside of the fort is developed and built into the slope of the hillside, with the entire inside divided into terraces with stairs between each terrace. The center of the fort features a cart and rail system similar to our own, but quite a bit higher quality.

As we made our way to where we'd be staying, I spotted a fairly large opening, about twenty feet wide, going diagonally down into the hillside, with it's own rail depot. I can't say for certain what goes on in there, but they had to get the stone for construction somewhere, so at the very least, I can probably assume that they cut some of their blocks for their walls from there.

We got all our crates moved to a secured warehouse with dwarven guards, along with the crystal. For today, all our goods will stay in that warehouse. Tomorrow, Shasta will show me the facility where the auction will take place, and we'll get started with some of the preparations for that.

I did find out more about that large opening that led underground, as we went down there as part of being shown where the auction would take place. As we went into the underground through the opening, I found out that it wasn't just some mine. This tunnel leading down opens up to more facilities underground, just like above ground. I didn't get to see what was inside most of them, but there were plenty of openings along the sides of the downward tunnel where you could go in and out of a facility.

One side of the path down had rails, and there were landings every thirty feet or so where the carts could turn around or enter a facility on that side of the tunnel. After we travelled about two-hundred feet, we came across an ornate archway. Inside was the location that the auction will take place. The walkway in splits quickly into two paths, left and right, and a closed doorway ahead of us. We went through the doorway, which led to a central display area.

The display area was a decagon, and about twenty feet in diameter, with a pedestal where the crystal will be installed for the auction. One face of the decagon was the path we entered from. Eight of the faces are large glass windows with stone walls dividing eight rooms. Then, opposite the path we entered, there was another door, though this one was made of metal. Through that door was a relatively small room, surrounded by metal. This is where the crystal will be kept until the auction occurs, in a vault that the dwarves have constructed here.

I was curious how the dwarves maintained contact with the mainland in order to communicate from their outpost, so I asked Shasta. I shouldn't have been that surprised by the response, but they pay a very hefty fee to have a dark elf with their specialty trained birds relay messages to and from the island. The birds are apparently trained enough that they can wait until the morning after a delivery for a response message.

The island itself doesn't have an elf, and can't relay messages back to Kao easily, but when he has information for them, or does a routine check-in, he can send a message from the mainland. I'm definitely starting to see how a year's notice was probably very expensive to coordinate this auction. Though that does tell me that the large crystals must be considered quite valuable for him to put all this effort in when his payment for this time is one of these crystals.

Given those costs though, and the construction of the vault that he put in here, I think I'll give him whatever crates are leftover after the greeting gifts are given, rather than just ten of them. It's best to show appreciation for hard work, and salt and paper are relatively cheap for us to produce. They'd just sit in our warehouse for a whole year anyway if I don't give them away. Though, if I'm just giving them away anyway, I should probably increase the gift to the participating warlords from 6 to 8 as well. With six warlords attending, that'd still leave 32 crates for Kao, which is quite the gift. It's hard to justify it in terms of lost trade value, so instead I'm thinking about it as buying a good impression.

We aren't expecting any of the warlords to arrive until the middle next month, which leaves us with about thirty days until any activity starts to pick up. On one hand, it seems like a bit of a waste for us to have come here so early, as we could be doing something more productive, but if we had potentially cut it closer, weather or other issues could cause plans to fall apart, so this extra time is fine.

I've been meaning to try to learn written dwarvish, so this is a good opportunity. I already speak some of it thanks to my interactions with dwarves over the years, and recognize a few words like month names, but learning it more properly should be beneficial, especially since we're using it for record keeping now.

I asked Shasta to teach me what she could in the short time. She agreed, but I'm being put to work on other tasks in exchange. Given that I can do labor for part of the day when I'm partially asleep, and then focus on learning language during the the rest of the time, that wasn't an issue. If anything, I'm glad to have something to keep me busy. The hobgoblins have also been helping haul materials for the dwarves.

When I'm half-asleep, I'm either hauling or cutting stone from the deepest part of their tunnel cutting into the hill, which I'd gauge at about a third of a mile long at this point. The hobgoblins aren't working particularly hard, and only do about four hours of work. Though that's largely because there isn't that much work to be done. The dwarves and I only have so much mana to cut stone with, and although we do have the large crystal here right now, we definitely won't be using it to recharge ourselves given it's going to be sold. We've only been at this for a few days, but I can tell that it's making a good impression on the dwarves we're helping.

As for food, the diet here consists mostly of fish and dry grains. The grains are kept underground in one of the many storerooms, and the fish are caught from the waters around the shore on a boat. Seeing them using a fishing boat with rods mounted on the boat itself makes me wonder if we should make a fishing vessel or two once we get our harbor built. The artificial tide pools are great, but they're also limited by location, and fishing boats would expand our food supply, especially if we introduce netted fishing trawlers.

[Vol.5] Ch.28 Auction Part 3

The first ship to arrive, which did so two days into the twelfth month, was Kao Ostark and a whole slew of individuals with him. Initially I was quite confused by all the individuals who came with him, but over the course of a few days, I figured out the reason. I've gotten accustomed to minimalism on the island, and as a result, when I initially saw where the auction would happen, I didn't think much of how plain it was. Over the course of a week though, it was transformed into an incredibly decorated location.

What were thick walls were carefully chiseled to give the appearance of pillars with ornate images carved in them. Many of the images were complete mysteries to me. Images of unknown beasts and dwarves lined the columns. Eight metal thrones were installed, one in each of the auction rooms, and multiple stone chairs of similar quality were also installed in each room. I also spotted eight decently sized lockboxes made of metal being hauled down the tunnel to an unknown location.

All in all, most of the individuals who were with Kao seemed to be either craftsmen or guards. I'm glad I had the opportunity to see all this, because it sheds a new light on why we've gotten so few immigrants, and what sort of improvements we need to make if we want to have a forward facing city.

Our current city was built with the idea of expanding as quickly as possible. If we decide to build a city on the other side of the island, near the future harbor, I feel like it should be built with this sort of standard in mind. Buildings and decorations that would entice merchants or skilled tradesman to come live there. Otherwise, we don't actually have a lot of valuables to offer.

After the war, outside of the forced refugees from Rathland, we haven't gotten any immigrants. Obviously, no one wants to move to somewhere that was recently invaded, but further than that, our mangalloy ore deposit dried up, which was one of the initial things that attracted a few people.

Though perhaps I shouldn't try to force that growth too fast. We do actually need to expand our own population to a much higher level first. Large swaths of our island are completely unused, and we have two more islands that we could reasonably inhabit as well. Part of the reason Kao can even muster up so many craftsman to build all this is because he has the population to support it. Though in the long run, stone shaping has far more potential for detailing stone than what I'm seeing the dwarfs do, which seems to be a combination of magic and tool work.

Finally, after almost seven days of work, things slowed down and most of the facilities seemed to be finished. Kao brought me to an administrative room to discuss what I should expect, who would be there, and any special conditions I have for the auction. In the room were three other dwarves, and Shasta, who once again was acting as translator. The three other dwarves were quite sharply dressed, and I was told that they'd be running the auction process when it occurs.

First, I was informed that when dwarven warlords are meeting like this, it is considered bad manners for them to meet each other before the rest arrive. Apparently it's a long tradition that started after one too many conspiracies happened to take out rival warlords. Given the circumstances, while I'm not their equal, nor am I to act like their equal, I'm also supposed to follow this rule and not interact with them until all expected guests have arrived.

The number of expected participants has also increased from six to seven, with the seventh having only assented to joining two days before Kao set out on his ship. Although the initial discussion implied it, I was explicitly informed that the warlords themselves would be participating, and not just representatives. I received a small amount of additional insight into the dwarven kingdom during this time. They currently have a total of 33 warlords who serve under their king, each ruling their own provinces. Seven (eight if you count Kao Ostark), have agreed to come participate in the auction for a large crystal.

Of those seven, five are from territories close to Kao, one is from close to the dwarven capital, and the last one, who was also the last to respond, is from a mountainous landlocked portion of their country opposite the capital from Kao. The five regions close to Ostark are: Adatara, Furnas, Ebeko, Kaguk, and Okmok. With the warlords themselves having the given names of: Fabul, Dataro, Biguk, Poko, and Tabo respectively. The warlord from near the capital is Chaga Asacha, of the Asacha region, and the furthest warlord attending is Goppok Kanaga of the Kanaga region.

I then got the opportunity to insert any requirements for bidding on the crystal, to which I said that I only had a single requirement, "That whoever wins the bid agrees to a fifteen year defensive pact, in addition to their gold bid." While the auctioneers seemed skeptical of the requirement, Kao nodded in agreement that it should be fine. Given that the auctioneers seemed skeptical, I gave them further context that "I plan on auctioning more of these crystals in the future, but the technology and ability to do so would be lost if our territory is destroyed." That seemed to satisfy their curiosity on the matter.

The auction has no fixed start date or time, because the arrival of the warlords could be delayed, but there is a latest date by which they're expected to arrive. Basically, the auction should happen around the fifteenth, but the latest it would happen is the twenty-first of the month. Though an exception could still happen if a freak winter storm were to occur.

I took the time to explicitly explain the gift situation with Kao as well. I explained how we brought along 40 crates of salt, and 40 crates paper, and I intend to gift four of both salt and paper to each attending warlord, and the remainder is a gift to him for orchestrating this, in addition to the extra crystal that I'll provide next year. This information seemed to lighten his mood somewhat, and he let me know that he'll orchestrate that the gifts are given at the appropriate time to the guests.

After all that was taken care of, the Auctioneers began explaining how the auction would take place. In my mind, an auction is a fast paced endeavor with people bidding against each other for pricing. When dealing with the politically powerful like this though, I suppose I should have expected something different.

The auction will likely take most of a day, and is apparently a very slow paced endeavor, with two breaks for meals that will be delivered into each of the rooms. Ultimately, there are a lot of formalities that have to be followed, and proper respect needs to be given throughout the whole endeavor. For the short amount of time remaining until the warlords arrive, I'm supposed to get daily training on how to behave and what to do for not only the auction, but for the first night's banquet, then the auction, then finally, the exit banquet the day after. I'm already starting to realize just why asking Kao to host this was quite the imposition...

After the meeting, Shasta told me about an idiom that has started being used by a few of the warlords and skilled trades people, "Making a deal with a demon". I chuckled when I heard that, simply because of the similarity to the phrase, "Making a deal with the devil", which coincidentally holds a somewhat tangential meaning. "Making a deal with a demon" seems to mean something like, "Do your due diligence when making a deal, or else you'll be dragged into conflict." It seems to have started being used once Kao began inviting warlords to the crystal auction, as people put two and two together that he got dragged into the war with Rathland in essence because he traded the crystal with us, rather than wiping us out in our initial conflict.

On the thirteenth, the first two of the warlords arrived. They also arrived with a whole retinue of individuals, though this time it it seemed to be mostly guards, although a few seemed to be artisans of some sort. On the fourteenth, four more of the warlords arrived, and I realized at that point that most of the buildings in the fort's above ground area actually didn't seem to have much going on in them until now. I don't know if the fort was like this before the auction was planned, but it seems like the above ground buildings are mostly living quarters, and currently each warlord has their own building that their retinues occupy.

That means we're just waiting on the final expected arrival. The only one not to arrive so far is Goppok Kanaga, the warlord who replied last, and has the furthest to travel. I'm actually starting to get a bit nervous now. I didn't think it would bother me much, but now that the time is upon us, the fact that I'm basically representing us as a first impression upon a large number of foreign leaders in a situation that I orchestrated, rather than one that was thrust upon me, is starting to eat at my nerves.

[Vol.5] Ch.29 Auction Part 4

The greeting banquet took place on the nineteenth, the day after the final warlord arrived. Although the banquet was interesting, I didn't get much of a chance to do anything, which also meant I avoided doing anything wrong before the auction. I was seated at a table with a handful of retainers from the warlords. We partook of the same food as the warlords themselves, but conversation at our table was limited and hushed. I only picked up on a handful of things said in dwarvish at our table, but none of it seemed particularly interesting. I believe our table was relatively quiet out of respect for the warlords, who were having lively conversation amongst themselves at their table.

Part of the dwarvish tradition for a greeting banquet apparently holds that each warlord bring food for the rest of the warlords to partake in. Most of the food was very similar, probably due to the proximity six of the warlords have to each other. Some of the food was a bit different though, and I assume, though I can't be certain, that it was brought by the warlords from near the capitol and further on.

The conversation at the main table seemed to remain friendly through the evening, and near the end of the banquet, Kao had the crates that I'd designated as gifts brought out and presented to the other warlords. I was, rather abruptly, called to stand next to Kao briefly as he spoke, then he drank from a uniquely shaped, and large, goblet. He then passed it to me, and nudged me to drink it. It tasted slightly familiar, and burned somewhat, but other than that seemed fine. I was then urged to pass it to the next warlord, and after each warlord had drank some, Kao finished the goblet, and the banquet ended.

It was until shortly after the banquet was over, and I checked my status that I realized why that burn had felt familiar. I initially thought it might have just been alcohol, and I can't rule out that some might have been present, but what I realized is that it was the feeling of mana being removed, like that plant on the mountain does.

<APEX LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 22
HP: 2284/2284
MP: 988/1321
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance, Partial Sleep
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands, Pulverize

I'll have to be sure to remember to ask Shasta about that whole process, and the reason for it. Tomorrow is the auction though, and the day after is the exit banquet, so that question will need to wait until after both of those are done.

The auction itself wasn't very exciting, mostly due to the pace it was held at. Long story short, each warlord was addressed individually, then asked for an initial bid after they were allowed to observe the crystal. Once initial bids were down, the highest bid was announced, and the process repeated. It was like a repeated silent auction, with the previously highest bid being the minimum you can bid in the next round. At the end of a bidding round, the highest bid was announced, and they also announced the number of other bidders who hadn't submitted a bid.

I assume the system was devised so that no individual party would feel intimidated by the potential political power of their competitors. By lunch, three of the seven warlords had bowed out of the auction, but had to remain in their boxes, and participate as if they hadn't. Seemingly to, again, prevent political power from potentially influencing the outcome.

I did find that part of the process quite sophisticated. Usually, when politics is involved, I'd expect corruption and abuse of power, but their system actually did do a pretty decent job of preventing that abuse. On the other hand, we only went through about one round of bids per hour, which meant things were progressing at a fairly slow pace. I can only imagine how long this whole process would take if there had been thirty-some odd warlords all having to bid. Each round would probably take half the day!

Though the auction wasn't very exciting, the amount of money certainly was. As the time approached for the new highest bid to be announced, I found myself filled with anticipation. The first round's bid was somewhat tame in comparison to what they rose to throughout the day. The first round's highest bid came in at about two-thirds of our annual trade budget.

By lunch, the highest bid came in at a bit over six times our annual trade budget, and only three of the seven had dropped out of the auction. From there, the next two round's bids came in slightly larger jumps, at eight, then eleven times our annual trade budget. At that point, another of the warlords bowed out, and it became a three way race.

I was getting quite anxious at this point. The bids were becoming quite significant in size. I had been thinking about this in terms of improved worker efficiency, which, for us, would perhaps give us 50% more work efficiency for certain, mana intensive jobs. That'd still mean that this crystal is currently being valuated at something close to 25 years of improved labor of our country for a single item before it starts paying dividends back.

Though to the dwarves, it probably holds an additional meaning, since up until recently, an important fixture in the capitol was their giant crystal. For these dwarves, this is probably also something like a symbol of wealth and status that they can display. Which is why I probably shouldn't have been surprised as the bids continued to increase steadily higher.

16, 20, 25, 29... then, finally, after the dinner break, a final bid came in, the winning bid, as the last competitor dropped out. Just over 32 times our annual trade budget in value in dwarven coins, plus the previously required temporary defensive pact. This one auction brought in more foreign wealth to our country than our entire history of trade. Though it's currently in the form of unrealized wealth, since we haven't actually traded it yet for any goods.

At that point, the winner was announced as Goppok Kanaga, which seemed to surprise quite a few of the other warlords present. Another thing I'll need to ask questions to Shasta about later, when I get the chance. Though again today, after I had gotten the crystal secured in it's shipping crate, the chance had passed for any questions, as everyone else had gone to sleep. Tomorrow, I might get an opportunity in the morning to ask Shasta a few short questions, but I have a few other duties to attend to during the day as a consequence of dwarven traditions for their exit banquet, so I might not get the chance.

As I thought might happen, I didn't get an opportunity to ask Shasta any questions the next day. Despite having some free time, she was also busy, so ultimately the only times that I could have asked questions like that were at the banquet itself, which would have been inappropriate.

During the day, I showed the various warlords the content of the gift crates they received, since they were solidly sealed with stone shape. Ultimately, they can break them open when they want to get to the contents, but since I have stone shaping, I can easily open and reseal them with little trouble. Through the translator we had present with us, it seemed a few of the warlords were somewhat impressed with the idea of airtight stone crates for ocean transport.

Currently, a lot of their water based trade goes through the inland sea between the continents of the mainland. To prevent humidity and water from spoiling goods, watertight barrels are made, and they aren't particularly cheap. Stone is in abundance though, and they feel like it's a shame that they don't have access to anything similar to stone shaping for the crates to be reusable. Perhaps in the future, when our demons aren't banned from the dwarven kingdom, we could set up our own trade company in other countries. Stone shaping would give us a bit of a leg up in the packaging department, so it might be competitive.

At the closing banquet, thankfully, Kao kept most of the warlords from asking me too many questions, though there might have been some amount of self-interest on his part in doing so. I was glad to get the opportunity to open talks with the warlords present at least, though most of the discussions were all tangential to the large crystal in some way. I never did get an opportunity to ask about establishing further trade, which was a disappointment.

I gained a little bit more insight into Goppok Kanaga during the banquet though. He's apparently the new warlord of his region, after his father passed away a little over a year ago. With dwarves, I have a hard time judging their age, so the only thing I can really tell is that he's an adult. Perhaps it's because I've been a demon for so long now, but I've really started to lose that sort of ability to distinguish age. For demons, age doesn't seem to be as much of a concern as your current prestige and species, which are fairly easy to tell apart, though sometimes traits can confuse it somewhat.

Everyone, myself included, is planned to leave tomorrow, so it'll be a busy day. I'll be helping with loading the crystal onto Goppok's ship, then, once all the warlords have left, our ship will also leave with our riches. Then I'll have to get on the process of making the crystal for payment to Kao for organizing this whole thing.

[Vol.5] Ch.30 Homecoming

The trip back to our island took just as long as the trip away did. I didn't notice anything particularly interesting about our other islands on the way back that I didn't already note before, unfortunately. I did, however, get the opportunity to talk with Shasta about some of the previous questions I had.

The first question was, 'What was the whole deal with the drink at the end of the opening banquet?'. She went into a long winded explanation about dwarven traditions, that I forgot most of, but I do remember the gist of it. It's something of a folk tale, though many think it really happened. Some time in the past, a powerful dwarf invited three political equals to a banquet, to discuss matters of government. The other dwarves, while politically powerful weren't nearly as militarily oriented as the first dwarf. Shortly after the banquet ended, the first dwarf slew the others, and claimed their territory as his own.

That dwarf continued to hold significant political sway, despite his misdeeds, due to the vital nature of the territory and military he controlled. So, whenever he would attend any other banquets, the other dwarves would force him to drink a draught which also drained his mana, so he would be at a disadvantage if he attempted to fight directly. Over time, that adapted to everyone drinking some of the draught at a banquet before a meeting, to show that there wasn't intended hostilities.

I suppose, in a world with magic, simply leaving a weapon at the door wouldn't actually prevent you from being incredibly dangerous on your own, so in a way, this is something akin to disarming yourself for a political talk. I thought it was neat in its own right, but it didn't actually drain that much of my mana, so I suppose the action is somewhat symbolic now. Though I was weaker after having drank it than not, so maybe it's only meant to weaken you enough that other guardsmen could interfere?

Though it does make me wonder if that implies that when Kao has come to meet with us in the past, and that tradition wasn't followed, if violence was still on the table... I suppose it probably was on the table, though I can't rule out that it's a tradition that dwarves only follow amongst themselves, and not with outsiders. It could also be that he simply didn't consider our talks to ever be on the level of equals.

The second question I had for Shasta was, 'Why did the other warlords seem surprised that Goppok Kanaga won the auction?'. She gave me a number of factors that likely all contributed to the surprise of the other warlords. First, the fact I already learned, he's relatively young, and has only been managing his region for a little over a year. Second, the region he manages is fairly isolated, poor, underdeveloped, and sparsely populated, partially because it's largely situated deep in a mountain range, but also due to it's more agrarian traditions, despite the poor environment for growing plants.

For any of the other warlords, the amount he bid would be reasonable to procure on short notice, but it was shocking to see that he could accrue enough wealth to afford that on such short notice, let alone that he'd be willing to spend that kind of money on this object. The amount he spent would be enough to fund the construction of a decent road through his territory, according to Shasta. So most of the warlords are left wondering why he'd spend that kind of money on the crystal when it could easily be spent on other projects that would have better impact.

Although that answered the question as to why the other warlords were surprised, it left me with even more questions that I can't get the answer to. Though his coin is good either way, so I'm not one to complain. Kao did have someone check all the coins that were brought along by the participants before the auction began, so I'm not worried about fraud at least. Well, maybe in the future I'll learn what Goppok's motivations were.

After the almost two month trip to Kao's island, I had a bit of news to catch up on. First, and sadly, I missed Konkur and his family leaving the island. They left with the merchant to return to the mainland. Though just before he left, the vein they were mining did hit pyrite. I'll consider that quite the good going away gift. In an ideal world, we wouldn't need to use pyrite as an iron source, but we'll make use of what we have.

He also left notes about a few of the other minerals that we might run into, now that we've found pyrite. Things like sphalerite, galena, and more gypsum are to be expected in the area. Although the gypsum would be a bit of a disappointment, I'd gladly take sphalerite and galena, which could give us zinc and lead respectively. Lead would be valuable for producing sulfuric acid and batteries, and zinc has a handful of uses, including making batteries, making brass, or being used as a sacrificial anode to help prevent corrosion.

Unfortunately, processing pyrite to make decent quality iron is a real hassle, and Konkur didn't have any notes related to it, probably because it's such a poor ore to process that they've had better sources, and don't practice refining it. The main problem with it is removing enough of the sulfur that the resulting iron product isn't incredibly brittle.

So, we'll have to do some experimenting to even produce a viable output product. We also need to be somewhat careful with the production, as it will release a lot of volatile sulfur compounds, which could be poisonous to breathe in. I'm thinking that once we get a process figured out, if we have enough ore, we should build the facility on the craggy part of the island that we don't currently go to. It's generally downwind from the city, and should be far enough removed that the pollution drifts out to sea, rather than falling back down on our island. In small concentrations, sulfur is vital to life, so I'm not concerned that we'll be killing off sea life as a result of our small operation. If anything, we'll be fertilizing the sea plants.

After I finished going through Konkur's notes he left for me, I checked in on Tiberius's research. His weapon utilizing the blood from electric fish, and the spine shooting organ from the other fish has gone through quite a few revisions, but it seems he's also tabled it for the time being. The current design for the weapon reminds me a bit of a shotgun, where the barrel can be tilted down, though instead of putting the shell into the barrel, you would load a spike into an organ in the handpiece, then re-slide the barrel over it.

The big issues with that weapon are that you need a source of mana to activate it, which means you either need to be underground where you can use a crystal which is small enough to carry, or the wielder needs a way to infuse mana into the weapon. The second major drawback is that the spike shooting organ goes bad after a few days, meaning you basically need a fresh organ for it to be valuable.

If it weren't for the second drawback, I'd actually think that the weapon could be useful as a defensive weapon for us. We could dig a deep bunker underground, and as a last resort, we could hide there, and use these weapons with embedded smaller crystals to defend the bunker. If the organ goes bad that quickly though, there isn't much of a use for it, as the enemy would just need to wait a few days for the weapons to stop working.

A thought did cross my mind that if Zaka's blood didn't boil due to his fireball ability, the troll regeneration might actually help preserve biological items from decaying. Unfortunately, his blood does boil, so we'd need another troll to evolve if we wanted to try that, and I can't say I like that I'm even thinking about that. I didn't mention it to Tiberius, for obvious reasons. He's currently doing a new series of tests using fish blood. It seems like he's meticulously recording the behavior of various kinds of blood when exposed to mana, then mixing them, and recording the new behavior. I'm not sure how long that'll go for, but it could potentially produce some interesting results.

While some of the sea life has obvious magical properties that utilize mana, others aren't quite as obvious, but I doubt that they're just not using it. It's not impossible, but with a source of energy readily available, I'd expect life to evolve to use it. The trees use mana defensively to help harden themselves here, and using water infused with their bark hardens in kind, which helped us produce our leather armor which could survive a powerful hit from metal. I would imagine many prey fish probably also use mana in some ways, though I doubt many will be very useful to us.

Content, I left Tiberius more funds to continue his research. Thanks to the mining crew clearing the road up the mountain in winter, it's possible for me to start making the new crystal right away, rather than waiting for spring time. Though before that, I want to figure out where the temporary bathhouse crystal is going to be moved to. I don't want to leave it near the ocean during springtime, at least not until we've gotten both valleys protected by a sea wall.

[Vol.5] Ch.31 Months of Work

One of the problems with picking a springtime resting point for the crystal in the other valley is a lack of options. Sure, there are a few places it can go, but none of them have nearly the same impact on productivity. Though I also didn't expect the now-submerged crystal just downstream of the dam to have as big of an impact as it did. Though I suppose if I did have a place where it would be as productive, I'd probably end up making another crystal to permanently reside in the new spot.

So, with that in mind, I shouldn't really be too picky with where I put it. I should probably just expand the bathhouse in the city some to hold another crystal, and that will be good enough. Our current bathhouse could do with some remodeling anyway. Given the current city size, it's a bit small. The old design relied heavily on pumping water and swapping it out every so often, while utilizing tree-steeped water as a better mana conduit than regular water.

As a consequence of that, many people in the city smell like, well, trees. I didn't really notice it until I came back from visiting Kao's island. So, considering that the stream has it's own crystal near the dam which is infusing the water with some amount of mana, I'm thinking that a new bathhouse will have two sections. A mana recharging section, which will essentially be the current bathhouse with it's tree-steeped water and current fee, and a larger cleaning section, which will be free to use. That section will divert some amount of water from the stream through long and wide pools, which will slowly drain down into the sewers. I'll also build an area between the stream and where it enters the cleaning pools where the new crystal can temporarily be kept.

This whole idea as a project is getting a little bigger than I initially intended, but if I get help from one of Zeb's construction teams, we can probably get it built before spring.

I was able to borrow a construction team for this project, so we were able to get it completed in a reasonable amount of time, though it took a little longer than I hoped, and we didn't finish it until 27 days into the new year. We did get the temporary crystal's spot finished before spring began though, so that wasn't an issue. The difficulty actually came from needing to hook the water drainage into the sewer system, and getting the flow rate from the stream right.

Ultimately, I spent a few days designing a float control valve. Thanks to lightstone being lighter than metal, making the actual float, along with a bunch of spares, was relatively easy. Unfortunately, fine tuning the float valve took some time before I got it work right. This particular float valve uses two floats. One regulates how open a gate is, and regulates the flow into the bath. As the bath gets lower, the gate opens up more. On the other side of the gate, another float actually regulates the height the base of the gate sits at, and is designed to raise and lower the gate alongside the stream's average level, so that seasonal changes don't break the system.

In the past, this might not work very well due to the daily shifts that would occur in the stream due to heavy rainfall. Thanks to all the rock dams and the large dam though, the flow of the stream is fairly constant, though extremely heavy downpours can still cause some rapid increases due to all the water joining the stream after the dam.

I'll leave the new bathhouse to operate while I go up the mountain to start work on the crystal to give to Kao. Before I leave though, I'm going to ask Karsh if he can build me another crusher machine like the ones we made before. I'll pick it up in a few weeks to take up the mountain to start dealing with all the pyrite that they've been mining out. I'll also need to hire a few helpers to speed up the crystal process again.

I, once again, decided that the goblins who assist me with crystal making will follow the same schedule as the miners, but I'll stay for an extra cycle each time. While they help me during the day with melting crystal material and bringing it to me down in the lab, at night I'm busy expanding the exploratory tunnels, and finding new crystal deposits to package for them to use. So, in the handful of days where they are gone, but I'm still working, I started digging out a new storage area up on the surface, where the pyrite ore will eventually go.

I did learn a new fact about the pyrite crystals from the miners though. Apparently, stone shaping doesn't work on pyrite crystals themselves. Though initially I didn't think much of it, it's probably worth waiting to crush the pyrite as a result. I'll still crush some, for my own tests, but a lot of the pyrite is embedded in other rock material. Rock material that I can use stone shaping on. So, rather than crush it all together, it may end up being necessary to concentrate the ore first using stone shaping as part of the recovery process.

All that needs to wait though. I have priorities that I need to handle first. If the pyrite is uncrushed, it can still move into the new storage area, I'll just need to keep things organized in bins in there so we don't mix crushed and non-crushed materials. Having the storage for it is important though, so it doesn't just pile up everywhere.

I'm currently a little over a third of the way finished with Kao's crystal, and we're already about half-way through the fourth month of the year. I'd be further along, but I decided that I'll make this crystal about a foot taller than the one at the sale, so it's taking extra time. Pretty soon the crystal at the bathhouse can be moved back to the shoreline, and more rapid excavation and construction can resume there. After I finish this project, I'll have a few months where I can experiment with the pyrite before winter.

We finally finished the crystal for Kao. It's a bit over seven feet tall, so I hope he appreciates that. I moved the temporary crystal back to the other valley in early spring, and since then, they've continued to work at a significantly fast pace building the sea wall and digging out the artificial tidepool in that valley. I'd expect that by next fall, our valley's sea wall will probably be complete. Then they can begin working on the next valley's sea wall.

It's early fall now, the second day of the ninth month, so I have about a month and a half of experimenting with pyrite before I need to get all the things ready for trade this year. I have quite a few things I'd like to trade for, like some of the previously mentioned crystals with effects like causing heat, so I'm looking forward to winter.

Outside of pyrite, there are a few other things to handle with the mine. It's been producing less and less quartz over the past few months, and the vein has been narrowing somewhat. Though what we lost in quartz, we've made up for in possibly two other occasional ore types, though I won't know for sure until I smelt them. I suspect one is galena, and the other is sphalerite, ores for lead and zinc respectively, but until I tinker with them, I won't know for sure. Which probably means that I need to make even more storage sections in the mountain for the different types of ore that are coming out of the deposit.

According to the notes that Konkur left me, when veins like this go through these sorts of transitions, it's not long until it narrows off even more, and the amount of material that is valuable dwindles. He even put a note that says he included pyrite in what is considered valuable, despite it not normally being considered as such by the dwarves. That narrow deposit continues for some time, but it's generally smaller crystals embedded in more rock than we've been seeing.

Which means I'll have to make a choice at that point. Do we abandon this deposit in search of another one, or do I have the mining team keep extracting despite the lowered yield? I'll have to look through Konkur's notes more thoroughly and see if he has any insight. He left me quite a few pages, and while I skimmed it with my limited dwarven reading ability, I've had to bring pages that I thought were important to the goblins who have been handling our records to translate. It's probably worth taking a few days and having one of those goblins translate all of them for me, so I can make a more educated decision moving forward.

[Vol.5] Ch.32 Sulfide Ores

I spent two evenings with one of the goblins who could read and write in dwarvish going through Konkur's notes thoroughly. I'm glad I did, because it did inform my decision about whether to close the existing mine or keep working it once yields are reduced. In those notes, he said that the deposit we found would be considered a small deposit, and he expects that there are probably between a few dozen to a few hundred of approximately that size on this island alone, though most of them are likely buried very deep underground. In fact, he suspects we'd find many high-quality deposits if we dug deep enough, though the labor would be intensive and limiting in our current state to find them.

He also expects there are quite a few larger deposits on the island than the one we're currently mining. The larger the deposit, according to Konkur, the more pure the maximum quality of ore that it tends to yield. With that information in mind, I'm leaning towards starting more exploratory mining tunnels after this particular mine's yield drops. If we get desperate for metal in the future, we can always return to extracting the low quality ore from our current deposit, but we won't find much more quartz doing that, which is another reason to find a new deposit.

There were notes on processing many different kinds of ore, such as the galena and sphalerite we found, which means I can probably fast track those ores to be smelted. In fact, since all of these are sulfur based ores, I should consider building the smelting facility for these ores in the neighboring craggy terrain, downwind from the city. Both of these ores, and likely the pyrite, will need to be roasted as part of their smelting process, which converts the sulfides of the metals into oxides, and gives off sulfur dioxide gas.

I'd personally like to modify the process a little to try to capture some of that sulfur dioxide to convert it into sulfuric acid. Though that would be a whole process in and of itself. Using an older lead chamber method for sulfuric acid production would require that we have a decent source of ammonia before we can proceed with producing sulfuric acid. Though I can at least build the ore roasting chambers with the idea of recovering the gases kept in mind for future expansion.

Alternatively, instead of using ammonia, we could use the niter we've been slowly producing, though that would mean we won't be stockpiling any more ammunition. If I had to choose between more artillery rounds, or sulfuric acid, for now I'd choose artillery rounds. Eventually, I'd even choose rifles over sulfuric acid produced in this way. I'd much rather build out the hydroelectric facility at our dam, and use that to electrolyze hydrogen and produce ammonia with the Haber process when it comes to that.

Regardless, that's a project for the future. While we could use the sulfuric acid to improve and change a lot of our existing production methods for materials, all those improvements require we have other materials that don't break down under sulfuric acid exposure. So, first we need to actually acquire those materials, like lead.

I told Karsh about my plan for a new facility for smelting these ores, and he gave me a funny look. Ultimately, it seems like dwarves, and possibly everyone, doesn't really see a concern with just smelting sulfur based ores in a city, other than the smell that it produces being somewhat noxious. I won't stand for it though. The off gas we're producing is the exact same one that I used to chemically attack Rathland's soldiers, so I know first hand that long term exposure is quite bad for you.

So, despite Karsh's insistence that we could just add a roasting component to the smeltery area in the city, I've started building it beyond the lab area, in the craggy terrain on that part of the island. Given how remote it is from the city, I plan on moving the temporary crystal to the lab area during this upcoming spring, so I can progress quicker than I currently am in building this facility.

Roasting ore, besides releasing sulfur dioxide, often frees other toxic materials, such as arsenic. Which is another reason I've chosen this part of the craggy terrain to build. Basically, the whole area is going to become somewhat toxic as a result of the ore roasting process, so I want it to be in a different watershed than our valley. Even if I reinforce the floor with compressed lightstone, those toxins are going to leech into the ground eventually. So, the hope is that by building it far enough from the city, and a moderate distance from the ocean, that we'll let it slowly leech into the ocean water, and that'll reduce the concentration enough over time that it won't be an issue. Though I might need to decommission the well near the lab if things get bad...

I had to stop my work temporarily as winter arrived. Today, we gave Shasta the new crystal for Kao, and had an interesting discussion with her after formalities were taken care of. First, it sounds like more dwarven warlords are interested in the next auction. They're already building a larger arena on Kao's island to handle the next auction. Shasta said that while Kao is probably currently a little upset about the extra work they're putting into the auction again, this new crystal more than makes up for the difference, and she doubts there is any actual ill will. Most of the warlords don't like meeting up with each other, as they're generally rivals and most of them don't like all the formalities involved, so it's more of a disdain for the individuals rather than the event itself.

The second piece of info she gave us was quite interesting. Many of the coastal regions facing the ocean and these islands have noticed a distinct lack of any leviathan sightings in the last two years. Normally, there would be a few sightings a year from coastal areas. The northern side of the dwarven continent hasn't noticed any change, and still spots them year round, but the lower portion of the continent, closer to us hasn't seen them. Shasta looked into the matter more, and it seems like winter sightings stopped shortly before contact was made with us, but there had been winter sightings before that.

While people aren't willing to risk it just yet, Shasta suspects that year-round travel might be possible now. The timing does seem to line up with when we started using two additional crystals on our island, the one by the dam, and the one in the temporary bathhouse. Given the extra evidence that removing our singular crystal during the war with Rathland seems to have returned the leviathans to the ocean between the mainland and here even during winter, the evidence that for some reason the crystals on our island seem to be influencing the leviathans' territorial waters seems strong.

That being the case, we should probably consider having a year-round military presence on our island, to prevent an ambush from occurring. Part of the reason the war with Rathland went as well as it did was because the enemy's arrival was predictable thanks to the threat of leviathans. Regardless of whether merchants want to take on that risk, militaries might be willing to, so we should be prepared. Since our population has been steadily increasing though, we should be able to spare a few individuals to work at a small standing military force. As long as we keep people stationed in the artillery bunkers and one of the spotting camps on the mountain, then we'll at least be able to have an early warning and do some damage to any would-be invaders.

Third, it sounds like Goppok Kanaga's territory had impressive crop yields last year, which is probably why so many more warlords are interested in the next auction. I'm hoping he has two more very good years, so that the price the crystal fetches goes up considerably. Though, given the number of participating warlords, I'm probably going to need to hold back more of our salt and paper that we would normally trade, since I'll want to give them as gifts again. Considering how much dwarven currency we got from the last auction, I'm not concerned about cutting our traded goods output affecting our purchasing power any longer.

Considering all the info I gained from our conversation, I'm quite pleased with how everything has gone in the past year. We didn't have any new migrants still, but I'd bet that we'll start to get some applicants in the near future if we continue to have these sorts of good reports about us floating in.

[Vol.5] Ch.33 Crystal Trade

I only had to wait another 6 days for the merchant to arrive. After we unloaded last years goods, we discussed a few different matters, but most of the information that the merchant had to share I had already discussed with Shasta. We did, however, have a long discussion about the types of materials the merchant could procure for us. Basic goods, are fairly easy to acquire, even in decently large volumes, so that's not too much of an issue, but rarer materials, like the crystals I'm interested in, aren't able to be guaranteed in a single year. That doesn't mean that they're impossible to get, just that it's difficult to get them in a short period of time, generally.

For that reason, a special contract had to be drafted between the merchant and Kembora for the procurement of particular crystals. Due to the amount of money involved, and the lack of guarantee of goods, the contract has a time frame of 5 years, at which point the merchant would be required to pay us back for any goods he couldn't secure in that time.

As a result, the contract was quite detailed, with itemized prices that the merchant gave us for all the goods we were requesting. All our goods this year are on the contract, and we've requested a significantly larger volume than we have in the past. Of our usual goods, we requested three male bargas, a significant amount of waterproofing materials, a bunch of clothes for dwarves and humans to help keep our handful of migrants happy, and a decently large amount of iron.

Despite the fact we might be making our own iron from pyrite soon, I don't want us to be solely dependent on me figuring that process out. Plus, it'll take time for the pyrite process to actually produce iron for Karsh to be able to use. This iron will come in billets, so he'll be able to work it right away. We could use most of it to build the previously mentioned vault for a bank, so that valuables can reasonably be stored in the city, rather than deep in the mountain.

Overall, that portion of our order was about five times the normal volume that we could afford through salt and paper trade, but, with the money from the auction, we can afford it. That also brought us to about the limit of what their ship would be capable of transporting to us. Though it still had room for a small amount of goods, which is reserved for potential crystals if the merchant can acquire them.

Even a few pounds of crystals that produce effects when exposed to mana are very expensive. That's partially due to the danger associated with transporting them. When exposed to any mana at all, they produce a small amount of whatever their effect is, so they need to be handled accordingly. I've requested crystals that produce heat, fire, electricity, or water, if they exist that is. I've also explicitly asked that the crystals be checked and that their history is well known, so that we don't get any 'cursed' crystals. Even if it is radiation, it's still deadly, and I don't want to deal with it.

Due to those requirements alone, a few pounds of those crystals runs us about three years worth of trade for each type. In order to pay for the four types, I had to give up twelve years of trade value in dwarven coins. Though, if I consider it may take a few years for those crystals to be acquired, we'll probably have had another auction by then, and will have recouped that cost, so I'm not extremely concerned by it. After all, we still have more than half of our dwarven coins left.

It was fairly easy for the merchant to set out the next day, since we kept most of our salt and paper, as preparations for the next auction, so we sent him off with dwarven coin instead, which required a lot less effort to load onto their ship.

After all the trade was taken care of, I returned back to the city, and started discussions with Zaka about getting permanent military positions on the island, given what we learned from Shasta. Those discussions went on for a few days as we discussed the details of how things would be run.

The biggest issue was that Zaka wasn't fond of having groups of our population living on other parts of the island for extended periods of time. I got the feeling during our discussion that he might have taken the other village being wiped out by the dwarves harder than I had previously thought. Ultimately, we settled on those positions being handled similar to the salvage and mining teams, but on a rotation. The five artillery locations and the lookout post will be occupied constantly, but they'll have a shift schedule of 20 days on, 20 days off, being relieved by the next team to take their place.

Each location will have a team of three, with one individual being "in charge" of the other two, and a singular individual back in the city being in charge of all twelve of the teams. Meaning that our military is going to consist of 37 individuals, though I suppose if you count the city guard, it's a bit higher. They'll also change which location they'll be at each time, to keep it fair, since some of the locations are much closer to the city than others.

While they're at their designated location, they'll be in charge of maintaining the equipment there, and making a dirt path to connect to the nearest road. In the past having the locations obscured was to our benefit, but now that we could potentially be attacked at any time, having the ability to quickly reinforce those positions is more to our benefit than having them be difficult to find.

With those discussions taken care of, I left Zaka to determine who should be part of the new military force, as he knows the population much better than I do. With that, there is still another month-and-a-half of winter, so I plan on building a new small bathhouse by the lab area, so that come springtime, I can move the crystal there and hopefully finish the ore roasting area for processing the galena and sphalerite, and hopefully also the pyrite when the time comes.

Since we already had the medium sized crystal in the basement of the lab, I was able to finish the bathhouse in only fourteen days, though I can't say I was a fan of how many trips up and down the stairs I had to make to do so. If it weren't for those stairs, I wouldn't even build the bathhouse, since I can just recharge at that medium crystal, but those stairs are exhausting, and it does interfere with some of Tiberius's experiments when I'm constantly interrupting to use the crystal.

He's still testing different mixes of blood, though it does seem he's moved from a general approach to something more precise, as I saw him carefully measuring out volumes of blood to go into a single container. I'm quite interested to see what results he can get from this sort of work. He must think there is something, since he's given up on two other projects when he realized there wasn't much more he could do with those.

With the bathhouse ready for springtime over here, I decided to resume work on the roasting area for the remainder of the time until I need to move the crystal. At night, rather than work in the dark so far from the city, I've been taking that time to produce lightstone in the city, where I have easy access to mana, then during the day, I haul it to the worksite while I wait for my mana to recharge, so I've been steadily building up a stockpile of lightstone there. Once spring arrives, I think I should be able to finish the ore roasting area pretty quickly.

Though I have a few improvements that I want to add to Konkur's design that might take a little longer after the general area is finished. Namely, I want to add forced air blowers to the roasting ovens, and add some medium sized windmills to the area to power that. The reason for wanting the forced air blowers is so I can add an exhaust chimney to the roasting ovens, and have the sulfur dioxide release higher up in the air, above a covered roof, so that the workers are exposed to much less of the gas than they would be otherwise.

[Vol.5] Ch.34 Ore Roasting

Spring was very rainy this year, which made it harder to work than I was expecting. The terrain where I've been working is craggy, as I've mentioned a few times, which means there are a lot of small but steep valleys with little flat land. That meant that during rain, all that water from on the mountain would run down the cracks in the mountain, rushing quickly along. By the time it got down to the altitude where I was building, it would run very swiftly with a decent volume behind it.

Ultimately, that meant that I had to build even more infrastructure around the area I was working to handle the water, and prevent it from damaging ores. Given the craggy terrain, I had been digging into the mountain to make flat areas that were easier to work with, and I had replaced the floors with a few inches of solid lightstone. The intent was to make a covered area, with chimneys that reach through the cover, to billow out the sulfur dioxide gas. I realized as the rains came that a simple gutter around the covering won't be enough to handle the occasional torrent of water that makes its way down the mountain.

What I ended up spending a lot of time doing was redirecting the water that would cascade down the valley. I tried a few things, like cutting a simple channel around the area, but ultimately, I ended up ascending a few hundred feet above the work area, and cutting a path from my bit of valley into the next one over, and then making a wide and tall redirection for that water. Due to the speed and volume of water during intense rain, anything less than a full redirection was just resulting in mud, rocks, and plant matter clogging any smaller scale structure. At least this should last quite a few years without much maintenance, and the previously cut channels more than suffice for the rain that falls between the redirection and the work area.

Though all that work meant that I hadn't finished the work area by the middle of the fourth month, and we moved the crystal back to the far valley to assist with all the city's construction projects. Though most of the large scale work that I was doing was able to be completed for the project at least. I also cut three decently sized storage areas into the mountain along the back wall of the work area, so that a fairly large quantity of roasted and unroasted ores could be kept onsite.

At that point, all I had left to build were the roasting ovens and the windmill. For the windmill, I went for a size in between a well pump's windmill and the full sized ones by the coast. I once again had Karsh assist with the construction of components, including a simple gearbox for allowing any of the four ovens to have their intake propellers powered or unpowered.

Three of the roasting ovens are of similar design to each other. Though one is larger than the other two. They contain a large, round, flat bed where crushed ore can be distributed with a shovel and special rake. From the back of the oven, a pipe ascends into the heating area. That pipe contains the fan further away from the oven, to force air through. The front of the oven can then close, to ensure that escaping gas leaves through the chimney near the front. When it comes time to roast the ore, wood or charcoal is set on fire on top of the ore, and once it's burning well, the door can be closed. There is an extra system that I installed on the flat bed, that they can then engage, which is a large, flat stirring stick which fits in the diameter of the bed, and will slowly rotate, ensuring that the ore is well mixed.

The fourth oven is of quite a different design than the others though. Unlike the others, where the resultant material is still a rocky substance, this is the oven for galena, where even a wood fire is likely to produce molten lead. That being the case, this oven is much more similar to the furnace up on the mountain, where crucibles can be used to smelt the galena directly, and the lead can be poured off to make ingots. Those ingots will be quite impure, and need reprocessing later, unless they're used for certain materials, like artillery shells, where we only really care about their density.

In the future, those chimneys could be attached to a gathering chamber of some kind to collect the sulfur dioxide gas, but for now, they'll function fine just venting to atmosphere.

By the time everything was complete, and I'd tested all the components to make sure they'd work, it was the 18th of the 6th month, or roughly mid-summer. Which meant it was time to start doing a trial run of the sphalerite and galena, as well as giving the pyrite a try in one of the smaller ovens. In the time I spent while building this whole facility, the mine itself has started to decrease in productivity, and it's about to the level where I'm going to direct the mining team to start a new exploratory mine shaft.

The galena did partially melt to produce lead, but it also left behind a lot of slag materials, which I've decided to save. The density of that slag material is still quite high, so I suspect there are more metals trapped in it. Konkur's notes also mentioned that these ores are likely going to contain a mix of the other metals that can be found in the area, so it'll take some work to purify them properly.

The sphalerite processing went well, and, according to Konkur's notes, it seemed to properly reduce the sphalerite to zinc oxide. For the pyrite though, I'm essentially flying blind. Though the pyrite powder did seem to change from it's brassy color to a darker gray color during it's roasting process, so I'm taking that as a good sign that it has turned into an iron oxide from an iron sulfide. I'll do some experiments with the first batch of this once-roasted pyrite to see what kind of quality the resultant iron will be.

Overall, the facility here only produces some low-quality lead, and some partially processed ore materials for the time being. We'll need an entirely different facility for processing Zinc, as its processing has some extra steps, requiring a very high temperature furnace to vaporize the reducing zinc oxide. The iron oxide made from processing the pyrite should be able to be smelted somewhat normally, however.

With the three roasting processes tested, I feel comfortable with the idea of making a few permanent positions for jobs of roasting ores, to start they'll just be roasting the galena and sphalerite. I want to wait until I'm confident in the pyrite processing before I leave it to some relatively untrained individuals to work on, though.

I established a permanent position for six goblins to work roasting ores. For the most part, the job is relatively easy, since the ores just need to be loaded, then they roast relatively unattended for quite a while. Most of their work comes from hauling the product around. Basically, four of the six at any given time are hauling the ores while the other two keep an eye on the roasting ovens.

In the twenty days they've been working, I've started to notice the plant life in the immediate surroundings, and especially downwind, has started to look unhealthy. Ultimately, that led me to make sure the goblins working at the site took turns being the ones hauling the ores, so that individually, they don't spend a long period of time in the area. I also decided that every five days, they should take two days off completely, for health reasons.

I tried breathing both under the large covered area, and a little outside it, and the air is quite a bit worse outside and downwind than it is underneath the covering, so I'm not concerned with concentrated poisoning at least. The roof does seem to be doing its job, with the wind generally pushing the gases away.

The first roast of the pyrite, however, didn't go as well. The resultant iron from smelting was extremely brittle, and barely useful at all. I suspect that the cause lies between impurities of other metals and residual sulfur. I have two options for attempting to fix the issue, though I'm leaning more towards one than the other.

The first option is attempting to fix the ore during the roasting phase. This would be difficult, because the amount of mixed in other minerals is actually quite high. The pyrite we're using isn't that pure, and has a lot of crushed rock mixed in. The second option is a bit of a pain as well. Since the iron is so brittle, it involves re-processing that iron again with a large amount of charcoal to remove as much of the sulfur as is possible, while also attempting to to remove as many of the other metal impurities using lime, though we'd still have to do more to remove copper impurities if they're too much of a problem.

[Vol.5] Ch.35 Lead Refining

Before I continue my pyrite experiments, I want to focus on finishing the lead production process. Doing so should allow us to recover a lot of the iron and copper that we used for making artillery rounds, since we'll be able to swap out the projectile portions of those rounds. Karsh also said he'd like to make all sorts of other things out of lead, since it's so easy to work with, but I shot down that idea. Considering how similar our biology seems to be to Earth, I'm not risking lead poisoning. Maybe the biology on this planet has an easy way to handle heavy metals, but I'd prefer to err on the side of caution.

The final step for lead production isn't that complicated, but it will require a slight change in how the city currently handles some of it's refuse, bones in particular. What we need to finish purifying our current lead according to Konkur's notes is to melt it down in shallow containers made from bone ash. That bone ash will absorb the lead oxide and leave behind a lot of other metals as long as we control the temperature of the fire. Thankfully, he left a diagram for charcoal smelters that should produce the approximate temperature for the process.

The metals recovered in this step are gold and silver, so those should be set aside for later analysis, perhaps I'll get a letter with the samples composed, along with some payment, and send it to Konkur this year. I don't know if he'll look into it or not, but I suspect he will, as long as the merchant can actually get the samples sent to him. If this step has a very low yield, then it could potentially be skipped over for processing bulk lead.

The next step for recovering the lead involves re-smelting the bone ash which is infused with lead oxides and other metal oxides like copper. It requires quite a bit of charcoal to reduce the metal oxides back into a mostly lead bullion. Finally, those bullions need to be melted again at a low temperature near the melting point of lead, leaving the other metals as a solid, and yielding a mostly pure lead metal.

So, my next course of action is to begin changing our handling of bone refuse, then to make the additions to the roasting area. One for the lead refining using the bone ash, and the other for re-smelting the lead. If this was any metal other than lead, I'd probably build them in the city, but given it involves working with lead, I don't want to potentially poison the ground water so I'm going to build it next to the ore roasting area, where I already expect those sorts of problems.

It took quite a few days to spread the word about separating out fish bones from your other refuse. It took even longer to get the practice properly handled. Ultimately, I had to settle on a recycling program style system. Individuals could purchase a small bin for their fish bones, and when the bin was filled, you could trade the bones inside for a fixed sum of money.

Getting that whole process organized ended up taking forty-three days, since I needed to hire a new goblin to handle the process, build a facility for processing the bones into bone ash, and get Zeb to have one of his stone shaping goblins spend some time each year building more bins for goblins to use for their fish bones. With that process done it means we have a steady supply of bone ash, which should have a few uses outside of our lead refining needs.

Next, I got to work on the area for the refining stage for the lead. I talked Zeb into lending me a construction team for ten days to ensure that I finished the facility in time before this winter. In those two weeks, we expanded the flat area around the roasting section to make enough room for the three new smelters, expanded the roofing, and added another underground storage area.

Then, I spent another twelve days building the first smelter for refining the lead. With it finished, I took another three days tinkering with the bone ash to come up with a good process to make the required containers for seeping the lead oxide into. Next, I took another ten days doing trial runs to get everything working in a reproducible way, so I could hire more goblins to handle the process long term. In those ten days, I collected quite a few small samples of the impurities from the lead, which I carefully stored.

The lead ingots from the original smelter weigh approximately ten pounds each, and after running them through this stage of the refining process, I'd receive a little bead of metal that weighed just under a twentieth of a pound. If I've done everything right, that means we're looking at about a half of a percent by weight yield of silver and/or gold.

Using conservative estimates of a 50% weight yield from the galena to our initial lead bullion combined with the five tons or so of galena we have to process, that'd yield about twenty-five pounds of these beads of silver. On one hand, it feels like a bit of a waste to do so much work for such a tiny amount of metal, but silver and gold both have pretty useful properties, and are somewhat hard to get, so it's probably worth it to continue this process.

I'll have a few samples bundled with some notes for Konkur, and hopefully he'll be able to get back to me within a year to tell me if it's considered economically viable to continue that recovery step. I took two days making a special package containing the samples, and working with one of our goblins who could write in dwarvish to have them prepare a letter to go along with the samples.

After doing those tests, I spent another ten days hiring and training three goblins to handle that process moving forward. After that, I started work on the second smelter, the one for re-forming the lead bullion with it's impurities from the bone ash. This smelter needs to get up to a high enough temperature to reduce the lead oxide again, so it needs another windmill to get the air-flow high enough to produce the temperatures necessary for a reduction reaction to occur with mixed charcoal.

Unfortunately, I had to halt construction temporarily, in order to handle our winter trade again. Though I can't say I was too upset by the interruption, considering I was expecting to potentially receive some of the crystal samples I requested. The merchant also arrived fairly early, on the ninth of the month, so I didn't end up wasting that long waiting on this side of the island.

I felt mixed emotions when I had only received a small container with three crystals in it. All three, I was told, produced heat when exposed to mana. I held one, and it did feel slightly warmer than I would have expected, so that at least made me believe it was performing as advertised.

Shasta was there to negotiate again, and also gave me a rough estimate for the number of warlords to expect at next year's auction. I was informed that eighteen had agreed to participate. Quite a few had declined, but if we included those who might still decide to participate, then we could expect up to twenty-five participants.

We unloaded the metals we traded for this year, and renegotiated new trade deals for the next year. We didn't need to trade for as many things this year, but to keep the merchant happy, I ordered enough goods to make the trip more than worth it for him. The order consisted mostly of more metals, in addition to the usual goods like clothing. Given the number of warlords who might participate in the auction next year, I traded entirely in dwarven currency for this year's trade, to ensure we have enough trade goods to give as gifts at the auction.

[Vol.5] Ch.36 Aesthetics

I was so caught up in all the work I was doing with smelting our lead, that I hadn't realized why it was so easy for me to requisition a construction team to help me for a short while. They had finished building the sea wall in our valley. It's quite the impressive view the first time you see it, but I've heard from more than one goblin that they miss the old view of the ocean. The goblins that work in both of the mills, the salt evaporation ponds, and a few of the fields no longer have a direct view of the ocean while they work.

The population really has been growing in the past few years, and we passed 2,000 residents quite a while ago. We're probably reaching the point where artwork is going to start to become necessary. Well, necessary is a strong word, but it will help morale. Until recently, you could easily look around and see nature surrounding you wherever you were on the island. In the decades since I've been making changes to things, we've pushed the wilderness further and further back. On one hand, that's made everything much safer and more stable. On the other hand, it's not very pleasing to look at most of it.

Most of the construction in the city is flat stone lacking features or details. When you spend your whole day surrounded by that, it probably wears on the psyche. I still spend plenty of time off in the edges of our civilization, slowly converting that wilderness into more of the drab stone structures, which is where art comes in. It'd probably be for the best to start exploring artwork as a way to spice things up, and make everything less uniform in appearance.

I'll talk it over with Zeb, but in an ideal scenario, we'd recruit directly from the construction teams to start sprucing up our building designs and make them less uniform. Some of the dwarven dwellings are like that, with faux brick exteriors. Perhaps sprucing up the architecture with Greco-Roman style pillar designs would be more appealing to the eyes? Honestly, just about anything is probably more appealing than the near-soviet style brutalist architecture we have now. It'd probably help with our image as well. Nothing says terrifying savages quite like brutalism, even if it was a consequence of functionality and ease of production.

I'd also like to get the other valley's sea wall up. It sort of conflicts with what I just said about brutalist architecture, but protection from weather disasters should come first. We can always pretty it up afterwards. Plus, it shouldn't be long now before Zeb designates a new construction crew. Every year he's been gaining a few stone-shaping goblins, and the current teams are about at the level where he'll probably pull some from each team and form a new one. I'm not going to micromanage how he runs things though, however he decides to run things is his choice.

It'll be another busy year ahead of me as well. Not only would I like to finish the lead production area, but I also need to make the large crystal for this next winter's auction. Time permitting, I'd like to get the pyrite refining figured out, and get the zinc furnace built. I now also have the handful of heat producing crystals to start analyzing when I get the chance. I've also realized that long term, we'll need locations for storing the remaining tailings from our metal production. The tailings from these sulfide ores are probably quite toxic, and contain lead and arsenic in large amounts, so ideally, I'd dig a very deep vault where they can be safely stored.

I talked with Zeb about introducing architectural design to our buildings, and remodeling the older ones. He was surprisingly reluctant to the idea. His reasoning was quite sound though, we're already pulling some of our available construction labor to building the sea wall, and if we pull even more of it to start doing architectural work the production rate of new dwellings will be significantly reduced. They currently add about one new living space a day on average, which means that Zaka usually spends about an hour each day summoning imps to keep up.

Zeb gave a pretty interesting analysis beyond that as well. From when a goblin first evolves, it takes a minimum of two years for them to start being productive in any particular field that relies on magic. Even then, it usually takes them another two years to really start becoming proficient in their chosen field, and from there they become more productive over time beyond that. So, while unskilled labor becomes available quickly, the skilled labor lags behind. If we reduce our growth rate, it'll have compounding effects on production down the road, based on that lost labor. We don't really need more unskilled labor right now, but we can always use demons that have more prestiges or evolution under their belt. Which means we need to keep summoning new demons as quickly as possible, so they can mature, level, and evolve over time.

After hearing Zeb's reasoning, I was inclined to agree. It can be delayed somewhat. However, I did convince him that once he gets more laborers, rather than forcing Zaka to spend even more time each day on summoning, we should consider improving the existing infrastructure to be more aesthetic. While he was still reluctant, I explained that I'd been hearing complaints from some of the goblins who work near the sea, alongside my own reasoning which included what I'd seen on Kao's island. He then agreed to hold a meeting with the construction teams when it came time to form a new team, to see who might be interested in that kind of work, but made no promises as to whether he would form a team regardless of interest.

That new team would still be under his jurisdiction if it's formed, but they'd focus on remodeling older buildings. That led into a discussion about updating new building designs, but ultimately, that came to a standstill. If it slows down production, Zeb's against it. Well, I'll take a win where I can. Partial implementation is better than no implementation. Over time, we'll get a larger construction force, and then it shouldn't be an issue anymore.

I debated with myself as to whether I should immediately begin work on growing the crystal for next year, or finish the lead refining process. Ultimately, I decided to start growing the crystal. Once spring comes, I'll pause growing the crystal to resume working on lead refining. I plan on moving the temporary bathhouse crystal back to the lab area again during spring, so it'll make construction in the roasting area easier.

Though, working on the crystal in winter is a bit of a pain, since the mining crew has to clear the snow on the roads periodically. As a result, in the two months we've been working, I've only finished about half the work needed on the crystal, which is a bit slower than I'd normally like. It's mostly due to travel delays for the goblins making their way up the mountain to assist me in work. In the extra downtime, I've been mining out more and more of the known crystal deposit, and building up a stockpile.

Once the deposits are mined out completely, I'll have a good estimate of how many years I have to find a new source of the crystals, or to figure out what raw materials are actually going into the crystals to artificially manufacture them instead. As an estimate of what's remaining though, I've got at least two auctions after this upcoming one before the current supply runs out, which works out to about nine years.

For the first two months of spring, I worked to finish the lead smelting, which actually was pretty easy. Between having the crystal close by the lab area, and the fact I'd gotten quite used to building and designing furnaces, the two last stages of the lead refining process were a breeze to make. I even added in an additional furnace for smelting the finished lead product, so it could be poured into casts easily, and made a cast for the lead shells that will be replacements for our current artillery shells.

The first furnace was very similar to the one in the city, except it is powered by a small windmill rather than a waterwheel, and it has a chimney to help reduce toxic fumes, since it's working with lead. This furnace is for reducing the lead oxide from the fish bone ash back into liquid lead and other metals.

The second furnace is actually more like a cooking oven, fueled with wood, with a shallow sloped surface and a hopper. You feed crushed up lead metal into the hopper on top, and as a solid, it rests on the sloped surface. The heat is relatively low, so the lead easily melts, and leaves behind other metal impurities on the slope. Every so often, you have to remove the buildup of the leftover metals on the slope, but it does a good job of producing quite pure lead.

From Konkur's notes, it seems that the leftover metal still contains a pretty high amount of lead, alloyed with whatever other impurities didn't melt or burn away. Down the road, it might be possible to extract more metals from the leftovers, using either chemical or electric processes, so I personally want to keep these leftovers separate from other tailings.

[Vol.5] Ch.37 Trigonometry

I took five days getting another few goblins trained on how to use the rest of the lead furnaces before spending another month and some change working on the zinc furnace. Considering everything else was built in this area, I decided to go ahead and build the zinc processing area here too.

For Zinc refining, there are a few steps. First, we take the zinc oxide we made by roasting the sphalerite, and crush it. Then, we mix the crushed zinc oxide with charcoal. Then, we heat that mixture to a decently high temperature, though the temperature is still quite a bit below the melting point of iron, so it's not that difficult. The mixture then reduces the zinc oxide down to carbon monoxide and zinc metal vapors, both of which would be incredibly toxic to inhale. So, the furnace needs to have a channeled air supply, which goes through a cooling chamber where the zinc metal can condense and reform into a metal.

In Konkur's design, the remaining carbon monoxide is just left to go to atmosphere, but I didn't feel that comfortable with the safety of that, so I put a small second furnace in line at the end. I'm sure that quite a bit of it burns before it actually reaches the second furnace, but I'd rather not have any accidents, and considering carbon monoxide is flammable, it wouldn't just be a poisoning concern.

That said, after getting the zinc process finished, spring was just about over, so I took a few days once again to train some goblins on the process before moving the crystal back to the coastal bathhouse. The sea wall is slowly making progress in this valley now as well, but it'll probably take a bit longer than the first wall. The coast here is a bit wider, and I expect that the new artificial tide pool they've been digging out over here will actually be completed before this sea wall, which means they'd need a new source of stone for construction, which will slow construction further.

At the end of spring, I took another two months finishing growing the new crystal for the auction later this year. Given my growing concern with our total crystal supply, I only grew the large crystal, and didn't mess with increasing any more intermediates. I still have a few of the 4 foot crystals, which should be enough to last us through the current crystal deposits for production.

Since I had to spend a lot of idle time in the crystal growing lab, I took to refining more lightstone while I waited, something I used to do quite a bit while I worked in the lab. We've taken to using metal for a lot of different things, due to differences in properties, but lightstone still has quite a few desirable properties so I find uses for it here and there. If we had more uses for it, I'd consider finishing the vibration stack separator project, so we could produce more lightstone through mechanical labor, but for most construction, just about any stone from the island works fine, so there aren't that many projects that use it anymore.

In the off hours, while everyone else was asleep on the mountain, I spent most of my time reaching the remaining crystal deposits that I could find with tectonic sense, but I did check on the ore deposit that the miners have been working on. It's quite deep, and I can tell from the rocks and the existing mine shafts that most of the deposit is already depleted, and that the quality of ore they're producing now is already below what I would have considered worth their time previously. I've been busy with my own projects though, so I haven't really had time to give them new orders.

If I include the gypsum and quartz, then they've extracted hundreds of thousands of tons of useful material from this deposit. Though as the quality of ores has declined, we're only getting fractional yields of useful output, but it's still a significant achievement for a few years worth of work.

I decided to shut this mine down now though. The yields would only get worse from here, and as the yields get worse, we waste more and more fuel in the refining process. Our current fuel supply isn't unlimited, we only have so much island that we can cut trees down on to make charcoal, so I'd rather be building up fuel stockpiles in preparation for higher quality ores than using that limited fuel in this manner.

With that in mind, I've decided to knock out two birds with one stone moving forward by creating a new source of stone for construction, and a new mineral exploration tunnel into the mountain. Based on Konkur's notes, ore deposits are more likely to be found in deeper portions of volcanos like this, and closer to where water would have had an easier time interacting with the volcano. Deeper stone in the volcano can be found in two ways though, one is by digging downward, but the second is by digging inward.

What I'm planning is to have the mining crew start digging a large tunnel straight through the mountain. The entrance to the tunnel will be not far from the city walls, which means it'll only be about a hundred feet above sea level. Initially, it'll be like the mining tunnels on the mountain, wide enough to run a cart through, with a little extra wiggle room. Ultimately, I'd like that tunnel to run through the entire length of the island, to the far beach. Then, down the road, the tunnel can be expanded and widened, which should cut travel time from one side of the island to the other down to less than a day.

There are a few problems that they're likely to run into with the tunnel, though. The first issue is water. Other tunnels have run into aquifers throughout the island, and I fully expect that to be an issue with this tunnel too. So, the tunnel will be dug with a gentle upward slope until it's near the middle of the island. A channel will need to be dug for the water to collect and run out from the tunnel.

The second problem is that at some point, we'll have to do quite a bit of detailed work to figure out our exact position, then dig in from the other side to finish the tunnel, though that'll be years from now. While the mining team digs the small scouting tunnel, looking for ore deposits, a construction team can eventually begin expanding the tunnel when they need a new source of stone after the second tide pool is completed. This could result in some logistical issues if an ore deposit overlaps with the construction team's planned work, but hopefully those instances would be separated by enough time that they never intersect. If they do, then the construction teams can always resort to expanding the dam's reservoir for stone like they used to.

Before they start any construction though, I want to make a bunch of tools for them, to reduce construction error as much as possible, so that when the time comes to join the eventual two tunnels, it can be done relatively easily. With that in mind, I'll probably need to take quite a few days to make everything.

While I worked on their new tools, I gave the mining team a vacation. As I thought about the various things I needed, I realized it was going to take a while to prepare everything for them and that I needed to do a lot of math before they could start working, and they deserved a reward for excavating the previous deposit to completion. There were a handful of tools I needed. First, I need tools to find the midpoint of the tunnel we plan on digging, then I'll need tools for the mining team to use for digging the tunnel with precision.

For finding the midpoint, I could use a rope of known length, a water level, a plumb bob, and a protractor. Of course, saying I could do so, and the practice of doing so was quite different. I had two ropes of 100 feet, with a loop that fit on a stake tied on either end. The stakes also have measurements on them, so I could tell how high the rope stands above the ground. Then, I'd drive a stake into the side of the road, note it's height, and then, 100 feet away, I'd put the stake somewhere on the opposite side of the road, drive it in, and mark the height, then drive the third stake, mark it's height, and then use the plumb bob and protractor to measure it's rising angle, and the protractor again at the middle angle.

After taking those notes, I had to go back, unloop the rope from the first stake, and move the whole thing to the next 100 feet. In doing so, I could do trigonometry to make a geometric measurement for the midpoint between two sides of the island along the road. I left the marked stake in the ground where I had driven it, and made a marking on it to indicate which number the stake was, in case I needed to return to it later.

Ultimately, going 100 feet at a time meant it would take about fifty-two measurements to travel a mile. I became quite discouraged as I worked due to the pace I moved at. If I had needed to sleep, it would have been even worse, but thanks to my ability to work while half asleep, I traveled and measured the length of our road around the island in thirty-six days. The total number of measurements I took was 1,864, meaning the road runs a little over thirty five miles, not factoring in that I alternated sides of the road with each measurement to avoid any plant life interacting with the rope. I decided then that if I need to do something like this in the future, I'm hiring and training someone else to do it.

I then had to actually calculate everything, which was just as tedious. I'd have to work using one triangle at a time to get the rise and run of a segment, and put those into a new column with their marked points each. Then, with that new information, I could calculate the height differential between any two stakes, which ultimately let me know that my starting stake and ending stake were about 35 feet different in height from each other, with the far beach's road being lower.

Then, using the projected length of run for each rope, and the angle that was formed between the two ropes, I could calculate a hypotenuse between them, along with the new angle between the hypotenuse and the next segment. Ultimately, the calculations were complicated enough that I couldn't do them while half asleep, so all the math ended up taking another twenty days, but I had the central line length calculated. The distance between the two points that I wanted to start digging the tunnel at was a whopping 17.63 miles. I made sure to replace the smaller stakes at the two points with larger stone markers, so that my work wouldn't be wasted.

There is still a lot of work to do before any digging can be done, but winter is about a month away, so I need to finalize everything for the auction before I continue work on this project. The mining team has been on vacation for more than enough time already now, so I'm going to have them assist in excavating the artificial tide pool area until I'm ready for them to start on the tunnel.

[Vol.5] Ch.38 Tunnel Tools

As I started making the crates for salt and paper to take to the auction, I realized that I should actually take a few days replacing some of the stakes along the road with permanent stone posts, rather than letting most of the work go to waste. Ultimately, I spent eight days doing so. I replaced every ninth stake with a larger stone post that I stoneshaped onto the bedrock or the road, depending on the location. I also replaced the second stake, and the second from the last stake, so they can be used as relative points for aiming the eventual tunnel.

However, rather than doing the math now to figure out each post's altitudinal change and linear distance to the last post, I'll save that for later. I have a feeling that I'll be waiting on Kao's island again for some time for the auction, and while I'd like to spend some of the time learning dwarvish, I can also spend some of my time doing those calculations. Though it means I'll need to prep some payment to Shasta to cover her teaching costs.

With that in mind, I spent an additional six days getting 110 crates ready. Four each for the participants, and ten for Kao, in appreciation for the work he's putting into this. Those ten are in addition to the 5% of the auction's earnings that he'll be getting. In retrospect, 5% might be a bit too stingy considering all the decorum that seems to go into interacting with other dwarven warlords, but I suppose that ultimately depends on how well the crystal auctions go moving forward. I did also give Kao that second crystal, which is, in essence, an entire auction's income...

Well, outside of the gift, I won't offer up extra money to Kao for free. If he brings it up, I'll be open to negotiating new terms. I do still have a bit less than a month left until the actual trip to Kao's island begins, so I can do a little more work here before I leave, so I think I'll focus on building the rest of the tools for the mining crew.

I've made a handful of tools to assist the mining crew to ensure that everything is dug as accurately as possible, though I'm sure that will also slow down their rate of excavation somewhat. The first item is a sled supported on two long rails, one on either side. Since they're mining using stone shaping, the idea is that you use the two rails to mark the edges of the tunnel, and their flat base to make sure the tunnel is staying level with itself.

I've decided on a very, very gentle slope for the tunnel, with a 1:200 slope. That means for every 200 feet the tunnel runs, it should only rise one foot in altitude. It's not quite as gentle of a slope as some aqueducts are built at, and it means that that I had to add functionality to the sled that they'll use, since it's too hard to properly read a plumb bob on a protractor for that gentle of a slope.

Ultimately, by making the sled 8 feet long, I embedded a water level into it. This water level is somewhat special though. I built the sled on a work area that I made exceptionally level initially, and built a water level into it. Then I tilted the sled to match the slope I wanted, and cut a notch into the back of the water level, so it drained the level slightly. I then cut a horizontal mark along the new water level along the water's meniscus at the slight incline. This way, whenever they want to check that they've been working at the right level, they simply add water until it overflows, and check that the water hugs that horizontal marking, this isn't perfect, but it should help prevent them from getting too far off the expected grade.

Beyond that though, I made a tool for them to verify and correct their work long term. With Karsh's help, I made a fifty foot long copper pipe, two right angle connectors, and some marked measuring tanks. By filling them with water, we can check the level in both tanks, and see what the difference is, since water pressure will correct the level in both tanks to be horizontal. We'd expect the lower tank to have 3" more water than the uphill tank. If it isn't that, we can either manually correct the tunnel at that point, or simply keep track of the differences, and attempt to correct it later, while digging from the other side. If, for instance all the error is in the same direction, then we might simply be able to use the same sled for the other tunnel, and the error would even out.

The final tool I made for them is a smaller sled, used for marking the drainage gutter, and the stone rail locations for eventual carts. It's ultimately just there to help standardize the final product, since they could just eyeball both of those, and it'd be relatively fine. With all those tools completed though, I have about ten days until Kao's ships pick us up, so I need to head to the other side of the island to be ready for that.

It only took Kao's ships 9 days to arrive, and after factoring in hauling our goods and travel to the far side of the island, we had four days of actual waiting. Though I didn't let that time go to waste. I used the opportunity to get an estimate for the height between the last measuring stake on this side of the island and the approximate high-tide mark, which was about 41 feet, give or take a foot. Ultimately, waves made it harder than I expected to measure the exact high tide point, but we got pretty close, all things considered.

The trip to Kao's island was less interesting the second time, but I still used my telescope to look over the other islands for anything of value. While I didn't spot anything valuable, it does seem like the lizards on the second island are still thriving. I also noticed a few locations that would probably be decent for setting up new villages in the future.

When we arrived on Kao's island though, I noticed quite a few things had changed in three years. The port area had been expanded with multiple new docks, likely to accommodate the expected number of ships. Beyond that, the road from the port to the fort was expanded, and the road continued up the slope beyond the fort now. The fort's walls also expanded beyond just the half of the slope it covered previously, and now encompassed the whole of the slope, meaning you'd need to pass through the fort to enter the raised center of the island, or else scale the cliffs elsewhere.

On the first night, we stayed in the fort, but the next day, I was shown to the new addition to the island. For all intents and purposes, there was now a large village in the center of the island, with a central arena. Upon closer inspection though, it's not really a village, but more like a bunch of small mansions with walls around each of them, demarking their own yards. It seems, due to their custom of waiting until all the expected warlords gather before any of them meet with each other, this is the result. Each warlord can occupy a mansion with their retinue without interacting with each other.

The central arena is, as expected, the location that the auction will take place, and just seems to be a much larger version of the previous auction's arena. Though this time there are rooms on top of each other as well, so it's even more intimidating than previously to be in the center of it all. Shasta did inform me that I shouldn't expect all the warlords to actually be present this time. Given the novelty of the first auction, those who participated where interested enough to arrive in person, but this time, I should expect a lot of representatives, rather than all participants being the warlords themselves.

Well, regardless of any of that, it'll be a month before the auction begins. I've brought along a decent chunk of dwarven currency to pay Shasta for more lessons on dwarvish, and I have calculations to do for the posts along the road. Unlike last auction, I don't plan on doing a bunch of physical labor leading up to it.

[Vol.5] Ch.39 Second Auction Results

I was able to work with Shasta some more on my dwarvish language skills in the time while I waited for the various participants to arrive. Then, in the time when I didn't have any dwarvish to practice, I worked on the math I had brought along. The participants started arriving a little earlier than last year, but I still had enough time to finish all the math I wanted to do. Unlike last year where the participants all arrived on their own ships, quite a few of the ships that arrived had multiple groups on them.

I asked Shasta how that worked, considering the warlords aren't supposed to meet until the opening banquet, and I was told that the groups who arrived on the same ships were comprised of representative delegates only, with no warlords present. Apparently, part of the reason Goppok Kanaga took so long to verify he was arriving last year was due to difficulties with securing a boat to transport him, since his territory is entirely landlocked. To get around this issue, it seems like more than a few of the landlocked warlords are just sending delegates, and working with their neighbors to share a ship.

Ultimately, a total of 23 participants arrived, and this time, we weren't waiting for anyone. Only nine warlords actually arrived themselves, but since the terms for the auction were already pretty well established, that shouldn't be an issue. It did, however, make the banquet feel a little more awkward due to the ratio of warlords to representatives. Other than that though, it was fairly lively.

What wasn't lively though, was the auction itself. Due to the sheer number of participants, the auction ran for five days before coming to it's conclusion. Though I shouldn't actually complain about it, since we made a lot of money from the whole exchange. Last time, the auction yielded about 32 times our normal trade budget. This time, it was just over 77 times our budget, more than double the last auction. Though, after we factor in Kao's 5%, it's only about 73 times.

That said, the closing banquet was lively, and we got everything sorted out pretty quickly, and within two days, everyone, ourselves included, had left Kao's island. Which means we now have at least 3 dwarven warlords who are contracted to help protect us if we're targeted again in the future for some reason. This year's auction winner is quite close geographically to the previous one. It makes me wonder if seeing the success of the previous crystal in helping an economy made the nearby warlords more willing to pay a larger sum of money for a crystal of their own.

I'll have to spend some time this year thinking about more expensive imports that we might want for our country. I really don't think it's that wise to just sit on money, when it could be doing work for us instead. Perhaps I should consider looking into the idea of hiring skilled laborers? If there are guilds of some kind who deal in different types of labor, we could potentially rent some labor out for a year to do some form of work for us.

I arrived back on our island on the twenty-second day of the twelfth month of the year. With only a little over a month left until spring, I wanted to start the mining team on their new tunnel immediately. So, after getting things measured out and lined up, I did just that. It took a few days to make sure we had everything as lined up and leveled as we could, but after that, the mining crew got to work cutting the new tunnel.

Due to the precision that I'm having the tunnel dug to, they do work a bit slower than normal, but other than that, they do seem to be managing the requirements for the tunnel quite well. While they slowly cut into the mountain, I worked on building a temporary bathhouse just outside the tunnel entrance, so that come springtime, we'd have a good location to move the seaside crystal.

During the spring, the construction team that is normally cutting stone from the new artificial tide pool can instead cut stone from the tunnel to widen it to it's final size. As long as the smaller guide tunnel is accurate, small deviations in the larger tunnel shouldn't cause any issues.

As spring arrived, and we transitioned construction locations to the new tunnel, things seemed to work pretty well. The amount of stone being removed from the tunnel was more than enough for construction in the city, and the wider tunnel was being dug at a faster pace than the small tunnel, probably due to having less strict requirements for construction, and having an easier time actually moving the stone with the extra space.

Since that project seems to be working well on it's own, I took a few days to have the information about all the posts around the road copied into the city's archive. As long as we don't have any major landslides or earthquakes, we should be able to use any of those posts as starting points for future calculations if they're needed.

After that, I finally had time to start on my own projects again, starting with the pyrite. We did get another crystal sample from the merchant this year, but that project can wait a little longer, since we currently are sitting on a decently large amount of pyrite which I'd like to turn into quality iron.

The issue with the first iron batch was how brittle it was. I can't say for certain what all issues it had, but one is probably residual sulfur, and another is likely contaminant metals. Though some of the metals, like zinc and lead, probably evaporated due to the high heat necessary to melt iron, so it's probably only a few metals, such as copper, left.

I previously discussed that I could try two things, either try to work with the roasted pyrite directly to make quality iron, or use the already smelted brittle iron, and refine it again. Of the two, I think it'd be easiest to work with the brittle iron, mostly because it already has some of the impurities removed. It might waste some work and materials to do it that way, but it's also the most likely to get good results.

Ultimately, I have three things I'm going to try. I'll do each individually, then attempt to merge certain steps together. First, I'll try adding a lot of extra carbon to the mix, and heat it for a long time, with the hopes that the excess carbon will remove some of the remaining sulfur impurities, in a similar reaction to how it removes oxygen impurities.

The second addition is another round of lime being added in as flux, to hopefully preferentially remove some of the other metal impurities from the iron. The third test involves adding soda ash in, to potentially capture some impurities that the lime wouldn't. I expect that each process will remove some of the impurities, but I'm not sure if they'll interact with each other negatively or not, so I'll have to try them independently first.

I took fourteen days doing testing, and came up with a reasonable process for refining the iron from the pyrite. The final quality of the product is still somewhat low, but it's at least functional, and should be useful for a lot of different production purposes. The final process modifies the first smelting step for the roasted pyrite, and then goes through a second stage.

When testing out additional carbon, I found that it improved the quality of the iron somewhat, but it had certain properties that we didn't want. However, a second melt of that iron would reduce those properties a bit. So, after testing with that, I found that we could get similar results by adding significantly more carbon into the first stage melt of the roasted pyrite.

Then, the second step involves adding a mixture of lime and soda ash to the iron as it's melted again. The slag that the mixture forms seems to be removing a few different impurities, and improved the quality of the iron further, though it does seem like there are still a few impurities that we're having trouble removing. Ultimately, the most expensive part of the process is actually the soda ash, since our best source of that is the float vines.

However, unlike previously, where we were somewhat limited in where we could harvest them, we now have the salvage boat, so in theory, we can harvest them from around the island much easier than before, if the need arises. The float vines only seem to take a few years to reach maturity, so as long as we're not completely clear cutting them, we can probably harvest quite a few of them annually without much issue.

By my calculations, we'll need about one mature float vine to refine one pound of iron, which means we need many thousands of vines to process our current stockpile of pyrite. Which means it'll probably have to take place over a few years time.

[Vol.5] Ch.40 New Crystal Properties

The salvage team is still busy pulling up all the sunken goods from Rathland's invasion, so using our single salvage ship for harvesting float vines would be wasting their time. So for the time being, we'll limit ourselves to the float vines that we can harvest close to our shores with reasonable road access. While we could build a second ship, I thought about it for a little while, and decided I'd rather have a safe harbor built before we make any more ships. Our current ship was pretty damaged in the last storm, and I'd like for us to not have that issue.

We could also build some smaller rowboats that can be dragged on land to assist in the endeavor. The issue with rowboats, for us at least, is that utilizing them around the craggy edges of the island would be fairly difficult. So, while they would improve the speed that we can harvest float vines, they wouldn't increase our harvestable area by that much, though it is better than nothing, so I'll probably go with that as the plan for the time being. We do have plenty of waterproofing supplies now, thanks to our trades during the previous two years.

After I build a few rowboats and teach some goblins to handle the float vine harvesting, I'll take the time to finally start investigating the crystals I requested from the merchant.

I spent eighteen days working with the carpenters to teach them how to make these smaller rowboats, and then teaching some goblins how to use and safely store them. The rowboats aren't that large, and can be operated by one hobgoblin or two regular goblins. They can carry a handful of float vines, or potentially fish, if they want to use them for that. Though I'm a little concerned about using them for fishing, considering how dangerous some of the fish can be. On land, you can at least run away when you spot a dangerous fish on your line, in the boat, you have to hope it doesn't decide to attack you, even if you cut the line.

That said, I've got four goblins working full time on the float vine harvesting in two rowboats. Once the vines are collected, they're brought to shore and laid out to dry for a few days. Once they've dried, they're burned in containers for collecting the soda ash afterwards for use in the pyrite refining process.

After I took a few more days to ensure that the goblins were harvesting float vines effectively, I started research on the crystals that the merchant had delivered. First, I made simple notes about each crystal based on their observable physical properties. The three crystals that I got at once have three slightly different shades of yellow/orange colors. All three have been artificially shaped, which made it much harder to determine their natural shape. They vary in size, one is a tube shape with a 3" radius and is 5" long, another is a plate shape 1" thick and 4" diameter, the last one is a square prism 6" long and 2" on the sides.

They're relatively soft materials as well, being scratched by many different rocks that I have. As advertised, when they absorb mana, they heat up, and the more mana I pour in, the hotter they get. Each crystal produced different amounts of heat from each other for the same amount of mana I infused in with tectonic sense as well. Ultimately, to try to get more information about the crystals, I broke them into smaller pieces and observed their fracture patterns. The crystals seem to want to break into octahedral crystals. A feature that is more common as a cleavage pattern than a growth pattern, so it's unlikely they grew in this shape, but not impossible I suppose, considering the mana crystals grow in octahedrons...

Even after retesting tiny samples of similarly sized crystals, they still displayed different amounts of heat production with the same amount of mana. I tried another scratch test, and determined that all three crystals are very likely the same material, despite slightly different colors and heat production. It's likely that the crystals each have slightly different amounts of the same inclusion material, which is leading to the different properties. That's more evidence for my inclusion theory for crystal's producing mana effects.

The last crystal that was delivered just this last winter was quite a different color compared to the other three, a pale green, and the mana related effect was quite different from the other three. When this crystal has mana flowing through it, it slowly seeps a highly flammable gas. It seems that it needs to be given an exceptionally large amount of mana to actually produce a flame continuously though. Despite it's different color, it does seem to be the same base crystal again, with a different impurity.

I took a few days doing tests with the gas producing crystal, and considering it's flammable properties, it does seem to be producing hydrogen gas. I tried inflating a fish's bladder using the gas produced by the crystal, and the weight noticeably decreased. A few other tests all but confirmed that the gas being produced was hydrogen. I also found that the crystals were insoluble in water, and tried submerging the gas producing crystal under water that was close to one of the mana crystals, which caused it to start bubbling at a rate fast enough that if I forced all the bubbled gas out of a small opening, it could sustain a strong flame continuously, like a Bunsen burner.

If nothing else, this singular crystal could be useful in the lab for that purpose alone. Because of that, I decided not to damage this crystal for research purposes. If I get another like this, then I'll give it a go.

After that, I resumed testing on the heat producing crystals. From what testing I did with heating samples of water, it seems like the crystals become less effective if they're smaller than a half an inch in size, and continue decreasing in productivity the smaller they get. Above that size though, I couldn't determine if they were less effective or not, as I don't have a precision instrument to measure temperature with, and was operating off feel alone.

I'd expect though that it isn't a hard cutoff necessarily, but rather a gradual one. Interestingly, for specifically tectonic sense tests, smaller crystals get hotter for the same dose of mana, but it seems that the total amount of thermal energy is actually lower than the amount produced by larger crystals. I also got similar results from using external mana sources, like the sun or a mana crystal. My guess is that some of the mana fails to be utilized as it travels through the crystal, and as the crystal gets smaller, it's less likely that the mana interacts with any of the inclusions in it. Though that can't be the only factor, because I tested using a bunch of small crystals in a pile, and it also didn't produce as much as a single larger crystal of similar mass.

Ultimately, something else must also be contributing to the drop off of smaller crystal effects vs larger ones. One problem I've started having is that I don't actually know that much about the specifics of different crystals from earth, so determining the exact composition of these crystals is a bit difficult. I do know that it's not corundum or diamond though, since both of those are hard materials. I do miss having easy access to Konkur and his knowledge. I don't even know if these crystals are actually that rare, or if it's just that finding reputable ones that aren't dangerous is the difficult part.

While I could spend more time taking notes on the physical characteristics of the crystals, I think I'd like to make a new space in the underground lab area, where I can add in the crystal powered bunsen burner, and start doing some decomposition testing on the crystals. I'd like to see what sort of behaviors I can get from them, and if possible, try to melt some of it down to grow a new crystal. They aren't soluble in water, but they might be soluble in other materials potentially, so I'd also like to try that.

[Vol.5] Ch.41 Fluorite

I ended up spending five days expanding the underground lab space so that I wouldn't interfere with anything Tiberius was working on. I made a new room behind where the medium sized crystal is, so that I could access its mana without interfering with things happening in the first room. I then built a lab table, with the bunsen burner design I figured out from before. I also added a chamber for holding water, with a faucet and a removable liquid container under a sink space, so I can dispose of potentially dangerous or hazardous materials.

This room is much smaller than the other room, but it doesn't need nearly as much space. I tested a small amount of the heat crystal over the bunsen burner flame, and found that it was non-flammable, but it did color the flame a yellow-green color. After being exposed to the heat for a period of time, the crystal started to deform. I retested the deformed crystal, and it had lost its mana related properties, sadly. After having heated the crystal, I reflected on the fact that I'm not using any sort of fume hood, so I could have potentially inhaled something toxic. Creating such a fume hood that deep underground would be a monumental task though, so I should probably consider the usefulness of making a larger surface crystal in the lab for this purpose in the future.

After that destructive test, I decided to move on to the next one. Since we've made lead, I've been wanting to get my hands on sulfuric acid. Glass is also functional for forming sulfuric acid in the same process I'm going to do, but lead is much easier to form into the shape I want. I want a container with a very high surface area, which means I should also fill the chamber with small balls of lead, to maximize the surfaces available. Making such a chamber with glass would have taken us some time to make all the glass beads, but with lead, it's a fairly simple casting process, followed by some manual rolling.

After three days, I'd gotten my reaction chamber made. Next, I needed a glass beaker to store the acid in, so I worked with the glass making goblins for two days until I had a decent sized container for sulfuric acid to be stored in. The last few steps of the process were fairly straightforward, requiring I heat some potassium nitrate and steam to add to the chamber alongside sulfur dioxide. By cycling the process a few times, I could get some low concentration sulfuric acid.

So, after about six days of tinkering, I had some low concentration sulfuric acid in a quart sized flask. There is a better method for making sulfuric acid involving ammonia, but ammonia manufacturing is a bit more complicated so for now I'm going to be limited to only making smaller amounts of sulfuric acid. If I do end up making ammonia though, then I could easily make the additions to the ore roasting area to manufacture much larger amounts of acid moving forward.

For now though, I'm quite interested in dropping a bit of the crystals in the sulfuric acid, and seeing what happens. It's actually quite interesting running through these sorts of tests. Without the internet, or easily accessible knowledge from other people, I'm basically working from a cheat sheet on material discovery. If I had perfect knowledge from Earth, I could probably tell from sight what these crystals are, or if they're a new crystal. Since I don't have that knowledge though, I'm basically running through some destructive testing, and trying to use what knowledge I do have to pinpoint what materials are involved.

Given my concern with fumes, I did the test with the crystals in acid on the surface, rather than underground, and it narrowed it down enough that I'm confident in what the crystal is. After fuming for a while, the mixture initially seemed to calm down, with the small bit of crystal having largely been destroyed by the acid. Though shortly after, the glass broke, and spilled on the ground. I used stone shape to bury the spilled material for safety reasons.

Given what happened, I went through the whole process again, this time with a thicker glass flask. That took another six days in total to prepare, and after I repeated the test, I observed it more closely. What I saw was that the resulting material in the flask was eating away at the glass. I could be wrong, but the only material I know of that is formed like this, which also breaks down glass is hydrofluoric acid, which would imply that these crystals are fluorite.

That comes with some good news, since I do know a few things about fluorite. Some lenses for telescopes and cameras were made of fluorite, so it is possible to artificially form and shape them, though the process to actually do so is unknown to me. Fluorite was also fairly common on earth, so I'd hope that they're also common here.

Though, the process of growing them might end up being quite dangerous to fully rediscover. I don't know what behavior pure crystals might have, and figuring out the various inclusions and their behaviors could prove to be fatal if handled incorrectly. It reminds me a bit of the original research into radioactive materials. Honestly, it seems like there are definitely going to be deaths involved in the process. I'll probably want to do some form of informed consent for anyone who decides to work on the matter, though I get the feeling Tiberius would more than willing to put his life on the line for something like this. Before that though, we'd actually need to get our hands on a large enough deposit of the stuff.

There are a few ideas I have for making some of the tests safer, like using stone shaping to release the crystal into a mana bath with some ground birds in cages to test the effects of any manufactured crystals. Then use stone shape to drain the water to reduce the mana flow to the test crystal again. Even then though, there is going to be potentially fatal consequences.

Having done what testing I can, with what crystals I have, I moved on to other projects. Given the time I spent, I decided to go check on the progress of the new tunnel. The progress is somewhat slow going, since they're having to be so precise with where they are digging. They haven't found any new layers of rock or anything else of interest, but that isn't that surprising to me. The slope of our island doesn't increase right away, so until they actually start tunneling under the higher slopes I don't actually expect them to find anything of value.

Since everything with the tunnel seemed to be going fine, I turned my attention to a different project that I'd discussed previously. I want to try my hand at making a greenhouse for salt production. In spring, like it is now, there is far too much rain for us to produce any salt from our evaporation ponds, which require there to be more evaporation than deposition of water. During summer, and part of fall, this issue goes away, but it still means we're only using the salt ponds about a third of the year.

So, what I want to do now that we've got a sea wall protecting the valley, is build a large greenhouse over one of the ponds, and make an underground condensation chamber with a fan to encourage evaporation. If things work well, that one pond might end up becoming significantly more productive than the other ponds that we have. The condensation should be fresh water as well, which means that it can be pumped to the surface and used for drinking water, which would be a nice source for the workers along the shore.

I'll make a request to the glass making goblins for a significant number of large glass panels, while I begin modifying one of the ponds and dig the condensation chamber. Ultimately, this single project will probably use up quite a bit of our remaining quartz, but if push comes to shove, we can always trade for some moving forward.

[Vol.5] Ch.42 Hurry Up and Wait

I knew it would take the goblins some time to produce all the glass for the greenhouse, so I'd have extra time to work on the greenhouse's overall design. I gave them guides for sizing the glass, so they could cut and break the pieces to the right size, and after they had a few made, I went to Karsh to start making the metal frames to slide the glass into. I'll need quite a few parts, so I left him with some of the glass sheets to use as guides, while I went to start work on the rest of the facility.

The whole greenhouse is planned to be thirty feet long, and twenty feet wide, with the majority of the inside being a shallow evaporation pond. After I marked out where all the corners of the greenhouse are going to be, I started the deep excavation work. Under the pond, there is six feet of stone, and then a large open cavity spanning the same size as the pond. The roof of the cavity is checkerboarded with stalactites measuring two feet long, which I hope will act as condensation points for water.

Then, beneath the stalactites, I dug a fairly deep pit, with a walkable area around the perimeter. Ultimately, I ended up having to compress all the stone in the cavity and coat the walls with lightstone to prevent salt water from seeping in, which I discovered was a problem during construction. From one side of the cavity, you can enter and exit via a stairwell, which I also used for construction. The stairs only descend a total of twenty feet, but it's noticeably cooler down here than on the surface, which is exactly what I was hoping for.

On either end of the cavity, a vertical hole 6 inches in diameter goes up to either end of the greenhouse, which I later plan on installing two small fans inside, one to push, and the other pull air, circulating a small amount of the air from the greenhouse down into the cavity. The volume of air being forced around should be fairly low, compared to the total volume of each space, with the cavity behaving as a dehumidifier, and condensing the water into the cavern.

Once we actually have the greenhouse built, I'll then add in the windmill that will drive both of the fans, as well as a simple screw pump to pull water from the cavity up to the surface. I spent 34 days working on the cavity, so I'll be quite disappointed if it doesn't work at all. Right now, about half of all the glass has been made, so it'll still be a little while before everything gets assembled. Karsh has finished the frame pieces at least, so I'm going to start working with him on the windmill parts for this facility.

After the spring rainy season ended, I moved the bathhouse crystal back to the second valley's shore, and the construction crew resumed excavation for the second artificial tide pool. I expect that they'll probably finish its construction this winter, meaning we'll have access to even more easy fish relatively soon.

While I was working with Karsh on the windmill parts, Zeb informed me that he'd gathered the volunteers to start making the aesthetic changes to the architecture of the city. Which meant I had to take a detour from working on the greenhouse design, though I actually didn't have much more work to do while I waited for glass to be finished.

So, I started discussing ideas with the group, who consisted of four goblins and one hobgoblin who all had stoneshaping. They were all quite open minded individuals, which I figured was probably going to be beneficial in the long run, but also meant that getting initial designs figured out ended up being a headache. Each individual had their own preferences for different designs that I showed them, and all those preferences clashed with one another.

In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have gone about the process by showing them various different architectural designs from earth, and asking which ideas they liked best. One liked Greek designs, another prefered Japanese. One liked the idea of having finely detailed ornaments, another wanted to keep things relatively simple. So, ultimately, I decided to mandate a few things while granting them certain freedoms as a compromise.

I am partial to the ease of replication of the greek designs using stoneshaping on existing buildings, so for overall theme, that's what we'll be going with. Many of the buildings will be improved with decorative pillars, and stylized roof ornaments. For the one who wants to keep things relatively simple, the pillars will prove to be exactly that, a simple, uniform task that is repeatable, but adds character. Along the bases of the pillars and along certain walls, I'm giving them free reign to make whatever designs they want, as long as the building itself remains symmetrical.

Then, every so often, I'll have a monument or garden space that I'll let one of them have full control over the design. Once they get a few buildings completed to a satisfactory level, I'll give them their first one, which seemed to motivate them to work hard, though I did have to keep an eye on them and correct a few issues in the first ten days of their work.

After all that was finished, I was only a few days away from having the last of the glass panes made for the greenhouse, so I decided to start assembling the building. By the time I had all the components, including the windmill finished, I'd spent another fifty-two days working on this project. If I take out the thirteen days I spent helping the new design team, and the day I moved the crystal at the end of spring, I spent seventy-two days to get this greenhouse built.

Initially, some of the goblins were skeptical of if it would work, which, if I'm honest, I was a little worried about as well. Though it was clear after only a few days that it worked, and worked well. The water seemed to be evaporating at a bit over 3 times the normal rate. Though I did end up spending eight days fixing an issue I had neglected to think about.

The greenhouse was very hot. So hot, in fact, that it made harvesting the leftover salt incredibly oppressive, and there was no real way to air out the greenhouse. So, I had to change a few sections of the warehouse to be openable windows, so that the greenhouse can actually be cooled when it's time to harvest the leftover salt.

The green house having three times the normal rate of salt harvesting wouldn't be worth it on it's own, but considering it'll also provide us with salt year round, it's probably closer to 10 times the annual productive output from this one pond. Not to mention that it's producing a decent amount of freshwater. I got a very rough estimate of the volume of water being produced, and it comes out to about 20 gallons per hour, which was actually quite impressive.

It also made the ambiance in the cavern underneath the salt pond very unique. It's practically raining inside the space. As the humid air gently blows through the few hundred stalactites, it condenses, and runs down to the point before dripping down into the collection pool. The stalactites closer to the air inlet drip faster than those near the outlet, but they each average a drop every few seconds. It's honestly quite relaxing down there, enough so that I'm thinking about expanding the area underground there, and opening it up for others to enjoy.

If we figure out how to artificially make the fluorite heating crystals though, we could potentially build a mana powered desalination plant, which would produce significantly more water and salt than our entire existing output combined. This would also mitigate a separate issue I ran into, which was that the glass production used all our available soda ash that I was planning on having go to iron production from pyrite.

Every time something like this happens, where we're short on some natural resource like soda ash, it makes me more and more keen on trying to colonize another of our islands or improve our infrastructure. If we had a small settlement on another island, they could harvest some of that island's natural resources, like float vine, and trade it with us for other goods. Though the soda ash issue could also be resolved by adding more roads and trails on this island to allow better access to our own resources as well, or by adding a new boat.

Unfortunately for me, all of these problems have the same underlying requirement, a higher population, which fundamentally just takes time to grow. To colonize another island, we'd need to have a decent way to communicate and travel between the two islands without losing control of them. Building roads requires stoneshaping goblins, which takes time, and while we can make some trails around the island, navigating the craggy terrain without tunnels is practically as bad as not having a trail at all for the purposes of moving goods around. I've also shot down the idea of adding more large boats until we have a harbor for them. So I'm left with the last option, hurry up and wait.

[Vol.5] Ch.43 Checking the Record

It's been quite some time since I checked in on the record keeping for traits, magic, and new species. I left others to handle the task, so I'm interested in how things are going. It does seem like a few new traits have been found, and a few traits have become much more common in our population over time.

We have 57 individuals who have gained the manavore trait. Based on the records, the manavore trait started showing up more frequently after I installed the extra crystal in the stream. A sizeable amount of the population has heightened strength or improved endurance, or both. There is an estimate that between 5% and 10% of the population also has the mana affinity trait, though it's mostly present in those who use the bathhouse frequently. Around 10% of the population have the carnivory trait and eat exclusively fish, and about 5% have the new 'herbivory' trait and can eat some plant matter that others cannot. Almost all the goblins and hobgoblins who work near the water also have water resistance now. I don't know if it's intuition or if there is an actual discussion, but it does seem that most of our population seems to prefer to prestige, rather than evolve.

That doesn't mean that they don't have the option to evolve into things we haven't seen yet, however. In the notes, there are four listed options that I don't recognize. When I say that I don't recognize them, I mean they seemingly make no sense in what they're written down as. I thought this might happen, back when I taught Zeb how to see his health and mana in numbers rather than as a more instinctual value. Basically, the interface that each individual sees is actually updating based on their own knowledge, so if a species hasn't been seen by any of us, it's name is basically meaningless, though I actually can get some basic idea of what it is.

One is called 'watergob' in the demon language. Now, I highly doubt if I had that option available, it'd be called watergob. It'd probably be 'fishman' or 'kelpie' or something along those lines. Another one translates roughly to 'fish hobgoblin' though in the demon language, it's a bit nicer sounding, since the word for fish and the 'hob' part of hobgoblin rhyme. Both of those options are presented to fishergoblins with very similar stats, prestiges, and traits, which makes me suspect they're both the same species being presented, but they've each interpreted it differently.

We have a similar issue when it comes to traits, though Elora and the goblin taking notes have seemingly standardized those after having discovered that the properties of the traits seem to be the same. One such trait that both of the goblins with the aquatic evolution potential seem to possess is 'aquatic maneuverability' which resulted in webbed hands and feet and an instinctual understanding of how to swim. Both goblins are fishergoblins who've started to spend their free time swimming around the jetty.

We've had two more goblins become the gorilla like species that Kaga turned into. As they've collected data on that particular species, it seems like there are four major requirements to evolve into one. The individual needs to have heightened strength, improved endurance, thick hide, and be at least a mythic goblin. Very few of our goblins gain thick hide due to how peaceful we are. Some of the carpenters seem to have it, along with the goblins in charge of forestry. Both are jobs where you're likely to get splinters or small cuts regularly.

We have two more available evolutions for some hobgoblin fishermen, though I suspect both are the 'ogre' evolution that I had offered before. I could be wrong about it, but between 'bigger hobgoblin' and 'bulky goblin' as their naming conventions, I suspect that's the case. I've really slowed down in my own leveling endeavor, but the fishergoblins are quite diligent, so I suspect quite of a few of them are actually ahead of me now in total prestiges and overall stats. A few of the projects I've worked on have needed me to cut down a handful of trees, but nothing on any large scales, so I've basically been getting only passive levels, which are very slow.

<APEX LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 31
HP: 2299/2299
MP: 1420/1420
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance, Partial Sleep
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands, Pulverize

Unfortunately, I can't directly compare the numbers for anyone except Zeb, since that would require teaching them to see their status the same way I do. It may be worth it down the road to teach the record keeping goblin how I see it, and how to teach others, so we could receive better documentation for some of this data. On the other hand though, I don't know if having that data is actually that useful. It's an interesting puzzle, and might give me better insight into why demons evolve and other species don't seem to, but the application of that knowledge seems lacking to me right now.

Back on the original topic of other new traits that have been found, a few goblins have gained a trait that the record has dubbed 'bad air resistance', but I suspect it might be arsenic or sulfur dioxide resistance because it's isolated to the handful of goblins who are working at the sulfur ore roasting area. It seemingly reduces the negative side effects of working in the area, but it also reduces their endurance slightly. It's quite interesting if I ignore carnivory and herbivory, most traits have only strictly positive effects, but this one has a detrimental tradeoff.

The final new discovery was a new magic dubbed 'sprint' which seems to function similar to the spell meteor shot, in that it seemingly affects muscles. As long as the user has the mana to continue using it, it allows their legs to propel them forward at about twice their normal maximum running speed, while experiencing very little fatigue. Only a few hobgoblins have it, and it's limited to ones who have improved endurance and heightened reflexes, and are at least rare hobgoblins. The three who have it all have a habit of running to their destinations rather than walking, even before they had access to sprint. It seems they can only sustain the spell for a few minutes before they run out of mana, so it's not going to be speeding up our cross-island transport, sadly.

After reviewing all that information, I started to think about a few things. We've sort of figured out that behaviors before prestige influence what options you'll receive during the prestige. We likely have a large amount of improved endurance and heightened strength due to the amount of hauling jobs we have at any point in time. In fact, there are more hauling jobs than any other job by a sizeable margin. Only for a few weeks during planting and harvest time do farming jobs even come close to the amount of hauling we have.

That isn't a problem in and of itself, but as our population has grown, the number of available jobs hasn't grown by an equal amount, leaving more and more of the population idle more frequently. It hasn't gotten bad enough that people are starving or anything, but if we don't come up with more unskilled jobs, it'll become a problem.

With that in mind, I started to think about what sorts of jobs could be beneficial and sustainable such that we can have a larger portion of the population busy. We've made quite a few tasks like this in the past, between farming, hauling, fishing, salt pond tending, and quarrying to some degree. For some of these, we can expand the total work in those fields. Fishing should have more available work next year when the second tide pool is completed, and we're always slowly expanding our farming area.

Given we want more stone shaping goblins, I'm inclined to expand the quarrying process, but I'll have to talk with Zeb about it. The issues we run into for mindlessly quarrying are two-fold. Namely, we'll suddenly have an excess of stone which isn't nicely shaped and it requires further work for most construction purposes. We've used stone like that for making the jetty before, so there are uses for it, but they're somewhat limited.

Though after some time, we can expect that a certain number of the quarrying goblins will gain access to stone shaping, and will become exponentially more useful, so even if the quarrying is a temporary stopgap, it might still be worth pursuing. Another option is to start growing plants that are useful for fine textiles. The amount of processing that plant based textiles take could provide our idle workforce with ample work that could then also be used for trade in the future, though it will take up more of our limited available land.

So, after coming to that conclusion, I went to talk to Zeb about the whole thing. I keep coming to him with these tasks that will result in pulling a construction team away to work on some new project idea, and I can tell that it's a bit frustrating to him. Though it was offset this time by the expected payout of many new stoneshaping goblins within a few years time.

Ultimately, we settled on bringing the number of construction teams building new housing down to only 1 team, while the second team will begin work on a new, large scale terraforming project. What they'll be doing is transforming our valley's hillsides into terraced farmland. A large number of goblins will be recruited for the process of breaking the majority of the rocks, and the construction team will do the detail work to make it look nice afterwards. Once the new tidepool is done, the crystal over there will be relocated to help with this project, and that construction team will also move to work on this project.

The excess stone that is mined out from the hillside will be transported to the far side of the island. Ultimately, I'd like two long jetties stretching out from either side of the natural bay, since I want to make it a harbor. Between the hauling and stone breaking, that'll use a significant amount of workers. As the terraces are completed, we'll also have more farmland available, and we can consider using some of it for textile plants, rather than food.

[Vol.5] Ch.44 Deep Forge

After getting all the terrace work figured out with Zeb, I found myself wondering what I should personally work on next. While I could have just assisted with the existing projects for a while, instead, I could also get a head start on some of the things that need done in the next few years. For instance, while we just had the auction a few months ago, I could grow the next crystal early, and we could use it ourselves for a bit.

I could, honestly, grow the next two crystals even, just to have it done. By then, we should have the new artificial tide pool completed, and I'd expect that the tunnel will have made it far enough that I could spend a few days using maximum power tectonic sense to see if I find any deposits or other points of interest. This winter, I have quite a large list of import requests I'd like to make. After those start getting delivered, I'll have a lot of projects I want to work on, so it's probably for the best if I plan on getting the crystals finished now, rather than later.

Given that I had focused my efforts before on growing the larger crystals, I ended up spending just over four months growing the next two auction crystals. In the downtime on the mountain, I also completely depleted the deposits of mana crystals from the surrounding area I'd mapped out with tectonic sense. Which, after doing some calculations, and excluding the moderately large natural crystals, it seems like these two crystals are the extent of what this deposit can grow.

I could dip into the medium sized crystals, and have enough material to grow two more large artificial crystals, so it's not like we're doomed, but the medium and larger natural crystals are actually pretty useful in their current state, since they're portable, and don't hurt to use directly. Though I'll need to consider how useful they'll actually be if they're just left up here on the mountain, rather than turned into larger crystals. If the tunnel finds a deposit, I could always attempt to move some of the crystals down using stations of the mana absorbing poison during an eclipse. I'm sure that'd also speed up tunnel construction over time as well, so it's something I'll consider doing in the future.

Right now though, we're very close to winter, so I'm going to haul one of these two crystals down, and install it near one of our many ongoing worksites that could use the extra mana source. After that, I'll get our trade goods organized for the year, and head over to the far side of island. I plan on requesting the merchant make a double trip this year, so I'll probably spend the whole winter on that side of the island. They've been hauling stone from the terrace project to that side of the island, so I'll start working on getting those jetties I discussed made.

Once all the salt and paper was ready for trade, I brought a bunch of goblins along with me to the other side of the island to help haul everything. Unlike previous trips, where we were the only ones on the road, the inns along the way were quite busy, as carts full of stone were parked overnight full of literal tons of stone making the journey every day from one side of the island to the other.

Once we arrived on the other side of the island, it was apparent that I had a lot of work ahead of me, as did the goblins that I brought with me. Months of stone being cut and piled over here has resulted in a few very large piles having formed. I'm glad that they're at least somewhat organized. One pile is comprised of larger, oddly-shaped stones, another of smaller oddly-shaped stones, and the final pile is made of smooth cut stone, which would be easy to stoneshape together.

What's a little more interesting is that the stone arrives only sorted in two types, smooth cut, and oddly-shaped, and the goblins unloading sort their load before returning home. I asked one goblin why they did that, and he just shrugged and said, "It's what everyone else is doing, so I'm doing it too." After I asked a few more goblins, it seemed like none of them knew exactly who had started the organization this way. It will make my job easier though, since the larger stones are the ones we want to use for the jetty base, and the smaller stones can simply be poured in between the larger stones before the outer layers are attached.

Before that though, there was actually a decent chunk of work that we had to do first. Both flanks of the bay on this side of the island were still overgrown, and had no roads reaching the edges. The bay is flanked by small ridges that reach further out into the water during high tide, though at low tide, it's less pronounced. So, I wanted to extend our roads along the sides reaching to where I want the jetties to be. Part of achieving that goal required me to cut down a few dozen trees, which barely moved the compass on my level. By the time all the trees were cut, I'd gained a single level, and based on when I last gained one, I was already pretty close before cutting them down.

I was interrupted while I was working by the trader arriving. He had quite the haul of goods that were requested last year. Some waterproofing supplies, a bunch of iron, some more bargas, various human and dwarven goods, and some tools that were requested by our craftsman. Initially, I just assumed the tools were for the dwarves and humans, but as it turns out, a few were for our carpenter goblins and our weaver. When I get back to the city, I'll have to ask them about how they came about requesting these goods, though I suspect it was conversation with some of our continental residents that informed them of certain tool's existences. I'm all for it, we have the money for the tools, and I've basically moved on from building tools for most of our craftsgoblins, so it's a good alternative.

I then placed our orders for the next year. I placed a large order for quartz sand for making glass, though we'd also take recycled glass to use instead. I used up quite a lot of our available quartz supply while making the greenhouse, though most of it had been used up in retrofitting old buildings, so it hasn't been a huge detriment that we're nearly out, but it could become one in a year's time. Next, I placed an order for some seeds that would be grown at higher altitudes.

Given the dwarven continent is fairly mountainous, I expect they also have a large diversity of plants that they've learned to grow in different climates. We don't have that much land at higher altitudes, but it'd be nice to start taking advantage of that space, especially if they have some good plants for it. I explained our different altitudinal climates to our merchant friend, and he said he knew of a few plants that he'd bring around next year.

Unfortunately, I didn't get any news back from Konkur on any of my questions. I hope that he's doing fine, and just unable to respond for some reason or another. Despite that, I did have another note made for him, discussing the questions I had about fluorite abundance and uses. The merchant didn't have any new samples of fluorite for me either, nor did he have much of an idea of it, since it's usually not traded. Him and Shasta both had a vague idea that it's sometimes used in dwarven deep forges, which peaked my interest.

I asked them about what a deep forge was, given the name, I had a decent idea, and my guess ended up pretty close. They're forges constructed deep under mountains, where very little mana gets to. When a new mountain is designated for mining out, they first dig a central deep forge, where all the ore will be transported and smelted. Large fans keep air flowing through the central tunnel, ensuring there is enough oxygen for smelting, while the consistent temperature that deep underground makes precision processes easier.

We had our brief rise in fame temporarily thanks to our mangalloy, but ultimately, dwarven steel is considered the best on the market, and master smiths hone their craft in the constant climate controlled environment of a deep forge. Most deep forges are operated by a regional warlord or the emperor who can afford to pay the large workforce to support them. Outside of that, they still have plenty of normal blacksmiths, like Karsh.

So, I also ended up paying for a few ingots of dwarven steel, just to see it for myself. All that was in addition to the other metals I ordered, and more of the various humanoid's goods that they requested for this year. After getting the trade settled, I paid a premium to have a load of the quartz sand and some of the metals brought over this winter again, then went back to working on the jetties while I waited for the merchant to return.

[Vol.5] Ch.45 The Mining Tunnel Part 1

Near the end of winter, the merchant arrived with a large quantity of quartz sand and some metal. By that point, I'd finished the two flanking roads around the bay, and had started building the new jetties, though I hadn't made it very far on either of them. After the merchant left, I spent a week getting all the goods shipped back to the city. When goblins would come to drop off stone for the jetties, I'd send them back with a cartload of quartz sand. Once most of it had been shipped back, I travelled back to the city alongside a few of the goblins hauling the remaining goods.

Once back in the city, I noticed that they had resumed using two teams for building new residences, which meant that the new tide pool was likely finished. I checked in with Zeb, and he confirmed that it's up and operational, though the need for it isn't there quite yet. The new artificial tide pool is actually bigger than the old one, and it might be worth considering expanding the old one in the future, just to increase food production.

We've also noticed a few trends related to the tide pools. Despite the existence of much larger fishes, the tide pools really only catch medium and smaller fish. Very occasionally, a larger sea creature gets caught, but those are rare events. My guess is that the larger fish generally hunt further from shore, and so there are fewer there to begin with, then they also leave the tide pool well before it's low enough to capture them. I know they're out there though, thanks to all the fishing that Boggs had done around the island.

After getting all the traded goods settled in their appropriate locations, it was finally time for me to go check the tunnel with tectonic sense. Every time I use it after having not done so in such a long time, I'm forced to contend with headaches, which given I was using my full mana pool for each check resulted in splitting migraines for the first ten days or so. Even after that, I was dealing with regular headaches for some time. Each pulse gave me a bit over 40 feet radius of information, and I would pulse from the bottom of the tunnel every 20 feet or so.

In the time that they've been mining, they've made the tunnel about a mile long, and I ended up doing a few hundred pings in total checking for points of interest. The first few days were quite slow going, on account of the migraines, so in total I spent about twenty-five days doing a tectonic sense survey.

For the amount of effort and pain I went through, we had very little payout. Near the current deepest part of the tunnel was the only location with a ping of any interest. A tiny blip at the very edge of my detection range, about 40 feet down. Due to it being near the current end of the tunnel, I figured the best course of action is to leave a simple marker, and have them keep digging. If it's a major boundary change, it should slope up towards the tunnel as they dig further into the volcano, so digging down to investigate would be a waste. If it isn't a boundary change, then we can always come back to investigate it in the future.

If I hadn't set such strict requirements for the tunnel's construction, the mining team would easily be three times as far as they are currently, but given our trade surplus and a stone-shaping shortage, it seems to be a better use of their time to work on infrastructure in addition to mining. After all, our consumption of metal on a regular basis is actually somewhat low, and my projects are some of the bigger consumers of the stuff.

Even things like gypsum and quartz are things I use more than the general population does, but over time that will likely change. Even now, we've integrated glass into our buildings, which has made it significantly easier to prevent buildup of dirt, dust, and water inside. Most of our cookware is either iron or copper as well. Eventually, we might even consider something like indoor plumbing, though that would require a considerable amount of retrofitting to apply.

After giving myself two days to recover from the headaches caused by tectonic sense, I decided to check in on how Tiberius was doing. If I'm honest, I didn't quite understand what was going on at first sight. If definitely seemed like he had gotten tired of doing blood mix testing, because there didn't really seem to be much blood around. However, I was wrong, or at least partially wrong.

Despite my initial surprise that he was using a hand-operated wooden centrifuge, it turns out they've been invented for some time in this world, despite the seemingly medieval standards of living across the board. Though their normal use is apparently for making expensive meals for nobility by separating milk. He's been spinning blood and then separating off the layers, which seem pretty normal at first glance to me.

There is a layer of plasma, blood cells, and a thin layer in between which houses everything else. What he's been working on has been using the plasma. It seems that's where the magical effects come from in the blood itself. He even demonstrated to me that only the plasma actually produces any effect when affected by mana. I'm honestly impressed at his application of a centrifuge to do this.

What he's currently working on is determining how long dried plasma hold's the properties before going bad. Which isn't actually a bad idea. If you could make the material last longer than it does in blood, and store it more densely as a solid, then it'd be possible to utilize it for all sorts of uses, including many I figured to be infeasible. If it bears any fruit, I might consider designing a refrigeration system, since storing certain types of magical properties could prove invaluable, and if it drastically increases the shelf life of a highly concentrated form, then it'd be worth it.

Since we received the extra quartz sand, I've decided to start measuring it out, and getting a proper estimate of how much we need for future housing, versus what I can use for more of those greenhouse salt ponds. Surprisingly, it seems like it doesn't actually matter what season it is, the greenhouse works at about the same pace, which means it actually produces about 12 ponds worth of salt, rather than one. In total, we have about one hundred ponds, which means that the one greenhouse is actually making up about 10% of our total salt production. Adding more greenhouses then could actually provide us with a sizeable tradeable income.

After I did the estimates, I set aside enough quartz glass to get us through the next year, and then still had enough left over to make another greenhouse, so that's what I worked on for the springtime. It was a good project to work on while I waited for the mining team to dig deeper into the mountain.

Another useful aspect of salt trading is that it's a practically unlimited resource for us. Despite the windfall of dwarven currency from trading giant crystals, it also felt like I was trading away our physical resources for temporary gains. By increasing our salt production, we can use that to buy more permanent resources, like quartz glass or metals to improve our conditions.

Good quality quartz glass trades at about five times the cost of salt, which when everything is factored in, means it'd take us about 7 greenhouses to produce enough salt annually to trade for the quartz sand to make another greenhouse. They also use a small amount of iron, so I should really bump that up to 8 greenhouses. Of course, if we find more quartz of our own, then we can accelerate the process. Alternatively, if we end up with a massive surplus of stone-shaping goblins, we can manually extract the silicon dioxide from other rocks, or I could start working on the classifier and separator to mechanically do the processing as well.

I built the second greenhouse next to the first one and connected the water pool underground, so it could be pumped and emptied from the same screw pump. After that, I went back to the miners, given they had a few months more to dig, I was interested to see if there was any change in the slight ping I got before.

I found two things in the extra few hundred feet they dug. First, the previous ping I got does seem to be a new boundary layer of rock, though in the distance they dug, it's only closed half the gap between the bottom of my detection range and the tunnel floor. Close to the new end of the tunnel though, I got a slightly different ping down at about thirty feet, ten feet under the boundary change. This new ping has a higher slope angle, so it could contain some new deposit of some sort. I've decided to help the mining team dig forward for a few weeks so I can get another few pings, and potentially determine if we need to dig down to investigate.

[Vol.5] Ch.46 The Mining Tunnel Part 2

After only a few days of helping the mining team, I improved their efficiency significantly, making me wish I'd spent a longer amount of time working with them previously. The tunnel only has one track, so the mining team was hauling one cart out at a time, which was resulting in a much slower extraction rate than what they were capable of. How I improved it was fairly simple. I figured out how long it took for one miner with stone shape to run out of mana, and then used that time to figure out how long it takes to load a cart, and how far it can be pushed in that time. After that, it's just a matter of having a number of carts in the cave that meet at different lengths, where they move the load in one cart to the next one. It's not as efficient as having two cart lanes, but it's much faster than before.

All in all, I helped them mine for 22 days before I decided to investigate the interest point underground. With more tectonic sense points to judge from, I got the general sense that one of the things I detected was the edge of a dome shaped intrusion in the layer change underground. The edge that I detected seemed to be about 80 feet wide, though based on the curvature, I'd estimate it's generally dome shaped and about twice that width. We're almost a mile into the mountain now, and probably around 1000 feet under the surface.

The plan now is to make a loading and unloading point attached to the tunnel over the deposit, and then dig down towards it. While the mining team works on that, I'm going to check in with Zeb and see how things are going with his teams. Given that the last ore deposit like this took a couple of years to extract fully, I'd like to have one of the construction teams get the tunnel expanded to the full width to that point, to improve the extraction speed. Though I suspect I'll have to wait for the team that's building the second sea wall to finish their work before I can borrow anyone.

As I suspected, it seems like I won't be able to borrow any construction teams until next year. According to Zeb, they're getting quite a few new stone shaping goblins thanks to making the terraces along the hillside. He wants the new ones to spend at least half of a year on an existing team before they're put on a newer one though, which is why I'll have to wait. They're gaining quite a few levels though, since they're having to clear cut the hillside as they do their work, which is why we're getting so many stone shaping goblins so quickly.

The terraces are actually quite intricate, which is why we needed a build team dedicated to making them. After the dirt is hauled off the stone, regular goblins break the stone into an approximately level surface, then stone shaping goblins cut channels into the layer, to facilitate water drainage down to the next layer. Above that, fine gravel is layered back on, and then finally the dirt is put back on top. Anything larger than gravel is then hauled off to the other side of the island. With the sheer number of workers, Karsh has been quite busy repairing and making pickaxes.

They're making great progress though. They're adding about six acres of farmable land a month. Ultimately, that means we're adding about 15 demons worth of food a month in available farmland. Given the majority of our island does require terracing to farm effectively, it actually is quite useful, even if it doesn't sound like that much. It also helps prevent mudslides, which do happen occasionally here.

So, depending on the time of day, I guess I'll either help the mining team, or work on expanding the tunnel further. During the day, I can hire some regular goblins to help me haul stone I cut from the tunnel, and at night, I can pile up stone in the loading area deep in the mine while everyone else sleeps.

It took us 44 days before we finally made contact with the suspected deposit. It took a while because we needed to dig a horizontal shaft first, so that we were centered over the deposit itself before digging down. Though once we started digging down, it only took a few feet before we started seeing different materials. Tectonic sense also helped me to locate the actual trunk of the deposit, which was a little off center from the dome, with a slight angle.

First, we dug partially into that different layer of stone, the layers we've been going through have been a very dark color, while this new layer is lighter in color, with more pockets, and also weighs quite a bit less than the previous layers. The dome material was a dark red color, bordering on black, and was significantly denser. I hadn't expected it to be an ore, given the last top was gypsum, but given how different this was, I figured it would be worth a test.

It took a lot of heat to get it to break down, and there was a significant amount of slag and impurities, but it seems to have made iron, which, given it's reddish color, I suspect it's hematite, though it's littered with impurities. If it is hematite, then it'd be worth setting up the power facility using the dam, because the easiest way to purify it should actually be to crush it and pick it up with a magnet, leaving all the other rock behind.

Since we hadn't planned to extract the whole dome, we actually weren't set up properly to harvest it. It'll take me some time to make a hydroelectric plant though, so I told the mining team that we'll eventually come back to extract it, but for now, they should keep digging down.

After 21 more days, we'd made it through a few different kinds of materials. We found more quartz bearing rock, galena, sphalerite, and pyrite, though they're fairly intermixed this time, which makes it much harder to extract them. Unlike the other deposit, where the crystal materials were larger, and layered more distinctly, here I can find sphalerite and galena and pyrite in the same chunk of rock. Thankfully, removing the zinc and lead from the pyrite should be fairly straight forward, so other than needing a few more personnel working on it, it shouldn't cause many issues.

A new use of tectonic sense also gave me a better idea of the deposit's size. If I had to guess, it's probably between five and ten times the volume of the last deposit, which would mean that the mining team will be working for decades before they extract everything. In practice though, within a few years I would like to have many more people working on mining, so it will probably last us significantly less time than that.

I also realized we needed a better system than manual handing off of stone materials to different carts, so we've started installing passing zones periodically in the tunnel. Since everyone has a torch of some kind, it's easy to see when someone is approaching, and carts loaded with stone have the right of way. This way carts leaving the mine easily make it out quickly, and empty carts can go to the loading area where someone is filling them for the return trip.

I ultimately decided that we should have a couple goblins doing manual sorting of the ores brought out first, to try to classify them based on where they should go first for treatment. If the rock was majority galena, with it's silvery black hue, then it should obviously go to lead melting first, to remove most of the lead. The tailings from that can then be sorted for sphalerite or iron oxide content if necessary.

If the ore is more sphalerite, but still has a lot of lead, it has to go through a new lead furnace that also has a zinc collection chamber, which took me fourteen days to put together. Lastly, if the sphalerite content is low in a pyrite sample, then it go through a lead furnace first to melt off the lead, then be treated like normal pyrite.

Ultimately, we could use pretty much all of our existing furnaces and roasting ovens to utilize our new deposit, but they do need extra maintenance due to the amount of cross contamination. I brought on a total of 12 new goblins to handle sorting and assisting with maintenance as a result.

Due to the extra sorting and maintenance though, ores are processed a bit slower before giving us useful metals, which itself could be considered a problem, but the shape of the deposit and its contents actually make that fine. Because the second layer is largely quartz laden rock, I've instructed the mining team to spend some of their time mining that layer out over digging deeper into the central root of the deposit. The quartz layer, from what I can tell with tectonic sense, is like a secondary domed layer, meaning there should be a sizeable amount of it.

The whole deposit looks a bit like a melting ice cream cone, with two different partially melted scoops, and a central cone of ore underneath, but that central cone is considerably smaller than the partially melted ice cream on top. I think that spending all this time doing hard labor with days without sunlight has given me weird cravings for food that everyone else doesn't even know exists, or at least, that's what I'm blaming it on.

Anyway, to get to the secondary layer, the best way forward is to also mine out the top layer, meaning we'll start collecting a lot of hematite. Which also means I need to see if we have enough available warehouse space, or if I need to make room elsewhere.

[Vol.5] Ch.47 Rising Tensions

I decided to shift my nighttime work from mining the deposit to building a warehouse near the tunnel entrance. We already have multiple stockpiles outside the tunnel, and as those piles grow, it'd probably be better to have some of the materials stored under a roof in case of rain. Mostly because of lead and arsenic potentially leeching out of the ores into the groundwater.

I'll probably keep building warehouses here after the first one as well, just because in a decade or so they'll be useful for reasons other than mining. Ultimately, this is supposed to be a tunnel that lets us cross the island in less than a day, which would mean it'd be ideal to have warehouses directly on either end of the tunnel, along with a potential inn, so that travelers can set out early and have time to unload their goods on the other side of the tunnel on the same day. That isn't even considering that we might have even more ore deposits in other locations along the tunnel that we may be mining at any point in time.

In addition, to perform magnetic separations on the hematite, it'll need to be crushed fairly small, so setting up some of the containers and crushers, and putting a couple goblins on that task would be good, since it will reduce the amount of space the hematite takes up in the warehouses when I finish them. Though I don't actually want to spend too much time making warehouses here. Before winter, I want to go up the mountain and make more of the mana draining liquid, and transport down a few trays worth of crystals from the cave down to this mine, which should improve the miners extraction rate significantly. Then I want to go back and build the hydroelectric generator on the dam, so we can build a magnetic separator for the hematite ore.

I spent 39 days making two warehouses. For effective use of space, I ended up digging a basement out for both of them, and adding a second floor to each. They're both fairly large warehouses, bigger than ones I've made in the past, but I figured it'd be a good idea given the volume of rock that comes out of the mines at any given time. If something new is extracted, it could take a year or more for a facility to be built to process that ore, so having a large amount of storage space to hold it seemed prudent. Thankfully, we're utilizing a lot of the materials being mined, so the only thing building up over time is the hematite.

After those were done, I had exactly 29 days until the next eclipse, and only 2 months until winter, so it was time to start extracting the mana draining poison from plants. I decided to borrow a few of the goblins in charge of forest management to come help me for a week, so I could harvest plenty of the plants. This time, rather than attempting to haul all the crystals down in one large container, I made a different plan.

I brought down only larger natural crystals, but I put them in a box with many holes in it, and suspended that box in the mana draining fluid. Then, at periodic locations down the road, I stationed a new container with the mana draining fluid. When the eclipse finally came, I had a few hobgoblins help me with transport, and at each of the stops, we'd quickly transfer that box to the new container, and haul it down further. This way, we could haul a larger percentage of crystals down in one trip, while reducing the amount of fluid we had to carry constantly.

The downside to this method was that we ended up consuming a considerable amount of the mana poison plants, but both myself and the forest management goblins collected seeds from quite a few of the plants, and while I was processing the mana poison from the plants, I had the forestry goblins begin planting the seeds periodically throughout the highlands near the cave. If Tiberius's research bears good fruit, we may eventually even farm these plants to make a dried concentrate that could be incredibly useful.

Long story short though, I managed to bring down 5 trays worth of natural crystals, and a few medium crystals for determining where the charging room should be built into the mining tunnel. By the next day, we had a small charging room set up that the miners could use just like in the cave mine. They bring a tray along when it's available and recharge in the mine, allowing them to extract more rock at once before needing to make the nearly mile hike out of the cave to recharge.

Though with only five trays, it's not quite enough to actually keep up with consumption. I'd plan on trying to bring more down soon to make up for this problem, but I'm a little worried about potentially driving the mana poison plant to extinction, so we'll show restraint until we know if the seeds we planted will actually sprout or not.

After handling the crystals, I had less than a month until winter, which meant I needed to go and manage our trade goods, and get a list of what trade goods we need. We have plenty of salt and paper to export, so getting those crated and ready to ship was fairly simple. Rather than relying on asking people for what trade goods they might need moving forward, I took the time this month to actually set up things more properly.

Previously, we'd just get word of mouth information spread of x person needs y item. Now, I've added a new worker in the city hall, who's entire job is just gathering those requests over time. This year, I still needed to go ask people, since they didn't know about the new goblin yet, but after this year, they're to make their requests to that goblin.

Unfortunately, we don't have any spare goblins who know how to write dwarvish. The goblin I've picked, however, has shown some aptitude for learning patterns quickly. When he receives a new request, he's to go find one of our goblins who do write in dwarvish, and ask them to write down the request on paper along with the amount requested. Many of the requests are the same year over year, so he should learn those words fairly quickly. Ultimately, I'll probably have to get one of the goblins who can read dwarvish to read the list come trade time, but that's still significantly faster than how we've been doing things.

It also comes with the added benefit that I can eventually dedicate someone else to handling our annual trade permanently, since I myself will be able to put in trade requests, and leave it to them to negotiate. This will be especially important once we get a harbor set up and have multiple merchants we're dealing with every year.

The merchant came a little later than normal this year, meaning a return trip in the same year would be impossible. There was a second ship with him, which Shasta was on. His reasons for being late were the more concerning part of the ordeal though. Tensions on the dwarven continent have been rising for the past year, and acquiring goods takes longer and more money as all the warlords are beginning to stockpile goods. There are murmurings going on of a rebellion against the king occurring, which is quite the problem for us.

Given the dwarves are our only trade partner, if they have a sudden civil war, it'll be very inconvenient for us. Thankfully, the only dwarf that we have a mutual defensive pact with is Kao Ostark. The other dwarves who have traded crystals with us have traded to guarantee our independence, not for us to aid them. Beyond that, our defensive pact with Kao really only extends to his island, with no expectations to help him on the mainland, though we may voluntarily do so, given how much help he was when we were threatened.

We also got some communication back from Konkur at last. The lead from the first deposit is middle of the road in silver concentration, so it's really up to us if we want to refine it, since it does result in some amount of the lead being lost in doing so. Given we have an excess of fish bones anyway, I don't see any reason we shouldn't collect the silver. Fish bones are technically renewable for us, where as the ore is not, so extracting as much of the more valuable silver is likely better long term for us.

The merchant did have another fluorite sample for us, and it's very similar to the hydrogen producing sample, and the merchant said it has similar properties. Konkur also responded to our question about fluorite, and I got a little more info about deep forges from that. It seems that fluorite is generally kept deep underground where mana can't reach it, and it's used in the steel making process in deep forges. Given its volatility when exposed to mana, it's rarely brought to the surface, which is why we have difficulty getting any. The merchant also gave us a small refund, given this was all he could acquire, and given the situation on the continent, he won't be attempting to find any more.

According to Konkur's note, fluorite is actually fairly common, and we're likely to run into some, so it's a good thing we asked about it before we accidentally transported it to the surface. He'd forgotten to mention it, since it hadn't occurred in our other deposit, but we should take care to keep it deep underground and away from any mana sources. It's definitely something I'll have to inform our existing miners about, and make sure they keep safe while handling it.

We completed our trade with the merchant, though it was actually quite a bit more expensive than previously to complete, and while our salt went up in value, paper has plummeted in value given its general status as a luxury. So, we ultimately ended up spending a bit more money for less goods overall for this year.

After the merchant left, Shasta stuck around for an extra day and we discussed a few more details about the tensions on the continent. While all of the information is hearsay, it seems that an anti-king faction is generally centered around the two dwarves who I've sold a crystal to. That's the reason Shasta is here. We aren't being targeted or blamed for the matter, but it has strummed up some controversy, and we should be aware of the situation.

Kao himself is less worried about the overall situation though, since his territory is quite far from both of those factions, and while his obligation is to the king, he won't overexert himself, and if the anti-king faction takes power, the fact he facilitated the crystal sales will probably be enough to maintain his own power. So, basically, we don't have much we need to be worried about directly for the situation. The last bit of news was expected, but a disappointment. Given the turmoil, it's very likely that next year's auction will be cancelled if tensions continue to rise.

We should be prepared in case tensions fall, and an auction does occur, but she wanted us to be aware of the overall situation. It made me glad we'd struck a new ore vein recently, given we'll have a hard time trading, and an even harder time making money during wartime. However, I do want to capitalize on the situation a little bit. If salt is up in value, and paper is down, we should plan on importing less items and saving our paper exports while expanding our salt production to capitalize on the market disruption. When all the prices stabilize in the future, we can then sell our paper stockpiles. We'll still likely have a trade deficit for the coming years, but we can at least minimize the problem somewhat.

[Vol.5] Ch.48 Dwarven Civil War Part 1

After Shasta left, we hauled back the rest of the quartz from our last year's order, along with the goods that the humans and dwarves requested. My first priority when I got back was to schedule a meeting with Zaka and Zeb about the turmoil on the dwarven continent. Zaka was much less concerned about the situation than Zeb who in turn was less concerned than I was. Zeb's concern mostly stemmed from the fact that I was discussing changing our construction priorities short term to capitalize on the war.

My concerns are two-fold. First, there's always the potential that conflict spreads to our island. Which meant we needed to start preparing for conflict now, to function as a deterrent. We've still been slowly stockpiling more artillery rounds though not quite at the rate we did before. Our main source of potassium nitrate is through excrement farming, and after the previous war, the majority of the population went back to using our restrooms the majority of the time. So, we're going to expand the existing saltpeter fields and pay people for their "contributions".

Just having more ammo won't be enough though, we'll also need more artillery pieces. Without Kao's military engineers though, production will be significantly slower to make a single artillery cannon. So we agreed to make requests to Karsh to produce one to see how it goes. In all likelihood, our existing iron isn't quite high enough quality to produce a good one, and I'll need to get the hematite refining plant going before we can produce any.

Which leads to the second concern I have. I'm only one person, and we have a lot of production changes to make to capitalize on the conflict. I made the first two salt greenhouses, but they take time to mine out, and I should focus my efforts on the hydroelectric facility. So, we're going to halt the terrace farming temporarily while the construction teams prepare multiple greenhouse facilities. That'll end up taking some of Karsh's time, and it'll keep the glass making goblins busy for a while. We once again have a significant excess of quartz, thanks to the shipment and our current ore deposit. I expect we can make four more greenhouses with our current supplies.

We still have our residual military force dedicated to maintaining the existing artillery and one of the watchtower locations, but I asked Zaka if we could expand the military further. I want to maintain all three watchtowers, add in two logistics squads, start training a few more squads for maintaining new artillery pieces if we have them built, and add in thirty soldiers who's purpose is to be in fighting condition at all times. Those thirty will train constantly, and focus entirely on fighting.

In the last war, the enemy had a handful of dedicated elites who seemed significantly more valuable to them than their regular soldiers. Basically, I want our own elite force who can handle groups of regular fighters on their own easily. While Zaka, Zeb and I are technically elite fighters, I want a larger force who, quite frankly, are more disposable. That does mean that we'll have to be somewhat careful though. We don't want them to become too powerful, and potentially stage their own rebellion.

To that end, I've suggested that every month, Zaka, Zeb, and myself each spend at least 3 days fishing or cutting down trees, to gain more levels. While it won't be much individually, by the end of the year, we'll have spent more than a month gaining levels.

After we had the discussion, I told the dwarves about the developing situation on the dwarven continent. Most of them showed some concern about the situation, but a few of them only seemed worried that they wouldn't be able to get the same goods they've been getting each year.

The final stop I had to make before I could work on the hydroelectric facility was the current mine. There were multiple procedural updates that we needed to make, based on the information Konkur had sent us. First, I showed them a sample fluorite, and showed them how to recognize it. Then, I informed them that they aren't to bring any crystals similar to them to the surface, and they need to be somewhat careful about bringing mana crystals into the current extraction location due to the potential for dangerous results if fluorite gets charged with mana somehow.

We only had about two months left of winter where I could begin work on the hydroelectric facility before it'd need to be put on hold for the spring rains. That was fine though, since there was a lot of preparatory work to do before actually building the facility. There needs to be additions to the dam itself to handle the generator, a building to house it, the generator itself, and then a facility for processing the hematite.

So, by the time spring came around, I'd gotten a lot of the facilities made, and started work designing the generator and magnetic separator for the hematite. In the couple months of winter, the four new greenhouses had been designed, and one of them is operational, with another getting close to completion. The big hold up for them is the glass making. Since it's taking so long to make the glass, I've given them the go ahead to make an additional greenhouse, as by the time the glass is made, we'll have excavated enough quartz for another one. I expect, if salt is still high value this next year, then we'll have quite the income.

For the rest of spring, I worked on getting the generator and magnetic separator made. After the construction teams finished the greenhouse, they resumed building the terraces, while occasionally going back to install the glass to finalize each greenhouse.

Zaka, meanwhile, was in charge of organizing the new military groups. The new artillery teams were sent to learn from the existing ones, while the thirty elites were training with Zaka directly just outside the city. Zeb, Zaka, and myself also found time to do our agreed upon leveling.

Getting the hydroelectric facility up and running and retrofitting the dam took quite a few months. It wasn't until the end of fall, just before I would need to go prepare for any winter trade that I finally got it working. The good news from that was that it meant I could properly utilize the dam once spring comes by filling the reservoir for potential energy.

The magnetic separator uses a large drum, made of wood, with an electromagnet sitting inside on one side with an iron plate dividing the inside. The crushed hematite is poured over the drum while the electromagnet is on and the drum is rotating. The hematite clings to the drum on the side with the electromagnet, while non-magnetic materials simply fall off. Then, on the far side of the drum, where the magnetic field is much weaker, the crushed hematite falls off. By dividing the two collection sides, we can easily filter the magnetic from the non-magnetic materials.

We've collected a few hundred tons of hematite at this point, so I'm hoping we'll be set on quality iron for a long time, unless I come up with a new project that requires a lot of it.

I anxiously awaited the merchant's arrival this year, hoping to receive good news. We brought one of the crystals over, in case things calmed down and the auction would resume. I also prepared our salt trade crates and marked them with our insignia, just in case I needed to use them as gifts for the auction.

Unfortunately, the news we got wasn't good from either the merchant or Shasta. The dwarven continent has devolved into a civil war, with the northern portion of the continent declaring that Goppok Kanaga was the rightful king, and that the current King's family had stolen ParTor centuries ago.

So, while the merchant could pay us for the salt this year in dwarven coin, he said it'd be unlikely he'd make another trip here until the war was over. So, we traded our salt for dwarven coin, and got about 6 times the trade value of last year, partially because we nearly doubled our salt production, but also because the rate for salt had increased.

Shasta's information was similar. Basically, we should be on alert, and Kao is going to be somewhat preoccupied, so we'll basically be on our own until the war ends. She also gave us a warning that the current King has taken note that our crystals were likely the instigating factor in the civil war breaking out, but there isn't any word on if he'll take action on the matter.

[Vol.5] Ch.49 Dwarven Civil War Part 2

I was certainly not delighted to hear that we weren't going to have any trade coming our way until the war was over. It meant that the rush to make the new salt greenhouses was not as useful as I hoped it would be. We did get a larger salt yield this year, and traded it for coin, but ultimately, that is significantly less than I was hoping to get. The fact we only got dwarven coin also was quite unfortunate. The coin itself is pretty much useless if we can't trade for things with it.

Though, because we relied on others to actually do the trading rather than having our own trade ships it's also our fault. Given that is the case, we might want to accelerate our harbor timeline. Though trade with the dwarves is unlikely while they're going through a civil war, perhaps a human or elf country would be able to trade with us.

Though I personally want to improve our self-reliance even more now. We aren't dependent on the continents for anything, but we do gain quite a bit of benefit from trade overall. The main issue for an island nation is our limited resources. While we've been blessed with many deposits of metal, and a decent food supply, there exists some upper limit on the availability of resources for an island nation, which is why I was so keen on trading renewable resources like salt for permanent resources like metal. However, the continents seem to be quite volatile, and using trade as a shortcut to provide our dwarves and humans with clothing and spices from their homeland is starting to show itself as a weakness. Now that they'll be unable to get those goods because of the war, I think it's time to attempt to integrate them further into our society.

I talked things over with Zeb and Zaka, and they agreed that we should focus on self-reliance more. At this point, Zeb has started to train up quite a few new stone shaping goblins, which means that sometime this year he'll have a few more construction teams available. I discussed it with him, and in a few months I'll be getting volunteers for a second mining team to join the first one.

This year, we'll plant some of our imported fibrous plants. These seeds were imported from the dwarves for the purpose of growing better plants for weaving cloth. If all goes well, we'll at least be able to make simple clothes of a quality similar to the dwarves. Most of our population is wearing shoddy clothing made from the plants that grow on the island or decent quality leather. The dwarves and humans, however, are wearing imported clothing. They don't have an abundance of it, but it was meant to make their transition to our lifestyle easier.

Zeb and I agreed that it was time to expand the production infrastructure in and around the city. We've had a few goblins who have worked as Karsh's assistants for years now, and it's about time to have them move to their own smithies, and give Karsh some new assistants. So, we'll be building two more smithy areas. There is a similar situation for carpentry and weaving. So for a few months, one of the construction teams is going to stop building new housing, and focus on getting those new buildings built.

For a little while, I'll be busy making sure that everything is working in the hydroelectric facility, and teaching ten goblins how to handle everything. The facility has significantly more electrical capacity than it's currently using, so we have plenty of room to add more machines in the future to that area.

After some discussion with Zaka, it's been decided that after I make sure everything is working as intended with the hydroelectric facility, I'm going to work on a few buildings in the city. We were waiting on a good supply of metal in order to make a bank. Given our overall growth rate, it's been decided that we don't just need a bank, though it's where we'll start. After building a bank, we'll build a mint for making more of our money. It's been determined that the mint will be built under our castle. There, we'll have a vault for storing our valuables.

Initially, I wasn't planning on doing something like that, but Zaka brought up a good point on the matter. As the population has continued to grow, there has been more and more crime of increasing severity. A decade ago, petty theft was about the highest extent of the criminal activity. We already have guards and a jail, but that hasn't stopped the occasional individual from engaging in more severe crimes. Recently, Zaka executed a hobgoblin for running an extortion ring. Currently, I just hide the minting equipment up on the mountain along with spare coin.

Following Zaka's logic, as the population continues to grow, it wouldn't be impossible for a criminal element to decide to steal our minting equipment or coin, which is unguarded. If, instead, it was kept in the castle and guarded, at the very least it would be easier to investigate the crime, should it occur. Zaka's been doing a good job of keeping the number of guards up relative to the rest of the population, though we're starting to run into a new issue as a result. Lack of leveling opportunities.

There still are some, but it's becoming more and more limited over time. Which, after some discussion, I've decided on a plan. We imported a significant amount of waterproofing materials over the last few years. Initially, I intended their use to be for more windmills. Instead, we'll be using it to make a decently large boat which we can use to travel to the next island over. There, a group of guards can be brought over for part of winter, where they can hunt giant lizards and cut down trees to gain levels. Which also means that once a few new construction teams are available, it's time to build the harbor, so we can safely store our ships.

Our plans for the year basically went off without a hitch. There were a few hiccups with the hydroelectric facility, but they were pretty minor and easy to fix. By mid-spring it was ready to be left in the hands of the goblins. They were separating hematite much faster than it was being mined, which was good. The enriched hematite was quite easy to process into good quality iron.

Which was good, because I needed plenty of iron to make the vaults for the bank and the mint. First, I worked on the bank, which consisted of a vault with 10,000 deposit boxes. Admittedly, there was no locks on the boxes, and some were larger than others, but any individual who wants a box can get one in the bank. Each box is labelled with a dwarven number, and we hired five clerks and ten guards for the bank. The clerks were given a basic rundown of dwarven number systems, and then also taught how to write names down.

From there, a ledger was kept of who had what box in the vault. For the time being, we're not keeping a running total, and anyone who wants to withdraw from the bank will have to wait for a clerk to physically check their balance. To prevent mistakes, they also have to have two other goblins double check that the right deposit box was checked.

After the bank was operational, Zeb was ready to designate new construction teams, so I joined in to get a second mining team. Since the new mining team was relatively low prestige, I split the existing team in two, and the new group was split among those teams. One team will focus on extracting the upper layer of hematite and quartz, while the second team will dig into the root of the vein to extract the sulfide ores.

After removing the new mining team from the pool, Zeb was left with three new construction teams. One of the senior teams was dedicated to building out the new smithies and other workshops, two of the new teams were put back on terrace expansion, and one senior team and one new team came with me to the other side of the island. I brought along the human harbormaster to help us plan out the future port.

A channel will be dug out into the bay, and for now a single wet dock area will be built with a lock to maintain water level even during low tide. Ultimately, ships can come in during medium tide and above, and by using a dual lock, we can make sure that the water level in the wet dock never falls below that level. I'd initially planned for the one wet dock to handle our single ship, but the harbormaster made a good point about having it two wet docks instead. If we only make the one, then we'll be unable to receive anyone who might arrive while our own ship is docked.

In the future, we'll add even more docks, but that was what they'd work on for the time being. After that, I spent a few more months designing the mint under our fort in the middle of the city. This vault was made more secure than the bank vault, with extra thick walls, and a combination lock. The actual coin minting area is in a higher level of the fort, but the equipment is stored down in the vault while not in use. After it was complete, we moved all the equipment and coins that were stored on the mountain down into the vault.

By that point, it was mid-fall and enough of the port had been built that I could begin construction of our new ship. I had initially thought about having it be a sail powered boat, but those require significantly more know-how to operate than a powered boat. Unlike the barge, which uses a paddleboat design, I wanted to go with a propeller and rudder design for this ship. Ultimately, the plan is for it to hold 50 individuals, and a bunch of cargo.

[Vol.5] Ch.50 Dwarven Civil War Part 3

We got the ship completed just before the middle of winter. After a few tests, everything seemed to be working right, so the next thing to do was select a group to go to the other island. I'll be going to make sure that everything with the ship works both ways. I'll be bringing along a construction team composed of ten individuals, thirty city guards, which is about one-quarter of our total guards, five of the elite soldiers, and four hobgoblins who will eventually be this ship's permanent captain and crew. The ship itself takes more than four individuals to operate, but those four are the only ones who need to be trained on the complicated parts. The rest of the work is easily completed by untrained individuals for short trips like this.

After the crew was assembled, we set out for the other island. The trip took about ten hours, and then we spent another four hours picking which valley to set up camp in. Ultimately, we picked one with a decent sized stream running into the ocean, though it was quite a bit more narrow than some of the other valleys. We anchored the ship offshore and used two rowboats to ferry ourselves and our supplies onto land.

The guards and soldiers hunted and protected the camp while the construction team and myself worked on building a fort for us to stay in. After about half of a month, we'd made a basic fort such that it took much less effort to protect ourselves. Every day before that, and even afterwards, we'd had a few giant lizards come bother us. I'm pretty sure that these ones are a little smaller than the ones that were on our island, even after factoring in that I'm larger than I was back then. They also have a slightly different pattern on their skin. They aren't any less aggressive though, which is a shame.

There are ground birds on this island as well, though they're also slightly different than our own. They too seem to be slightly smaller, and their plumage seems to be a bit lighter in color. Between hunting and cutting down trees, many of the individuals who came along on this trip have gained quite a few levels.

By the end of the month-long trip, we'd added basic sleeping quarters to the fort, a few storage areas, a proper cooking area, and two charcoal kilns. Our ship's boiler uses charcoal for fuel, so keeping a stockpile at this fort is just common sense. It took us two days to get everything loaded onto the ship to leave. In the future it'll probably take less time, because most of the time spent came down to wasted time due to lack of skill. Though, I decided we should probably add in some basic pulleys to help with hoisting cargo up onto the ship, since lifting a whole rowboat each time was a lot of effort.

Ultimately, our return haul from the island included 70 giant lizard hides, a bunch of charcoal, and a bunch of levels under the belts of most of the trip's participants. Even factoring in the entire year prior where I did at least a month of leveling, I'm still only gaining levels very slowly. I didn't do any lizard killing on this trip though, so that's probably partially to blame.

<APEX LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 44
HP: 2689/2689
MP: 1563/1563
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance, Partial Sleep
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands, Pulverize

As winter gave way to spring, we didn't end up getting any word from the dwarves, which was somewhat nerve wracking. For what it's worth, Elora was getting updates from the elves using their bird messengers. I took what she said with a grain of salt, but it sounds like the situation is at a standstill, with both sides having dug into defensive positions.

Building up our defensive positions seems like a good idea as well. With our new hematite iron production, I'm hoping Karsh can make a fully functioning artillery piece, and we can build up even more coastal defenses. I also had another strategy meeting with Zeb and Zaka to plan out this next year.

Without any trade, we're currently just stockpiling our extra salt and paper, so we won't be expanding any salt production this year, even though we have a decent supply of quartz coming in from the current mining deposit. I did, however, convince Zeb to dedicate a construction team to expanding the tunnel leading to the current deposit.

We also discussed a few old ideas that had been put aside for some time. Between the terrace farms and our normal clearing of forests to make new farms, we've gotten to the point where we've decided to dedicate a construction team to developing some villages outside of the city. Currently, some of the farms are about a two hour trek from the city gates. So, after looking at some maps, we've picked out two locations to build villages. The general idea is that a village will have between 40 and 75 individuals. They'll be mostly self-sufficient, though they'll only have basic necessities.

The plan is to have the villages have a well, some warehouses, a carpenter, an inn, and houses rather than apartments. One is being built along the road that goes around the island, just before the tunnel to the other valley. The other is being built up along the road up the mountain, closer to where we have the allotted forest plots for wood production. Both locations are actually along a stream, but for good measure, a manually operated well is going to be installed too.

The villages won't have a city wall, nor will they have a set of guards. Though they'll have a designated leader who'll be in charge of immediate handling of crimes, should they be committed. Ultimately, their village chief will report to Zaka once a month, or if any serious problems arise.

There was also a question as to how fecal waste would be handled. Unlike the city, where I built a sewer system that ran to the ocean, in both of these locations, there is a serious concern about contaminating the water which eventually runs to the city. Ultimately, it was decided that multiple saltpeter fields would be set up near the villages, with extra stone shaping being done to help prevent leeching into the water supply. They'll have special outhouses dug that can be cleaned out periodically to transport the waste to the fields.

At the same time, we still plan on growing the city. Some degree of discussion was had about the idea of building a new style of residence for hosting ogres and other similarly sized demon evolutions. Zaka has his own residence due to his size and status, but there are other demons of similar size which will only increase in number over time as more demons evolve. The main point of the discussion wasn't whether we needed the residences, but rather what form they should take. Should it still be communal housing, or should reaching that level of evolution come with additional residency perks, like having your own house?

Ultimately, it was settled that Zeb's team would continue only building out communal style housing. If a large demon wants a house, they can pay for one like everyone else, and given their increased size and stats, it should be easier for them to earn enough money to do so if they want one.

We also still have a significant amount of excess stone coming from the terracing and mining operations. So, while the port won't be directly expanded this year, the two jetties over there will be, as a way to use up the excess stone. The jetties help calm and direct the waves in the harbor, so it should make the port easier to navigate. We've also reached the point where the salvage team has started to run out of sunken ships that they can recover supplies from.

For over a year now, they've been collecting the remnants of the ships from the city's side of the island, and there are much fewer on that side of the island. That being the case, we'll switch it over to harvesting float vines from locations that are harder to reach for the rowboats. That also brought up the notion that next year the group going to the other island over winter should include some float vine harvesters, so we can gather even more float vine as it's actually our limiting factor in a number of metallurgic processes.

Hopefully, by next winter, the war will have died down and we can resume business as normal. Internal growth is great, but integrating ourselves into the economy of other countries is one of the best ways to prevent war.

[Vol.5] Ch.51 Dwarven Civil War Conclusion

The spring season this year was marked by above average rain, though no major storms. The first village was completed at the beginning of summer. This one was built near the tunnel to the other valley along the main road. With where the village is located, only around a quarter of the fields that the village will be in charge of are actually completed, so the village will initially be in charge of clearing their forests for more farmland, and eventually the hill will have terraces built.

By the end of summer, the second valley's sea wall was completed, which freed up another construction team to work on other projects. With the extra labor, the second village was completed by the end of summer, alongside the expanded tunnel to the deposit under the mountain. This village has even fewer completed fields, but it does include the dedicated forest area for tree growing, so they still have plenty of work to do.

With those construction projects completed, I took some time to teach one of the construction teams how to continue digging the tunnel using the tools to make sure everything was sloping at the right rate. With so many other projects finished, Zeb moved construction teams around, expanding the city's growth rate. With our planned work complete early, I've decided to spend a little while observing the mine and the deposit.

Only three days into researching the mine, and we experienced a major catastrophe. In the early morning I felt an extremely powerful mana shock wave. Almost all of our crystals exploded. Every single one on the surface, the one in the lab where Tiberius does research, and the ones in the mine's charging area. Fifteen individuals perished immediately. We performed an autopsy on a few of them, and it seems like they were cooked internally, all of them were in the immediate vicinity of a large crystal when it exploded. If this had happened a few hours later in the day, it's likely we'd be dealing with significantly more deaths.

Beyond the death though, nearly fifty individuals suffered severe injuries, likely suffering from internal organ damage, and a few hundred suffered minor fever for a day or so. I called an emergency meeting, bringing in some dwarves, humans, and Elora to try to get to the bottom of the situation.

Elora, and two of the older humans, had some more information. We're experiencing something called a "Mana Surge". Normally, they're actually considered a blessing and a sign of good fortune. They're normally of varying strength, and this one is middle of the pack in that regard. They last for a few hours, and frequently occur in groups in short succession over the course of a few days, sometimes recurring throughout the month. They occur irregularly, and the last one was about thirty years ago, though that one was a bit smaller than this one.

Even without the mana crystals, my mana is regenerating at about five times the normal rate. They're considered blessings because they usually signal good crop yields, healthier livestock, and better individual health. There also has never been a demon invasion in the three years following a mana surge in recorded history. Mana surges are also always recorded across all three of the mainland continents around the same time, so in all likelihood, all the crystals we shipped to the mainland have also exploded.

Unfortunately for us, that excess mana has completely overloaded all our surface crystals. Given that our crystals exploded, I followed up with Elora about ParTor, the dwarven artifact crystal in their capitol. While her knowledge on the matter is somewhat limited, she said that there isn't any record of the dwarves doing anything special in regards to ParTor, and it's survived significantly more powerful mana surges in the past.

The loss of life was bad, but we've got an even bigger problem looming over us now. Most of our crystal material was on the surface or in the charging rooms in the mine or the mountain. While I haven't checked the mountain yet, I assume the charging room there is completely emptied too, the only crystal material we probably have left is what material was left after having grown all these crystals down in the crystal lab.

Which also means that we're probably isolated from the mainland. Without any surface crystals, the leviathans are likely to become a threat for ships during winter. We could probably make a single crystal large enough to be installed on the surface using all our remaining crystal materials, but even if that's the case, if another mana surge occurs, it'll shatter too. Our initial strategy will be to recover from the damage that the mana surge caused to lives and infrastructure. Most of our construction and mining is going to slow considerably, and I doubt we'll experience any boon from the surge, if anything, our crop yields might fall without all the crystals installed in our waterways.

Four days later, Elora received multiple messages via the Elven birds. First was news that the dwarven civil war ended. ParTor was unharmed by the mana surge, but our crystals, which had been fueling the rebellion, exploded. Both had been installed in critical forts at the two main passes through the rough mountainous terrain of the northern part of the dwarven continent. Without the crystals, the two forts fell quickly under the onslaught of the larger southern faction. After that, the northern rebellion surrendered.

The second message was a decree that was to be relayed to us from The Dwarven King. Henceforth, trade from the dwarves to our island is banned. Any agreements or other pacts are also nullified. That was somewhat unexpected news, given how he'd previously had little say in what the warlords were up to.

The third message, from Kao, answered some of those questions. After the northern rebellion surrendered, for unification purposes, the blame was put on Goppok Kanaga and us for providing his rebellion with the crystals. Given that our crystals ultimately failed, that was given as proof of The King's right to rule, and that we, like other demons, were just there to cause problems. While not everyone bought in to that reasoning, given the circumstances, most of the remaining warlords agreed to that stance. Kao's crystals have also exploded, and Shasta, and the other dwarves on that island are stranded.

Which leaves us with a whole host of problems. Given everything that happened, it might not be wise to install any new surface crystals. As much as I'd like to keep our production speeds up, right now the ocean is a nice defensive barrier between the rest of the world, and ourselves. I'll need to discuss further with Zeb and Zaka about our plans moving forward.

I saw my first leviathan, followed shortly by my second leviathan. A second wave of mana surge came the day after Elora got all those messages, and during it, I saw what seemed like a giant eel be literally cut in half by an even larger monstrous fish with a beak. It looked like it was miles from the shoreline, but they had to have been hundreds of feet in size.

Shortly after seeing that, the discussion about our future as a nation began. It began with just Zeb and Zaka. While there were many small details that would need ironed out, we've decided to not install any extra surface crystals for a few years at the minimum, though we have decided to bring down three medium crystals in a few months. One for the mine slash tunnel, one to be put under the castle in the middle of the city, and one for the lab space. We're hoping that they don't remove our protection by the sea, while still allowing us to perform some of our work at a faster pace.

The one in the tunnel will give us more metal resources to build defensive structures with, while also allowing us to expand the tunnel to potentially find more crystals to replace those that broke. Based on what Shasta had said when I first met her, I suspect that if I grow a crystal large enough to rival ParTor in size, it should be stable even through any mana surges, and that can be installed for longer term use.

The one under the castle will let Zaka and the construction teams in town continue to expand our population at a reasonably fast pace, while the one in the lab will allow Tiberius, and potentially myself, to research more magical technology which could prove vital in military situations. Tiberius's research has shown that certain concentrated powders last longer than others, and the environmental conditions do matter. He's started working on direct applications for some of the powders now, so it seemed wise to continue letting him research.

After that, we brought in Karsh as a representative for the dwarves to discuss matters with them, and fill them in on the situation. Basically, they're all stuck here, and we don't have a way to fix that. I mean, we technically could, but it'd be too costly and risky for us to build a single large crystal again. While most of the dwarves won't have much issue with it, he was a little worried about his children's future, and voiced that it will be the biggest concern for the other dwarves as well. Many of them had expected they'd eventually be able to send their children back to the dwarven continent with a merchant, and that is no longer an option. While we couldn't promise when, we did say that we expected that in some years we expect that we'll reestablish travel.

[Vol.5] Ch.52 Isolationism

In the following days, we held a brief memorial for the demons who died in the mana surge, and the aesthetic construction crew was told to make a memorial for them. Despite the fact that I can't actually trust anything that the elves say, I did follow up with Elora to try to get a better understanding of what exactly causes mana surges, so we can potentially prepare for them better in the future.

For an event of that level, I was surprised that very little was known about what causes mana surges. They're infrequent enough that, outside of the elves, it's unlikely that any other humanoid lives long enough to notice a pattern themselves, at least without consulting some form of written record. The only piece of real evidence I have to go off of is that they seem to occur on the sun-lit side of the planet. No information on whether eclipses interfere, or whether there is any discernable pattern to their occurrences.

The evidence would point to some sort of effect coming from our two suns, but that needn't be the case necessarily. It's enough evidence that I do want to do some research on the subject. There are some preliminary steps I'd need to make to properly research this subject though. We've made some basic telescopes, but I'd like to make a slightly larger one, and then also make some tinted glass to use as filters. Fortunately, our island is tall enough to reach above some of the cloud layers, so I might end up being able to build a facility on the summit eventually.

Before I do any of that though, I'll need to start preparations for moving some medium crystals down from the mountain. The lab can have one reinstalled relatively soon, since it already has an underground facility for housing one and the mine won't need much extra work to include a medium crystal, but the castle will need to have a deeper extension dug to house a crystal. I'm also concerned about us potentially overharvesting the mana poisoning plants that we use for the transport of these crystals. Winter is only a few months away, so I'm planning on only bringing one crystal down before then, and waiting until late spring to bring down the other two.

The first crystal will go in the mine, since I only need to spend a day or two adding in a chamber to hold the crystal and water for charging mana from. Since the mine will be the first location with one of these charging crystals, at least temporarily, Zeb has agreed to dedicate some more of the construction teams to working on expanding and digging the tunnel, since their labor will be significantly more effective there as compared to anywhere else.

With a little less than a month left before winter, we installed a 4 foot crystal in the mine for recharging. Things really have slowed down considerably on the island, at least as far as construction and mining goes. There has been a general sense of unease on the island after the crystals broke. We had all gotten used to the sensation, but it feels like the world is colder now, and it's not just because winter is coming. The air was heavily charged with mana from all the large crystals on the surface before, and now that its gone, it's really noticeable.

We aren't heavily reliant on farming, but I'm still worried about our crop yields. The goblins working in the original tidepool have noticed slightly less fish than previously, but the new tide pool hasn't had any noticeable changes. I'm assuming that it had to do with all our mana charged water outflowing into the ocean near the tide pool. Since we have significant excess with the second tide pool, it's not a threat, but it is somewhat concerning. The manavores in our population have also started to consume some amount of regular food again, as they aren't getting enough mana to fully sustain themselves anymore.

All these factors make me hope that the mine hits a layer flush with mana crystals. Ideally, I want to grow a new crystal comparable in size to ParTor, such that mana surges are unlikely to threaten the crystal. While it's not guaranteed that is the reason ParTor hasn't broken, I find it likely to be the case. If growing crystals to a certain size allows them to survive ambient mana, then growing them larger should increase that limit even further. If Konkur was here, I'd consult with him about the usual location of mana crystals. I suppose I can ask around among the dwarves we have to see if anyone knows anything. If they don't, I could try to ask Elora, and maybe I could get her to send out a message and ask around, though I imagine that won't come cheap.

None of our dwarves had any extra details as to what sort of environment that mana crystals are found in. As I thought about it myself, I did think of at least one thing though. They're unlikely to form below sea level. All of them grow in bubbles formed in the rock. If they're below sea level, it'd be reasonable that the magma would be less likely to form hollow chambers. I don't know if it'd be impossible for them to form, but I think it's at least reasonable to assume that we shouldn't dig down to find them.

I took a chance in asking Elora as well, but she didn't know, and trying to utilize the elves network would be expensive. In fact, the rate she gave me to have the elves gather that information was about a quarter of all our dwarven coin. If we get desperate in a few years, we could consider it.

After a bit of discussion, Zaka and I decided to halt the trips to the other island until we get a large crystal installed again. After we saw those two leviathans, I think it's reasonable to assume that there is a chance of something dangerous happening if we venture into deeper waters. As a consequence, we both talked with Zeb about prioritizing getting more jetties built. They're actually relatively inexpensive to build mana-wise, and catching larger fishes is a decent source of levels.

Ultimately, this didn't lead to much change in how construction was planned. Quite a bit of excess stone had started to build up from the terrace work, and expanding the tunnel forward is only going to increase that volume. One team will go work on the jetties on the far side's harbor, and another team will start on a jetty in the second valley. Terrace work is going to be put on hold, since it does require a bit more mana. Sometime in the summer though, we'll fully drain the reservoir and have one team dedicated to working alongside manual laborers there to provide us with a significant amount of stone for work. That does mean we'll have to halt our hematite processing during that time, but the facility can process more ore than the mine produces, so that isn't an issue realistically.

Considering it's only been a few months, I think we're actually adapting quite well to the new reality of our situation.

[Vol.6] Ch.1 Rescue

This spring brought with it a bad storm that raged for three days. Our valleys experienced some minor flooding, but were relatively unharmed thanks to the sea walls. The harbor, on the other side of the island, experienced some damage and the ships needed some repairs, but nothing as bad as what had been experienced in previous years.

Not long after the storm had passed, we got a request for aid from Kao's island via the Elven bird delivery system. Their harbor and ships were heavily damaged, and with a lack of wood on their island, recovery on their own will be impossible. They do most of their fishing from their ships, so this likely severely hampers their ability to feed themselves. However, it's not like we can just travel by ship, we've seen the leviathans as well.

Our response was, "While we understand the situation is rough, as you've probably guessed, all our crystals also broke, meaning the waters between us and your island are dangerous to travel in large boats. As ordered by your king, trade between us is also forbidden. The best we can offer is refugee status on our island where at least food will not be a concern. Though making the trip is dangerous, we may be able to send some long rowboats, which may be small enough as to avoid attracting attention of the leviathans lurking in the depths. Even that would need to wait until summer. Any refugees will also need to work and earn their keep. It is undetermined how long it may be before we make a large enough crystal to restore connection to the mainland, but the minimum time is a few years."

For the kind of boats we plan to send, which are based off of Zaka's memory of how he got to this island in the first place, there won't be any room for a steam engine, which would be far too bulky. We didn't have to wait very long for a response, "Food expected to last until mid-summer with moderate rationing. Send rescue as soon as possible. 76 individuals in need of rescue."

We did discuss briefly whether we should even send aid, given the new diplomatic status between our nations, however, we're also trying to fight the stereotype of demons, and assisting those in need will be good for our image. Plus, despite the current diplomatic status, we aren't actually on bad terms with many individuals from Kao's group, so maintaining those relationships in the positive might at least keep our nations at peace.

During the rest of spring, we made multiple of the long rowboats for rescuing the stranded dwarves. Each rowboat can hold a total of 20 people, alongside enough food and water for the trip both ways. I call them long rowboats, but they're closer to a viking longship. They're wide enough for two people to sit side by side, with the seats doubling as storage for food, and the front and back cones having barrels for water.

We made eight of these ships, since they need to be half-manned to functionally operate and maneuver, leaving ten slots per boat for the refugees. I'll have to join in the trip to help navigate our group to the dwarven island. I expect it'll take about twice as long as it did with our powered ship, so reaching the dwarven island will take between eight and ten days, depending on if we stop on the other islands along the way to rest.

Once we return, I want to harvest more of the mana poison plants to install the other two crystals to start growing our population, and allow Tiberius to resume using mana exposure for his research.

I underestimated how hard the journey would be to reach the dwarven island using oars. It was a grueling effort, and we stopped at each island on the way just to rest and recover. When we arrived at Kao's island, it was clear why they needed assistance. While they had seemingly repaired some of the damage to the fort, it seems like a landslide had occurred along one flank of the fort, and their piers were all completely missing.

The landscape around the lowlands of the island also looked a little different from my memory of them, but it had been a while, so that might have been my imagination. The dwarves, while not completely starving, where clearly malnourished, which meant they weren't going to be very useful for the return trip.

Shasta was among the dwarves, and I recognized a few others from the times I had come here for auctions. Ultimately, the return trip took just as long, making the full round trip take 23 days. The dwarves brought a handful of items with them, but given the size of our ships, they couldn't bring much, only their most valuable possessions. Thankfully, during the summer months, storms are infrequent, and we only had one storm arrive, which we saw coming, and we camped for an extra day in the fort on our second island to wait it out.

Once we were back, we gave the dwarves ten days to rest and recover before we put them to work. Shasta was put in charge of teaching multiple goblins how to read and write in dwarvish, starting with the ones who make records who've been working until now with only the most basic understandings.

Quite a few of the dwarves have some skill in construction and mining, and while their ability to make buildings the way we prefer them made is lacking, their ability to cut blocks from stone is much more mana effective than using stone shaping to accomplish the same goal. So a handful were added to each construction team, with more being added to the mining teams than to those building new buildings. Their ability to cut blocks also made them excellent assists for the goblins manually breaking rocks in the reservoir, since it was fairly inexpensive for them to make irregular surfaces into smooth surfaces by cutting blocks out of them.

There were a few administrative dwarves that we needed to find uses for. Both a quartermaster and foreman were put under Zeb to help with managing the resources being extracted from the mine and the reservoir, and distributing them to their work areas. We initially thought about having the quartermaster assist in our military endeavors, but given he could end up being a military asset for the dwarves in a future war against us, we decided that was unwise, even if we thought it unlikely to happen.

Lastly, they had two blacksmiths, four cooks, and a tavernkeeper. The blacksmiths were easy enough to integrate into our existing smithies, and the tavernkeeper was able to be put to use doing his job as he did before, keeping the mood of the dwarves up by providing entertainment within our inn. The cooks took the longest to determine how we would utilize them, but ultimately, they were set to provide the meals for all the refugees who didn't want to make their own meals, which turned out to be most of them. They operated as a military base for the most part, so having dedicated cooks was part of their normal routine.

As compared to their island, they actually have a bit more diverse of a diet here, since we actually grow quite a few dwarven crops, and even have our own baker. I took a month with a few goblins to go get the last two medium crystals, and when we returned, spirits were quite high among the refugees, and I received numerous reports that despite the increase in amount of labor they were doing as compared to their island, the better conditions more than made up for it.

When we prepared the mana poison liquid to bring the crystals down, we found that a majority of the seeds we planted for the poison plants had sprouted, though many hadn't fully matured yet. That was enough evidence for me, however, that we should probably plan out some terraces along the road higher up the mountain to grow the plants en masse. Though managing the terraces that far from the city would be quite the arduous task, so it will probably need to wait until we actually have a large demand for the plants to justify it.

All the previous messages had been paid for in advance, but we sent a message to Kao at our own expense this time, letting him know that all 76 of the dwarves had been brought to our island and were safe. Since we can't actively trade with anyone on the mainland due to the threat of leviathans, we didn't actually need to pay anything immediately to Elora, but what we owed was put in a ledger to be collected upon when trade was actively available again.

How much we could reasonably owe was apparently left up to Elora to judge. Given how we're slowly building up a stockpile of salt, we currently don't even need to dip into our dwarven coin stockpile to make payment for this message. Though we might actually want to use the coins over the salt. If the elves will accept the dwarven coin, then it's more useful in that manner, considering we can't trade with the dwarves directly anymore.

[Vol.6] Ch.2 Basic Astronomy

Navigating between the islands is relatively easy, since you just need to aim in the roughly correct direction, and you'll see it over the horizon pretty quickly. However, I haven't observed how the dwarves or humans navigated out here from the mainland. If we plan on setting up our own merchants down the road, that'll be a necessary addition to our knowledge. That also coincides with my desire to research the heavens, so I figured now that I've brought the remaining medium crystals down, I could take a little time to begin preliminary research on the matter.

So I consulted Shasta and our refugee harbormaster from Rathland. There was quite a lot I learned, and a lot of my assumptions were way off. I'd talked with Shasta a long time ago, back when we first met, and had learned that the night stars played a role. However, I expected complicated equipment and star charts, which I was wrong about. They did have a sextant like tool, though it didn't use any lenses. Outside of that though, they seem to use the suns and six somewhat recognizable constellations to navigate, and that's about it.

I was confused how that would be enough to navigate by, since I expected seasonal changes in constellation locations. However, what I found out was that there doesn't seem to be any seasonal changes in the angle of constellations, or the suns. Our planet has negligible axial tilt. That raised more questions for me to investigate at a later date. I'd just assumed the tilt was less than earth, but still present, based on the existence of seasons.

The way they navigate involves using three of the constellations at sunset or sunrise. At sunset or sunrise, you spot two of the three constellations, and then measure their angle to the horizon. One star in one of those three constellations seems to be stationary, functioning like the north star. Using that information, you calibrate your other measurements accordingly against the remaining three constellations for determining your location. After a bit of back and forth, I realized that the "year" on our planet doesn't sync up with the orbital time around the suns. The first three constellations are being used to determine where in the orbit we are to calibrate the second set of measurements.

On earth, since our year is synced up with our orbital location, you can expect the constellations to be in the same spot on the same day every year. Here, they return to the same place about every 143 days. With a year of 390 days, the math just doesn't line up well to keep a record and memorize what day you can expect what horizon values, though experienced sailors get a good intuition for it.

I also followed up with another question, which was something that bothered me occasionally. When I look up at the sky, it seems bare, especially for somewhere as dark and isolated as our island. When I first got here, I didn't think much of it, on earth, light pollution had made it hard to spot all but the brightest of stars, and the night sky here seems about the same as that. Very few stars populate the sky, even when the moon isn't present. I asked if there are more stars visible at other locations, and tried to compare what I could see with what the humans and dwarves could, in case something about our eyes made it harder to see stars with.

However, I was disappointed to hear that, in fact, the sky always looked that way, with only a little over a hundred stars. Basic use of my pocket telescope shows that there are still more stars out there, too dim to see unaided. Though this makes me wonder whether we're just in a sparse galaxy, or cluster, or if there is something else at play. I do sort of understand why telescopes wouldn't be invented though. The night sky is naturally quite boring, and crystals are seen as somewhat dangerous. Combine those two facts, and optics would be quite unlikely to be stumbled upon.

I've already made some basic Galilean refracting telescopes, and I wanted to make tinted filters and a slightly larger telescope for making solar observations. This information about navigation makes me interested in making other observations about our solar system. A few of the "stars" are quite suspicious in that they're considered wandering stars who don't follow the usual patterns of movement. I'd bet that they're planets as well.

Astronomy seems like a good hobby to follow for a while while we wait for the tunnel to get dug further so that I can sample for new deposits. Mana crystals are the main find I'm looking for now, but other deposits are also welcome.

A month's worth of work resulted in a new, larger telescope, though it wasn't actually that large. Very large telescopes are better made as reflectors, using mirrors, so I didn't want to overdo it with this project. Even then, getting everything dialed in took some time. One of the main issues with these refracting telescopes is that the larger the main lens is, the longer the telescope gets, if I don't want to complicate the design. So even for my little 6" lens resulted in an eight foot long telescope. I didn't get around to attempting to make tinted glass though, so solar observations will have to wait.

Before that, though, thanks to the added workers in the tunnel and mine area, I had about a third of a mile of tunnel to check with tectonic sense. Unfortunately, despite the headaches, I didn't actually find anything of note. Eventually they'll make it deep enough under the mountain that I'll anticipate we'll find something. I consider it quite lucky we already found the deposit that we did, where we did.

After taking a day to mentally recover from using tectonic sense so much, I turned my sights upwards. I shifted my half-asleep times to the day, where I would assist either the mine or the reservoir expansion team using improved stone shaping, then at night, I made observations of the night sky using the telescope.

Due to our lack of trade, we have a significant excess of paper, so recording all my observations was easy. Most of my notes were in a hybrid between Dwarvish and English. I used Dwarvish for the words that I could, but a lot of the words were phonetic spellings of English words. Though many of the notes were actually pictures, rather than words at all.

The first things I turned my eyes to were the so-called "wandering stars". Sure enough, the three of them appeared to be planets, and two of them had moons large enough to see with my telescope. Over the course of a month, I made multiple observations a night of these three bodies. They already have names, though both the Dwarven, Elvish, and Human language have distinct names for each. After discussing with our harbormaster, Shasta, and Elora about the origin of the names in their respective cultures, the Dwarvish names had the most compelling naming scheme.

They were named after a folktale of three dwarvish brothers who travelled the three continents meeting the other races, and eventually splitting up to wander their favorite continent. The youngest brother, Kroko, who was the most energetic ended up on the largest continent, the human one, and thus travels the most. The middle brother, Dukum, travels the middle amount, and is associated with the Elvish continent. Finally, Dar-Dor, the eldest brother, travels the least, and stays on the dwarven continent. Dar-Dor lives a humble life for the most part, and thus is the dimmest brightness of the brothers, sometimes being hard to find in the sky.

Unfortunately, that's the end of their mythology on the matter, so I didn't have anything to go off of to name the moons. The more they travel, the closer to the sun they should be, accounting for their faster orbital period. Surprisingly, Kroko and Dukum both appear to be gas giants, and possess the moons I saw. Kroko has a pair of moons, and Dukum has one. Kroko's moons seem to orbit every 2.2 and 4.4 days, and Dukum's orbits every 9. Kroko also has a very faint ring system.

I couldn't determine for sure if Dar-Dor was terrestrial or a gas planet, and it was far enough away that it was hard to determine much about it. It'll take quite a bit of additional observations to determine any additional info, like their orbital periods. For the majority of the night, I spent time looking at each of the major constellations, and making star charts with them. The main stars would be marked with larger circles, then I'd make little marks to indicate all the smaller stars I could see with the telescope.

While most of the demons weren't very interested in what I was doing, the dwarves and humans both seemed quite intrigued, and quite a few were very impressed at seeing planets through the telescope. Once I finish making the star charts I'm interested in, I'll probably limit my night-time observations to two or three times a night, marking information about the planets, and start working on other things in the in-between times.

[Vol.6] Ch.3 Seasonal Insight

One night, while I was making another star chart, I decided that I'd attempt to make tinted glass during the daytime for a while, to eventually make solar filters for the telescope. I had initially thought I could just make a single, strong filter to use, but that is actually quite a bit harder than making multiple panes of more lightly tinted glass, and then just stacking the filters. The main issue with making a single, very dark piece of glass is uniformity.

Uniformity will be a problem for any tinted glass I make, however, for light to moderately tinted glass, I can look at the entire pane that we pour and select the most uniform section to make the filter. If the glass is too dark from the start, I can't make those observations easily. As an added bonus, I won't have to worry about any weird interactions happening in the glass as a result of doping it too much with different oxides.

We have access to a few metals, which it shouldn't be too difficult to make some oxides of, and then sprinkle into the glass mix to tint it with a particular color. We'll have to wait to see what colors we get until after making them though. If I wanted a single filter, I'd probably need to mix multiple oxides into the one glass mix, but with multiple filters, I can just stick to one type per filter. That also should offer flexibility down the road if, for instance, I wanted to look through a particular color spectrum through the telescope. Blue and red would be ideal filter colors to have in that regard, given the prevalence of stars in those colors in my home universe.

I took eleven days tinkering with glass additives, and while I didn't get perfect results, I'm content with what I did get. Iron oxide gave me a green color, which was reminiscent of beer bottles on earth, copper oxide gave me a nice blue, and both lead and zinc didn't seem to affect color much, though they did affect the glass slightly in other ways. For good measure, I also tried adding powdered pyrite made from solid pyrite crystals, which gave me a yellow-brown color.

I had been hoping that I could find a good red colored glass to use as a filter as well, but with just blue and yellow-brown, I could filter out a significant amount of the light. Enough, in fact, that we could safely look at the suns. Working up to that point was quite tricky, however. After I made a few of those filters, I would layer them in front of the telescope, and then aim it at one of the suns, with a paper behind the eye piece.

Two, three, and four layers weren't enough. With two layers, I still had to turn the telescope away quickly, because the eye piece got too hot to touch. At four layers, the paper still heated very quickly. At five layers, it seemed cool enough, but for good measure, I went up to six before attempting to look through.

I had aimed it at the brighter of our suns, and what I saw was actually quite boring all things considered. I saw a fairly uniform circle, with a few dark spots on it. I turned the telescope to the second sun, and had to remove two of the six filters to see anything. It's considerably darker than the larger sun, but without the filters, that would be hard to determine. This sun was quite a bit more boring as well. There were no visible spots or anything, just a dim circle.

I kept up observations for 26 days, periodically checking both suns during the day, and making star charts at night. The smaller sun had no noticeable difference in it's appearance. The larger one, however, is seemingly tidally locked to the smaller one. The total orbital period for the two stars around each other is about 13 days, and the sunspots on the larger star always point the same direction relative to the smaller sun.

On the 27th day of observations, we experienced another solar eclipse, signaling the next month of the year. As I watched it happening, something clicked mentally, and I realized why the seasons are what they are, and why each year perfectly lines up with the lunar eclipses. The solar-lunar eclipses and solar-solar eclipses are probably regulating temperatures.

As the two suns orbit each other, they eclipse each other occasionally, resulting in less solar radiation reaching our planet. We have thirteen months, and it takes thirteen days for the two suns to complete an orbit around each other. Our moon eclipses both suns for about six hours every thirty days. Since thirteen is a prime number, and thirty isn't a multiple of thirteen, it means that each of our lunar-solar eclipses occurs during a different time during the solar-solar eclipse cycle.

Sometimes, our lunar eclipses occur while both suns are visible, and other times it overlaps with one of the solar-solar eclipses. Any time we get a lunar-solar eclipse, we get no light from our two suns for those hours, cooling the planet. If that lines up with a solar-solar eclipse, then we lose out on relatively less heating than we would otherwise.

If my hypothesis is right, then I suspect that during our winter months, our eclipses will occur only during non solar-solar eclipses, giving us the lowest amount of solar radiation in the year. With winter coming soon, this should be easy enough to check. I asked around with the dwarves and humans if they'd ever heard of a thermometer, which they hadn't. Which means I know what I'm going to start working on next. We do have some alcohol that has been brewed in the past few years using dwarven crops, which I should be able to concentrate enough to make a thermometer. With that, we can start making temperature measurements, and actually get some hard data on ambient temperature.

Thanks to thermal hands, I was actually able to make a thermometer in only 12 days. After concentrating ethanol to a reasonable level, I then added some dye to make the fluid more visible. I made multiple different prototype sealed bulb thermometers, then with thermal hands, it was easy for me to manipulate the temperature of the bulb to have the ethanol move up and down the capillary portion to test which design worked best for what I wanted.

Ultimately, I found that I needed to cool the bulb portion first before sealing and adding the capillary tube, otherwise the fluid wouldn't give any readings at ambient temperature. Ultimately, this thermometer is quite large. The reason being that I need to be able to tune other thermometers to this one to keep consistent readings down the road.

Without a machine to produce duplicates, every thermometer we make will have to be labelled with temperature after being mostly completed. I'll basically have to label it against the big thermometer at three different temperatures, and then use those to mark out all the other temperature points on each thermometer.

For now though, we only need the one thermometer. On Earth, I'm sure many people would be upset that I'm going with an approximately Fahrenheit scale, but I already think in terms of Fahrenheit, and I don't have a way to measure the boiling point of water to mark since the ethanol would boil before that. Instead, I'm using the freezing point of ocean water as 0, and a comfortable air temperature as 70. Since this is imprecise anyway, I think it's fine. I only really want to use this for relative measurements of temperature. I've hired three goblins to help me with my endeavor.

We'll be measuring temperature at four points in the day, sunrise, sunset, midday, and midnight. The midnight time is going to be more imprecise, given the lack of references and clocks, but again, I'm really only measuring relative data here. I'll also have them mark down when solar-solar eclipses begin, and they'll make more temperature measurements during those, and the same goes for lunar-solar eclipses. Ultimately, each will also be marked down relative to what day they were measured.

In a few years time, I can review all the data, organize it, and make some graphs to see if there are any trends that I haven't noticed. With that planned out, I only have a few more nights until I'll consider myself done with the star charts I'd planned to make. After that, I don't know what I plan to work on. I should probably check on the mine again with tectonic sense, to see if we're near anything interesting yet.

[Vol.6] Ch.4 Freezer

The tunnel digging has been proceeding at a good pace, and as you proceed deeper and deeper under the mountain, the slope of the grain of the rocks has slowly been getting steeper. While I haven't detected anything new directly with tectonic sense, I have a feeling that, at the very least, it shouldn't be long until we get a layer transition.

Extraction and refining of ores has generally been going well, and we're building up quite the stockpile of materials. Unfortunately, most of said materials are lead and zinc. Though the lead has been processed to produce silver. We've gathered a couple of approximately 10 lb ingots of the stuff.

The two villages are also doing well, and the added niter from both of their excrement fields has allowed us to build up a much larger arsenal of artillery shells for defense. Soon, we might actually have enough to consider attempting to make personal firearms. I'm sure that Tiberius won't be fond of that idea, however.

Speaking of Tiberius, I've settled on what my next project will be. A simple refrigerator/freezer for preserving the extracts that he's making. Discovering refrigeration was quite complicated, but once you know about it, it's actually not that hard to make simple refrigerators. In fact, for the design I plan to go with, I'm going to be using a stirling engine. By forcibly driving the engine, I can turn the work into a temperature differential, rather than using that differential to produce work. Though when using a stirling engine in this way, it needs a larger regenerator than a normal stirling engine to be useful.

Stirling engines are fairly simple devices compared to things we've been making, so getting the first one made was relatively easy and took only two days time. I utilized the lab's well windmill to power the engine for testing purposes. However, I ran into issues as I attempted to use it for refrigeration. As the cold end reduced in temperature, the water inside the air of the engine froze and caused the engine to jam.

So, I built a second engine in a day's time, this time the air it was charged with was taken from one of our dry rooms filled with desiccant. While this second engine worked better, I could still hear the ice crystals crunching internally. However, it worked well enough that I came up with a way to make a third engine without this issue.

I made a large box to function as a freezer out of stone in one of the desiccant areas, and used the second engine to drop the temperature to below freezing. The box had a high internal surface area, with grooves to encourage deposition of water ice. After a few hours, the second engine was starting to struggle, with the ice crystals internally jamming things.

At that point, without opening the freezer, I stone shaped a container inside the freezer to trap the air. Hypothetically, this air should be almost water free. Then, since the first two engines had likely been scratched and damaged by the ice crystals, I made a third engine, and infused it with the dry air.

This engine worked much better than the other two. I had also made a few minor improvements in design in places where I noticed leverage issues, improving it further. I left this engine to run while attached to the windmill for three days, and it seemed to be running just as well as it did when I first made it.

I had attached it to a rudimentary freezer made of stone, and unfortunately, that had cracked and lost it's seal, so the inside area wasn't much cooler than the outside temperature. I thought that the remedy for that would be straightforward, and that I could just add a layer of metal inside to keep it airtight.

While the metal layer did remain airtight, the stone casing I made around it broke again after a day's time. I tried replacing it with lightstone, but that broke too. Finally, I tried powdering the lightstone, then roasting it at high temperature before reforming it around the freezer, thus driving out the water content from the stone. This seemed to work, and after four days, the freezer remained intact.

This freezer is relatively small, being only about 3 cubic feet of internal space. This one, however, is just to assist Tiberius in his testing. Ultimately, it's there to see how much it improves the shelf life of the extracts he's making. If some of the more useful ones are drastically improved, then I'll consider building a facility dedicated to making some of the extracts, and building a larger freezer for storing them.

As for how his extract experiments have been going so far, some of the extracts have a much better shelf life than others. He's been diligently collecting and testing samples for the last few years, and has found some interesting results. There are some external factors at play in how long extracts will last.

Some samples seemed fairly shelf stable, losing about fifty percent efficacy over the course of an entire year when kept on a regular shelf on the surface. Others went completely bad in ten days in the same environment. That lead to Tiberius storing samples in multiple locations to test different environments for storage.

During the mana storm, most of the extracts went bad, except for a handful that he'd had a goblin store in the old mountain mine away from mana sources. The more mana they're exposed to, the faster all the samples decayed. Depending on the sample, they decayed in different ways during the mana storm. The electric extracts crackled with static, while an extract from the bone shard throwing fish scattered itself around.

However, heat also seemed to cause some to decay faster than others, as did humidity. Though across the board, it was consistent that a low mana, low heat, and low humidity environment aided in how long the extracts would last. Some apparently produce varied effects while partially decayed, usually related to their original function, but occasionally not. A common partially decayed effect was be heat production when exposed to mana.

Ultimately, that information led to me making a final change to the freezer. While light stone seems to be mostly silicon dioxide, which comprises quartz, smaller quartz crystals have less of a mana insulative effect as compared to larger ones. So, I decided to make an additional container around the freezer, which we filled with quartz crystals. We started with large crystals, then added in medium, and finally smaller crystals and sand to pack the area completely, as to reduce the amount of mana leaking into the area. Unfortunately, this did require the addition of a secondary door comprised of similarly designed quartz packing material.

In order to figure out if this actually helps, I made a second container, without the freezer portion, which we'll keep next to the freezer and store a few samples of each of the extracts inside. I made a second freezer without the quartz packing as well, just to keep the study even. This way we can record which environment is best for storing different samples. For some samples, the regular freezer might be enough, and knowing that could save us extra work down the line for storing particular types of extracts.

With about a month left before winter, I lead a few of the forestry goblins up the mountain to once again harvest the mana poison plant, and replant the seeds. This time, however, we're bringing the samples back to Tiberius, so he can try collecting an extract from them. We spent another ten days systematically collecting and planting to try to make the most of this year. I'm honestly hoping Tiberius's research on this topic, and in particular this plant, yields more positive results, as it could be quite revolutionary.

Tiberius's focus is, and always has been, magical weaponry. As such, most of the extracts he's focused on have been focused in that area, things that shock, burn, explode, or are just generally a hazard to be around. However, I could easily see the usefulness of extending his research to other areas. Defensively, making an extract from tree bark might be very useful for a transformative material. We already used water infused with tree bark to make leather armor that hardens when infused with mana, the applications by using a concentrate could be even more extreme.

Most of our tree bark currently just gets turned into charcoal, so if that extract turned out to be particularly useful, that would be a boon to our economy and prosperity.

[Vol.6] Ch.5 Sulfur Hunt

Between Tiberius's research, and the goblins taking temperature and sun spot measurements, I've got some waiting to do before either of those projects bear fruit. Our ore deposit is probably a year or so from reaching the level where the ore becomes too poor to be worth their time harvesting, and the sulfur deposit that we found along the craggy terrain where our road goes is nearly depleted. We've been using it for some time to make black powder, and the deposit wasn't massive, so it was only a matter of time before it ran out.

In theory, we do have a new source that we could tap by converting the SO2 from roasting ores back to elemental sulfur, but that requires a substantive amount of hydrogen gas to produce. We do have a minor source of hydrogen that we could use in that crystal, or we could hydrolyze some at the hydroelectric facility. However, before doing that, we should dedicate labor to finding another natural deposit of elemental sulfur, as it is significantly easier to make and use.

The issue with that is actually finding it. This deposit was buried under about seven feet of rock. The only reason we found it was because Konkur knew what he was looking for. I got the gist of what he was searching for, but actually applying that knowledge is an entirely different story.

While it was found in the craggy terrain section of the island, it was under a somewhat flat area. The area still had slope, just much less than it's surroundings. If I had to guess, it probably was the site of an ancient hot springs, which slowly deposited out various minerals, but due to the insolubility of sulfur, over the years, the sulfur was one of the things left behind. I also know that he checked dozens of spots before finding this deposit, so it's unlikely we'll find anything right away.

So, I plan on getting forty or so goblins to begin canvasing the craggy terrain on either side of the island. They'll be looking for somewhat flatter areas in the craggy terrain, with soil similar to the first deposit. The soil there had a lighter gray tone as compared to the generally darker color around the rest of the island. That said, there are other areas that have the lighter colored soil, and as far as I can tell, there isn't any sulfur under those, so neither is a perfect indicator.

After the survey finds locations to check, I'll have them remove the soil in a small area at each location, so I can use tectonic sense to see if I can sense any buried deposits. Once spring comes, we'll halt the search if we haven't found anything, since the heavy rains generally make the craggy terrain dangerous to traverse if you aren't on the road.

I took a twelve days getting the forty or so goblins trained up on what I planned to send them off to do. While that might seem like a long time, I took extra time to teach them how to travel safely through the terrain and trained them on buddying up, and divvying up areas to check, along with scheduled meetings to make sure everyone is safe. The craggy terrain has a lot of cliffs and muddy areas, so I wanted to make sure that this search for sulfur wouldn't result in any accidents.

Two days after I returned to the city, Zaka approached me with a question. He asked why, if we could travel to go rescue the dwarves, why we weren't returning to the other island this year. I didn't actually have a good answer for him. The best I had was an excuse, which was that I hadn't really thought about it after I'd deemed using the large boat to be too dangerous. There wasn't a good reason why we couldn't use the smaller longboats to go there and back, even during seasons other than winter, though I don't recommend springtime for the same reason we won't be searching for sulfur during that season.

There are two small downsides to using the longboats to go to the other islands. The first reason is that the longboats take a longer time and significantly more labor. It's a two-day rowing journey to get to the next island, where as the large powered boat can make it during daylight hours. The second downside is that there is much less storage space on the longboats. Transporting goods from one island to the other using them will be much more limited. Though, since it's not relying on charcoal, the journey could be done more frequently by individuals to bring back lizard hides if needed.

So, after some discussion with Zaka, I'll be going to the other island again. I'll only be there for a month this time. I'm going there to help set up facilities for burning float vines and collecting the valuable soda ash. Since the soda ash takes significantly less space than the dried float vines do. Technically, finished leather products from the giant lizard hides also take less space, so that's another reason to consider setting up a more permanent colony there. A permanent colony might just naturally evolve out of us going there frequently enough though, so I'm not going to force the issue.

After gathering up a different group of military demons from last year, along with a handful of float vine gatherers, we set off for the other island. I had to do a small amount of maintenance around the fort after it having been neglected for multiple seasons, but after a few days, everything was back in order. After that, I started on the float vine drying area, and then the places where they'll be burned, and the soda ash collected.

After that, I decided to do my agreed upon leveling time while here. I took eighteen days hunting lizards while cutting down trees. I only killed a lizard about every other day, and as I did so, I thought about the fact that keeping this island relatively unsettled actually provides us with a good leveling source. If it becomes colonized, we'll reduce the natural animal population considerably. By keeping this island as a military outpost only, we're essentially letting the animals on the island soak up the natural levels throughout the year, and then we harvest those levels into the individuals who we want to have them.

Despite their size, the lizards have the best yield on the island by far, and I suspect it's because they eat a lot of ground birds. I haven't directly observed their lifecycle, but between our island and this one, I never really saw any very small lizards, which means they probably mature fast. I've noticed juveniles, which are about 2/3rds the size of the adults, but I haven't seen any smaller than that, which means they probably stay in a nest until reaching a certain level of maturity.

Given how the population seems to bounce back after only a year's time, I think they probably mature quite quickly, meaning they have a fast metabolism, which they'd need food to supply. The main sources of meat on the islands are ground birds and fish, and I haven't seen any lizards in the ocean.

Trees are a decent source of levels, but only because they've lived so long that they've accumulated the levels over time. Ground birds, who eat small plants and nuts, don't really accumulate levels very much, and give only slightly better yields than harvesting a small plot of annual crops. The only source of levels comparable in harvesting time to the lizards are exceptionally large fishes caught off the jetties, and it's significantly harder to do that as compared to killing a lizard. So, preserving this island as a military installation seems like a good idea.

After a total of thirty-three days, I was back on the main island. While not nothing, I still am disappointed by how slowly I gain levels. I'm honestly quite worried about how slowly I'll level after capping out in levels this next time.

<APEX LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 60
HP: 3169/3169
MP: 1739/1739
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance, Partial Sleep
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands, Pulverize

After returning, there was already over two-dozen potential sulfur sites for me to check so I took eight days going to them and using a full power tectonic sense at each to see if I detected any anomalies. I detected something at a single site, though it was nearly thirty feet underground. Given that situation, I had the surveying teams keep searching for potential sites while I considered how to to proceed with this potential find.

After some discussion, Zeb and I agreed that when spring approaches, we'd move the individuals who are expanding the reservoir over to this potential deposit to dig a small mine to see what we find. In order to make that viable, I found some of the forestry goblins, and brought them along to the location. It's almost a mile off the road, so I figured they'd be the best individuals to figure out the best path between the road and this location, and potentially even clear a dirt path for travel before spring arrives. They're fairly familiar with how spring affects the island's forests, and what areas are safe vs unsafe during the rainy season, so I'm trusting them to find a path that should be traversable.

[Vol.6] Ch.6 Fluorite Deposit

During the remaining two months of winter, we checked about as many spots for sulfur as I had in the first month. Each spot got further and further from the road, which led to slower progress. Ultimately, we found a second potential source of sulfur. The new one is even more remote than the first, though it does appear to only be 20 feet underground. We decided that while the first potential source is having a scouting tunnel dug into it, the forest management teams will start searching for a safe path to this second source, so we can repeat the process there as well.

All these potential areas that we've checked have either been on the side of the island with the road going around it, or close to the ore roasting area, meaning we have about a quarter of the island that we have basically left untouched due to the difficulty travelling through the craggy terrain there. It's probably worth considering expanding our surface road infrastructure around that side of the island, if only to aid in potential future projects.

I talked it over with Zeb, and he had a pretty good idea. Currently, in fall and winter, we're having some goblins manually breaking rocks in the reservoir to expand it and potentially gain stone shaping when they prestige. Accompanying them are a handful of dwarves and goblins who clean up the jagged rockfaces behind where the manual breaking is happening. This spring, that group is doing the digging into the potential sulfur deposits. During this upcoming summer, the reservoir will be in use for hydroelectric power to separate hematite. Zeb had planned to have them expand out some of the terrace farms during this time, but he was indifferent to having them build out some roads instead.

After additional discussion, this also means we'll have to halt jetty construction during those months, meaning we'll have even more teams available for road construction. Building a road uses much less stone than building a jetty, but without a large supply of stone, building the jetties would quickly consume all our stockpile. So, during summer, we'll have multiple teams building out roads. In fact, we have too many teams for working on a single road, so we also picked the heaviest travelled dirt path used for getting to some of the terrace farms, and we'll be turning that into a proper stone road. Being able to bring carts along that road should make harvest season much easier for the farmers who work there.

Fifteen days into spring, the first potential sulfur deposit was breached, however, there wasn't any sulfur present. What we found instead might be more valuable though. Reddish orange crystals that appear to be fluorite. By the time the tunnel had been opened to the atmosphere, and I was informed of the find and came to look, the tunnel had become unbearably hot. Even I couldn't even get halfway down the tunnel, and I have heat resistance. I was concerned about the crystals potentially melting themselves, so we re-sealed off the tunnel with almost ten feet of stone.

Unfortunately, to use this fluorite, a lot of work will need to be done to access the deposit safely. I can't quite get close enough to determine the absolute size of the deposit with tectonic sense, but I could at least determine that it's large enough to be worth exploiting. Even then, just because some of the fluorite seems to be the heat producing variety doesn't mean all of it is. For the next month, I'm having all the miners who were close to the deposit report in for daily checkups, and once a month after that, just to keep an eye on their health.

In order to access the deposit safely, I'll likely need to dig in from an area a decent distance away, so that mana in the air doesn't seep in too quickly. Even then, I suspect the crystals will get very hot due to the sheer volume of them. Generally speaking, individual crystals seem to be able to dissipate their heat into the air quite easily. The issue is likely the volume of the deposit, alongside the thermal conductivity of the surrounding rock. The heat that the crystals produce just doesn't have anywhere to go easily, and so it just builds up over time.

One potential option, if I wanted to get a handful of crystals at a time, would be to reopen the mine every so often, and then cut as many crystals as we can out before it gets too hot, then seal the mine off again and wait for it to cool down. That might at least work until a longer tunnel is dug. One issue with that, however, is oxygen deprivation. If we leave the tunnel open to get oxygen in, it'll heat up, driving the air inside out of the tunnel, and the only way to cool it is to close it off, pulling a vacuum inside. When we open the tunnel up, the air outside will rush in, likely bringing a bunch of mana with it. Meaning the window to actually harvest crystals before everything heats up will be very small.

Regardless, I want to wait until the end of the month to make sure that none of the miners get sick before we open it back up. I will, however, start excavating a new tunnel myself while I wait. I plan on digging to the side, and then tunneling around the deposit, and entering it from the back, with the hope that the extra distance will be enough to make the heat bearable inside. It'll take much longer than a month for me to mine that far myself, so I won't need to worry about an accidental exposure to potential toxins in that time.

Thankfully, in the month of monitoring, none of the goblins got sick. Well, outside of the first day where a few showed minor symptoms of heat stroke when they left the mine shaft after it heated too much for them to stay inside. The second potential deposit did produce sulfur, so we're back in business for sulfur harvesting. I am worried about us running out of elemental sulfur at some point, so I've started to think about how I'd go about recovering sulfur from the sulfur dioxide given off from roasting our ores.

We're likely losing literal tons of the stuff to the atmosphere, which I'd prefer to recover if possible. Unfortunately, things like this are never free, and I'd want to find a renewable resource we could trade to produce the sulfur. If we end up trading something else that is limited in exchange for the sulfur in a reaction, it's just not worth it. If fluorite research yields good results, then I could potentially use hydrogen as a reactant to produce solid sulfur and water vapor.

We could do that currently with electrolysis as well, but that would require significant energy consumption from the hydroelectric facility, which would mean we wouldn't be able to separate as much hematite. If the fluorite research doesn't yield any results by the time we've run out of hematite to refine, then I'll consider it to be a viable option for recovery.

I'm only about the third of the way done with the tunnel that I'm digging to the fluorite deposit. Given that no one got sick, and we don't need everyone extracting sulfur at this point, I'm planning on bringing those miners back here to help me dig this out, so it can get finished quickly. With the extra labor, I might even extend the tunnel further before turning back, just to be on the safe side.

With the extra labor, we completed the new tunnel in just under twenty days. It would have been less, but I decided to extend it further. The tunnel current digs into the mountain for 200 feet, then turns, goes another fifty, before returning and running into the deposit after another 110 feet. The temperature is still a bit too hot for other miners, but with my heat resistance, I can handle it, meaning I can extract fluorite. So, that's exactly what I started doing.

Due to the potential danger of bringing too much of it up at once, and also exposing more of it to air, I dug multiple small rooms near the deposit, which I sealed off with doors. As I break the surrounding rock to recover crystals, I'm being careful not to let too much of it pile up. I take the time to sort it as I go, and store the partial product in the rooms with the doors closed to limit their exposure to mana. That said, as I've mined into the deposit, it's gotten a little hotter due to the increased surface area as I've dug into it.

To help with this issue, I've started to cover the floor, walls, and ceiling of my mining tunnel with stone, which seems to have helped a little. Most of the crystals I've recovered are quite small, but I've recovered three that are comparable in size to the ones that the merchant gave me.

I took a few days to test how much of what size crystals I could reasonably store in a box to transport from the surface to the lab basement. As previous experiments indicated, the smaller the crystals, the larger the total volume I could safely transport as their efficacy goes down with their size.

After another twenty days, I called it for now. I got those three larger crystals and about two hundred pounds of smaller sized crystals that I can experiment with.

[Vol.6] Ch.7 Cutting Crystals

Previous experimental results indicated that smaller crystals produced less heat per unit mass than large crystals, and the new crystal samples also exhibited the same trend. Glass exhibits almost none of the mana insulative properties that full quartz crystals exhibit, despite both being silicon dioxide. So the first new experiment I wanted to run was determining if this also occurs with fluorite.

It did form into a glass, which was roughly the same color as the initial crystals, however, it was quite brittle. The chunk as a whole barely produced any heat, even when large amounts of mana were pushed into it via tectonic sense. As disappointing as that was, it lent more credence to the idea that the mana related properties that some crystals exhibit is an emergent property of the size of the crystal. Glasses are basically amorphous solids, with only the tiniest of crystals present in their structure.

For my next experiment, I sanded down one surface on one of the larger crystals, leaving it with a flat edge. I then retested the properties of the crystal, to see if it produced a proportional amount of heat to it's new mass, or if it made less than that. Basically, I was concerned if the mana related properties of the crystal were affected by the smallest plane within the crystal, or just the general size. If it's the smallest plane, then having one side sanded down would considerably reduce the performance of the crystal, more than expected from the small loss in mass. Thankfully, that doesn't seem to be the case.

This means I could, in theory, sand down crystals to tesselate, letting me fill a space with them. Rather than continuing that test with fluorite, I have excess quartz that could prove useful. It's much harder to test the quartz properties in this way, since absence of mana is harder to detect than existence. Though if it works, I can considerably reduce the volume of our freezers while simultaneously increasing their effectiveness. Quartz, however, is much harder than fluorite, and processing it will be much harder as well.

Basically, the only way we'll be able to cut quartz is to use a sand made from quartz, which we repeatedly drag along with a blade in order to cut quartz crystals down. The big issue with the current crystals is that they're tapered to different degrees, and they're different sizes. If we can cut them into rectangular prisms, then we can use them much more effectively for mana insulation, even if we weaken the property slightly for each individual crystal.

I'll do a test run to see if I can cut one. If I can, I'll design some tools so that I can set some goblins to mass producing quartz blocks that we can use.

It actually ended up being somewhat hard to devise a way to cut quartz without breaking them. The first few days were full of attempts using crude hand tools. Ultimately, I settled on an abrasive disc covered in quartz sand that was hooked in to a foot pedal to spin up to a high speed. Using that, I could get the disc rotating fast enough to make cuts into the quartz crystals, eventually cutting bits off and shaping them into rectangular prisms.

Since we then had a working method for cutting the quartz, the next step was to sort our larger quartz crystals into particular size categories, and settle on some standard sizes for rectangular prisms. If my hypothesis holds true, then larger quartz crystals will have a better mana insulative effect than smaller ones, even if stacked to the same shapes. So, for an initial trial, I devised two sizes of rectangular prisms to be made. One was twice the size of the other in each dimension, meaning each crystal would have eight times the volume.

After deciding on two trial sizes, I went to the north side of the city, and started setting up a waterwheel that could be used to power multiple of the grinders. Quartz dust is actually somewhat harmful if repeatedly exposed to, so I've also set up basic fume hoods over the grinders, with a glass shield and fan to help direct the quartz dust away from workers. I also plan on doing a rotating work schedule for these workers, similar to those who are processing the sulfuric ores. They'll take turns being on sorting or cutting shifts, to help reduce the amount of time they spend being potentially exposed to danger.

Twenty days later, and I had a quartz cutting facility set up. Even if it turns out that it's not as effective as I thought, having quartz shaped like this will almost certainly be more effective than the current packing system around our freezers, so I don't feel like it's a waste to be doing this. Even outside the freezers, it could be useful to surround a few prison cells with quartz to reduce the threat the prisoner poses.

The next step was hiring and training goblins to do this work. I settled on a workforce of twenty goblins. There are only four grinders, so it's a bit oversized, but there is other work besides the grinders that the goblins have to do. Sorting takes up quite a few goblins, and comes in multiple steps. The first step happens at the mine, where a handful of goblins sort through crates of quartz to find crystals that are potentially large enough to be used for the process. Then, a single goblin looks through those crystals to determine if they have any cracks. If they do, they're likely to break during the cutting process, so they're rejected.

Next, another handful of goblins determine which size prism the surviving crystals can be cut into, and sort them accordingly. The final non-cutting job involves packing the finished crystals carefully into crates, using dried plant material to act as cushioning between the each crystal to help prevent damage. The goblins take turns rotating from their primary job to the grinders, so each individual goblin only spends 1/5th of their work time being potentially exposed to quartz dust.

After taking eight days to train this new goblin workforce, I went to go make two more stirling engine freezers. Thanks to the larger workforce, they had cut enough quartz for the two freezers in the six days it took me to make the rest of the two freezers, so I was able to get them assembled and added into Tiberius's ongoing study on the decay rates of his various extracted essences.

He's already gotten some preliminary results which are somewhat promising. Most of the materials seem to decay slower while frozen, with one exception. The mana poison that we brought back for him to extract actually gets ruined when frozen, and stops working within an hour or so. However, it does last longer when isolated from mana, and it decays slower while cool rather than hot. Likewise, most of the materials seem to decay slower while mana isolated, though the mileage varies based on the material. I still want to wait until there is more data before building out larger infrastructure though.

With the aside to handle cutting quartz taken care of, I have some more testing with the fluorite I want to do. When molten crystalline material is cooled too quickly, it either forms a glass or multiple small crystals which precipitate out. I know firsthand how difficult growing larger crystals can be, and I was lucky enough that I figured out a method for growing mana crystals. First, I'll go up the mountain and try the same method with fluorite, and see if I can grow the fluorite crystals that way. If not, I want to try a few different methods to artificially grow larger crystals.

I spent five days on the mountain trying various methods to grow fluorite in the existing crystal apparatuses, and the only thing I achieved was damaging my smallest apparatus beyond repair. The molten fluorite cracked and destroyed the smaller fluorite seed crystal, and despite trying to heat the whole apparatus, I couldn't fix this issue. Small fluorite crystals formed on a bunch of surfaces, and basically rendered the whole device inoperable.

Unfortunately, that means I'll have to devise a different way to grow larger fluorite crystals, or just give up on the whole thing. The potential payout for being able to grow fluorite crystals is quite high. Ignoring the fact we could experiment with different inclusion materials, larger fluorite crystals of the heating variety could be shaped and used for all sorts of applications to reduce our dependence on wood as a fuel source. If you add in the potential to produce hydrogen at will, then the payout becomes even larger.

With that in mind, I think I'll start experimenting with growing fluorite in the lab. I have a few ideas of things I could try to attempt to grow the crystals.

[Vol.6] Ch.8 Refocusing on Mana Crystals

I knew that attempting to grow fluorite would be hard, but after a month of trying I don't feel like I'm any closer than I was when I started. Each time I recycle the fluorite by melting and solidifying it, it's color changes ever so slightly as well, which means that something is happening with whatever material is the inclusion in the crystal. I only noticed that after observing one of the larger natural crystals directly next to the most recent batch of failure synthetics.

That is making me a little worried, as color is about the only way we can currently tell if the crystals are safe or not. All the synthetics attempts I've made have been failures, and either glass, or just clusters of very small crystals, so they don't have much of a magical effect anyway, but I'm a little concerned what might happen if I succeed in growing a larger crystal from this recycled material. On the other hand, using non-recycled material would be a huge waste of our natural resources.

I said that I feel like I'm not making any progress, but that's not technically true. I've found a bunch of ways to not grow large fluorite crystals. It's nearly insoluble in water, so despite the fact it was probably grown naturally via hydrothermal methods, that process would take far too long to grow crystals artificially. I also do know that I can at least get small crystals from the molten fluorite, so I should be able to use that method to grow larger ones, as long as I can actually figure out the details of how to do so.

Since a month has passed, I need to go spend a few days fishing to get some levels, then I'll go do some more tectonic sense scouting in our tunnel. It's been a while since I did so, so I expect that I'll have quite a lot of scouting to do. The hydro facility has also gotten through their backlog of hematite and it's mid summer, so it might be worth draining the reservoir down to extract more stone and get more stone shaping goblins.

After a few days of leveling, I took a few days to use tectonic sense in the tunnel. With the dwarves assisting them, the scouting tunnel has made it quite far under the mountain. In another three years, maybe a little longer, I think they'll reach the middle section of the island, and we'll have to start digging from the other side. The team widening the tunnel is still quite a ways behind the much smaller scouting tunnel though.

As I went down the tunnel, I noticed a few changes in the rocks as I went, and ultimately, the stone they dug into most recently near the end of the tunnel looks very similar to the stone that made up the bulk of the cavern. Tectonic sense didn't show anything of interest in almost the entire mile that they had dug. However, at the very end of the tunnel, I detected a few empty pockets. They were small, but present, which hopefully means there are mana crystals here.

The extra crystals will help with speeding up mining, because crystal trays can be transported into the mine after recharging, allowing one miner to work for an extended time, rather than having to walk almost the whole tunnel to recharge their mana at the crystal. Obviously, I only intend to keep a certain number of crystals in a charging room, rather than the bulk of the large crystals. We'll only keep what's needed in the charging room, in case another mana surge happens, shattering all our intermediate crystals.

Unfortunately, I did break my smallest apparatus for growing mana crystals while trying to grow fluorite in it, but I do still have a few intermediate crystals in our storage, so if I intend to grow any large crystals, we could start that process at any time. Though that's a whole different ordeal now, since I don't want to stop at six or eight foot crystals. I want to get it up to sixteen feet tall, as to prevent it from breaking to mana surges like ParTor. I don't know if we'll even get enough crystals to do that with. A sixteen-foot crystal has the same volume as eight eight-foot crystals.

We couldn't make that many from our initial deposit, meaning we might still be unable to make one that large. Plus the amount of waste that I generate in the apparatuses grows with their size, due to the amount of the captured gas I have to charge them with. Realistically, it might take ten to twenty times the raw material of an eight-foot crystal. A way around that would be figuring out what the gas is, and using it for growing the crystals. We have literal tons of the waste solid stored away that could be reused if we could figure out what the gas is.

I do have a few hints to start looking into what gas it is, should I decide to start that process. I'm sure I've inhaled a lot of it over the course of the time I've been working on crystals, meaning that it's likely not toxic. The containers I've stored crystals in, as well as the pockets that we mine them in don't seem to be altered chemically, meaning that the gas doesn't seem to be reactive with stone. Add in that the gas doesn't seem to have a scent, and it's likely that it's very chemically stable.

Crystalline lattices are generally repeatable patterns of a material. Since the gas seems to be both forward and backwards compatible, since I can reform crystals from broken crystals, it likely means that the gas isn't forming any new molecules from being in the solid crystal vs the gas. Since I need the gas to actually grow the crystal, it means it's probably not just trapped in the crystal, but instead is integral to it's structure.

I'm not certain what the atmospheric composition is here, but it's likely not too far from what Earth had, given the similarities in what life looks like. Carbon dioxide can be ruled out as the mystery gas, since it's two different atoms. Nitrogen and Oxygen should be plentiful within the atmosphere, making them unlikely as the culprit. I'm almost certain it's not nitrogen given it's reactivity, but oxygen has an easy way to rule it out since I should be able to attempt to burn something using the gas. The gas seemed colorless, so that rules out a handful of gasses like chlorine, though again, chlorine is highly reactive, so I wouldn't expect it.

Factoring in all those things, I'm left with a single column of the periodic table, and it's somewhat surprising, the noble gases. Almost every other gas forms a diatomic molecule with itself otherwise. Once a diatomic molecule is formed, it's unlikely it would want to break back down into the crystal form. It's not impossible, and the heat being added when we melt the crystal material might be enough to encourage the molecules to break back down, but if that was the case, then it'd need to be a gas not present in large amounts in the atmosphere, since I wasn't able to grow the crystals in atmosphere. They were grown in a partial vacuum filled with the mystery gas.

If the gas is a noble gas, that means there is some odd chemistry going on that is beyond my earth knowledge. Some of the extremely heavy noble gases like Xenon can be encouraged to form molecules, though a crystal structure is basically out of the question except at very high pressures. If Radon was the culprit, I wouldn't expect ParTor to have existed for hundreds of years, since the radioactive half-life of radon is days. So, in all likelihood, this is some magical effect. That would also explain why the crystals seemed odd to me, and I didn't recognize them. They aren't a crystal you could find on earth, because the underlying physics would be impossible there.

I'm actually a little upset that I didn't reason this out sooner. Though even if I had, we've only just gotten to a technological point where that could potentially even matter. If it is a noble gas, as long as it's not helium, then we could potentially try to harvest it from the atmosphere by liquefying the air, then use fractional distillation to collect the noble gases. That would also get us closer to being able to synthesize ammonia by using concentrated nitrogen in the Haber process.

I was planning on just going back to work on fluorite, but now, even if those pockets don't contain any mana crystals, I think I want to attempt to liquefy air and separate it to attempt to grow mana crystals. The process will be somewhat difficult, but it's at least something I'm a little more familiar with, as compared to growing fluorite.

[Vol.6] Ch.9 Cryogenics Part 1

The process of separating air is quite complicated, and I have multiple major hurdles to clear before I can do so. The first step is making a functional cryocooler. This can be accomplished using a sterling engine, but I'll have to do a significant amount of fine tuning to make that work. My existing sterling freezers aren't that cold, and likely aren't even freezing carbon dioxide. That means there are significant improvements that I need to make before that can work. I already know of a few areas where significant improvements can occur.

The second step is making metal dewar flasks. I've already managed to pull a pretty good vacuum using stone shaping before, so if I can devise a way to utilize that before sealing off the walls of the flask, we'll have the design for containers for holding liquid air, as well as the distilled components. I'll also want to use similar technology we'll develop here to help insulate the distillation column we'll make in the next step.

In air separation processes on earth, air liquification and separation is done continuously. Here, however, we don't have the means to produce facilities to the degree necessary to do so. I also lack multiple bits of critical information to do so. For instance, I don't actually know what the atmospheric pressure is here, which critically affects the boiling points of liquid air components. I also don't actually know what the total air composition is here on the planet. If, for instance, nitrogen makes up far less of the atmosphere than on earth, I would potentially imbalance the distillation column and waste all the construction effort. I also can't remember off the top of my head the boiling points of the gases in air, so I'll have to rediscover that.

So, for the third, and hopefully final step of the process, I'll build a batch distillation column. Using a batch column, I'll be able to start separations, despite being unaware of the exact contents of the column. Since we're dealing with liquid air, the heated bottom portion of the column can be substituted with a metallic heat sink to boil off the liquid air. The condenser at the top of the column will be cooled using a large cryocooler.

If I have enough layers, then I should be able to pull of mixtures from the column tops repeatedly, with different batches being different compositions of the air. Whichever gas boils first should be largely the composition of the first batch, and so on through the different gases. This won't get us to 100% of any gas, but it will give me multiple different samples that I can use to start determining compositions from.

For instance, if the first liquid I pull off encourages flames, then it's liquid oxygen. If it doesn't, then it's some other atmospheric gas, likely nitrogen or argon. I probably won't be able to achieve temperatures cold enough to condense neon, hydrogen, or helium, nor do I expect the atmosphere to contain a large amount of it. I also don't expect to be condensing enough material to recover much xenon or krypton at this stage, as they, along with neon and helium, will likely be too rare to recover without processing very large amounts of air.

Since we're basically limited to using sterling cryocoolers, we'd need an extreme amount of them to produce enough liquid air to recover a meaningful amount of xenon and krypton, and we'd need a closed air system to isolate neon and helium. So I'm really hoping that Argon is our target gas for mana crystals. Argon is the best candidate though, followed by helium, just based on expected abundances, so that's encouraging.

The first round of improvements was fairly obvious for the sterling engine design. The regenerator needed to be completely redesigned first. I hadn't put much thought into the regenerator other than the fact it needed to be somewhat porous. To reach cryogenic temperatures though, all components of the engine are going to have to be as efficient as possible. For testing purposes, that meant I wanted an engine that I could easily resize the regenerator, and fill it with different packing material with high porosity.

First, I worked with Karsh to make dies for making metal wools. They're basically like the wire dies we made before, but instead of being perfectly round, they have a sharp edge that cuts into the hole, which causes a section of the wire to peel off. Those strands are then just bunched together to make the metal wool. Since we have a few different metal candidates, I gave the task to one of the goblin smiths to make a bunch of wools of each metal, and provide me with three different strand sizes of wool of each type.

Initially, I'm going to just use steel wool in the regenerator, since it should be good enough for testing other components until we get to cryogenic temperatures. Once I actually get a stirling engine down to cryogenic temperatures, then I'll experiment with the different metal wools, since at those temperatures, I expect the metals to behave differently than they do at ambient temperatures.

The second improvement that I knew I could make was replacing the air in the engine with hydrogen. With the one fluorite crystal we bought which produces hydrogen, I can collect a large amount of it, then dry it (since the act of bubbling it through water will evaporate water into the gas mixture), and fill the stirling engine with it. Hydrogen should be a significantly more effective gas for two reasons. Hydrogen should be a better thermal conductor than air, and I know that it liquefies at a much lower temperature than air.

The third, and final, improvement that I knew I could make off the top of my head had to do with the general shape and design of the stirling engines I had made before. In short, they need better thermal designs to reduce general losses. I need to make more portions from insulative components like dried lightstone, while also adding in better heat exchangers on the hot side, to help remove the excess heat.

Since I want to produce liquid air on the scale of gallons, I'll either need a lot of small stirling cryocoolers, or a few big ones. The general issue with larger coolers is being able to dissipate heat fast enough. I plan on building all the final components at the hydroelectric facility to provide consistent power to the setup long term. That being the case, I realized that I can utilize the mountain stream as liquid cooling to remove heat faster, so I decided to design a larger cryocooler.

Though for testing purposes, I started with a smaller design, to get a feel for the general mechanics, since it's much easier to replace and redesign a smaller cooler over a large one. I took a month just tinkering with various designs, and running them to check temperatures. By the end of that month, I'd gotten to the freezing point of the ethanol thermometers, and was able to make a small amount of solid CO2 from pre-dried air which had deposited on the cold side head.

Unfortunately, below the freezing point of ethanol, I don't have a great way of checking just how cold the stirling engine was getting, and without a dewar flask to hold liquid air without it evaporating quickly, I couldn't really tell if I was actually at that cold of a temperature. So that was the next thing on my agenda. If I have a dewar flask, and we can get to the point where air liquefies, then I can test different regenerator materials by measuring the total volume of liquid air in the flask after a set period of time.

Actually making a dewar flask wasn't quite as difficult as I initially thought it would be, and I was able to make five half-gallon flasks in ten days with Karsh's help. A dewar flask is just two containers, with a vacuum between them. You want as little physical contact between the flasks as possible, to minimize any conductive heat loss. I'm sure the method I settled on probably reduces it's effectiveness by a small amount. We were able to mold steel into the shape we wanted for a double walled container and left a small hole at the bottom. Then, using stone shaping, I slowly pulled a vacuum through that hole, and then sealed it with a large dried lightstone plug.

The downside of this method is that the lightstone plug is somewhat large on both the inside and outside, so that it can resist the vacuum causing it to break. Thus the flasks are a bit bulkier than I'd like, and the properties of the lightstone probably make it less effective than true scientific grade dewar flasks would have. I did make special lightstone stands for them though, so that the bottoms of the flasks aren't in contact with the ground as much, to help reduce losses a small amount. Though next year, once the reservoir is refilled, I want to try electroplating flasks with what little silver we have, to further reduce losses due to radiation.

The flasks seemed to work well, and kept boiling hot water hot for a considerable amount of time. With a few flasks ready, I can finally try to make some liquefied air.

[Vol.6] Ch.10 Cryogenics Part 2

I tested different configurations one at a time for a day each, with a day of downtime to adjust the build in between each test. By the third test, I decided to make a second stirling cryocooler for testing, so I wouldn't have to take a day of downtime to make modifications. By the fifth test's completion, I had the second cryocooler to work with. I then decided to make a third one, and run two tests in parallel at a time, since I still had quite a bit of free time while the tests were running.

After fifteen days, I had three cryocooler tests running at a time, with one down for changes at a time. With three cryocoolers, I was also finding myself having to spend some time each day or night producing the dry hydrogen to recharge the stirling system with, since each time I changed a component, I'd lose the gas during maintenance. Unfortunately by this point, I still hadn't achieved any success with liquifying air across the ten different test runs, and without a thermometer that could reach that low, I really didn't know how effective I was being. I did get some test results that at least led me to some preliminary conclusions on the matter.

My testing began with three different sizes of steel wool packed into three different sizes of regenerators. None of which yielded any liquid air. I moved on to the next prepared metal wool, copper, which again across the nine tests, didn't produce any liquid air. I got the same results for zinc and lead as well after a total of 36 tests over. However, the copper tests were unable to freeze the thermometer in all but one test, and zinc shared a similar fate in three tests.

In the copper wool tests, the only one that did still freeze the thermometer was the larger regenerator with the smallest wool size. In the zinc wool tests, the smallest regenerator failed with the largest and medium sized wool, and the middle size regenerator failed with the largest wool.

That information, while not perfect, indicates that higher thermal conductivity in the regenerator material is a problem, and that the regenerator might still be undersized. It also seems to indicate that I want higher surface area. As much as I'd like to just use metal shavings to drastically increase surface area, I don't have a good way to keep them in place in the regenerator, so I'm stuck with metal wools instead.

Thankfully, lead seems to work well, which means it is in competition with steel wool. Lead is quite soft, which should make it much easier to make a finer grain wool to use as well. So, I've decided that the next stages of testing will only involve steel and lead wools alongside new regenerator sizes.

The new tests were actually quite interesting. The new tests included the previous finest metal wools, and two new finer grains, along with larger regenerators. With our dies, this is probably the finest steel wool we can make, but I think we can still make even finer wool from lead. Ultimately, this round of testing was 18 trials long, with three regenerators and three wool sizes for the two metals. The largest of the new regenerators packed with the finest wools of both steel and lead also failed to freeze ethanol, however, the larger grained wools still worked in that regenerator.

My hypothesis is that as the wool gets finer grained, it has a higher resistance to airflow, causing losses. Despite the fact the largest regenerator with the smaller wools failed, the smallest of the new set of regenerators with the finest grained lead wool produced a miniscule amount of liquid air in the 24 hour period. Or at least, I assume it was liquid air based on it's behavior. That meant to me that I was potentially on the right track.

With that result under my belt, I decided to focus in on improving the lead wool and regenerator design in the next set of trials. I'll try to push the limit of how fine we can make the lead wool to see how effective we can make things.

After a week of testing, we were able to make an extremely fine grained lead wool by briefly heating the wire just before pulling it through the die and then catching the shaved piece on a plate to prevent the lead's weight from tearing the shaving. It was very labor intensive to make this ultra-fine grained wool, but it turned out to be worth it.

Since I believed we had somewhat dialed in on the correct property of the regenerator material, I only used two sizes of lead wools in the next tests, though I did use eight different regenerator sizes. The third smallest of these regenerators loaded with the finest of the wools produced the most liquid air, followed by the second smallest regenerator for total volume produced. So, I made an intermediate size between those two, and found that this intermediate was the new highest producer. I repeated that process of making intermediate sizes two more times before I settled on what I believed to be a fairly optimal size regenerator.

As for the amount of liquid air produced in a 24 hour period, we were still only looking at about a fluid ounce. There was a secondary problem that likely reduced the amount produced, however. That problem was buildup of ice and solid CO2. So I took a few days modifying the building where the crycoolers were housed. The room now has desiccants inside as well as in the newly installed air vents, to help reduce the total volume of water in the room. I watched the new production over it's 24 hour period, and periodically scraped off ice and CO2 that built up, and ultimately, this cryocooler design produced about 3 ounces of liquefied air.

When we move to larger production, we'll likely need to have workers manually scrape material from the cold condenser piston occasionally as well. Though, since I have these smaller cryocoolers, I do sort of want to put them to good use in the final facility by installing them in the air intake lines to the facility after the desiccant, to potentially condense out some of the CO2 before hand while also pre-cooling the air into the facility. It won't be much cooling, but I'd hope that some is better than none.

With that, I'm fairly confident that I should move on to the larger cryocooler designing stage now. It will also need a significant amount of testing done, and winter is only a month and a half away. I want to make sure that by spring, I'm ready to do testing.

The first issue I had with the larger design was that I needed a complete redesign of the hot side heat exchanger. Because the whole design was much larger than before, I needed a proper heat exchanger with small tubes to effectively transfer heat from the internal gas to the copper piping I was using. Since I was using small copper pipe, that also increased resistance, meaning I needed more powerful pistons to drive the exchanger. Due to the size of the whole device, I then needed to add a pump to a water reservoir that could run water over the heat exchanger, and the whole design kept growing and growing in size. It grew to the point that the only way to properly drive this cryocooler would be to use the dam, as it would be the only thing providing enough sheer horsepower to turn the whole thing.

I'm thankful that I decided on a batch process, so that downtime can happen each year to repair the engine as needed. The copper piping will probably need to be replaced at least once a year, and new grease will need to be applied regularly as well. Hydrogen will need to be recharged frequently, and the regenerator's internal material will need to be replaced on occasion to keep efficiencies high.

I ended up spending quite a bit of time building the housing facility for the cryocooler. It's a facility built onto the base of the dam, similar to the hydroelectric facility. The main spillway is situated between this facility and the hydroelectric one, meaning I really don't have any more space for facilities powered by this dam if I need one in a future. The hydroelectric facility does at least have extra space for more generators and machines though.

This facility could potentially house a second large stirling cryocooler in the future, and has space for the eventual distillation column. The facility has thick, triple layer walls with an air gap between each wall. The way in and out is through two sets of doors, where ideally only one set of doors is opened at a time to reduce air leakage.

There are four moderately sized vents to provide airflow into and out of the building, each of which has desiccant trays, that can easily be removed and regenerated as needed. On the inside, they each also house a box with a stirling cryocooler cold side condenser inside to pre-cool the air being drawn into the facility. A main crankshaft from the dam will then power those four smaller coolers, while the larger stirling cryocooler will have it's own power source.

Ultimately, all the construction and design took until the last month of the year to complete. Even with all that, I still need to do testing and resizing of components on the large cryocooler to try to optimize it's production of liquefied air once the spring rains refill the reservoir.

[Vol.6] Ch.11 Cryogenics Part 3

With a little time yet before I need to start testing the large cryocooler, I needed to catch up on the leveling that Zaka, Zeb, and I agreed to. Ultimately, I decided to not only do the couple of days of catch up, instead I did training until the start of the new year. It was a good break while I contemplated how I could handle the next few stages of work. No matter how many days I work on leveling though, it always feels like I've barely moved the needle anymore, which is too bad. It's even worse relying on fishing. At least on the other island, the large lizards still make a dent.

<APEX LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 69
HP: 3439/3439
MP: 1838/1838
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance, Partial Sleep
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands, Pulverize

I did come up an idea to improve how I'm doing testing while I was levelling. For one, while the ethanol thermometers do freeze before they're directly useful, I could cool a metal object down and submerge that in a consistent quantity and temperature of water, and measure the resultant water temperature. That will at least let me compare trial runs to see how cold things are getting in each run. Thanks to thermal hands, I shouldn't have much of an issue with getting the initial temperature set for the water either.

I had a copper ball made that was three inches in diameter, and I had some larger dewar flasks made, which could fit the new cold-side piston head through their opening. That took a few days of the start of spring to do, along with getting extra testing components made, but the reservoir does still need to build up some more volume before it'll be useful, so I didn't actually waste any testing time. I'm also fairly confident in my choice of lead wool for the regenerator, so that's at least one component of this larger cryocooler that I won't need to test.

I had hoped that I'd be able to do two tests a day with the larger cryocooler by using the metal ball for thermal tests, but I actually have a different limiting factor. I can only produce enough dry hydrogen to charge the larger cooler's internals with once a day, so I'm still limited in my available tests.

I have four main components I want to do testing on, the hot-side heat exchanger, the hot-side piston, the regenerator, and the cold-side piston. Unlike the previous tests with the smaller cryocooler, replacing each of those components is actually a decent chunk of labor from me and the blacksmiths. Each component likely has some degree of effect on the other component's sizing as well, so changing any one will affect the other's performances, making the testing somewhat difficult.

So I've made only two versions of each component for now, designed in the way that I suspect they might perform better. I have sixteen tests planned, using each of the possible combinations of components. From that, I'll try to get better insight into how the components interact at this larger size, and then make another set of components, and repeat the testing cycles through spring.

The first round of tests were very disappointing. In fact, none of them froze the ethanol thermometer. However, I did get insight into what direction to go for the next set of components. I kept the best combination of the testing components, and then made new components that were more exaggerated in the direction they were going. The hot-side piston became wider with a shorter travel distance, the hot-side heat exchanger tubes became slightly larger with fewer tubes in total, the regenerator became longer and thinner, as did the cold-side cooling piston.

The new components for testing took another five days to make, followed by another sixteen days of testing. After the second round of tests, two of the sixteen tests were able to freeze the ethanol thermometer, and required using the copper ball to start estimating their performance against each other.

It took three more rounds of this style of testing before I started to zero in on the best designs for the components in this configuration, which brought us out of spring and into early summer. I wasn't done yet though. Some of those configurations had started to produce liquid air, but I had only hit near the target. Each of the tests prior to this had involved fairly large step changes in component designs.

I resigned myself to using all the available dam time this year for testing, and then moving on to working on the separations column next year. I did five more rounds of refining of the design before the reservoir was depleted beyond the point of being able to drive the piston. The last two rounds were very marginal in their improvements as well, so I'm quite content with how this cryocooler works. In fact, the building itself was very chilly despite the season by the end of everything.

The final yield of the large cryocooler came out to be about a third of a gallon. Which might not seem like much, but considering where we are technologically, it actually is quite impressive, I think.

In the year or so I've worked on this project, I've basically neglected a ton of other projects that were ongoing, so I took the time to examine those in greater detail before I returned to start designing the batch separation column.

First, I checked in on how all the mining was going. The tunnel progress had slowed somewhat as more resources were diverted to looking for mana crystals. They have found some, but the crystals are fairly small, and the deposits are far fewer in number than they were around the cave. They're still expanding out to find more pockets within the layer, but the yields have been abysmal. Though having some crystals are better than having no crystals. They've set up a small storage room just before the crystal bearing layer, and have filled a handful of small crates with mana crystals, so we do have something.

One of the dwarves seems to have gained enough levels that they've gained access to their linear rock scouting ability that Konkur showed me. So they're basically digging tunnels from one pocket to the next, guided by his ability. I let them know that if they run out of pockets, they should just resume digging the tunnel forward, and not to stress over continuing to find mana crystals here.

The next thing I check in on was how all the experiments with Tiberius went between refrigeration and mana isolation. For the most part, things went quite well, and he's developed quite a list of results. While there doesn't seem to be an easy way to determine in advance what storage method will work best for a particular extract, they basically all fall into one of three categories.

The first are extracts that survive being frozen, and are indifferent to being isolated from mana or not. Only a single extract, the fish which throws its spines, seems to fall into this category, but it's conceivable that others will as well. The second type are those that survive being frozen, but do need mana isolation as well. About half of the extracts fall in this category, and seem to basically last indefinitely when frozen. They all experience some amount of effectiveness loss, but that seems to come from defrosting them, as they lose the same amount of effectiveness whether they were thawed either a day or a year later.

The final type are those that benefit from being cold and mana isolated, but break down once frozen. The remaining half fall into this category, including the mana poison type extract from the mountain plants. Unfortunately, everything in this category also seems to break down somewhat quickly, even when refrigerated. The longest lasting extracts lost about a quarter of their potency over the year. The mana poison plants lost about two-thirds of their effectiveness over the same period while being refrigerated. Making refrigeration of the mana poison practically pointless.

We also had the secondary experiment going with cut quartz, which yielded the results in line with what I expected. The larger cut quartz blocks performed better in isolating internal materials from the same thickness of the smaller quartz blocks, but both seemed to perform better than the randomly packed natural crystals. My guess is that the naturally packed crystals still have too many air gaps, so while they provide a decent chunk of isolation, it's not nearly as much as tightly packed crystal blocks.

With those results, I went to the quartz cutting area, and spent ten days adding in some new production lines. First, I added an even larger size block. While very few of those blocks will ever be made, having the option in the future to use them will probably be valuable. Second, for all three lines, I also added a function to the block cutters. The ability to make half blocks in both height and length. I don't want many of those made, but if we have multiple layers of cut quartz, staggering the spaces between them by using half blocks will probably improve the mana isolation efficiency somewhat, and even if it doesn't, it'll improve the resilience a wall made that way against physical collapse.

[Vol.6] Ch.12 Cryogenics Part 4

I had a few months left before winter, so I started work on the batch distillation tower. A major problem I'm going to run into with the tower is pressure. The tower will be condensing and evaporating air, forming layers of different concentrations of liquid, meaning equilibrium might actually occur at a higher pressure than I'd normally want. Unfortunately, with our technology at the stage it is at, I can't really control that without doing a few years worth of research. I already don't know what the air's overall composition is, nor do I know the exact ambient pressure. Both would play a critical role in being able to properly size the batch distillation process to avoid those sorts of issues.

So instead, I'm going to aim for overkill of the process. A batch distillation tower is basically a bunch of layers in a tower, where the bottom evaporates the material that we're trying to separate, and the top has a condenser to liquefy it again. Then, we need a way to pull material from somewhere in the batch process, in this case, I'll be using the top of the tower near the condenser, with a secondary collector near the bottom, in case I need it if something breaks.

I had initially planned on just using a few small cryocoolers for the condenser portion, but I'm now inclined to make the second large cryocooler, and have its cold piston feed the condenser. If I could thermally isolate the distillation tower effectively, then I'd be more confident in using a smaller cryocooler, but we'll likely be dealing with some amount of heat gain throughout the tower that the main condenser is going to be dealing with.

The bottom of the tower needs an evaporator, but given the cryogenic temperatures involved, I actually don't think I'll need a heat source. Instead, I plan on just making a copper heat sink to transfer heat from the ground directly into the distillation tower at the base. I also need to figure out what volume I want to process at a time, as that determines the size of the heat sink and the tower.

On one hand, a larger batch process ultimately means I can extract purer product, and it should also be more efficient. As the column increases in size, it's surface area to volume decreases, meaning the outside of the process has a lower percentage of influence on the temperatures in the process. However, the higher surface area also means that there is an overall increase in total thermal energy leaking in, which needs to be removed from the process somehow.

Ultimately, the current cryocooler produces about a gallon of liquid air every three or four days. Meaning that realistically, I could maybe process five to ten gallons in a batch. While I could try to go higher, I'd need to design a larger dewar flask to store more liquid, and give that flask it's own small cryocooler to help prevent loses over the time it takes to fill another container. Given I don't know that much information about the atmospheric composition, overkilling it with a ten gallon process might be a bad idea.

With distillation processes, the more independent layers you have, the better your separations are, at the cost of needing more thermal energy and a longer time to reach equilibrium. Layers I make aren't going to be perfect either. In high quality separations, layer design is highly important to getting good efficiencies. Each layer will house some amount of condensed liquid, and some amount of gas passing over top. Each tray in a layer needs a weir to hold some amount of liquid, and a way for gas to pass through.

From memory, having raised holes in the tray in each layer that the gas can rise through is a somewhat effective method. The inside of the column will be metal, with metal trays, but it will be encased with dried lightstone to give it some degree of pressure resistance. Then, I want to have a partial vacuum gap, similar to the dewar flask, and a second layer of dried lightstone. Then, outside that, I want an air gap, which is cooled with a stirling cooler. All of this is to try to remove as much thermal influence as possible from the outside world from the column.

Five gallons of liquid isn't actually that much volume either. I wanted to try to make twenty layers in the column, but that might be unrealistic given the total volume of material I'm working with. The column is going to end up being quite small, but that's probably for the best. Ultimately, I want to have a bunch of different tray designs made before I start testing, so I can swap them out quickly, and then make requests for new trays once I have an idea of what I might want.

I'm going to have to do a lot of fine tuning to make it work, and I'll need to come up with some testing methods to determine how well I'm actually separating products. The best test I can think of is that I can put dewar flasks of equal mass on a balance, and extract liquid from the top and bottom of the column of the same volume, and measure the mass difference. The larger the mass difference, the higher the purity of the the gases on either side. The biggest flaw with that is being precise with the volume of liquid gas in each flask, but if I make the flasks tall and thin, it should minimize that problem.

Building out the column took a bit longer than I had hoped, because I kept running into multiple different problems as I built different parts. First, because I wanted the partial vacuum layer and an outside cooling layer, I ended up having to partially compromise on that design so that I could have easy access to changing designs within the column itself. So, about 80% of the column is surrounded by that design, and twenty percent is designed as three removable wedges that are re-attached with stone shaping after any modifications are done. Meaning modifications will have an extra hour or so of work added in any time I want to do so.

Second, Rather than have to change the design of the building we're in, I ended up doing quite a bit of excavation into the ground to put the column in. The top with the condenser sits at ground level where the large cryocooler piston is. The bottom sits about fifteen feet underground, with copper being used as the heat exchanger, embedded into the ground to try to improve heat exchange on that side.

Third, designing new dewar flasks as well as the valves to pull material out of the column took some time. Getting everything right for a mass balance was relatively easy. Thanks to thermal hands, I can activate it along the rim of a dewar flask to attempt to evaporate a little extra of the liquid in one side of the balance if they aren't quite even.

After all was said and done, we only have 20 days of winter left, meaning we have about 30 days until I can start using the dam as a power source and start testing. Since I have just about everything ready, I'm going to go do my agreed upon leveling for the next year again. I'm both excited and afraid to finish this final step of the process. In the best case, we can make a ton of massive mana crystals. In the worst case, I've wasted a few years making a liquid nitrogen facility that we barely have any use for, if I can get the column working. If I can't, then we have a liquid air facility, which I'm not sure what uses we have for.

Initial testing results were awful. I expected bad results, but everything was basically mixed throughout the whole process, and that was after fixing multiple leaks and breaks that occurred during the first few tests. The biggest problem, by far, is that it takes a little over a day to modify the column for another test, since I have to wait for it to warm up some, then disassemble and reassemble everything. I am thankful that the production of liquid air at least keeps up with the column's losses of gases from extraction and mass balancing, so I wasn't waiting for more liquid air production before I had to run another test.

After a month of making various changes, I started to get the most minute of results, and it was because I had made a really dumb mistake. The larger condenser was pretty much overwhelming the passive heat sink, and the rock that the heat sink was attached to wasn't able to keep up. While I initially considered trying to use water, I had a brief epiphany, and exposed the heat exchanger to air, and cut a bunch of the larger fluorite heat crystals to fit the existing design, and attached them to the heat sink, and that worked, giving small results.

Unfortunately, I then had to take another month of time restarting on the tray experiments. However, I did start to see marginal improvements through various testing. Following testing results, I ultimately added more space to the evaporator at the bottom, and a larger tank for condensation, and charged the column with more total liquid, which helped. I also started narrowing down the tray design necessary for the whole process at that point.

After another month and a half, I'd gotten to a point where I was confident that I was separating the liquid gases to a high degree with the column. Meaning I could start testing on those purer gases.

[Vol.6] Ch.13 Argon

Out of each five gallon process, I could reliably pull out 9 half-gallon containers before it was difficult to pull more material out of the column. Due to the nature of a distillation column, the composition of the material I pulled out would depend on both which end of the column I extracted from, as well as what had been extracted prior. For example, if I pulled all nine samples from the top of the column, I would get different compositions than if I pulled from the bottoms.

To attempt to get my bearings on the composition gases, I pulled a sample from the top, then the bottom, and tried sticking a flaming stick into a small amount of each. The top sample didn't react, but the bottom sample flared up, likely meaning that liquid is rich in liquid oxygen. It's very likely then that the top is liquid nitrogen rich, but I'd need a different test to verify that for certain. I would expect argon to make up between 0.1% to 2% of the atmosphere, dependent on various factors like atmospheric thickness, and planetary age.

To get a rough estimate of oxygen concentration, I recharged the column with a fresh batch, and pulled quarter-gallon samples from the bottom, and repeated the stick test until the stick no longer flared up. By the fourth sample, it was barely flaring up, and the fifth sample no longer flared. With a little room for error plus the small percent of oxygen likely remaining in the column, I'd say that we have between 15% and 22% oxygen in our atmosphere.

I then resumed using the balance to try to determine the presence of a third gas. Results, while somewhat small, did seem to indicate a denser gas that has a boiling point between the two other gases. I tested this by drawing out different samples of gases from the tops and bottoms in a row, and testing them against each other. At the point where the oxygen starts to disappear, the density rises slightly, before falling quickly and remaining low. Considering it's a small spike in density in about one, sometimes two samples, followed by the remaining 4 gallons or so being lower density, I'm guessing that it's argon.

At this point, I've got about a month worth of water left in the reservoir to use before I'd need to wait until next spring to resume testing, so I really need to make things count. I could easily try to charge oxygen and nitrogen into a crystal growth apparatus to grow a crystal on the mountain currently. I currently am incapable of charging argon. What I would like to do is collect multiple of the argon rich samples, and throw them back into the distillation tower and enrich them further. For that, however, I'd need another small stirling cryocooler, with a cold side head that could be inserted into a dewar flask and kept relatively sealed, to prevent evaporation of collected samples while I distill them.

Given we're only actually making about a third of a gallon of liquid air a day, I don't think we'll actually make enough to re-distill out any reasonable amount of argon. We might, however, be able to pull a rich enough amount out of the column to at least attempt to charge a crystal apparatus with it. To achieve this, I'll initially pull off about two and a half gallons from the top of the column, then pull about a gallon and a half from the bottom, after reaching equilibrium again.

That gallon and a half will get mixed with liquid air again, and put into the column. Some basic fractional math will let me calculate how much more to pull off the top next time, and so on. After three cycles, I'll pull off some of the oxygen from the bottom as well. In doing this, I'm basically using the column as a cooled container where I'm slowly concentrating the argon, if it is argon.

As I hauled a dewar flask up the mountain, I wished it wasn't summer. I filled three flasks with what I considered to be the best samples I could for each of the three gases. I have a goblin on either side of me carrying one other flask each. Each flask is actually fairly small, only holding about a cup of liquid. Since I broke my smallest crystal growth apparatus, I'm going to be modifying the next largest size, and testing growth with what few crystals fit in that apparatus that I have left.

I plan on testing the oxygen last, given how high risk it is to actually use. I plan on starting with nitrogen, then moving on to the argon. That said, the argon test is actually still majority oxygen. If the argon test yields any results, the oxygen test should inform me of which of the gasses actually contributed. If none succeed, then I think I'll put the project on hold.

Well, I ruined this crystal growth apparatus as well, but not before getting some promising results. I modified the apparatus to have a gas charging chamber attached, where the liquid gases could boil and then enter the chamber as a gas through a stone-shaping operated valve. I had the two goblins I brought along remelt the old crystal slag, and then would slowly try to grow a crystal like I did previously. The nitrogen was useless, as expected.

The argon rich oxygen produced a very small amount of growth. The pure oxygen, however, did not produce any growth, and in fact, irreparably weakened the container, causing it to collapse when I tried to pull a vacuum to empty the chamber at the very end of work. I'm sure the argon test contributed, given it's large percentage of oxygen. Oxygen is so reactive, that I'm guessing it modified and weakened the structure to the point of failure.

The argon test being successful, even if minutely, was a huge win. It means I can move forward with the next stage of this whole process. First, I'll need to fix the two broken crystal growth apparatuses. Next, I have a few ideas for how I'd like to proceed with processing the argon to make it more pure. First, I'll need to make two more small cryocoolers, designed so that their cold-side piston fits snuggly in a five gallon dewar flask. That way I can use the cryocooler to keep whatever liquid inside in that state. Then, as I use the distillation column, I can pull of the quarter of a gallon of oxygen that was rich in argon.

By repeating that process 20 times, I'll have enough of the argon rich oxygen to repeat the process in the column again, and this time, I'll pull the argon from the top of the column. Though we might run into production issues at that pace. If everything works perfectly, we only produce about 60 gallons of liquid air in the operational months, but I want about a hundred for processing.

Even then, the total volume we produce on the tail end of that isn't that high. Depending on how the argon actually forms in the crystal structure, it probably won't add much more to the volume of a crystal than it possesses as a liquid. Adding a gallon of argon to a crystal apparatus, for example, probably won't grow the crystal by more than a few gallons itself. Considering a gallon is only about an eighth of a cubic foot, we'll need a lot of argon.

I'll eventually be able to check this, but for the sake of argument, if I had a gallon of liquid argon, and it grew a crystal by a cubic foot, I'd still need nearly 700 gallons of argon to get a crystal the size of ParTor. In short, our facility would need to be scaled up considerably for that to work. Even if it actually grows the crystal by ten times that amount, we'd still need 70 years to reach our target.

That is, it would take that long if we only relied on this argon production and the old crystal waste material. We do have the mana crystals that the miners are currently harvesting as well as the handful of leftover crystals in the cave. Next year, I'll probably also bring on some stone shaping goblins or lesser earth demons to take over the argon liquid gas production process, freeing me up to begin work on other processes.

As byproducts of the argon production, we'll have a decent amount of liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen. The liquid oxygen actually would be quite useful to aid in our ore roasting process. We could simply put a container of liquid oxygen to evaporate near the air intake for the roasting ovens, and the extra oxygen content should roast the ores more thoroughly, removing a larger percentage of the sulfur. The liquid nitrogen would also be a fairly pure source of nitrogen to use for the previously discussed Haber process for making ammonia. In fact, the oxygen would also be useful for attempting to make the iron oxide catalyst for the process as well, though the Haber process is still quite low on my priority list.

[Vol.6] Ch.14 Industrialization Plans

Fixing the two crystal growing apparatuses took a few days, but I ended up spending nineteen days on the mountain modifying all the other apparatuses to also allow for use of an external gas source. I also took inventory of all the crystal waste material we have on hand. It's about 600 cubic feet of the waste material, which would also be cutting it close for growing a crystal about the size of ParTor. If I factor in that I'd likely be starting from a crystal that is already two-feet tall, and that we do have other mana crystal material, then we should have enough material, once we get the argon for the project.

That said, the argon isn't going to be made very quickly. In order to make more liquid air, we'd need an even larger production area for it. The dam just doesn't really have enough available power to do so, and wind power won't cut it. In theory I could build multiple smaller facilities along the stream using water wheels, and then transport the liquid air to the distillation column, but that would produce so little liquid air compared to the resources used that it's probably not worth it.

I have thought about the idea of using fluorite crystals to produce heat to boil water to drive machines, or used directly in a stirling engine as the heat source. In theory, that could work, but it does come with a few engineering problems of it's own. While individual crystals can produce a decent amount of heat, the bigger the area of crystals the less effective they are at actually converting mana to heat.

I theorize that the mana has issues penetrating into a pile of crystals before potentially being rejected outward. So while four crystals might, in theory, produce 50 watts of energy in the form of heat, sixteen crystals in a similar area may only produce 100 watts. While there is still a net increase in heat, there are significant losses of efficiency. A single crystal with the mass of the four original crystals, by comparison, might produce 100 watts on it's own. These numbers aren't exact, obviously, but they're observation based heuristics, using the research I did on the fluorite crystals before.

Now, there are a few solutions to that problem. One potential solution is to simply grow large enough singular crystals that they boil water without overheating themselves to the point of melting. If I grow the crystals deep underground, I could grow them obscenely large, then cut slices out of them, so they have very large surface area, while still maintaining a fairly large volume. Depending on the actual amount of heat they produce, I could space these sources out and combine their steam lines to power a large steam engine. A turbine would be better in place of a steam engine, but without stainless steel, a turbine would likely be too high maintenance and the design would be much more complicated.

A second solution, and my own preferred option, would be to simply install a large mana crystal upstream of the water inlet, providing a mana rich water as the source thus increasing the output of the individual crystals. The issue with this, obviously, is that it puts the cart before the horse. We currently are trying to make a large enough crystal to put on the surface again, so we definitely don't have a spare to use on this.

A second problem with this potential process that I fear might happen is something I'm going to call mana stripping. We already noticeably felt the loss of mana in the water when the crystals that had been submerged in our stream broke. If I then used that same stream to boil water with fluorite crystals, I have a feeling it'd consume the remaining mana in the stream, leaving none for anything downstream. Never mind the fact that we'd want to use a condenser to recover the water we boiled.

If, instead, I tried to go with a stirling engine design, I'd run into multiple problems. First, stirling engines actually are fairly low power, and our large cryocooler actually does require a decent amount of horsepower to work. Second, these power generating stirling engines would basically need to be run with air as their operating fluid, rather than hydrogen. The hydrogen engines, while much more efficient, require more maintenance and a constant supply of hydrogen. We only have a small supply of hydrogen, so it would be impractical to use it here.

There are many design challenges involved in making these stirling engines as well. I'd basically need to design a standard crystal cut, like I did with quartz, so that I could easily make stirling engines that could have said crystals embedded in the hot side of the engine. Figuring out how to grow fluorite, and determining what inclusions produce what effects would potentially let us produce hydrogen on a larger scale, as well as allow us to make decently sized crystal plates to use for producing heat.

After thinking through all those possibilities, I'm really inclined to try to resume fluorite crystal growth research. It seems like a real contender as a magic shortcut to sparking an industrial revolution, since we'd exponentially increase our available energy to drive machines. If we could get the heat in the fluorite deposit under control, I'd like to get some other people to start extracting more of it. I suppose I could always check to see if any of the goblins have gained heat resistance, though I doubt they'd also have stone shaping.

While I worked on the new dewar flasks and stirling engines for the cryogenics facility, I checked in with our records, and while we do have goblins with heat resistance, none have stone shaping. They're really quite different groups if I think about it. The goblins with heat resistance all work around the various furnaces, and they generally only handle already processed ores. At first glance, it'd seem reasonable to just use a pressurized air pipe to bring cooler air from outside into the fluorite mine, but that would introduce a large amount of mana, just heating the whole area again.

As I installed the new cryocoolers in the cryogenics facility, I realized that I obviously have a solution right there. When we pull of liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen from the top and bottom initially, we can remix those cryogenic fluids into a slightly more oxygen rich solution than normal, and transport a few gallons of the mixture to the mine. I'd need to make a basin where it could be poured out to evaporate, but I'd suspect that it'd only provide a few hours of reprieve. While it couldn't run all the time, it'd at least let people other than me extract the fluorite, plus it's a straightforward use for our byproduct cryogenic fluids that doesn't require much additional work to use.

As I thought about the stirling engines, I also realized that we could keep subpar crystal clusters of fluorite in the greenhouses for salt evaporation. The extra heat should increase the rate that the water evaporates, making them even more productive. All this will have to wait for next year, when our first actual batches of cryogenic fluid are made.

After finishing all the work that I had planned to do for the next cryogenics year, I first checked in on the mine. There were a few changes that had happened since last year. First, the exploratory tunnel was continuing to be extended. They'd run out of crystals to harvest that they could find. With the dwarf who has his own version of tectonic sense, I don't even need to be the one to scout for materials. It takes him a bit longer to scout all around the tunnel at various points than it takes me, given his sense is in a straight line, and his total mana pool seems quite a bit smaller than mine. Since he works all the time though, it's a few days a year that I don't have to spend, so I'm happy.

The large metal ore deposit earlier in the mine is also practically depleted. We actually do have quite the large stockpile of metals backed up now thanks to this deposit, so I'm hoping it will last us at least until we find another deposit. After discussing with Zeb about our stone demands, it seems like we're still operating with quite an excess of stone for construction.

So, I decided to change how we're operating in the mine as we build the tunnel. Rather than transport stone all the way out of the mine, some of the stone is being used to fill in the large mined out area. We're taking a small amount of the nicely cut stone, and using that to make support pillars at frequent intervals in the pit mine. Then the space between the pillars is being filled in with any loose oddly shaped stone, gravel, and sand made using pulverizers. After four or so feet has been filled in, stone shaping is used to make a foot thick solid layer of stone, then the process is repeated.

Ultimately, the time saved by not having to haul stone all the way out of the tunnel is lost on having to haul it to the bottom of the pit. However, I don't really like the idea of leaving a large hollow space under the mountain like that. If we had an earthquake or similar event, the hollow pit would likely cause catastrophic failure of the land above it. By filling it back in, at least some of the potential damage will hopefully be mitigated.

[Vol.6] Ch.15 Managerial Interlude

Before starting on another long endeavor, I thought it would be a good time to check in on the solar and temperature observation team, to see how data collection has been going, and take a few days looking over their observational data. Interestingly, there were quite a few other factors that I hadn't considered, which seemed to be contributing to the seasonal temperature changes, and there were quite a few trends that I'd really failed to notice.

First, while the eclipses occur every month, some months they aren't visible from our part of the planet, but we still notice the mana effect at night. As it turns out, they occur at the same part of the day in each month every other year. So, for example, the eclipses that occur around summer time happen near dawn and dusk on alternating months, and the next year, they've switched whether they occur at dawn or dusk. So while it might seem somewhat unpredictable, it's actually somewhat regular.

I do appear to be on the right track about solar and lunar eclipse coincidence rates for seasonal effects to some degree. The summer months experience two overlaps of lunar eclipses with solar eclipses, and the two other eclipses seem to occur at solar minimal output. During winter, however, there are back to back eclipses just before, and then just after, the larger star gets eclipsed by the smaller one, leading to a much larger drop in overall solar heating.

Interestingly, however, I failed to notice that throughout any month, the temperature slowly climbs until the eclipse occurs. If the eclipse occurs during the daytime for us, the temperature generally stays low throughout that day, and falls again at night, resetting the cycle. If the eclipse occurs over a different part of the planet during our nighttime, there is usually a steady fall or stagnation of temperatures over a three to ten day period.

Surprisingly, there actually appears to be very little solar activity in the form of sunspots. Of course, solar cycles can take a long time, so perhaps it's just a coincidence that we've recorded almost no sunspots on either star.

After spending five days looking over the temperature and sun data, I was approached by Zeb. In short, now that excavation has ended on the ore deposit, we have too many people working in the tunnel. Previously, we had two teams excavating the deposit, a team working on the expanded tunnel, and a team working on the scouting tunnel. Now, we have three teams working on the expanded tunnel. Two teams is basically already pushing the available work space, and if we weren't filling in the mining pit, it'd definitely be overkill.

So, we discussed what to work on next. The mining tunnel has access to mana crystals, meaning anyone working in there is working at a faster pace than they otherwise could be. To continue expanding our ranks of stoneshaping goblins, we've had one team that assists on expanding the reservoir every year since we lost the surface crystals while a handful of goblins manually break rocks to expand the reservoir itself.

During the off season, we haven't been having those goblins do any manual rock breaking, since it's hard for stone-shaping goblins and dwarves to keep up with the sheer volume of rock being made. Instead, those construction teams have gone on to expand and build the jetties around the island for fishing. I haven't really taken the time in a few years to see how those projects have been coming, but Zeb has informed me that pretty much all of the jetties we had originally planned have been built out. There is a little work left to do on one jetty on the far side of the island, but that's about it.

All in all, it means that we'll soon have five construction teams that need new assignments. I have a few ideas for projects that would basically be just as difficult with or without surface crystals. Any project that requires a lot of movement, like road construction, tends to benefit very little from large surface crystals, since you need a facility to properly provide mana for recharging. So, on a crude map, I discussed plans for a new road.

This road will go around the other side of the island, through the craggy terrain. Though, there are a few changes between this road and the other road. The other road is meant to be only that, a road. For this road, I also want it to be built in parallel to an aqueduct. Currently, any time it rains, all that water runs quickly down the craggy terrain and into the ocean, wasting precious freshwater. Due to the slopes, those sharp valleys experience flash floods during rainstorms, making harvesting that water difficult.

So, on the map, I laid out my plans for how this road and aqueduct will be built. It's basically an upward sloping road, with the aqueduct running beside it. We'll tunnel through the ridges to keep a constant slope, intersecting with the centers of valleys. Along the valleys, I'm going to have the goblins in charge of rock dams begin building them wherever they can. I'm even going to have them hire on more goblins, just to make sure that all the dams are well maintained. For quite a few years now, they've simply been doing maintenance on the rock dams in the two valleys on this side of the island, with no new workers. Despite that, our population has grown greatly, so they could do with having a few more workers, and expanding their work area.

The aqueduct and road will actually be begin their path above the dam, allowing all the flow that runs down the aqueduct to be collected in the dam, which should also prevent any accidental flash flooding due to potential failures in the other valleys. Overall, this should increase out water supply for our city by a decent amount, while also giving us easier access to any natural resources we might find in any of those craggy valleys. For good measure, we'll also be coating the aqueduct in a layer of lightstone, to hopefully help prevent erosion. The slope of the aqueduct is planned to be 1/200, and travel about eight miles around the edge of the island. As a whole, this project probably won't take more than a year or two, considering how many construction teams will be working on it. Though they won't all work on it year-round. Some will still spend part of the year expanding the reservoir area.

So, after the aqueduct and road are done, I've also laid out two other roads that I thought would be nice to have. One is a road leading up to the mountain peak, continuing on from the road leading up to the cave. The other is a road designed to run along the coast along the bottom of the craggy valleys. That road in particular will actually be built with a raised platform with paths for water to flow under it during rainstorms because, as mentioned before, those valleys are prone to flash flooding. If we include both of those road projects, we'll probably be set for five years of work, even after factoring in the increasing number of stoneshaping and improved stoneshaping goblins and lesser earth demons.

As for what I'll be doing while I wait for next spring, I'm going to resume trying to grow fluorite crystals. Tiberius is nearing the end of his current research, and this seems like it would be right up his alley. Though if I succeed in growing a fluorite crystal, I'll need to make sure that the area where they're grown is deep underground and mana shielded. The last thing I want is him experimenting with random inclusions, and causing a nuclear explosion by growing a crystal too large with some particular inclusion material.

[Vol.6] Ch.16 Artificial Fluorite

While I had been working on the cryogenics facility, I had thought about methods for growing fluorite crystals from time to time. So, I resumed my research with renewed vigor. However, that vigor ran out fairly quickly. My first few attempts involved attempting to partially heat the top of the molten fluorite, and slowly cool it down to grow the crystal. All of those attempts still failed. Too many new nucleation points, or simply the production of a glass were the results of those experiments.

So, after a month of attempts, I tried a different approach. Instead of moving the heat source, I instead tried lowering the vat of liquid fluorite. That seemed to initially have the same issues as before, but I persisted and tried tinkering with the process. I found that if I lowered it too quickly, it'd form a glass, and as I slowed down the rate that the vat was lowered, I started getting nucleation of crystals. The problem was that I was getting multiple crystals all over the vat, and they remained fairly small, eventually getting encased in glass themselves.

I changed out the vat for a vat made of polished steel, and changed up my entire apparatus. Instead of manually lowering the vat, which seemed to always result in it getting lowered too quickly, I changed it to be gear driven, with a gravity driven escapement mechanism to very slowly lower the vat away from the heat. The first few tests were slightly more successful than the first, but I was still having the issue of too many nucleation points.

After another month of testing in total, I changed the vat design again, this time having the bottom of the vat shaped the same as a singular fluorite crystal. My hope being that the lowest point, which would be furthest from the heat source, would also provide the starting for nucleation, and that crystal would be where all the new fluorite deposits.

This method had mixed, but improving results. Intermediate results would still have too much nucleation occurring, with new crystals growing off the sides of the vat, or even on the face of another crystal. I decided then that I still had a few too many variables to control to properly form this process. For one, I was still attempting to heat the vat using charcoal, so the temperature was likely fluctuating a lot near the top of the vat. A second issue was likely that the whole process was still exposed to air.

So, I took a month and a half attempting to alleviate both of those issues. While I'd love to use a fixed rate hydrogen fire to generate the heat for this process, we don't really generate enough heat for the vat I've been using for testing. We can, however, improve the consistency of the heat in a different way. If we used standardized charcoal pellets over raw charcoal, the general temperature fluctuations should be smaller with the more consistent fuel source. Of course, producing charcoal pellets was easier said than done.

First the charcoal needed to be pulverized into a powder, which was fairly easy with our given technology. However, the process of compressing and cutting pellets was a little tricky to rediscover, and I got fairly lucky. I designed the pellet machine to compress powder through small die, like how we make wire. However, since I want regular pellets, I wanted the cutting process and the compression process automated and tied together mechanically, so they'll always work at the same pace.

Ultimately, I lucked out in that I just so happened to time the passage of the blade which knocks the pellets off with when the compressive roller would finish forcing powder through the die. If I hadn't timed it like that, the machine would have output a lot of failed pellets in addition to a few good ones, and I'd probably have wasted a day or two figuring out what was wrong. After hooking the pellet press up to a small windmill, I then tasked some goblins with making charcoal pellets from now on. Besides being potentially useful to me, the stable burn of pellets will probably also be useful in some precision metalworking which the blacksmiths might want to do.

I also did some design work on how the heating element is fueled, to keep the heat source balanced. Thanks to having already worked on the pelletizer, I already had a good idea of how to make sure our fuel source was evenly distributed, and I designed a rotating pellet source and scoop to constantly rotate above the fire, pouring new pellets on slowly, while also scooping excess pellets off that might have piled too high.

The vat itself was fitted with a stone lid, with a stone shaping vacuum valve, so I could attempt to remove any potential impurities that might occur from that end. After finishing this new design, I've realized that I only have a little under two months left before I need to start training goblins on cryogenics to get that facility running more permanently. Which basically means if this new design doesn't work then I'll have to put artificial fluorite on hold again for a few seasons.

Results seemed promising enough in the first real trial that I continued my attempts. I say first real trial because there were multiple mechanical hiccups during the first few days of tests. Seven days in, I had my first real taste of success, albeit a bit lackluster. The crystal seed at the bottom did grow to be the largest crystal in the vat, but there were still numerous other crystals forming throughout the vat's walls. That trial growth ran over 12 hours in total. The largest crystal still had off-growths on it as well, so I slowed the growth process down further by inserting extra gears into the escapement mechanism.

After multiple trials of increasing duration spanning 25 days in total and some upgrades to the escapement mechanism, I finally succeeded as much as I think I'll be able to with our current technology. There were still some secondary crystals growing on the vat walls, but the main fluorite crystal in the center of the vat was the bulk of the mass. The main crystal was practically flawless, and because it was grown on the surface, it was still extremely hot to the touch.

The first artificial fluorite crystal that showed success was practically colorless, but had a very faint orange tinge, a remnant of what little of the natural impurity was left after melt cycling it so many times. The crystal also produced the faintest amount of heat still. The largest natural fluorite that I had pulled from the limited amount I mined was about 4 inches along it's diagonal. By comparison, this crystal was about twice that height at just over 8 inches.

While an 8-inch octahedron is nice, I'd like to grow larger ones in the future, now that I know that it's possible to grow them artificially. It's also important that I handle the crystals as little as possible as we melt them down to reform them, as to attempt to keep as much of the natural inclusion material as possible. For research purposes, we actually want to do the opposite, and heavily process and filter until we have naturally pure fluorite, which we can then attempt to add inclusions into.

In retrospect, I should have probably been wary of the transparent fluorite, in case it too produced any unknown magical effects. Though by the time I realized that, I'd been handling this new crystal for a few days while experiencing no symptoms. With just over a month left, I want to grow a colored fluorite crystal this size, and test some plates cut from that crystal to see how they perform.

I ended up having to mine more fluorite to make a good batch of molten fluorite material. That being the case, I decided to mine enough for a few batches of crystal growth, just in case I had any other sudden ideas while I worked. While I did successfully grow an 8-inch tinted fluorite crystal, it's color was still slightly fainter than the natural crystals I had mined to make it. Since I grew it on the surface, with ambient mana about, it was actually quite hot to the touch even after it should have technically been cooled down.

Thankfully, fluorite is pretty soft, and I was able to easily cut an inch thick plate from the center, leaving me with a squarish plate measuring just over 5.5 inches per side. Then, I was left with two square pyramids each 3.5 inches tall. While I could continue cutting the pyramids down, they could each be useful on their own as well, and the larger the crystal, the more efficiently it turns mana into its final product, so breaking it down further might be a waste.

After testing the plate, it still seems like crystals, or at least fluorite, rely pretty much entirely on volume for magical effectiveness. The plate, while only 1 inch thick, and 5.5 inches to a side, has nearly three times the volume of a 4-inch fluorite crystal, and seems to produce an appropriate amount of heat that I'd expect for that volume. The difference, however, is that it has a much shorter distance to it's center from the surface, meaning it can dissipate heat generated across it's volume faster, making it much more useful for industrial purposes.

Although I don't have proof of it yet, I also suspect it can probably intake mana more effectively, given it has a higher surface area to volume ratio. While a small crystal would have an even larger surface to volume ratio than the plate would, small crystals suffer from being unable to produce much of a magical effect, losing any advantage they might have had.

After only nine days of work though, I recalled that I should probably go do some levelling again before the new year begins so I went and did thirteen days worth. Next, I'll need to train the new goblins on how to operate the cryogenics facility. After those goblins are trained, and I'm confident in their abilities, I plan on trying to design a much larger fluorite crystal growing vat. Since the 8-inch crystal was already quite hot on the surface, I'll actually need a decently sized underground facility to do this work in.

<APEX LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 74
HP: 3589/3589
MP: 1893/1893
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance, Partial Sleep
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands, Pulverize

[Vol.6] Ch.17 Gambler’s Hall

Operating the Cryogenics facility actually requires that you have access to stoneshaping magic, since a few of the maintenance and access processes require it. So, I had to go and talk with Zeb, and ultimately, I took in six stoneshaping goblins who had gained access to the magic within the last two years. I wanted goblins that were relatively low prestige, in case there are any interesting new abilities that they might gain from working in such a cold environment.

In addition to the six stoneshaping goblins, I'm bringing on 12 additional goblins to work in the facility. While I was able to work 24 hours a day, that would be impossible for the goblins, so they're being split into three shifts, each having two stoneshaping goblins and four regular goblins. This way, everything can run around the clock, with very little interference from myself. Unfortunately, it also means I'm basically losing access to the hydrogen generating fluorite crystal, since they need it for maintenance work on the stirling engines in the facility.

I showed them how to operate all the machines, and gave them various other instructive duties, and made some extra dewar flasks to handle the extra tasks I had for them. For instance, they'll be pulling off oxygen and nitrogen from the distillation column, then mixing them again and preparing them for transport to the fluorite mine.

I talked it over with Zeb when I asked for the six stoneshaping goblins, and we'll be borrowing a construction team every so often to go work on fluorite extraction for a day at a time when we have enough cryogenic air to cool the mine down. Since this cryogenics facility is built at the base of the dam, and the new road and aqueduct are being built above it, it should be easy to get a team's attention when enough fluid is prepared to make the mine bearable, though I do still need to go and dig the basin out in the mine for them to pour the cryogenic fluid into. I plan on coating the basin with copper plating with heat sink fins, so that the air is what's cooled rather than the underlying rock.

After working with the cryogenics team for a full cycle of everything in the facility taking fifteen days in total, the numbers worked out that we basically need two cycles of the distillation tower before the fluorite mine can be used. That means about once a month the fluorite mine will be active for about eight hours or so. Though again, that's still better than wasting the cryogenic liquid, and having to mine fluorite myself all the time, though it'll end up taking more than a year before the time I put in to make the basin actually pays itself back. If I'm able to craft some large fluorite crystals though, that turn around time might become quicker if I can make a new industrial power source in the form of fluorite heat plates.

With the help of a set of blacksmithing goblins, I got the basin designed, crafted, then installed in the fluorite mine in seven days time. Meaning that there is still about eight days until we'll be ready to test it. I then checked in to make sure that the cryogenics facility was still running well before heading over to the lab to start excavating my new fluorite lab area.

Since I want it to have access to the current underground mana crystal so that Tiberius could use it for testing, I started digging the new stairwell down in that underground lab. I've started the new stairwell across the mana crystal lab from where the current stairwell enters. To help with mana isolation, I've installed a sliding door at the top of the stairwell, which is filled with the smallest quartz blocks.

The stairwell isn't nearly deep enough yet though. In the seven days I worked on the stairwell, I've dug down 30 steps, with each step being a half a foot tall. For the sake of safety, I want to go another 170 steps down under the mountain. I could probably work quite a bit faster if I hire some goblins to haul the stone I'm removing, since that was what took most of my time up.

I took three days to oversee the fluorite mine, and make sure everything worked the way I intended. While there was some initial difficulty because I hadn't considered the hazard that cryogenic fluid pooling on the floor may cause, there wasn't any permanent damage to anyone. One of the goblins touched the fluid as I poured it out, but withdrew his hand nearly instantly. It looked like he received some mild frostbite from the encounter. The incident reminded me that I should probably give safety discussions before, not during the time when they'd be important.

In any case, the cryogenic fluid evaporated fairly quickly, and brought the end of the mine's temperature down to nearly freezing. Over the course of about six hours it warmed back up to unbearable levels for everyone except myself. With the help of a whole mining team however, quite a bit was extracted. The total extracted amount was about twice what I could extract alone in a 24 hour period.

I then returned to the city to hire a handful of goblins to haul stone for me while I excavated the new basement. There, I noticed a building that didn't look like the others. I haven't been spending much time in the city in the last few years, but construction has continued at a steady pace. This building, however, looked like it was made of stone blocks, and had a different architectural design, one I recognized from Kao's island.

It stood two stories tall, shorter than the surrounding apartment buildings, but taking up twice the ground space. Intrigued, I entered the building. Inside were tables occupied by a majority of dwarves, but with a few goblins and hobgoblins too, all participating in different kinds of gambling. Some seemed to be basic dice games, while others were too complicated to determine at a glance.

One thing I've learned over time, and sort of gotten used to, is that demons really aren't that creative naturally. There are outliers obviously, but all in all, they're all a quite straightforward group. What demons lack in creativity, they make up in adaptability, however. They're exceptionally quick to learn tasks when taught, and generally follow orders well without much need for entertainment, though they're still subject to things like greed.

After asking around a bit, it seems that Zeb gave the dwarves that were helping with construction the go ahead to build this place, as long as it didn't interfere with their daily work. In the evenings, they'd each do a little bit of work, building up this building. While I was asking around, Shasta walked in and joined one of the tables. While I was interested in what the building had to offer, I decided not to interrupt her free time to ask about it, instead opting to ask around between different tables.

After a few hours of asking around, and schmoozing by giving out money in exchange for information, I had gotten the gist of the whole facility. The majority of the first floor were the gambling tables. All the tables operate on an honor system with no designated dealer and no upper or lower limit on gambling. The building isn't really a casino, and isn't trying to turn a profit. There are, however, a few dwarves who work here full time. They've built stills in the basement, where they've been brewing alcohol.

The top floor functions as a kind of inn, where patrons who get a little too drunk can stay overnight. Initially, the upstairs was a second gambling hall, but Zaka had to have a talk with them after dwarves would stumble through the city drunk in the middle of the night, vomiting on the streets, so they remade the upstairs into a place for the drunkest among them to stay.

Entertainment was something that I'd really neglected developing, but even I didn't feel a need for much of it. Most of the work I was doing was interesting enough. Though perhaps that was actually just how demon minds work, needing less entertainment. Either way, it seems that a few of the goblins and hobgoblins seem to enjoy the facility. Though from what I gather, it's actually a fairly small minority. I have a feeling that if I looked into the matter, they're probably gambling addicts, but cost of living is cheap, so I'm not going to worry about it too much.

In fact, I was able to recruit some laborers who seemed more than eager to earn some spare cash by hauling stone for me, furthering my suspicions about their addictions.

[Vol.6] Ch.18 Fluorite Growth Lab

I ended up needing to replace some of the laborers that I hired in the gambling hall after five days. They basically stopped showing up to work, so I went and found new workers, only for the original ones to show back up after a few days, begging me to let them work again. They're definitely gambling addicts.

I let Zaka know the situation, and left it to him to decide how he wants to handle them. I'm inclined to let them live their life as long as they don't start committing crime to fuel their addiction. It's not my problem to handle them anymore, though, and some of the original workers from the gambling hall have continued to work well, so I don't think that they're actually addicts.

In any case, excavation of the fluorite growth lab has been going well after that initial hiccup. About halfway down, I excavated a landing and storage room, where fluorite can be stored intermittently. On either side of the landing I've installed another sliding door with quartz blocks added in. The idea being that, hopefully, whatever mana is still in the air by this depth gets consumed by the fluorite in the storage area, leaving almost none for the growth lab even deeper underground.

In twenty days, we've managed to get down to the level where I want to build the new fluorite growth lab. There is still quite a bit of excavating to do to actually make the facility. There are a lot of factors that actually have to be considered for the place itself. The path down here is so long that I'm quite concerned about running out of oxygen. We don't have any source of light outside of fire, because I want to keep the mana levels at near zero, meaning we're really burning through the O2. It's somewhat cool underground, so I do have an idea for how I could at least attempt to make this more functional, though I'm going to have to wreck a bunch of natural fluorite to do so.

In essence, I want to make an air inlet and outlet pipe going down to the lowest level. Throughout the inlet pipe, I want to put fluorite crystals cut into mesh shapes and fit onto heat sinks installed periodically down to depth. Hopefully, as the air passes through those meshes, mana that is being carried in the air will get consumed and turned into heat. The heat can then be dissipated into the tunnel and rock.

I'll also need to create a stable power source to power fans on the air inlet and outlet. Since this is actually a fairly low power application, I'm thinking about using the singular fluorite plate that I've already made from the 8-inch artificial crystal to power a small stirling engine to drive both fans. If I also have the stirling engine close to the air inlet, it'll hopefully drain even more mana out of the air prior to it entering the system.

While I started designing the stirling engine to power the fans for the lab, the second batch of fluorite mined with the help of cryogenic cooling in the mine was delivered, and taken down to the storage area. I gave a few goblins the task of sorting the largest natural fluorite crystals out, while the smaller ones were set to be melted down.

The general design of stirling engines comes naturally to me by now, there were still design choices that I made that meant I couldn't just re-use old designs. For starters, I have that fluorite plate that is functioning as the heat source. It's only 5.5 inches to each side, and an inch thick, so it's not that large, but it's still quite hot. If I rest a thermometer on it's surface while it sits in the atmosphere, it's a good 40 degrees above ambient temperature. If I submerge it in a pot of water that isn't much bigger than itself though, it'll bring the water to a boil.

What I decided to do was embed a metal grid through half the plate's thickness, to act as a heat conduit into the hot-side piston head. That piston is only 8.5 inches in diameter. The metal grid slash heat sink was then isolated using lightstone, and then everything was hooked together into an appropriately sized stirling engine. Thanks to the previous improvements I made with cryogenics, like quality heat exchangers, and fine lead wool as the regenerator, the engine was able to easily spin the 12 inch fans that I'm using for the air intake and outlet for the lab, though the actual tubes aren't completed yet.

The fans are 12 inches, but I'm planning on making the air tubes themselves only four inches in diameter. The reason being that I want to make sure that I have plenty of natural fluorite that I can use to remove the mana from the air in the tubes. The tubes are going to just be made of stone and embedded in the ceiling of the stairwell down to the fluorite growth lab when it's completed. I plan on having the air outlet be on the far end of the lab, and the inlet be close to the stairwell, to encourage cross flow.

All in all, I spent ten days getting this new stirling engine and air intake system built.

I decided to build the first fluorite radiators just beyond the first underground lab layer, after the first sliding door. To make it, I started with the largest of the natural fluorite, and cut two thin plates from the center of the crystals, then I used progressively smaller parts of the crystals until I had enough plates that I could cut notches in them to make a grid with half inch spacing. Each plate is about a fifth of an inch in size, and independently, they don't produce much heat. On either side of the grid, copper grips the grid, and connects to the pipe. From there, small heat fins extend down into the hallway on the roof, providing some amount of ambient heat.

The whole heat sink apparatus is only about 8 inches long, and uses two 4-inch fluorite crystals to make. Since they aren't very efficient, given how little volume each crystal plate has, I needed a lot of them before I'd feel comfortable that I was actually removing enough of the mana in the air, so I took a day to teach a goblin how to make them, while I started excavating the main room.

With the help of goblins hauling the stone I cut out, I was able to get the main fluorite lab area and the air system up and running in thirty days. Of course, the lab is empty right now, but at least I've gotten it made. The space is forty feet long, twenty feet wide, and has eight feet tall ceilings. For starters, this should be plenty.

Though the air system is up and running, I'm having the goblin continue making the heat sinks for the air line. He produces one a day, and I've got thirty in the line already, but there is still a decent amount of mana flowing into the room. I can tell because my own mana is recharging at about a fifth the rate that it does on the surface. While that's quite a bit slower, by comparison, my mana recharges at about a twentieth the rate if I'm in the fluorite storage room part of the way up the stairs.

It'll take me some time to build the new fluorite crystal growth apparatuses down here anyway, so I'm hoping we can have that problem fixed by the time I've got the machines ready. Considering the improved efficiency of scale for fluorite crystals, I wanted to increase the size that I could grow considerably if possible, though I suspect it'll take much longer to grow larger crystals, so I decided to think through use cases first to determine what size apparatuses I should build.

This lab has two main goals. First, to produce heat producing fluorite crystals, which can then be cut into appropriate shapes for various practical applications. Second, to be used for researching different inclusion materials for varied output effects, which will probably a Tiberius research subject. For the second goal, I think it'd be wise to actually build another offshoot room from this one, and isolate that room with quartz blocks all around it, just in case. It's probably also worth considering building a mana test chamber beyond that room as well, where mana crystals can remotely be exposed to the fluorite.

In the case of practical applications, I think it's worth considering just what applications I want. Obviously, a very large stirling engine is the goal. If large enough, these stirling engines could power numerous processes that we're currently relying on wind or hydro to drive. There are also numerous smaller processes which would benefit from having smaller crystals similar to the eight inch ones I've grown already. Smaller stirling engines, or hot plates for cooking would be a great improvement.

The larger crystals would still have slices which are smaller that are left over in the end, but I suspect that growing larger crystals is going to be significantly harder than growing the small ones. That being the case, I think I'll first make a slightly larger apparatus than the one I made before, and aim for 12-inch crystals next. Once that is working, and I've trained some goblins how to operate it, I'll try to make something like a 30 or 40 inch growth chamber.

[Vol.6] Ch.19 Magitech Heat Source

I spent nine days getting the 12-inch fluorite growth chamber designed and built. I decided to slow down the descent rate even more, to compensate for the larger size. I had the 8-inch crystal descend over 3 days. I expect material probably deposits at a fixed rate based on the available surface area, meaning that the growth rate is probably approximately linear from the surfaces. So a 50% increase in height would correspond to a 50% longer growth time. Just in case it's a bit slower, I'm going to have the crystal descend over the course of 5 days, equating to a 66% longer growth time.

A 12-inch crystal's volume is about 3.5 times the volume of an 8-inch crystal, so I'm hoping that having a fifth of the natural mana down here will be enough to prevent issues. I've installed another nine of the mana heat sinks in the air lines, but haven't noticed that much of a change in the total mana available down here. I also need to find a few goblins who I feel will make good operators down here for monitoring the crystal growth process. It's fairly hands off, but you do need to make sure that the charcoal pellets don't get jammed in the dispenser, and refill the hopper if it gets low, or else the whole process ends up a failure.

While I was able to get some goblins to help me and learn the ropes, the resultant crystal was still very hot and difficult to handle, though it was successful. While we waited for it to grow, I made some new pedal operated crystal cutting saws down here, with a catchment to get the extra fluorite dust that was cut away.

At least cutting the crystal down makes it easier to handle, since it's producing less heat. I started to wonder about the exact application and effects geometry had on the crystals. While regular shapes, like a rectangular prism and a regular octahedron, seemed to only be affected by volume, was that actually the case for all shapes? Did I mess up by cutting the heat sink mesh into the plate on the stirling engine providing air down here?

That seemed easy enough to test using this new crystal. First, I cut the large central plate, about 8.5 inches to a side, and 1.5 inches thick. Interestingly, that plate has more total volume than the 8-inch crystal has in total. I know that cones are weird when it comes to calculating volume, but it's still wild to think that such a small vertical cross-section has such a large amount of the volume for this object.

Next, I cut pairs of 1 in thick plates out of the remaining two equal square pyramids left over from each half. For one of those plates, I cut a grid through half the thickness, and for the other, I left it untouched.

I crafted two buckets of equal size on the surface, and filled them with water, and then submerged each plate at the same time. Each of these plates was an average of 6-inches to a side, making them comparable in size to the plates in the stirling engine on the surface, which I knew that plate could boil water.

The uncut plate boiled slightly faster. I repeated the test a few times, and the results were pretty definitive. There was about a 15% difference in the time between the uncut bucket and the cut bucket. My working hypothesis is that it for any crystal that is a convex polyhedron, volume is the primary factor, for but a concave polyhedron, there is some amount of loss based on how isolated portions are. In the grid pattern, for example, the bottom is a solid plate a half inch thick, and the top is, for the purposes of this discussion, comprised of about 16 smaller plates.

Now, why that only results in 15% slower boiling time is beyond me. For good measure, I tried cutting it even further, so only a sliver of material was left connecting each section of the grid, and it performed even worse. I cut the uncut grid into individual pieces the same size as the grided plate, and this new pairing performed almost identical, with a slight edge going to the still connected grid.

I could do all sorts of studies on how different shapes are affected, but for now, I'll work with the knowledge that making a shape concave is probably resulting in lost efficiency. In the future, I could also try making multiple shapes of identical volume, and conduct similar tests to try to determine if all convex solids are actually the same or not. Previous tests with my initial crystal samples seem to indicate yes, or at least that the differences are negligible, but surely there exists a transitional point, where an extra thin and long rod of the crystal would either under or overperform for it's volume as compared to an octahedron of the same volume.

To conduct such a study would require multiple grown crystals, so that I could carve shapes out that are large enough to do a water boiling test like the one I just did.

As I let the goblins run the new fluorite growth chamber, I noticed that we weren't reducing the mana in the basement, even after adding in more mana heat sinks. I was intrigued, so I started testing various things to determine the cause. My first hint was that the stairwell, with it's stagnant air and connection to the raw fluorite storage, had less mana than the fluorite growth room. The second hint was something that I noticed before with the submerged mana crystals. While the mana seemed to flow downriver, it also did affect upriver some degree.

So, I decided to move a few of the heat sinks from the inlet to the outlet. Sure enough, within about an hour, there was significantly less mana in the room than there was previously. I still think that we'll need a few more heat sinks installed on both sides to reduce it as much as possible, but we're already at about 1/15th of the surface's regen values.

When the next crystal was ready, while still warm, it was at least cool enough that it could be held in your hands without causing pain without needing heat resistance. Since I don't yet know exactly what purpose I'm going to employ these particular crystals, I'm going to have the goblins making them keep them stored away. I've made a small area in a corner of the room, where the crystals can be stashed, at least until I come up with a use for them.

For the time being, I'm going to have them keep making the 12-inch crystals while I start designing the even larger growth chamber. The good news is that despite only mining once a month, the mine still outpaces our current fluorite consumption, due to how slowly these crystals grow. To everyone, including the dwarves, this just seems like novel applications of natural materials, no different than burning wood to make a fire. To me though, this is magic, and I'm combining it with technology I already know. The mana crystals, while grown with technology, were a sort of low tech, direct to body thing. These heat crystals are real magitech. A magical component that can drive technology.

I settled on making the large fluorite growth container 36 inches for the crystal height. Meaning it'd have 3 times the height of our current 12 inch crystal. Since the vat needs to lower away from the heat source, I dug into the floor about two feet to make everything fit nicely while still making operation easy. Since the 12 inch crystal grows over 5 days, I decided to go with 18 days of growth for this crystal.

Building everything took ten days, and while I was eager to start, I was a little worried that the ambient mana might be a little too high still, so while I waited for more of the mana filters to be built, I decided I should start building the area where Tiberius will eventually work, if he chooses to pursue this research path.

While we have quite a lot of cut quartz, I don't think we'd be able to make a massive room for it, so I've settled on two fairly small rooms, with double doored hallways connecting them. The first room will be eight feet long by six feet wide, and six feet tall, with a small two foot by two foot alcove on one side where I'll install a small crystal grower like the ones in the main lab area. This particular crystal grower will be much smaller than all the others, and is planned to only grow a 4-inch crystal over the course of two days.

The double doored hallways are also quite narrow, only 2.5 feet wide, and 4 feet long, with a sliding door on either side. These are meant to help prevent air mixing between chambers if used correctly. That way, a small amount of heat producing fluorite can be installed in each area, and should passively consume most of the mana in the area, reducing the odds of an accident occurring. The final room will be a small test chamber, six feet on all sides, making it a cube. Ultimately, I'll probably need to add various functions to that chamber, but I'll wait until those requests come in before I actually work on them.

[Vol.6] Ch.20 Fluorite Research

Excavating the rooms for the high risk fluorite research didn't take that long because they were so small. All in all, I spent thirteen days building them. They aren't very large, but I needed to be very precise with the quartz blocks and sliding doors to prevent as much mana as possible from entering the space. I've used up pretty much all of the cut quartz as well, and while the mine isn't producing any more raw quartz, there is still a decent stockpile that needs cut, so we aren't actually out yet.

I also decided to mount some of the heat fluorite in each of the short hallways and small rooms, to hopefully consume any mana that might leak in. It's not foolproof, but the growth room barely has 1/1000th the surface mana regen, and the testing room was about 50% lower than that. In fact, I wasted an entire day just waiting for enough mana to regenerate just to verify that the rate was that slow.

As I've thought about it, I realized that a 4-inch crystal could still be incredibly dangerous, and I should probably hold off on building that machine until procedures are figured out. Instead, I'm going to build a tiny crystal grower, meant to only grow small, half-inch crystals. The way I've gone about that was redesigning the semi-functional grower that I initially made. By only using a 2-inch growth chamber, and having the heat source be removed faster than would be necessary to make a single crystal, I can induce small crystals to grow. By changing the chamber shape, it should have multiple nucleation points as well. That way, Tiberius, or whoever does the research, can also have multiple samples for testing, while still keeping them small enough that minor exposure hopefully won't be lethal.

I built the small crystal growth chamber where I had planned to build the 4-inch chamber in three days, and gave it a test run. After a day of tuning, it was ready to grow crystals. That didn't mean it was actually ready though. Our fluorite source has an unknown impurity in it. From experience, repeated melting slowly seems to remove the impurities. There probably are better ways to remove it, but rather than experiment with that for a long period of time, instead, I'm just going to use one of our furnaces to melt a large amount of the fluorite repeatedly over the course of a few days to remove enough impurities.

I plan on melting enough that dozens, if not hundreds, of experimental growths can be done from the raw fluorite. Though, to make enough fluorite glass for that, I'm going to need to do some fluorite extraction of my own. I'm hoping that by the time I'm done, we'll have enough of those mana filters completed that I can be comfortable with the extra large fluorite growth chamber being used.

After twelve days of mining and refining, I've made all the purified fluorite glass material, which is transparent, that I wanted. As I noticed before, the glass of fluorite, even with impurities, doesn't seem to exhibit any mana related properties, so I'm somewhat confident that I could mix the impurities into glass samples and use that for growing crystals.

However, I've been saying for a while that I'd rather offer this research up to Tiberius if he wants it. It is magical effects, after all. We've also been in summer for over a month now, which means the reservoir is probably getting low. That means it's about time to take my first large amount of argon up to grow a mana crystal. Since I should have a pretty good idea of the total amount of argon I use, I can attempt to calculate the ratio of argon gas to added crystal volume, to determine exactly how much argon we need to grow a crystal of any particular size.

The last six days have been filled with highs and lows, to say the least. Tiberius agreed to work on the crystals, since he's basically all but concluded his research on extracts. In the near future, I'd like to review his total findings, but in short, it seems like with the right storage equipment, we could have some very interesting military equipment. Given we're on the verge of reliable mechanical power, we could potentially start paying any demon that fishes off any of our jetties for certain fish catches, since their extracts could be valuable.

If that was the extent of it, then it would be fine, but Tiberius demanded that he "have no less than three assistants, and make sure they're disposable." That was concerning to say the least. However, I did inform him of the potential risks, so I suppose he's just mitigating that risk in his own way. I talked it over with Zaka, and I was surprised that Zaka basically agreed that it would be fine, as long as the goblins agree to it willingly, and are paid well.

I keep having to remind myself that there are weird disconnects in demon society's norms that I don't expect. I'm always the one who wants to memorialize the dead, and most of the demons don't even care that much for entertainment. Either way, it wasn't actually very hard to find goblins who gladly took on what would be considered a very hazardous job in exchange for high pay. The work itself is actually pretty light too, which probably contributed to the ease of finding them.

After that was done, I took a day with Tiberius and the goblins, working on getting impurities into the fluorite glass. Fluorite comes in a lot of colors, and most of that is due to impurities, though not all of it. It follows, then, that most elements or basic compounds can actually fit one way or another within the fluorite crystals. So, after giving a brief lecture on the kinds of materials that are likely to work, we began using crushers to make the fluorite into fine powder, and attempted to add in a few of the ores we'd mined.

Given our lack of information on what exactly can fit within fluorite, we made multiple different glasses that they can later use for testing. We used pure metals of our available types, as well as both the sulfide ores and oxide ores. Interestingly, two colors were eerily similar to samples I've recovered, and a third was close and worth investigating.

The iron oxide from our hematite, and copper metal impurities were the close samples. The hematite sample was nearly the same color as our heat producing fluorite, and the copper sample was similar to the hydrogen fluorite. The third interesting sample was the pure iron. It had a richer color compared to the hematite, and given the similarities in atoms, I thought it would probably be worth investigating.

Ultimately, each glass sample took on a different appearance, and we made enough in two days that they should be able to grow multiple samples from them. I gave them instructions, and told them they could always ask the other goblin operators who are growing the heat fluorite if they have any questions.

After that, I went to check how things were going with the cryogenic production, and was quite disappointed. A half of a gallon was all we had made of argon. I don't know if it's actually a lot or a little, because I don't know the exact atmospheric concentration, but I'm a little sad we didn't get more. The reservoir is too low to run the cryogenics facility here again, so I'm going to go grow what I can with this argon, and then we'll decide what to do. It also, unfortunately, means that I'll be on fluorite mining duty in order to supply what is needed for making the fluorite heat plates.

My initial estimate of 700 years wasn't far off. In two days, I'd used up the half-gallon of argon, and grown the crystal by 0.9 cubic feet. Meaning that instead of 700 years, it'd take closer to 500 years. Unacceptably long, in other words. However, if things go to plan and we start growing the very large heat fluorite, and it turns out that copper fluorite makes hydrogen, then I could easily make more facilities for creating and refining cryogenic air.

Though I do need to be somewhat careful. While our fluorite deposit is big, we only have the one deposit right now, and those large crystals aren't going to be cheap. Plus, we've already seen what happens when we become too reliant on a singular point of failure. I can already see a future where the large fluorite plates melt during a mana surge. At least in that situation, I'd expect that we could reprocess most of the fluorite to repair the damage, as compared to the mana crystals, where we lost all the argon, and most of the flaky solids leftover from the crystal breaking were washed away.

[Vol.6] Ch.21 Fluorite Impurities

I foolishly didn't design the fluorite testing room with secondary access, which means we actually don't have a safe way of getting mana into that room currently. Since we have very little cut quartz left, I've settled on a very rudimentary design for getting some mana into the area. I've built a 2-inch wide square pipe connected to the larger room, and surrounded the pipe with what little quartz we have left. The pipe has 3 small quartz gates installed, one in the testing room, one in the large main room, and one able to be opened from the middle room. This pipe ended up increasing the amount of mana in the testing room to about the same level as in the crystal growth room, but we needed a solution.

Since it seems like mana can flow even against air currents, I've decided not to attach any sort of fan to the system. Instead opting for a small quartz container that can be opened on the end of the pipe. There, we can put some of the charged mana crystals that we mined from the tunnel when we want mana to leak into the testing room. Of course, that also means I need to take a few days to transport some mana crystals here, so they can be charged and brought down for testing.

I spent five days getting the pipe installed, and Tiberius and his assistants have six different kinds of fluorite crystals they want to test. In addition to the three that I recommended, they've also grown pyrite impurity fluorite, lead impurity fluorite, and zinc impurity fluorite. The pyrite fluorite and to a lesser degree the hematite fluorite look a bit worse than the others. There are clearly shiny pockets of pyrite within the fluorite crystal itself, which makes me think it doesn't actually fit into the crystal lattice well. If I had to describe why the hematite looks worse, it's only when compared to the pure iron based crystal. The hematite looks somewhat cloudy, and the crystals are a bit more brittle.

I suspect that the oxygen isn't doing the crystal any favors, especially considering fluorine and oxygen are similar sizes, but oxygen has twice the charge demand, which is probably causing issues in the lattice. By comparison, the iron only fluorite is colored about the same, but is far less cloudy, and the crystals just seem more pure. Though until we do testing, we won't know for sure if they have similar effects.

I had sixteen days until the next eclipse when I had decided to bring some mana crystals down to the lab area. Ultimately, I took six of those days getting everything ready, from distilling mana absorbing poisons to preparing crystal trays to bring over, leaving me with an extra ten days of time to fill. I took a day of that time to install more mana filters into the air supply for the fluorite lab, which did drop down the ambient mana even further, with regen values dropping to 1/40th of surface values. Unfortunately, it didn't seem to decrease the value in the two research rooms any further.

With fluorite production on my mind, I spent the remaining days mining fluorite, to ensure we had enough on hand for a few months of production. Then, on the day of the eclipse, I brought a few trays of mana crystals down to the intermediate lab where they could be charged before testing happened.

Since we're looking for observable effects from the new fluorite crystals, I had a few basic experiments prepared. One would consist of small water containers where a thermometer would be used to measure temperature differences. Another consisted of tall, clear, glass tubes, where again, water would be filled, and a crystal submerged to see if any gasses are produced. Yet another suspends a crystal on a string, to see if it produces any physical force. For now, those are what tests we're planning.

While the sliding doors are made of glass, with quartz in between, they're actually still quite hard to see through, so one of the goblin assistants will have to be the one to observe the experiment and yell out what he's observing, so that Tiberius can write down the results. I've also informed them that after every test, they should take a few days to monitor everyone's health, to make sure that nothing dangerous was produced.

The testing space is actually quite small, so to keep things relatively easy for the observation goblin, only three different kinds of crystals were used. The hematite, pure iron, and copper fluorite crystal samples were put into the three different testing apparatuses, as well as three just left on display plates.

I wanted to oversee how things went for this test, since the outcome could determine my next project, so the hallway outside the test chamber was quite cramped as Tiberius and I listened to what the goblin inside observed. He observed nothing. None of the crystals seemed to do anything. I went in after using a small amount of mana, and my mana regen was still basically zero.

We double checked the pipe and the mana crystal container, and everything seemed to be fine. I thought back for a bit as to how the air was so full of mana on the island before, and realized that almost all of our mana crystals were submerged in water, usually doped with a mana carrying material. So, I went to the surface and boiled some water with bark in it, and then brought that water down, stored it in a container, and brought that down to put in the container.

Upon restarting the test, the results were a little different, though the small crystals and low mana meant that the effects were minimal. That was the intent, however, as I really didn't want any horrific effects to come out of these tests. The hematite raised the temperature of the water ever so slightly, while the pure iron raised it nearly three times as high. The copper didn't change the water temperature, but did, in fact, cause tiny bubbles to form. None of the crystals seemed to exhibit any force output on the pendulum, and the fluorite just sitting on display didn't look any different.

Though these results are promising, we'll still wait to check if there are any adverse health effects before diving into these tests further.

After four days with no adverse health symptoms, I had us repeat the tests, but with more of each color of crystal within their respective testing containers. More of the iron and hematite fluorite within the thermometer testing, and more copper fluorite within the bubbler. A flame test seemed to confirm that it was hydrogen bubbling out of the copper fluorite, and the pure iron fluorite seemed to be a much better heat converter than the hematite fluorite.

With those results in mind, I had the fluorite growing goblins in the main area halt their production. If iron doped fluorite is more effective at making heat per unit volume, then we should obviously convert our production to making that instead. We already have a handful of the 12-inch fluorite crystals made from the natural hematite fluorite, but I think I have a use for some of them, and those that I don't have a use for, we can always melt back down.

What I want to do is build an area just outside the lab where we can process the fluorite and make our different doped glass types, which can later be reprocessed into crystals. To do that, we first need to remove the natural impurities from the fluorite. We're currently doing that by repeatedly melting the glass down, and letting it solidify. Each time, it seems like some of the impurities drop out of the solution. Normally, smelting is a somewhat expensive process mechanically, and all three of our main smelters are built along the stream using a water wheel as the energy source to pump air into the smelters.

So, what I'd like to do is make a batch processing facility, powered by stirling engines using the natural heat fluorite crystals we already grew. The facility I'm envisioning would have two large smelters for melting a large amount of fluorite, multiple basins for casting the glass in, and mechanical grinders to turn the fluorite into small grains for melting as well as to make fine grains of impurities to add to the mixes. This also lets me do a trial run of a slightly larger stirling engine, so future designs might be a little bit more efficient.

[Vol.6] Ch.22 Fluorite Processing Facility

The first step I needed to complete to make the new fluorite facility was cutting those 12-inch fluorite crystals into a plate that could be used to power a stirling engine. So, I cut a 2 inch thick plate from the center. I decided to leave the triangular edges on the plate, since they aren't really in the way. Then, I cut a grid into the crystal only a half of an inch deep. I didn't want to harm the heat production capabilities too much, but I still wanted to have the better thermal conduction out of the crystal.

Ultimately, that meant that I had a plate that still comprised about 40% of the initial crystal's volume. That also means that this singular plate has about 25% more volume than the 8-inch crystal I grew before. Meaning I needed to prepare accordingly for the stirling engine, since it would produce a decent amount of heat.

A quick test showed me that, indeed, it did produce a large amount of heat, and I hadn't even traveled that close to the surface before I had to turn around because I started needing to use mana on thermal hands to keep myself from being burned while carrying the plate. That made me realize that I needed to assemble some of the stirling engine down in the low mana area, and haul it up to the surface for final production. At the very least, the future crystal plates will need to be attached to their metal housing underground before being brought to the surface.

Between the potential for the pure iron fluorite to produce even more heat per unit volume, and the much larger fluorite crystal grower, I'm actually somewhat concerned about the final temperatures involved. On the other hand, I can cut those plates thinner while maintaining a high heat production, distributed over a larger surface area, so it'll probably be quite ideal for a stirling engine. There are also questions about mass production that come to mind. Namely, each octahedron can only have one large central plate cut out, or two slightly smaller ones, then all further plates will be ever decreasing in size.

I'll have to wait until we have our first extra large crystal to really evaluate the proper method moving forward, but I suspect that I'll want the largest possible central plate for powerful machines, but then the remaining plates we'll actually choose an intermediate size, and cut them all to that size, so that we can have a standard plate for construction.

In any case, I ended up making a replica of the crystal plate out of stone so that I could design the whole stirling engine on the surface. Next, I brought the attaching point down to the crystal, got it attached, and carried that whole chunk of metal and crystal to the surface by using wood as an insulator to carry the increasingly hot piece of metal.

After I got everything hooked in, the stirling engine functioned well for a little while before steadily losing torque. At this point, I'd already spent six days on this project, so I was a little frustrated. After taking the whole thing apart, it was clear that the fine lead mesh had partially melted and formed something of a clog in the regenerator section. I hadn't really thought much of it, since the other large and efficient stirling engines were being used at cryogenic temperatures, but here that wasn't the case.

So, after another day, I had cleaned out the regenerator and replaced it with steel wire. After that, the stirling engine ran better than before. The actual power output was quite impressive, and I was confident that this one engine could easily run both furnaces and one of the grinders. One downside to stirling engines is that it's very difficult to properly harness the energy being produced, and in fact, I can tell that It's losing some efficiency in the hot side piston from sight alone.

To really harness the energy well and not have a long travel distance, the piston is actually quite a bit larger than the plate, meaning that the center of the piston casing plate is quite a bit hotter than the outside. While I've done my best to insulate the piston, it's still experiencing losses as a result. It's as if I'm using a blowtorch on the center of a metal dining table, and trying to cook on the other side of it. The good news is that I'm able to learn from this experience in designing the next engine.

Rather than making such a thick plate, for the next engine, I'm going to use two crystals to make 4 plates an inch thick, and put all four on the piston, equidistant from the center and the edge. The next engine is intended to power the rest of the mechanical grinders, so it might be slightly overkill, as I expect it to be more powerful than the last one. However, given how close I want this facility to be to the lab, I'm sure there are other things we could hook in to the spare mechanical power, like a freezer.

I was initially quite confused when the second engine wasn't working as well as the first one was. I had already spent another five days building this second engine, and I was remembering the fact I'd had to change to steel wool, and was worried I had a problem similar to that. When I had opened it up, however, I didn't notice anything really out of the ordinary. However, after using thermal hands to protect myself, and get a rough gauge of the temperatures involved by looking at how much mana I lost to keep myself safe over a short period of time, I figured out the problem.

While the net energy going into the stirling engine was higher for the second engine, and the heat was better distributed, the highest temperature it was achieving was lower by a decent amount. I'm only hypothesizing here, but due to the source of the heat being more concentrated before, the overall temperature was higher. That extra distance from the center of the piston plate acted as a quasi-insulator allowing the piston as a whole to hold on to that energy better, since the bottom there was insulated somewhat by a layer of rock. This design has far more of the total crystal volume exposed to air, however.

So, it was leading to a two-fold efficiency loss. First, the efficiency of a carnot cycle, and by extension a stirling cycle, is determined by the hot and cold end steady state temperatures. So while I gained a small amount of efficiency in getting the whole piston head up to temperature, I was reaching a lower operating temperature, reducing the efficiency drastically. Second, I was rejecting more of the heat I wanted to turn into work to the atmosphere, causing even more losses.

So, I came up with two fixes for this. While I'd love if I could make some rock wool, it'd be incredibly tedious to make it with stone shaping, so I did the next best thing, and made a few layers of fine honeycomb pattern made of rock around the piston to help insulate it more. Second, rather than having the crystal plate exposed to air directly, I made a series of air vents in line with the surrounding insulation leading to the plates. While that might limit the mana getting in by a small amount, it should allow the air to heat up and move less, reducing convective losses, and allowing the crystals to reach a higher temperature.

That brought the second engine quite a bit passed the first in terms of total power output. However, it did take me two additional days to implement those changes. After taking another two days to implement those changes back onto the first engine, and the improvement was at least measurable, though the second engine still outperformed the first by a decent margin. I'd expected that, however. While the second engine is made of smaller plates, their total volume is twice the first, and while there are a decent amount of losses thanks to the crystal volume scaling factor, it only makes up about half the difference in total power output in this case.

With the power sources for the fluorite processing facility done, the only thing left to do was actually build it. I placed an order for four mechanical grinders along side the various mechanical components that I need to get power from point a to point b. Rather than try to convince Zeb that I needed a construction team with words, I brought him to see the two stirling engines I'd already made, and discussed how these basically run all the time, and aren't dependent on wind or water meaning they can be built just about anywhere. They do slow down quite a bit during the eclipse, but that's far less limiting than the other two sources.

Plus, thanks to stoneshaping, they're actually lower maintenance than our large windmills and the hydroelectric facility. Though the waterwheels are still easier to maintain overall. Basically, getting this facility online, and potentially training some stoneshapers and blacksmiths on how to make the stirling engines opens up an entire field of magically powered labor. Though I didn't tell him that most of my plans for the initial mechanical labor are cryogenically condensing air to re-grow our lost mana crystals. After that though, there are tons of applications. If we could make a mechanical lathe, for instance, we'd speed our production of parts up drastically.

After all that, I think I may have oversold him on it, because three construction teams showed up. This upset Tiberius somewhat, because there was a near constant stream of workers going down to our intermediate crystal to charge for four days until the facility was completed.

The building is a fairly unremarkable rectangle measuring sixty feet by thirty feet, with a twenty foot ceiling. It's constructed similar to the lab next door, where the floor is recessed slightly, and part of the building is built into the hillside, meaning it has no basement. The facility seems quite large on its face, but in actuality, most of the work occurs in a relatively small amount of the floor space. The rest of the facility is storage for fluorite and fluorite glass. Multiple labelled areas for handling raw, purified, and specially doped glasses were scattered around the facility. Fans bring air in to help fuel the furnaces, and also take air out of the same area.

I also realized that I should probably use the spare energy from the stirling engines to install some large intake and outlet fans in the facility. Between the furnaces, stirling engines, and natural heat fluorite that will be stored, the building could get very hot. I specifically have the air flowing perpendicular in the building as compared to the wall where the cold side pistons on the stirling engines are facing the outside world, just to help maintain efficiency and temperature control.

I took two days doing checks to make sure everything worked as intended. Now that I'm fairly confident everything is good, I think I can bring in some goblins and train them on how to run the place. I want to start making some iron doped fluorite and hydrogen fluorite as soon as possible.

[Vol.6] Ch.23 Radiation Poisoning

As our population has continued to grow, the economy has grown to match it in the city. Most of that growth has just been in the form of more people working in the same industries. When I built out additional blacksmithing locations years ago, there were a handful of individuals working at each location. Now it seems that teams share the space, with some getting up early, and others working late, keeping the forges running for a longer period of time, with more apprentices running about handling small tasks.

I haven't taken a direct account for what everyone has been doing lately, but having a larger economy is convenient at times like these where I need to hire goblins to take on a new role. So, after a quick discussion with some of the blacksmiths, I took a few apprentices from them to start handling the fluorite processing facility. Tiberius hasn't had the time to do research into what quantities of iron impurities are ideal for making heat, so I've decided on using the same ratio as we used to make the first samples underground. Even if it's not the most efficient amount, its quite a bit more efficient than using the natural fluorite, so it's definitely worth it, and it's fairly easy to change those quantities later when we know better.

Ultimately, I took four days getting them trained up and working as a team to make the fluorite glass doped with iron. I also made a small amount of copper glass with the intent of growing a 12" crystal of it to increase our hydrogen production. Unfortunately, I'm our only source of fluorite until I either get a new cryogenics facility going, or spring rolls around, so I'm going to have to spend quite a bit of time mining, or else things are going to stay idle. We have enough fluorite on hand that I think we can try to grow a 36-inch crystal, so I'll help that get set up before I go to do more mining.

Eight days into my mining excursion for more fluorite, and I had to stop. Not because it was too hot or unbearable for me, however. After I hauled a load back, I was informed that there was a problem with one of the goblins who was helping Tiberius. The goblin has fallen very ill. Many of the symptoms seem to mimic what I know as the flu, but disease here seems to be practically non-existent, so everyone is rightly very concerned. He's been sick like this for a few days, and after getting a look at him, it definitely would be what I'd expect radiation poisoning to look like. His skin is scabbing over in a few small places, and I noticed loose hair scattered around his bed.

Tiberius had continued doing more experiments with grown crystals in the lab space after I left, and this seems to be the result. I'd known, and be warned that this could happen, but I'd gotten so excited at the potential upsides, and likely discovery of the source of heat and hydrogen fluorite that I'd let myself jump ahead and skip some safety planning. What we should have done, for both the initial tests, and for any test of unknown fluorite effects, would be to put a caged ground bird in the room for a few hours while exposing the crystals to mana, then remove the mana, and watch the health of the bird.

If we're lucky, this goblin will recover, though it'll be a long journey. If he survives, lets hope that even cancer can be cured by evolving, otherwise he's in for a short life.

The test that caused this was again a multi-crystal test, which honestly, we should do away with that as well, and stick to one type at a time. There were Zinc doped crystals, Lead doped crystals, and Silver doped crystals. Of those, the Zinc crystals glowed an eerie orange color, despite being an off-green color, and the other two crystals didn't have a measurable effect in our primitive tests.

They want to blame the zinc crystal for this. It easily could be the culprit. I know some crystals are fluorescent, and likely, given the similarity to the word fluorite, I suspect that most fluorite crystals are fluorescent. If the crystal was releasing gamma rays, x-rays, or even ultraviolet light, it could cause radiation damage while also causing the crystal to glow.

However, that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. One of the other crystals could be the culprit, and they simply aren't fluorescing. I'll have some cages stocked with ground birds, and we'll do some animal testing to begin doing further testing on this matter.

I took two days getting the ground birds together for the experiments. The two other goblins who were hired to work on the process have refused to help, and I don't blame them. Tiberius seems to be the only one who is still willing to throw his life on the line to do further research on this matter. Though, considering he's been working in the small room growing crystals, which also happens to be where the crystals for testing are kept without any symptoms developing, likely means that he's been receiving some low level dosage of radiation. To help combat that, I also made a small lead cabinet for storing the testing crystals in. That should do a decent job of shielding some of the potential radiation moving forward.

In any account, over the course of three days, we carefully proceeded with three tests. For each test, a ground bird in a cage was put in the testing chamber along with a few crystals of a single doped type, and one bird was kept separate, but caged, as a control. Then, as we left each area, the subsequent valves were opened to allow mana into the testing chamber. Mana was left flowing for two hours, then we closed the first valve. Then we waited an hour, and closed the second valve. After another hour, we closed the last valve. Then, we waited three more hours before finally going into the test chamber to retrieve the ground bird. The crystals remained in the test chamber for another six hours before being retrieved.

Each ground bird's cage was labeled and the birds were monitored for any health problems. Somewhat surprisingly, it appeared as though the silver doped crystal, the last crystal we tested, was the culprit of the radiation poisoning. After five days of monitoring, the ground bird that was exposed to the silver doped crystal had died, while the other two were relatively fine. The three living birds all showed some signs of stress, but considering the lead and zinc birds showed the same signs as the control bird, I suspect that, at the very least, those crystals are fairly mundane in their overall effects.

I do want to do more testing before that is determined for certain. The goblin who is battling radiation sickness had far less exposure than the ground bird, only getting about 15 minutes worth of time around the crystal, but he's still fighting and not really recovering, which is very concerning.

That, of course, has made the goblins even more unwilling to work in the lab. Well, as long as the health and safety tests are done on ground birds consistently first, Tiberius will probably be able to manage without any help. Seeing the goblin struggling with radiation poisoning definitely explains the lack of fluorite on the market though. We're working with singular impurities in the lab. Natural fluorite, even the fluorite that we've been mining, isn't normally particular about the impurities within it.

Our natural fluorite is mostly hematite, or at least, that's what our experimental evidence seems to show. I wouldn't be surprised if it has small amounts of other elements in it as well, however. Depending on the quantities involved, you could end up finding a natural heat colored fluorite, like we have, but it has enough silver that after a week of exposure, you end up very ill from radiation. Silver is only the first material we've found with a detrimental effect like this, who knows how many others there might be.

The upshot of all of this, however, is that if further testing shows that pure Zinc is actually harmless, we'll have access to magical lighting technologies, which itself can be very helpful in many situations. We have a lot of warehouses and other buildings that have basements that could use with basic lighting. Our main streets could also have lighting installed on them. The mines will be tricky, because deep underground, there isn't much natural mana, but you could devise a rechargeable lamp by pairing the fluorite with a mana crystal, which would be much safer than using torches for light.

[Vol.6] Ch.24 Secret Lab

After the revised testing procedures involving ground birds were finished, the new, 36-inch fluorite doped with iron finished growing. Well, it didn't actually grow as intended. While the beginning of the crystal seemed to grow as intended, it fractured into multiple smaller growths off the top, meaning we really only had a singular 18-inch crystal, and tons of smaller ones. While I could have potentially used the 18-inch crystal, I decided to break it down, make some changes, and try again.

So, I tinkered with a few changes to the growth chamber. I extended the growth time to 20 days from the 18 it was set to before, and I modified the shape of the furnace portion. The furnace previously formed a ring around the chamber, designed to equally heat it. However, based on the fact that the small crystals started to precipitate on the faces of the large crystal, I adjusted the furnace shape to be a diamond, matching where the crystal faces should grow. Hopefully this will result in the temperature near the crystal surface being more even, though I'll have to wait 20 days to find out if that actually helps or not.

Those modifications took two days, and in the middle of making the changes, I received word of another development happening. About a quarter of the dwarves that we rescued from Kao's island have decided that they're tired of waiting to go back to the mainland. They've decided that they'd prefer to risk the trip in canoes like we made to rescue them, rather than wait any longer.

I think they expected either Zaka or I to object, based on how they decided to present themselves for the situation. They gave notice in the morning that they wanted to hold a meeting with Zaka and myself, and showed up en masse at the time of the meeting, with many appearing disgruntled or upset. Considering that it was a minority of the dwarves we rescued, I'm guessing that they'd thought we were taking advantage of them somehow, and that we could, at any time, simply reinstall a large mana crystal, and allow them to return.

I mean, it's not actually that unreasonable of an assumption, if you consider the kinds of technology that they've been seeing getting constructed in the past few years. Though making exceptionally large mana crystals isn't really on the table unless we find another deposit of crystals or they wait an unknown number of years until we get enough argon to effectively use our existing supplies.

I explained our situation, and how we're also attempting to get large mana crystals online again, and while they seemed to at least be less immediately upset, they still wanted to return. So, I offered that we'd help them build whatever boats they need for their trip. I also let them know that they could exchange our money for dwarven coin to return home with, and that I'd send them back with enough spare coin to pay for a message to be sent back via the elven communication method, so they could let other dwarves here know if the journey is safe or not if they make it back.

While I appreciate having the spare dwarven workforce, which has been significantly speeding up our mining and construction projects, I'm not looking to make our relationship with the dwarven country any worse than it's already become. That doesn't mean, however, that I'm not conscious of the potential for spying. While I doubt that any of the dwarves could recreate any of our more advanced machines from only seeing their outsides, I don't want to take any chances.

After the dwarves left the meeting, I talked with Zaka about getting some of the military to guard a few locations around the clock. I have three processes that I want to keep secret, and now that some of the dwarves are planning on leaving, they might be inclined to try to find some extra information that they could sell back home. I keep the vacuum chambers for mana crystals sealed, but I still want some guards at the cave on the mountain to protect that. I also want the stairs in the lab guarded, to protect the fluorite growth process from prying eyes. Finally, I also want the cryogenics facility guarded.

Thanks to the dwarven civil war, I've already seen how much of an upset to existing power structures some of our technologies have caused. Part of the reason I built the lab away from everything else was for safety reasons, but now, I'm also seeing that it's probably useful to keep things secretive for strategic purposes as well. I'll need to talk with the workers that I've already hired to work on these processes, and see if they've already leaked information. For the most part, other than the demons who seem to be addicted to gambling, the demons and dwarves don't actually interact all that much. The demons who do gamble also don't really hold down jobs for long, so none of them have worked long term in any of my facilities that are important, so the odds of any major information having leaked is quite low.

Things are only going to get more complicated in the next few years, because I have quite a few technology ideas that will utilize our artificial fluorite, and each technology will require more and more people working to produce the machines utilizing the products. Thinking about it that way, I should talk to Zeb about building out a village around the lab space. Realistically, it would function more as a military base, and I'd want it to be walled and stationed with guards, just like the city.

Zeb was less eager to help build out walls around the lab's area as compared to the fluorite facility from before. Admittedly, we do have a goblin in critical condition now, and the wall is less about productivity, and more about safety. There are other concerns as well related to building a village here, even if it's a small one. There isn't a very steady source of water here, for starters. However, I convinced him that during the spring, when the reservoir is unable to be dug out further, rather than have those teams go to build out the aqueduct and road, they should come here to help build out a wall.

I was also able to bring him around to the idea of building housing over here. The lab does have it's own mana crystal underground, so it won't be any slower than building in the main city, and once demons move from the city to here, it's functionally the same as building in the city, as far as total population is concerned.

The lab is closer to the city than some of the other villages, so sourcing our water there, at least temporarily, shouldn't be a concern. I proved out that we could build a well for water, and in fact, it's still here, though it does need to be repaired for it to work again. I would just say we should build another aqueduct down at this altitude to supply our water, but the next valley would be somewhat useless to gather from, since just uphill in that valley is our sulfide ore roasting facility, so all the water that we'd collect would likely be tainted by lead and arsenic.

However, we could dig a few water channels into the hillside to get a small stream of water out of the mountain, and then create a smaller reservoir that we could pull that water from. Even a very small stream should produce enough water for us, as long as it's collected for the whole day. Which means I'm going to be juggling a few different jobs at a time for a little while. I'll need to keep up with our fluorite supply to make sure we can continue to grow crystals to fuel production moving forward, I also will need to design our initial engines that use our heat fluorite when we get our first large crystal.

I also need to plan out what this walled in area will look like, where the housing should go, and how large of an area I want encompassed. In addition it will need a reservoir, and water tunnel. Finally, I'll also want to build a much larger cryogenics facility over here, and potentially decommission the one at the reservoir. If I'm going to be scaling everything up, I may as well shut down the other facility once the larger one is online, since I'd prefer to keep this sort of technology secret. Which means I'm actually going to need a lot of space walled in over here, since there are quite a few facilities that need built, if you consider I want to have a dedicated blacksmith and smelting area where we can cast replaceable parts for stirling and steam engines.

[Vol.6] Ch.25 Stirling Facility

I had mined plenty of fluorite in the eight days that I had spent that I wasn't concerned about running out for a little while, so I turned my focus on planning out this research base's layout. I only had a few days until the first construction crew would show up to start building the residences, so I quickly started planning where some of the buildings should go. There are a few design constraints that I needed to work around in the design.

First, I wanted the residences to be clustered in one place, and have them in the safest location possible. Even if the industries here are usually safe, I think it's a good idea to plan for the eventualities that some future expansions might end up being less so. Ultimately, that led me to wanting to place the residences on an edge, away from the hillside. Ultimately, I actually want there to be two entrances into this fort, one that goes directly to the residences, and one that avoids them. It's a fairly common practice, and should limit accidental exposure to materials being transported to and from the facility as a whole.

As for other buildings that we plan on having, I'm concerned about a few of them. The cryogenics facility could be dangerous if kept too close to the residences, but there are mitigations we can take to prevent failures from spreading very far, so it's not that dangerous. However, the facility where I plan on having hydrogen produced, and where we'll make stirling engines, is a bit higher risk, since the hydrogen has the potential to explode.

So, the way I'm currently thinking of designing things, we'll build a small raised reservoir for water between the residences and the cryogenics facility. The cryogenics separations and storage will go on the side of that building that is furthest from the residences as well. Should any liquid gas happen to be released, it should interact with the reservoir first, and safely evaporate, rather than freezing any potential bystanders.

Over closer to the lab, we'll build the stirling engine facility where they'll be manufactured. Since the crystal plating has to be installed deep underground anyway, that should help lower the amount of hauling the large metal pieces need to go through. We'll also need our own food supply area, and we should probably have a general storage for tools or other non-hazardous supplies near the residences.

I think I want there to be between 60 and 100 residences here, to help accommodate any future buildings for a while. By building the residences on the edge of the facility, it should also make expanding the number of people relatively simple in the future. Ultimately, for what I have planned out, this area will take up about 25% more space than our innermost walled section of our city, which was the original goblin village's area.

I just barely finished marking off all the areas as the construction team arrived four days later. I ultimately decided on mostly goblin sized apartments, with a single building dedicated to potentially larger demons. This work doesn't cause any accelerated leveling, so most of the demons who work here will be goblins for decades if they choose to prestige only.

There is still quite a few days left until the next large fluorite crystal is potentially ready. We do have a few 12-inch crystals that we've grown of the pure iron doped fluorite, and those crystals should be big enough to power the casting facility that I want to make for various parts of stirling engines.

While many steel items are created via regular blacksmithing methods, on many occasions, we've created molds using stoneshaping to create the desired final shape. While that has performed relatively well, especially when using specially heated lightstone to remove any water that might be in the mold, I think we'd be better served by using a wet sand mold process. Which means they'll need fine sands, and a decent source of water.

For the sand, I'd still like to use lightstone as the source material. The lightstone will be crushed then ground to a fine size, then tumbled to round out some of the jagged edges. Once the sand is made, it can be shaped using pre-designed pieces that match most of the design specs for specific stirling engines.

The cast pieces will then need to be filed and smoothed in order to be completed, and then the engines will need to be assembled from those parts. Thankfully, there aren't that many parts that go into a stirling engine. Though some parts, like the steel wool, will need to be drawn through dies rather than cast.

As far as sizing the facility goes, we currently grow a 36-inch crystal in 20 days, and a 12-inch crystal every 5 days. From the 12-inch crystal, I currently have us make two slightly different stirling engines, and I haven't yet determined how many engines of what shape I want to make from the 36-inch crystal.

I think that moving forward, the idea of making the components into replaceable parts is probably wise. So I'll be changing the design of the two 12-inch crystal plate stirling engines to be a single engine type that has two different crystal plate carriers. Since I'd rather have the larger engine be the most efficient one, I'm going to make the four plate carrier engine suffer the efficiency loss of fitting into the other form factor.

However, when it comes to the 36-inch crystal, with replaceable parts in mind, I want to make three different engines that use up the crystal. An extra large engine that uses a 2-inch thick cut from the very center of the crystal. Then, we'll cut three 1-inch thick plates from either side of the crystal. Giving us six large plates to use for another engine design. Next, we'll cut more plates down until we're at 14-inches to a side. Those plates can be cut into quarters, and used in the previous smaller engine size that we're already designing. Then we'll cut another handful of plates out, making a third engine size. Finally, a handful of plates can again be cut to the 12-inch crystal size, providing us with dozens of those stirling engines per 36-inch crystal.

Which means that to keep up with even the current crystal growth rates, we need to be producing multiple small stirling engines a day, as well as at least one large engine per day. Nevermind the fact I also want to have space to do other casting projects, like making more cryocoolers here.

We already have a problem when we're making molten iron in other locations. In essence, the temperatures involved are hot enough that they damage our furnaces over time. So every few cycles, we have to have a stoneshaping goblin repair them. Likewise here, we'll probably need multiple furnaces for melting iron in, and a full time stoneshaping goblin to repair the inactive furnaces.

This facility will also get very hot. So, similar to the fluorite facility, I plan on installing many large fans in the facility walls to keep air flowing and temperatures bearable inside. The floor plan is going to end up quite large, so I'll probably be quite busy for a while. I'll once again be hiring a handful of goblins to help haul materials for me, so that I can focus on building out this manufacturing facility.

After another fifteen days, I went to check on the new 36-inch crystal. This time, it came out as a fully functional single crystal. Even with the low mana underground, it was incredibly hot initially. However, over the course of an hour, the temperature fell to a much more manageable level. The ambient mana level also fell quite a lot in the main room. Which I discovered while trying to figure out why the crystal was getting cooler.

It seems to be large enough that it converts more mana to heat than the room gains in new mana. After consuming most of the ambient mana, it fell to the level of replacement, which was still very hot. Since I'm nowhere near ready to design the next stirling engines to use this crystal, but I at least know what sort of plates I want to use, I took a day cutting the crystal down to the shapes and sizes that I want, while also showing the goblins who work down here how I want not only these heat crystals cut, but also the 12-inch crystals.

Since the excess heat is starting to be a concern down here, I've decided to dig out a new storage room down here for all the crystal plating before I resume construction on the stirling engine facility, which I've only just finished getting the flooring built in. Hopefully, by having the crystal plates all be in a single room which is closed off via a hallway with two doors, the ambient mana in that room will be low enough that heat shouldn't be a problem. If it is, we could always try installing copper heat sinks to hold the crystal plating, and drive the heat into the ground, rather than the air.

[Vol.6] Ch.26 Technological Musings

I spent two days digging out a storage room for the crystal plates to be stored, and then went back to continue construction on the stirling engine facility. After handling all the plates, I had a pretty good idea of what size sand casts we'd need for making everything, so I had a good idea of the amount of floor space we'd need for most of the work.

That said, I still spent another 18 days building the facility, minus any of the machines or smelting furnaces. Though I also did build out storage next to the facility where the completed engines can be kept until needed. They'll be stored without the heating elements, for obvious reasons. I decided they should also be stored without hydrogen in them. The heat powered engines won't be using hydrogen anyway, so I can at least focus on finishing this facility before moving on to that one.

Unfortunately, I got word as I worked that the goblin who had gotten sick from exposure to the silver fluorite had perished. He had seemed to be recovering for a while, but then he started to lose weight, and couldn't keep it on. If I was a betting man, either one of his organs was fried, or he developed cancer from exposure. In any case, I've installed a small obelisk in the lab area, and etched his name in as a reminder of those who lost their lives in this pursuit of progress.

As I finished building out the frame of the building, I was informed that the dwarves that plan on returning to the mainland want to leave right after the eclipse that marks the beginning of winter. Meaning in about a month, they'll be setting out. I checked in with Zaka, and we've already gotten boats prepared for them, along with adequately preserved food and barrels for water. Since there is a decent chance they won't make it to the mainland, I've talked it over with Zaka, and we're going to throw a feast for them on the day before they leave as an additional thanks for the work they've done.

I've still been eating our plain grilled salted fish for years, but recently, the food markets have been filled with fried foods, which seem to be one of the many things the influx of dwarves brought to our island. After they built their gambling den, it seems they started adding even more things to our society, such as the aforementioned fried food. Intrigued, I did some more digging into the details of what exactly they've contributed, and found that besides a handful of foods and gambling, some of the demons have taken a liking to collecting novelty coins commemorating events.

There aren't many different coins right now, as there are only a few events that they've commemorated in the time since they started making them, but some of the demons seemed excited to buy a coin commemorating the next year. Which brings us to another addition, calendar years. I'd been using the dwarven monthly calendar, but we hadn't really had a great reason to keep track of the years openly. Internally, we had a year count on documents, but it was kept as "years since we started counting". Now, however, many of the demons are keeping track in terms of the dwarven year. The current dwarven year in their calendar is 7,709.

That number seemed quite high, which led me to take even more time asking questions as to how their calendar is at such a high year. I had two guesses going into it. First, they're just on a very old calendar, which means their year count is basically the total count since they invented the calendar. Second, they've calculated the year out based on some historical event from before recorded history.

Both guesses were incorrect. This is their third calendar, actually. The first calendar when appropriately adjusted to the current one, spanned 3,132 years. The first calendar was actually only a monthly calendar, and on the dwarven continent, most of the seasons are fairly similar to each other. Not identical, but similar enough they didn't find much use in keeping track of the actual year. After they started trading with humans, they came to their second calendar, which accounted for years, and was generally a good calendar. It ran for 973 years, until the dwarven continent was unified under their governmental system. At which point, their current calendar started counting.

So, all in all, their calendars go back 11,814 years. As I dug in on the subject, it does seem as though there are many questionable exchanges of what family holds central power on the dwarven continent. Every so often, either through assassination, lack of heirs, or war, the central authority changes hands, though the new authority has always claimed their rightful heritage.

Almost twelve-thousand years of calendar keeping, yet despite magic, they're still in the equivalent of the early renaissance era. I asked around for a little bit of information on the development of new technologies, and while there are occasional advances and some interesting to me discoveries, I think I'm starting to get a better picture as to why they're lagging behind.

There seem to be a few reasons. First, resource allocation. Thanks to magic, individuals can be incredibly powerful, but they require more resources to train and keep appeased as a result. This seems to have led almost all nations to developing some form of caste system with a heightened warrior class, lacking in general discipline, thanks to their heightened individual strengths. This leaves less resources for technological discovery and investment, as well as less drive for it. If you need stronger weapons, there is a tried-and-true method of investing resources into warriors who will overwhelm your enemies.

Second, stale repeated combat. Every so often, they have a demon invasion. While each invasion arrives at a new place, and is somewhat unique, they're rarely technologically different. So, ultimately, their response strategies became more and more focused on their ongoing primary threat. Their response was to keep powerful individuals trained and ready to respond wherever they might be needed. Any particular individual weapon might be found to be ineffective against a particular type of demon, so investing in any type beyond what already works effectively is overkill.

Why invest in long range artillery when your primary opponent is a surprise attack? Why develop firearms when powerful individuals can already survive much larger powerful attacks? I've seen first hand how much physical damage Zaka can survive as a troll. Basically, there isn't a steady path forward for development.

Third, disease as I know it is practically non-existent. They talk about leveling sickness, I've seen firsthand what mana overdose does, I've firsthand seen radiation sickness, and I've overheard a conversation about something called wasting disease, but all three seem to be caused by the magical equivalent of vitamin deficiencies. Without disease to suddenly upset the stable systems, the only thing that occasionally causes disruption is the demon invasions. Plus, I have firsthand knowledge that the elves are also guiding societies to keep things stable, whether they realize what they are doing, or not.

As I've said though, some inventions are surprising. They've made centrifuges, and from what I can tell, the dwarven steel seems to indicate some very interesting alloying procedures. So, it seems, in areas where there is still reason to grow, there have been advancements. Their agricultural and land management knowledge is actually far better than mine. They were the ones who gave me the idea for rock dams, and they've also shown the farmers how to utilize the fields better, implementing special crop rotations, with hybrid planting of two crops at the same time.

On earth, a lot of the technological driving force has been war, famine, and pestilence. Their wars are stale, famine is rare, and pestilence is practically unheard of. So their society seems to have stagnated at the level where they've solved their wars for the most part. This is all speculation, though I was surprised by how deep the rabbit hole went after wondering why the year on their calendar was as old as it was.

I'm really starting to think that my physiology is affecting how curious I am about things, as well as how driven I am. Myself, and honestly every other demon, seem to be capable of doing mundane repetitive tasks endlessly.

By the time the feast and send-off occurred, I finished building many of the devices in the stirling engine factory. In fact, the only devices left to make were actually the stirling engine power sources to drive the other devices. I learned a little from the design of the fluorite processing area, and designed the building with heat exhausts in mind for the various stirling engines meant to power the factory.

In the time since I started building this facility, they've grown two more 36-inch heat crystals, and nine more 12-inch crystals. Tiberius's safety testing of the existing crystals has started showing some more results. I'm a little disappointed in some of his research, but I'm not surprised by it. He's always been very weapons focused, so much of his testing has involved narrowing down exposure limits using ground birds of different sizes.

However, he did do other tests using the existing crystal types. He borrowed a plate of the heat crystal, and other than dehydration, the ground bird seemed fine, even after long exposure. In fact, the only other crystal that had any noticeable effect on the ground bird was the zinc crystal, which seemed to induce a mild sunburn if exposed to a large number of the crystals for a very long period of time.

Which probably means that the zinc is creating ultraviolet light, which is then causing fluorescence in the crystal, creating the visible light that we see from the crystal. I told him to try the test again, but this time put some regular glass between the bird and the crystal. If it is ultraviolet light, then the glass should filter it out, and we could start making magical lighting using the zinc crystals.

[Vol.6] Ch.27 Lights

The zinc fluorite test with glass between the crystal and the bird seemed to remove the sunburn potential of the crystals, so I decided to queue up 12-inch zinc fluorite crystals for production, in place of 12-inch heat crystals. For these crystals, I just want to cut the crystal into 8 equal parts, and then have glass casings developed for them to function as magical lightbulbs. Perhaps if we only cut the crystals in half, we could make floodlights to light certain areas at night time, if we think that would be useful. Though for now, I think I want to regulate their usage to storage basements and mining lights powered by mana crystals.

His tests took four days to repeat, and the growing of the first 12-inch zinc crystal took 5 days. I used stone shaping to make prototype cut zinc components out of stone, and then had the glass makers develop a sheath for the cut pieces. What we decided to do was cover three faces in glass, then use stone to form as the seal on the final face. The stone can then either be attached to stone ceilings with stone shaping, or opened up to form a pocket with water where a mana crystal can be inserted, functioning a bit like a battery. That light can then be held or attached to a stand or wall to provide light until the mana crystal empties out.

I put in an order for enough glass to make 160 lights, which would be made from 20 zinc fluorite crystals in total. Making all those crystals with our current setup would take 100 days in perfect conditions, so I doubt they'll be done any time soon. In the future, I'll probably want to make more crystal growth chambers deep underground to keep up with production.

The first zinc fluorite crystal was cut quickly and placed into the glass containers for the lights. These first eight are going partially to the tunnel miners. I've even had the carpenters make tripod mounts for them, so they can be easily moved as construction proceeds. After the first eight were done though, we started putting the lights into various warehouse basements.

I then started work on the new stirling engines, so I could finish the factory for future ones to be built in. I used two of the lower efficiency small engines to power the large fans moving air through the buildings. Since I was being careful to also make positives for the sand molds later, I ended up spending twelve days to make and install those two stirling engines. Their hot side pointed up out of the roof of the building to help with heat problems.

I also needed to design out all the parts for the other sizes of engines, so I figured I should implement each of them into the factory as well. Which meant I had three more sizes to design and tinker with before I was done. I started with the largest design, which used a two inch thick plate cut from the very center of the 36-inch crystal. That engine alone took 28 days to design and refine to a reasonable level.

During that time, we received a message via the elven messenger birds. Two thirds of the dwarves that attempted to return to the mainland perished. They weren't attacked by any leviathans, however, they did still get attacked by other large sea-life, resulting in destroyed boats, drowning, and starvation, even with the extra supplies we sent them with.

The only reason they were still able to send a message was because Kao paid the difference to make sure his other dwarves trapped here knew of the danger. Kao provided a list of the survivors as part of the message. Morale among the dwarves plummeted after the message arrived. I think quite a few of them were hoping that the trip would go well, and they all could attempt to return home via that method. Instead, they were informed of a loss of many of their comrade's lives. Thankfully, there was a seal on the note, which multiple dwarves vouched for the authenticity of, otherwise I'd be worried about a mutiny if they thought I was perhaps withholding information or faking the message.

I installed the extra large stirling engine in the factory, and set it up to power all the crushers and the furnaces, though there are mechanical disconnects to prevent the machines from running, and a brake to stop the stirling engine if it isn't needed. After that, I still needed to power the tumbler drums for smoothing the crushed rock to smooth sand, so I designed the next largest size engine. Each of the three drums is fairly large and has its own stirling engine to power it.

Those engines took just as long as the largest one to design and make as they are quite a bit smaller, using slightly smaller heating plates that are also half as thick. One problem that I'd like to solve is the need for manual separations of lightstone. I mentioned various methods before to attempt to separate lightstone using density and meshes, but I'm still not certain on the viability of that process. Plus, most of the lightstone will be reusable in these molds, so we should only need a few stoneshapers making more of it at a time.

The facility was functional at that point, so I went around the city hiring on new workers, including grabbing a few more stoneshaping goblins that had recently gained the ability. Zeb wasn't too happy about me taking more future construction workers, but it is what it is. The last of the initial apartment buildings were being completed, and I figured it was as good a time as any to move all the workers in the lab area into their new housing.

That had mixed results. Some were more than happy to move closer to work, rather than having to walk over a mile each way. Others were less happy as they felt like they were losing their previous community. When it came down to it however, I agreed to pay all of them slightly more money to get them to move, and they agreed. When it comes down to it, they're being paid for secrecy as well as the fact that they do have to travel to go to any of the amenities in the city.

It actually took quite a while to train the twenty-one goblins to work the factory. After six days, the goblins had gotten more familiar with how everything worked, and we had produced enough sand to try a casting. Needless to say, it was a complete failure. I ended up spending thirty-seven days until we'd worked out how to actually do sand casting. Part of that time was spent directing construction teams on where to build walls, watchtowers, and gates for the facility, as we entered spring shortly after I started the whole endeavor.

After the new workers could actually start working on the process, I still had one more stirling engine size to design. This was the most intermediate-sized design, and ultimately, getting all the replaceable parts designed ended up taking 15 days. During that time, the crystal growers finished the order for the crystal lights.

I'd been so preoccupied that I was shocked that the time had passed so fast. They ended up installing a few of the lights around the doors and tools down in the crystal growing room as emergency lighting. They weren't very bright, given the low mana in the environment, but if any of the fire sources ever went out, it is enough to let someone get out from the dark environment safely.

The other lights were sent off and installed in storage basements throughout the city. Many of the dwarves were very skeptical of the crystalline lights initially. After a short while of there being no injuries or health problems for any of the demons, they seemed to be less afraid. Even if they figure out that the crystals are made of fluorite, figuring out how to grow a fluorite crystal is practically a magic iteslf without a prior understanding of crystallization processes. Which is exactly why I'm having the walls around this facility constructed. These could end up being an incredible strategic and economic resource, so I really don't want anyone stealing this idea.

Ultimately, I'm only partially done with all the construction I need to do in the facility. Next, I need to design a facility for making and storing hydrogen, then I need to design the new cryogenics facility. With spring having rolled around, a mining team has been hauling over new fluorite crystals about once a month, which has been a big help, since we were almost out of everything I'd mined in those eight days a few months ago.

I'm actually a little behind on my training, and if I'm being honest, I'm more than a little worried. I'm getting closer and closer to maxing out my level, and I don't know what exactly to expect when I do. I think I should probably bite the bullet, and just train continuously for a little bit, and try to reach that point, just to get it over with. On the other hand, the sooner I get this facility up and running, the sooner we have a surplus of cryogenic argon to grow mana crystals with.

[Vol.6] Ch.28 Lava Demon

After 37 days of fishing and cutting down trees, I finally reached level 100.

<APEX LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 100
HP: 4369/4369
MP: 2179/2179
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance, Partial Sleep
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands, Pulverize

This time when I reached the cap, I only had the option to evolve, and with that, I only had the same two choices from last time. Ogre, or Lava Demon were the options. We have a couple of ogres in the city, some enterprising fishergoblins, or I suppose, fisherogres who used to be hobgoblins. So, given I haven't got a clue what being a Lava Demon is, I was interested.

It seems like when you first become some species, you usually gain either a magic or trait related to it, and it seems to similarly occur when you reach Apex. So, finding new species could end up as a vital expansion to our economy. It's unlikely, but I'd hate if I missed out on that opportunity.

I was a little worried before I fell asleep, so I asked if I could stay with Zaka for a few days. I ended up sleeping for 20 hours, and not needing more time to evolve. I was glad that I stayed at Zaka's house, because I grew a foot taller, and also became bulkier. My scales are thicker and larger, and have taken on an obsidian shine. I've also gained three parallel ridges down my back, which also seem to be made of scale.

<LAVA DEMON>
Level: 0
HP: 4369/4369
MP: 2179/2179
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance, Partial Sleep
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands, Pulverize, Thermal Regulation

Thermal Regulation: Spell. Variable Cost. Allows regulation of internal body temperature in extreme thermal environments, while providing some degree of thermal protection to the body as a whole as well. Cost per second scales exponentially with thermal gradient maintained.

The scales on my back seem to be related to my new magic, Thermal Regulation, which seems to be similar to thermal hands, except it only lets me keep my body temperature regulated as compared to the environment, rather than manipulating something beyond that. The mana cost seems to be similar to what I had to expend for thermal hands.

It's not actually all that useful, as compared to say, just passive heat resistance, but I suppose there could be survival or combat situations where having sudden immunity to either freezing or burning could prove useful.

With that out of the way, I went back to resume work at the facility. Since I looked entirely different from before, it actually was a little confusing to prove who I was. Which led me to realize a glaring flaw in our security over here. Unlike with a single race of stagnant beings, demons prestige and evolve, meaning that we change appearance. So while our security is still pretty good at preventing unwanted visitors from non-demon races, it'd be fairly easy for a demon to infiltrate security. They'd simply claim they evolved or prestiged, making them look and sound different, and then waltz into wherever it is they aren't supposed to be.

As an extra detriment, any demon at the same prestige with the same traits and magic look like twins, making it even harder to do identification. At the very least, we should probably start giving paper permission to demons leaving the facility to go to the city, which they need to present to return. I'll also probably need to create some form of temporary work badges that we can give to temporary workers who are either hauling materials or doing other work. All that can wait until the walls and security guards are actually in place, but I have a feeling it won't go over well with the workers here.

I initially wasn't quite sure how I wanted to build out the hydrogen facility, and I was quite hesitant to keep and store large amounts of hydrogen due to the explosion hazard. I also have a much larger problem, which is that I don't have an off switch for production for the method I intend to use. My intent is to use copper doped fluorite to produce the hydrogen gas. However, if I decide to go with that method, I'll have to deal with a continuous production of hydrogen. Even if I keep the actual hydrogen production deep underground, it'll still have some amount of hydrogen it's producing, which would leak into the environment and be a hazard.

So, rather than risking that, I think it'd be better to make a flare stack to burn off the excess hydrogen that we don't use. I do want to do some small scale experiments to determine the behavior of the hydrogen crystals as well, before I settle on a larger industrial scale design, so that's what I'll work on first.

I started by asking Tiberius to do some more rigorous health studies on the copper fluorite crystals. Over the course of a few days, it seemed like the only hazards involved were the hazards associated with hydrogen gas itself, so I moved on to my next phase of testing. I had a larger crystal grown in the 12-inch apparatus, but stopped part way to give me a 5-inch crystal for testing with.

The main question I was trying to solve was whether I could displace enough air with the hydrogen produced by a crystal that I could skip the bubbling through water step, which let me more easily isolate the gas. So, I made a small chamber out of stone, with a long and thin outlet line, and then placed and sealed the crystal inside.

What I quickly realized, however, was that we weren't actually making hydrogen gas. We were making protons. At first, I thought it was potentially monatomic hydrogen, since the chamber started to rise in temperature quite quickly, which made me think that the hydrogen atoms were forming diatomic hydrogen and releasing heat. While that was also true, we had an even bigger issue.

Since the chamber was made of stone, and filled with air initially, there were a few loud pops, which quickly settled down, followed by a small plasma jet forming out of the exhaust line. Stone and air are reasonably good insulators, and the chamber was sitting on open ground, and the plasma jet was actually crackling with small electrical discharges. In essence the crystal was producing a large amount of positive charge buildup, which was getting ripped from the air at the exhaust as well as internally from the walls of the chamber.

The chamber didn't last much longer either, cracking and falling apart within a few minutes. Inside, the crystal had also formed dozens of cracks throughout itself. Lone protons are the reason acids break materials down, and they cause all sorts of trouble in other environments too. In essence, our previous crystal was somewhat smaller, was less pure, and was never really kept in an environment meant to keep it completely isolated to build up it's own gasses. Even the wooden box with padding that I'd received the previous crystal in had appeared to be shoddily made, but looking back on it, that was probably done on purpose.

The water that I had submerged the previous crystal in had worked as both a thermal and electrical conductor, distributing the heat and electrical buildup across the entire water chamber, preventing this sort of thing from happening. However, thinking about it, that crystal was also not in a pure octahedral shape. Instead, it was thinner and longer with multiple points where it had been cut. My guess, and it is just a guess, is that it had cracked in places like this crystal, and so the owner had smoothed down the cut edges to make the crystal more presentable.

At a certain thickness, quantum tunneling and charge restoration probably reduces the amount of self-degradation that the produced protons cause. I actually hadn't planned on cutting these crystals into plates like the heat crystals, but now, I feel like cutting them into half-inch plates might actually be very beneficial. So, for my next test, I'm going to have an approximately six inch crystal grown, and then cut into half-inch thick plates. I want to try holding the crystals in copper plates, which might help with charge imbalance, since it's a conductor.

[Vol.6] Ch.29 Hydrogen facility

Unfortunately, holding the copper doped fluorite with copper plates didn't actually help that much. While things were less energetic, the container still failed, and the copper itself showed clear signs of degradation. It was as if the surface had been sprayed with a fine mist of acid. The plates themselves stayed intact thankfully, though I did end up getting minor injuries on my hands from hauling the plates up to the surface. So I've taken to using stone shaped tongs to pick them up and move them.

Which basically means I'm stuck submerging the crystals in water. I have a few thoughts on how I should proceed with the next experiments, since there are some risks involved that I was unaware of previously. If I had used salt water, for instance, the water would probably become much more acidic, due to the presence of dissociated chlorine. The water I was using was probably becoming acidic due to the extra protons present, but at a certain point, the conductivity of the surrounding water and tank would promote the production of diatomic hydrogen over free protons.

That also means, however, that I can't just expose metals inside the water to increase the conductivity, as any metals that we have access to are going to be rapidly destroyed by acid. So instead, I'm going to need to get creative. There are a few options available, and I think a combination of them is probably the best bet moving forward. First, I should have the vat of water be fairly large in size as compared to the amount of hydrogen output I expect. This will hopefully distribute the electrical burden across a larger volume, and make the concentration of acid lower at the edges of the container.

Second, while the inside of the chamber should be covered in an acid resistant material, like quartz, just under that surface, I'd like to have copper plating with grounding wires buried into the ground. Additionally, I want to install a fairly robust lightning rod nearby. This production of hydrogen is going to cause a buildup of positive charge, which is likely to attract lightning strikes. Having lightning striking nearby a bunch of contained hydrogen gas is very hazardous, so I want to make sure there are safe ways for that charge to be handled.

Third, the hydrogen is going to be produced in water, the resultant gas mixture is going to be wet hydrogen, with water vapor mixed in, so I'll need a drying process like I used before. For this facility, I want to have a few batch freezers available to freeze the water out of the air. I think that having the facility dug under the ground, rather than on the surface, will help reduce risk.

At the deepest point in the facility is where I want to produce the hydrogen. There is a tradeoff with lower ambient mana underground, but I don't think I'll build too deep that it'll be that much of a concern. Above the production area, I want four valves that each go to pressure tank freezers. While any particular freezer is in use, the others can be cleaned or maintained. Then, those freezers will empty into a much larger tank for keeping dried hydrogen with it's top being just a few feet under ground.

All these tanks will have spring powered emergency release valves going to a flare stack, with one way pinhole fittings along the way to prevent accidental blowback. Though I'll need to do a bit of careful piping to keep a pilot light burning in the flare. The part of the facility that is above ground will contain the valves and fixtures for draining the large tank into other containers to charge them with pressurized hydrogen.

I actually was able to get some help from the construction teams that are building our wall to dig out the areas underground for the hydrogen facility. It's just easier for them to get the stone here than it is to haul it from other locations, so they were more than willing to help out.

All in all, we dug out an area 40 feet by 40 feet at the top, which tapered off in three 20 foot tall layers. The next layer down was 30x30, and the layer under that was 20x20. Part of the purpose of putting the hydrogen production area so far underground is to reduce the surface charge difference, and hopefully allow strategically placed lightning rods to reduce the likelihood of actual damage occurring.

Digging the area out, with the help of the construction teams only took fifteen days, though using stone shaping to install copper grounding cables into the walls ended up taking another ten days. I installed a total of thirteen thick cables each proceeding out in a straight line positioned in a descending spiral to reduce overlap as much as possible. Each cable goes forty feet outward, and then I used stone shaping to fill the hole in tight around the copper cable again.

While the construction teams were digging the area out, I did some additional testing, to make sure that what I had planned would work. I ran a few tests using lightstone in place of the eventual quartz for the hydrogen production chamber, and found that the lightstone was fairly resistant to the acids involved, but some of the impurities were slowly being eaten away, causing the lightstone to become brittle. However, if I then used the remaining stone and shaped it again, that problem was essentially solved.

So, rather than attempt to build the chamber out of pure quartz, I figured I could acid wash existing lightstone, then reform it to make the new chamber. Since the process is somewhat slow, I set up a container on the surface with a small piece of the copper fluorite submerged in water, and then put pulverized lightstone into the tub to be acid washed.

I'd made enough of the acid washed lightstone by the time I went to go install cables that I was able to coat the inside of the acid wash chamber with it, so that I could be a little more negligent with it while I went to work on the rest of the facility. After this facility is done, I might want to consider doing some material testing on other things in this acid water.

The lowest level took me twenty-five days to finish building, and an additional six days to fine tune some of the emergency relief valves. The hydrogen generation chamber sits in the middle of the room, with very thick walls, and cables reaching in from the outer walls onto the surfaces. The inside of the chamber is coated in the acid washed lightstone, which, in the time I spent building this chamber, had barely reacted at all in the other container on the surface.

Maintenance of this chamber will require stone shaping to open a hole to enter through every half a year or so. There are four main outlet tubes, two safety relief valves, a bypass to flare line, and a purposeful weak point meant to fail before the rest of the chamber does, in case the other safety devices fail to work.

On the floor above that sits the four freezer chambers where the four tubes on the previous level go to. Each one has it's own stirling cooler that I took ten days designing. Unlike a lot of the other coolers I've made in the past, these ones have a very long and straight layout, such that their hot end heat exchanger reaches all the way to the surface.

Building out the rest of the freezer floor took an additional thirty-three days. This floor was more difficult, because I had to design these chambers to be able to be thawed out and drained. So the gas inlet actually enters higher up in the chamber, and liquid draining valves had to be installed that were also airtight to prevent gas leakage. Ultimately, the way I've implemented this relies on a small quartz viewing window to allow a small amount of water to be left at the bottom of the drainage valve, so that the water, and later the ice, form a solid seal, preventing gas escape through the valve.

The third floor, and last below ground floor, simply consists of a fairly large pressure tank, with a few outlet pipes going up to the surface where the hydrogen can be collected from. This floor took another ten days to make. As with all the prior levels, multiple safety valves are installed to prevent accidents. Each chamber is equipped with two manometers to measure pressure, along with a warning label of what I consider safe vs unsafe.

Then, on the surface, a single story building is built over the prior floor, with access down to the lower levels. One side of this building also houses the second largest size stirling engine powered by fluorite, which is used to drive the freezer coolers. Rather than build the lightning rods here, where it would still be very dangerous to get a spark, I instead went out about thirty feet in each cardinal direction from the building, and installed 30 foot tall obelisks with a thick copper cable running down the center of each and into the ground about ten feet to a wide metal plate. Building out everything on the surface took another forty-two days.

Of all the buildings I've built, this one definitely seems to give off the most evil scientist vibes. The four freezer heat rejection ends make the outside of the building shimmer with rising hot air when they're running, and the obelisks on the outside make it seem like I'm doing some kind of ritual. From the outside, it probably does really seem like that. We're even getting a magic invisible flammable gas from it. I'd definitely be suspicious if I didn't know better.

I think I'm sympathizing with mad scientists over this. I can imagine myself yelling at someone during a thunderstorm, "Whatever you do, don't smash the obelisks, everything would explode!" Then the heroes smash the obelisks, and in a true rpg game fashion, lightning strikes, and the whole facility explodes taking me with it. Perhaps the mad scientists in stories aren't as mad as they seem...

[Vol.6] Ch.30 New Cryogenics Facility Part 1

I was a little interested by the fact that the two construction teams at this facility were still working here at this time of year. We're now in early fall, and usually by now, the reservoir would be drained, so they'd be working there again. However, after investigating the matter, I found that the new aqueduct is actually about three-quarters done, and that has resulted in not only a larger amount of water reaching the reservoir in spring, but a larger amount of water year round, meaning the reservoir is also draining slower. They expect that around winter time, it will be fully drained, and they can go expand and do maintenance on it.

Honestly, as long as we have a good source of stone, at this point we don't really need the reservoir to be expanded much more. It can already hold a significant amount of water, and helps smooth out the city's water supply significantly. The only time we might need to be concerned is if we experienced multiple strong hurricanes in a single season, over a short enough period of time that we couldn't safely drain it. If that happens, we'll probably be dealing with bigger issues, like mudslides or rockslides destroying the dam.

I also haven't done a checkup on the tunnel in quite a while, so I figured it'd be a good idea to do so. What I found was that the scouting tunnel had reached the midpoint almost two years ago, and they'd started work from the other side now. The expanded tunnel portion is getting close to reaching the midpoint as well. From what I can gather, the fort on the far side of the island, along with some of the buildings and inns over there, are being used as a staging area for digging the tunnel from that side, though I'm not sure what they're doing with the stone they're excavating over there. I'd hope that they're stockpiling it, so there will be an excess for construction of buildings on that side of the island once we're done.

I also found out that the dwarf who had access to their version of tectonic sense was among those who left the island last year, meaning we haven't had any scouting capabilities for new ore deposits for a while now. So, realistically, I should probably do that myself, as most of our ore refining and smelting is complete at this point. There is still some lead refining to make silver left to do, since that relies on cupels that we make from recycled fish bones, but other than that, our ores have all been turned into ingots.

I took a total of fifteen days checking the new portions of the tunnel for any anomalies in the stone with tectonic sense. The far side tunnel's construction is actually going much slower than the near side, since they don't have a medium sized mana crystal underground to assist them. However, they should soon be deep enough to install one, and since the widened tunnel on the other side is nearly complete, we'll probably just move the crystal from one side to the other.

The large part of my time was actually spent recharging mana on the far side of the island. I did notice one point of interest near the end of the near side tunnel at the center of the mountain, but it was nearly thirty-five feet diagonally down meaning we'd need to dedicate quite a bit of resources to reach it, and for all I can tell, it just seems to be a layer change, meaning spending that time could result in basically no returns. I'd rather wait until the tunnel is fully complete before dedicating anyone to that task. If, however, we end up low on metal in the near future, then it's at least something we could pursue.

One interesting aspect of the tunnel, and one I'm glad I prepared for, is the amount of water draining out of it. It's actually quite a lot. The partial tunnel is miles long, and quite a bit of it has slow dripping water. Over that total length, it comes out to quite a decent sized stream. I have some ideas for long term plans for the tunnel as a whole, which involve digging a sewer line under the tunnel and a rest area in the center of the mountain where travelers can stop.

With the pace that the tunnel is being built, I think the main tunnel will be finished at around the same time that the area within our main city's wall is starting to become filled enough that we would consider building another circle of walls. Instead, it might be good to adjust our primary construction focus to the far side of the island at that point, to distribute out population to make defense and overall use of our island easier.

We're also reaching a point of industrialization that it would probably be worth establishing a material science lab to start determining the real quality of certain construction materials over others. If, for instance, acid washed lightstone ends up being very easy to make and structurally stronger than the regular stone we've been working with, then we could, in theory, build taller buildings, increasing our population density, which would keep more of our land available for other projects.

After going on that brief vacation, I went back to the research base to start designing the cryogenics facility. The largest of the heat driven stirling engines can drive six of the large cryocoolers by my estimates. If I were to use hydrogen as the internal medium for the large stirling engine, it could probably drive even more of them. I'd actually prefer if we could use the Joule-Thomson effect to produce a continuous stream of liquid air, but we lack a lot of the necessary resources to make various components of the quality needed to exploit the effect.

So instead, I want to make a lot of the large cryocoolers in a hallway, where they can reject their heat to the atmosphere outside the hallway. That way, the efficiency of each individual cooler should increase as well, since the ambient temperature should drop within the cryogenics facility due to all the cooling. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if operators in the facility end up needing protective leather to handle things in the facility.

One large cryocooler is capable of producing a bit over 100 gallons of liquid air in a year. Of that, there is about 1 gallon of liquid argon. Doing some quick mental math, if I want to have a giant mana crystal capable of surviving any mana storms in 10 years time, then we'd need around 25 large cryocoolers producing liquid air.

It's actually completely doable to make that. If I account for maintenance times, I think I should up the number to around 30 cryocoolers. That would mean we'd need five large stirling engines as the main power source for this building. That means we'd also be producing about ten gallons of cryogenic air a day, which still isn't anywhere near enough to do a continuous distillation, meaning we'll still be doing batch distillation. If we're doing batch distillation, we'll also need to make plenty of cryogenic storage tanks for handling all this fluid.

Some of it will be useful as part of extracting fluorite from the existing deposit, but we'll still have an excess of liquid nitrogen after that. The inert nature of nitrogen could be useful for a bunch of processes. As an inert gas, it could be used for storing other reactive chemicals we might make. If we end up being able to attempt the haber process, then we could also end up making ammonia, given we have a hydrogen source as well. There is also the option of using it for cooling in locations where building a cryogenic cooler isn't feasible, or only a small amount of cooling is necessary for a brief amount of time.

There will need to be a lot of other peripheral devices as well. First, I'll want fans to drive air over the hot ends of the cryocoolers and the cold ends of the power producing stirling engines. I also will need additional cryocoolers for storage tanks and a batch distillation tower. Realistically, we probably want more than one batch distillation tower, with a smaller one for processing the Argon. We'll also need a smaller system of desiccant and freezers to remove most of the water and some of the CO2 from the air before it enters the facility for condensing.

Overall, similar to the hydrogen facility, I think having a lot of the tanks underground will be a good idea. In the event of a failure, there is less risk to the environment. Though unlike with the hydrogen, we'll actually need a way to remove the liquid from the bottom, rather than only needing to pull it out from the top.

[Vol.6] Ch.31 New Cryogenics Facility Part 2

Adapting my previous designs for the large and small cryocoolers to be made in the new stirling facility took eighteen days. Then, while I had the goblins making the cryocoolers and stirling engines to power them, I started building the new facility. I started with the underground part of the facility, since it would also provide me with the stone to build the above ground portion of the facility. I decided that ultimately, I want a five foot thick roof on the underground portion, along with a few small vents to let extra air out from any evaporating materials.

After taking nearly thirty days, I'd excavated the underground portion and had finished work on the dewar style tanks for storing the cryogenic fluids. Each tank is equipped with two outlet valves, a pressure relief valve, a small cryocooler to keep the contents liquefied and an emergency failure patch of thinner material that should fail before the rest of the tank. The underground room also vents to atmosphere in case of an accidental spill or a more catastrophic failure.

The first tank was a ten foot in diameter by twenty feet long monster of a tank that I embedded partially in one wall. If the atmosphere is something like 75% nitrogen, then this tank should take about four years to fill up with liquid nitrogen. The second tank was eight feet in diameter and ten feet long. Using the same heuristic pattern, this one should hold about four years worth of liquid oxygen. The third tank was four feet tall and three feet in diameter, and should hold four years of argon.

I also installed two more tanks that were identical in size to the argon tank. One is for holding liquid air before it goes into distillation, and the other is for holding the argon rich oxygen portions until they can go into a separate distillation column. I haven't started on the columns yet, but I've decided on making two fifty gallon columns, and two ten gallon columns. The larger columns are for separating liquid air, while the smaller ones are for processing the argon. Since we're doing batches, I want to have two columns for each, so that we would have redundancy during maintenance times.

Unfortunately, designing the columns actually requires that we have access to liquefied air so that I can do the necessary tests to determine column efficiency. However, I did learn quite a bit from the last column design, so I could get most of the columns' components built before I actually started fine tuning. All in all, after twenty-four days I'd finished getting the columns mostly assembled and the casting teams had made all the large cryocoolers. Well, they'd made the shells. I still needed to take the time to charge them with hydrogen.

So, next, using the stone from excavating the underground portion, I first rebuilt the roof over top the pit where I'd been working, to make a basement. I then installed some of our fluorite crystal lights on the ceiling in the basement to keep things visible. Then, over the course of another twenty-six days I had the surface building built. Once again, I went with a double layered design, meant to help keep the inside of the building more insulated. Ultimately, I designed it to be a long hallway with fifteen cryocoolers on either side. Their hot ends extend out of the hallway and are exposed straight to air for now.

At the other facility, they have flowing water to cool their hot end's down enough to allow cryogenic temperatures. Here, I've gone with a slightly different approach, and we'll see if it will work. The hot ends have very large copper heatsinks installed on them with a fan blowing air rapidly over each individual heatsink's surface. The fans are angled upwards toward the sky to hopefully direct the heat up and away from any air intake. The issue with attempting this before would have been the amount of mechanical power necessary to actually power an active cooling system in addition to the cryocoolers. Now, with the fluorite powered stirling engines, I'm less concerned with not having enough power.

I've gone through a lot of trouble to attempt to design this place to ensure that the air inlets into the cryogenic building are isolated from all the rejected heat that we're producing. Along the roof of the facility is where the five largest stirling engines will sit to power the cryocoolers. At the far end of the building, there will sit two more engines of the second largest size, each driving the fans for the heat sinks on their respective side of the building. The air intakes into the building go through desiccant, and then their own moderately sized freezer chamber designed to freeze any remaining water, and potentially some of the CO2, out of the air before it reaches the main room. Each of those freezer chambers also has it's own stirling engine power source, though it's being mechanically powered through a long axle to keep the engine further away from the air inlets.

Ultimately, it's very similar to the other cryogenics facility, however, due to the size of it, many items were scaled up. I have about twenty days worth of changes and adjustments to make before I actually start turning things on by fetching the crystal plates to plug in to the bottoms of the main stirling engines.

The first thing I needed to do was generate enough hydrogen to charge the cryocoolers. The hydrogen facility seemed to work, at least for the time being. I didn't need that much hydrogen either, so perhaps in the future if it runs for a very long period of time, it might end up showing signs that I need to make changes. Ultimately, I brought the hydrogen generating plates up from storage down in the crystal facility for a few days to make the hydrogen I needed, then put them back down there. If the hydrogen plant starts running full time in the future, I'll want to keep an eye on it for a bit to see if I notice any dangerous defects occurring.

After the cryocoolers were charged, I went through a manual check of all the connections and devices to make sure that nothing was experiencing any sort of mechanical issues that would potentially cause mechanical failures that would require rebuilding things. Once everything seemed to be good, I was two days ahead of my estimate, and so I tried to turn the facility on by installing the fluorite heat crystals.

At first, everything seemed to be working as I expected, which had me feeling quite good. However, as I brought more crystals up, and started turning on more of the cryocoolers, I started to notice an issue. With each new power stirling engine I turned on by bringing up a new crystal, the more all of them seemed to struggle. By the time the last engine was turned on, I could tell that they were all struggling to actually power the number of devices they were attached to.

If I hadn't already designed the air system going down to the crystal growing area, I'd probably be more stumped on what was happening. Today, however, there is almost no wind, and while I know that mana can flow against the direction of airflow, I know that it more readily flows with the direction of airflow. We've got a total of six massive stirling engines powered by our largest crystal plates, and four of the next largest size, all concentrated within this one area.

So, I did a small test, and sure enough, my mana regen on the roof of the building was about half of that just over fifty feet away where it was normal. So, first I shut down all the engines so that they wouldn't degrade, and moved their heat crystals back underground to preserve them. Then, I got to work on what I hoped would be a working solution.

If mana flow is helped by airflow, then it's somewhat reasonable that we just need a bigger natural airflow over these engines. On a windy day, they might run fine on their own, but I don't want to wait for a windy day. So instead, on either end of the roof of the long, hallway like building, I installed two massive fans pointed from the front to the back. Each fan has a ten foot radius with six blades, and it rotates about 10 times per second.

Building them took six additional days of time, and I used a single of the second largest stirling engines to power both of them. There was a significant amount of airflow over the roof now. I then took a day getting all the stirling engines turned back on. This time, only the very last engine seemed to be struggling a small amount to keep up, while the first engine was actually working overtime.

I could already envision a much better system, using individualized air intakes that would flow directly over closed cavities over top the crystals for each stirling engine, but implementing them would take additional weeks of time. Instead, I took an extra two days, and installed two smaller fans angled in on that side of the building pointed at the last engine, and that seemed to do the trick.

Thankfully, it's the middle of winter now, meaning I can easily go and move the goblins who worked at the old facility, and bring them to work at this one. I'll need more intermediate dewar flasks for transporting and collecting all the cryogenic fluid we'll be making while I fine tune the new distillation columns. So for now, I'll shut the facility down again for a few days while I get the goblins up to speed.

[Vol.6] Ch.32 Cableways

Getting the goblins up to speed in the new cryogenics facility took ten days, part of which was start up time, and most of which was making enough dewar flasks to collect the liquid air under each of the cryocoolers. Interestingly, I really didn't need to hire any additional goblins, because most of their job is waiting to empty devices. While they do have to work harder now, it's still a lot of waiting, though I'm sure maintenance periods are going to be more common. It's also a bit noisy, given the number of mechanical devices in use.

The facility itself is actually very cold as well, which I expected. In fact, this did seem to improve efficiency somewhat, since the ambient air was already cooled below the freezing point of water. I had expected about 9 gallons a day, but we were actually producing 11. On the other hand, I've had to put an order in for special bargas wool clothing to be made for all the workers, to help keep them warm while they go in and out of the facility.

I then had six days where I needed to wait for enough liquid air to be produced that I could start experimenting with the column design. So I took that time to start clearcutting trees in a new area. I expect any day now that the aqueduct will be completed, so I walked down to the coast where the new road will get built along the coastline, and started clearing trees that were in the way. I technically already did my levelling requirements for this next year, since I did that huge burst earlier in order to evolve, but getting some extra levelling beneath my belt didn't seem like a bad idea.

Fine tuning the distillation columns took quite a while. I actually have two large cryocoolers installed as the top condenser on both of the large towers, and another one on each of the smaller ones. Thankfully, we have plenty of fluorite plates to use for heating elements for the reboilers, so that was relatively easy to install.

All in all, between doing density sampling and repeatedly refilling and waiting for the column to reach equilibrium over and over, I spent eighty-seven days before I was finally confident that all the columns were working well enough for our purposes. While I worked on this, the construction teams resumed building the walls around the facility during the spring rains.

Afterwards, I took a day to tell Zeb about adjusting the work distribution for construction teams. I'd thought about it before, and outside of spring, when the streams swell due to all the rain, we can still dedicate at least one construction team to working in the reservoir above the water line. Then, when we reach winter, we can add more teams in to expand the base level of the reservoir more to catch up with the rest of the year's work.

I had thought about us just stopping reservoir work, but I decided that we should probably keep working on it while we can. Once the city as a whole reaches a certain population level, we'll probably start using the reservoir as a way to keep a constant stream volume, and store more of our early year's water for later in the year. Right now, we actually over-drain the reservoir earlier in the year, and then practically empty it in winter. If it weren't for the aqueduct we built, we actually would already have water issues in the city, but thanks to it providing a decent amount more of water, we're still keeping up, even in winter.

I spent another two days taking apart the old cryogenics facility, while I had a handful of goblins move the old components to the new facility. They aren't going to be used there, but like I said, I want to keep the technology secret. Ultimately, we're actually producing far more of the stirling engines and crystals than I have uses for. So, while I want to keep growing crystals and just storing them away, I want the casting facility to also start making other items that would benefit from replaceable parts.

Namely, I've started to think about the idea of mechanizing some of our transportation on the island, though it does come with it's own challenges. First and foremost, unlike most other engine types, we can't actually easily regulate the output torque on a stirling engine. They take time to ramp up and down. Depending on what sort of application I want, this could be hard to overcome.

For instance, if I wanted an automobile style vehicle, there would need to be a lot of complex machinery to allow the vehicle to stop and start quickly. Thankfully, the items I have in mind are much simpler. Things I'm thinking of are more like small rail, conveyors, cableways, and ships. There, having a slower startup and shutdown are less of an issue, and added bulk for controls are less of a concern.

Any large system that we might end up designing would obviously need quite a bit of maintenance, but we're reaching population levels where that is manageable. For instance, multiple cableways could prove very useful for transport of goods between locations on the island. Thinking about it, it's actually a bit of a problem that we're digging through the mountain, because any fluorite powered machines travelling through the mountain would need to be supplied with mana crystals. However, if we ran a cable line through instead, then we could simply have the cable's engine sit on the surface. That being the case, I think small rail is basically out the window, since the only places it would go are probably better served by cableways, given our geography.

As for ships, I'd love to design a much better ship. The first powered ship design we made was the paddlewheel steam ship, which functions somewhat like a barge. With the leviathans about, I don't know if we have a good use for ships or not right now, but in the future they could form an invaluable part of our military. All the ships that are currently used for transporting troops are wind propelled, so having a much heavier, metal ship powered by an engine would probably upset the balance of power far more than the rifled artillery did. However, building such a thing would be a massive endeavor, and require a huge amount of metal.

From here on out, about every half of a year, I'm going to need to return up the mountain, and work on growing the mana crystal using our argon supply. So, while I wait for that first batch to be done, I think I'll start tinkering with design ideas for a cableway, along with thinking about where I'd want it built.

The whole facility is built right against a hillside, meaning I had adequate testing grounds for attempting to make a gondola system. The first step was getting the cabling and cable cars designed. Since I already had a decent idea of what things needed to look like, I started from what I knew, and then started experimenting with the designs to find something that worked well. What I quickly found, however, was that we probably should have been using these for at least some of our projects already.

After eighteen days, I'd had enough cable made from steel to start doing testing. For now, I set the system up with a top station about three hundred feet away from the bottom station with a single intermediate tower with a few rollers to help lift the cable. What I found was that I didn't need a motor at all if I intended all trips to be down the hillside. The weight of a gondola full of rocks was more than enough to pull the cabling with it. In fact, it kept accelerating until it crashed at the bottom.

Right now, it's not that useful to us, but a few years ago, when were were moving lots of stone from the tunnel down to the city, it would have been worth considering. The same situation goes for when we were hauling ore from the cave on the mountain all the way down to the city. Now, however, any ore we find is likely going to be found on the far side of the mountain in the tunnel being dug there. While we're still extracting stone from the tunnel, not all of it goes to the city, so it seems even less useful to make a one way system there.

However, there are two places that could use a powered cableway currently. One could go from this facility up the mountain to about the level where the cave is by following this ridge all the way up. That would allow much easier transport of crystal material and argon between here and there.

The second location is also along this ridgeline. Specifically, bringing ore over the ridgeline to the sulfur ore roasting and smelting facility. While we were able to handle hauling all the ore by hand using carts for most of the way, it did require an inordinate amount of manual labor. Though that did at least give a lot of the goblins work to do to earn some cash.

I'm going to continue doing testing to see what sorts of cableway designs I can make work. I'm also thinking about the idea of a ground embedded cable car, like what some cities used, but instead have it running through the mountain through the completed tunnel, though we'd almost need to expand the tunnel again to make that happen. The benefits of having a powered transport from one side of the island to the other would practically eliminate any concerns about shortages in one city versus another.

[Vol.6] Ch.33: Galvanized Steel

By the time I'd made a second trip up the mountain hauling approximately three gallons of liquid argon, I was determined that I'd have a cableway up the mountain before the end of the year. Part of the reason for this is that the current path from the new facility to the cave is quite long. We follow a road back to the city, then follow the winding path up the mountain, which was designed to keep the gradient fairly low. Ultimately, it takes about seven hours to get from the facility to the cave while hauling a large dewar container.

A slow moving aerial cable lift can probably cut that time to less than two hours. There are downsides to a cable lift though. As I've said before, maintenance will be a large endeavor. Though the amount of work to maintain one lift versus multiple won't be linear. If we install even more lifts in other places, the maintenance burden won't actually be that much higher. The main repair and maintenance would be splicing cable that had been damaged, and that shouldn't happen that often, meaning whoever is trained to do that will also be able to basically handle multiple lifts around the island as part of a single job.

Likewise, once the majority of cable is made, we shouldn't actually need that much spare cable, and the damaged parts can be re-melted and formed back into undamaged cable as needed. I've already started narrowing down design ideas as well with testing. Ultimately, I want to use a single cable size for all our potential cableways, which means for some of them they might be oversized. That being the case, I started testing on the three main types of cableways I'd want on the island.

The first type is designed to haul a single person along with a moderate load of cargo. It looks something like a ski lift, but with a moderately large bucket on the back of the bench for holding transported materials. I decided to go with a solid safety bar on the bench as well, to hopefully prevent accidents. The second type is a passenger gondola, with inside seating, meant to transport four people, as well as a handful of personal items that those riding might bring. The third type isn't suspended at all, but instead would be pulled along rails within the tunnel. Given the much shallower incline involved, and the fact that they aren't suspended, these cable cars can actually be quite a bit larger while using the same size cable, hopefully facilitating the transport of goods and people through the tunnel if we get to that point.

In the last fourty-four days, I've really started to narrow down a lot of the design properties, though I still have some amount of work left to do. Thanks to all the rain, I quickly realized that I'd actually need to update our steel processes for this application. Much of our steel items are covered with some kind of protection, whether it's stone, or they're indoors. However, this will be mostly outdoors, and as such, they're prone to corrosion. We do, however, have a solution for this and I've already tested it to some success, galvanization.

We've had access to zinc for a while now, and it's mostly just been stored away. So, what we're doing now is filling a vat with molten zinc, and then dipping our steel that will be exposed to rain in it. For the wires that make our steel cable, each wire is drawn through the molten zinc using a set of rollers that submerge the steel wire under the zinc as it's slowly pulled through to coat the wiring. Without nickel or chromium, we don't have much of an option to make corrosion resistant steel, so galvanizing it was our next best option.

I've started a few tests designed to see how corrosion resistant these new wires are by comparison. The testing apparatus periodically sprays a small section of cable with water as the cable continuously rotates around a pair of pullies exerting force on it. Ultimately, it's meant to mimic the conditions the cable will be under long term, while exaggerating the amount of water it's exposed to. Regardless of the results of this test, I don't expect too many changes to certain aspects of the system as a whole, so I plan on finalizing the support tower and station designs relatively soon, so construction of those can begin while some of the tests continue.

In the last month, I've started work on various part of the aerial lift from the research facility up the mountain. I'm getting through my leveling requirements for quite a while as part of this, since I need to clear a path where the lift will travel up the mountain, so I've been focusing on cutting trees during daylight hours. At night, I focus on doing more of the design finalization for the stations and bullwheel for the lift.

The effort to build this is probably on par with a road. However, unlike a road, a lot of the labor is centralized and doesn't require stoneshaping to effectively make. The support pylons will still mostly be made of stone, but since they'll be spaced every thousand feet or so and only stand about sixty feet tall, it won't require quite as much work as filling in a road with stone, even including foundation work. Where as the lifts and wire will all be made at a metalworking facility. The lifts will probably be composed of cast parts, and the wire for the cable will be made through extrusion.

At our metalworking area, I've devised a way to feed semi-molten steel into a roller and extruder so that we can make continuous lengths of steel wire, which should vastly improve the quality and amount of cable we can make. These three day breaks to go grow a mana crystal every month are actually getting to be quite annoying, and I'm still a long ways from being able to change my work pattern. I could delay them every so often, but doing so would then require that I also bring other goblins with me hauling more liquid argon. Which would lead to more chances to attract unwanted attention.

Since I'm carrying the large flask, I go through the city to stay on roads all the way up the mountain, while the goblins who help with melting the crystal material take a long detour before joining me on the road. If it's just me carrying something odd, most people just tune out what I'm doing at this point. I'm conspicuous, but I'm always conspicuous, so most people have stopped bothering to try to figure out what I'm up to. Once the lift is done, I'll easily be able to start spreading my trip time out anyway. Plus, this lets me take a little bit of time to start some of the work up there for the lift as well.

The station won't actually be right at the cave, since it'll be travelling a mostly straight path. Instead, it'll probably be about half of a mile from the cave entrance, meaning we'll at least need a decent trail between the two locations. So, while the goblins who are helping me melt material sleep, I've been mapping out a path to where I want the station, and have started on some of the tree cutting up there as well.

I ran into a few more issues that I had to solve as I worked on the design for the aerial lift system in this last month between crystal growth sessions. First, as I did load testing on my smaller rig, I realized that I actually need some kind of tensioning system to balance the load on the cable continuously. Thankfully, a little bit of mechanical work was able to solve this issue, though it's going to be a bit trickier to handle it with the large system.

All I needed to do was install a pulley along the line on a rail with a counterweight to keep constant tension on the line. Though there were a few problems that I needed to intermediately solve for that. First, I quickly realized that I needed the pulley wheel to be large. Our cable is about two inches across, and I found that a wheel about nine feet across was necessary to not cause damage to the cable. My test system is also quite small at about 300 feet. In comparison, the length of the full system will be about five miles long, and the tension in the cable will increase with that total length and extra load.

Meaning that not only will my counterweight need to be much bigger, but it'll also need to have a huge pit dug under it so that it can travel that extra distance to make up for the slack involved in managing such a long cable. Which unfortunately means I'm going to have to get a construction team involved. The good news should be that most of that stone from excavation should find use in the support pylons along the way down the mountain.

[Vol.6] Ch.34 Cableway Progress

Interestingly, the solution to the tension problem also solved a problem with cable corrosion. As the cable would go in and out of tension, the zinc coating could more easily get worn away, making the galvanization less useful in my small scale test. After I changed my testing system and monitored it over the next month, I found that a more consistent tension in the cable prevented wear and tear, and reduced corrosion.

This month was full of all kinds of interesting discoveries beyond that though. Shortly after returning from growing the mana crystal, Tiberius had an update on one kind of fluorite. He'd been testing all kinds of materials doped into the crystal growth, but most didn't have an effect. Based on the various organic and inorganic compounds he tested, it seems like the first two rows of elements don't seem to have any appreciable effects. Most of his testing was focused around trying all kinds of organic compounds, which, in retrospect, I probably should have warned him about. I find myself frequently mistaking his ingenuity for having certain knowledge. It's fairly obvious to me that putting any organic compound into molten rock is basically going to break the majority of the bonds in it, reducing it to a soup of elements.

He did, however, seem to eventually catch on that it didn't really matter what the organic material was, it pretty much had no effect. He did discover a very interesting property of lead doped fluorite. In our initial tests, it had seemed to have no properties. However, we weren't testing for the property that it seems to exert. Tiberius claimed that the property is increased weight based on his observations. During one test, the string suspending the crystal snapped. Intrigued, he tried other thin strings, and they also snapped.

After doing some other measurements using a balance, he thinks it's just heavier. However, I'm not sure of that myself, based on the tests he described doing. I've instructed him to test moving crystals to see if they're also harder to move horizontally, even while not experiencing friction. Based on his existing tests, they could have three different properties. They could be affected more greatly by gravity, have a downward force applied, or have more mass.

At the very least, it should be easy to determine if they have more mass somehow while exposed to mana. If it's not that, I don't know if we have the capability to determine if they're affected by gravity more, or if they have a flat downward force applied to them. We'd need to have access to varied gravitational fields for that to be done. Personally, I'm hoping that they have increased mass, since that would be the most exciting property of the three.

The team that was expanding the tunnel through the mountain finally reached the middle as well. I ended up spending a few days making a very large mana poison container to let us move the medium sized crystal out of the tunnel on this side, to improve the speed they mine from that side. Since we designed the tunnel to drain water, it's actually draining quite a bit. It's many miles long, and it's draining about 80 gallons per minute, which is quite a lot of water. However, I don't expect it to stay that high forever. As the water pressure in the rocks slowly decreases, it should reach a new steady state somewhere lower than the current amount after a few years.

When all was said and done, I barely did any construction work for the cableway, which means getting it completed this year is starting to seem more and more like a pipe dream. Though I did at least get a rough estimate for how deep I'll need to make the counterweight pit. I triple checked my math, and it seems like it'll need to be about 100 feet deep, based on how much was necessary in my smaller system. With a pit that deep, it'll take some time for it to get dug out, even with a construction team's help.

The counterweight will need to be quite large as well. If it's made out of stone, it'll end up being a cube just over 7 feet per side. Which is not a miniscule amount. What I'll probably end up needing to do is cut the cube from the bottom of the pit, and attach support cabling up to the tensioner pulley, and then use a lot of leverage to get it up to position in the system.

I decided to accept that the cableway wouldn't be able to be completed in a single year, which, when I phrase it that way, should have been obvious. I've focused the efforts at the end of this year on getting the counterweight pit dug alongside a construction team. I also took a much more proper estimate of how far the cableway will be traveling by using stakes and rope along where I'll put the pylons, and it's a lot less than I had thought. It's only about three miles long, rather than the five I was using to estimate before.

That shrunk the counterweight size from just over 7 feet down to just under 6 feet to a side, and the pit only needs to be about 60 feet deep, rather than 100. When you add it all up, considering I want three feet of clearance on either side of the counterweight, that means we need to excavate less than half the original amount of proposed material. Before we were going to have to cut about 1600 tons of rock, now that number is close to 700 tons.

Despite these savings, it was still worth it to build a small crane for lifting stone out of the pit. Thanks to the fact we were using a crane, we were able to cut larger blocks out, speeding up the excavation process. Unfortunately, it does mean I'll have to cut the blocks down to a more manageable size when I want to use them in the future. While we'd wait for our mana to recharge, we'd either work on getting the pathway prepared for the pylons down the mountain, or clear the path back to the cave.

The pit was completed about half a month before winter set in on the mountain. I kept the construction team around for an extra day to build a basic building over the pit so that the snow wouldn't fill the pit and make working on it a nightmare next year. With argon production at our current rate, I think it'll be about six more years until I've grown a mana crystal to be a bit bigger than ParTor. Unfortunately, to get it to that point, I will need two more crystal growth apparatuses, each larger and more complicated than the previous ones.

By these two stages, the crystal will be so large that it'll be easier to simply break the bottom of the apparatus out and repair it, rather than try to come up with a complicated mechanism for easily removing the crystal. It'll sit in each apparatus for a few years anyway, so that would further complicate any removal mechanism.

Though I should also consider whether I should simply remake the mana crystal growth apparatuses down at the facility instead. The cableway would still be useful if I did, since I'd need to move all the containers of the spent crystal material back down the mountain, alongside the current in-progress crystal. There are other reasons beyond that for this cableway as well.

The altitude that the cave is at also happens to be the altitude that mana poison plants grow. It's also approximately the altitude where we have our handful of military watchposts for looking out over the ocean, since it's generally still below the cloud level. Plus, I'd rather our first largescale cableway not be frequently used. I'm sure I'll find all sorts of problems that we'll need to resolve with this cableway, meaning it'll be quite unreliable. I'd rather this one fail, rather than one hauling a gondola full of goblins up a hillside.

With all these projects taking so long, I keep falling further and further behind fluorite production, and I think it might be worth thinking about simple uses for some of the fluorite types. Otherwise, we'll end up with thousands of heat plates without any use for them.

[Vol.6] Ch.35 Mechanics Team

As I tried to think about potential other uses for fluorite, I recalled two important facts that I needed to keep in mind. First, when I installed all the stirling engines at the new cryogenics facility, the local mana level dropped, and required manual movement of air to increase the mana level high enough to prevent issues with the machines. Second, the rate of growth of plants near the city, and the general quality of life for individuals declined when our massive mana crystals broke. Considering those two facts, I'm nervous about adding too many fluorite crystals in non-industrial locations.

One potential item, even though we don't actually need it, would be a mana powered salt evaporator, using heat fluorite and a large brass bowl to boil off the water. If we ever open trade back up, that would be a potential free source of income. I suppose putting fluorite lights at the gates of our city might be a decent idea, though it won't end up using that much fluorite. Something I'm more interested in making would be a lightstone processing facility using copper fluorite, but that also won't use much fluorite, and will take longer to make and design than the fluorite it will actually consume.

In other words, I don't know that we actually have a good use for all this fluorite. Though the second we end up needing a lot of it, I'll be glad if we've stockpiled it given its long turn around time. None-the-less it feels like a waste just having all of it sitting around, especially the smaller plates that we have hundreds of. Perhaps I should just give a handful out to some of the goblins in town, and see if any of them come up with interesting uses for them.

I myself plan on spending the winter working on what I can for the cableway, while also digging out a new area deep underground for mana crystal growth chambers. I want to keep it relatively secretive as well, so I think I'll dig it out off of the temporary storage room most of the way down to the fluorite area. Very little fluorite is stored there anymore, though we do still store the fluorite glass before it's melted down in the room. I'll probably dig to the same depth as the other room. I'm hoping that I'll have the next growth chamber done by the time the current crystal is ready for it, meaning I have about a year.

I took a dozen of the smallest heat plates to the city, and gave them to a few different goblins working in different industries. Depending on how things go, and what they come up with, I'm more than willing to give out some more, as long as we keep the concentration of the plates to a minimum. If we manage to grow a mana crystal to the size of ParTor, then we can install more plates around. Though they might need to be adjusted if the mana concentration is too high, but that'll be a problem for a few years from now.

I myself focused in on what work I could do through winter. The wall around the facility is getting closer to completion, so I'm hoping that during springtime, I'll be able to borrow a construction team to assist me in excavating the mana crystal growth chamber, so until then, I've only been digging out the stairwell down to where I'll eventually work. I've also been taking more time to continue clearing a path up the mountain where the pylons will go for the cableway. I'm leveling at pretty much the same rate as before I evolved. So, despite how many trees I've been cutting down, I haven't gained that many levels really.

<LAVA DEMON>
Level: 13
HP: 4629/4629
MP: 2251/2251
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance, Partial Sleep
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands, Pulverize, Thermal Regulation

Though cutting down all those trees did give me an idea for something that we could use some stirling engines for. Our current milling operations of all kinds use windmills to power them. However, the windmills require quite a bit of maintenance and constant resource input. Between wood, and our ever dwindling waterproofing supplies, I think it might be worth converting them to run on stirling fluorite engines.

In fact, I'd prefer to try to teach a demon with stoneshaping and a long history in construction how some of this mechanical conversion and power works. Before now, our ability to install mechanical devices to power things was so limited that it was relatively fine that I was the one who knew how it all needed to be hooked up. Now though, I've started lining up multiple projects that could use that sort of skill, enough that I'm falling far behind the available production of it.

Besides just flour mill, paper mill, and our charcoal pellet press, we also have the lead ore roasting area that could do with switching from wind to magic power. I'd also consider it reasonable to set up a larger charcoal pellet press and mechanical lumbermill up the mountain closer to our dedicated tree farms that we started setting up many years ago. I've been passing them on my way up the mountain each year, and they're reaching the point where the earliest farms will be ready for cutting soon, so getting a permanent processing facility set up would be a benefit there.

I've got just about ten days left before the new year now, so I'll try to talk to Zeb about pulling at least one senior demon from his construction teams for this purpose. Ideally whoever I choose would end up with their own mini-team of assistants as well.

Zeb had quite a few stipulations to put on me taking away a senior construction team member alongside a handful of other demons. First, and this was one I think is actually preferable, Zeb would also be coming along to get a gist of the job, and the new mechanics team would report to him since these large stirling engines are being installed in buildings anyway. I agreed to that one readily, though I did also inform him that he'll probably want to start appointing managers for each department at some point as he gets more and more workers, rather than managing all these laborers himself.

His second stipulation was that this would actually only be part-time work. Rather than split apart an entire construction team, he'd rather just have a whole team join in the process as needed. He agreed that the mechanics portion would take priority for any jobs that come up. His concern is that after the handful of planned buildings get built and retrofit, there won't be any new work for them for months, and he doesn't want their labor to be wasted. I agreed that that was a reasonable requirement as well. Thinking about it another way, on earth construction companies would normally have plumbers, electricians, and hvac guys to do all the specialty work for their construction anyway, so this is a sort of mirroring of that.

His final stipulation was that I stop springing so many surprise, short order requests and changes that have high priority on him. He doesn't mind helping out, and sees the value in what I've been working on, but it's very disruptive and many of the construction teams get quite frustrated when they're suddenly sent all the way up the mountain to dig a large pit. He also said that Zaka and I both are far too imposing to voice their frustrations to directly, even if both of us would be understanding of it. This has only become more true since I turned into a lava demon.

While I couldn't promise that I'd never have surprise construction projects, I agreed that many of them could wait a few months as needed. It'll be somewhat frustrating to have to wait to work on some projects, but I've got enough stockpiled projects myself that I can easily work on a different one while I wait for a construction team to help with the first one.

Speaking of, I figured I should bring up that I was hoping to use the teams building our walls at the research facility this spring for excavating out a new mana crystal area. Zeb rolled his eyes, since it definitely seemed like I wasn't learning my lesson. He'd already planned out what projects they'd go work on after finishing construction of the wall, so I would essentially be pulling them off of planned work to do something else. After a short discussion, I'll be getting one construction team to help me sometime this summer, though I'll have them for a longer period of time so I can get the lab more effectively laid out.

After coming to this agreement, I took Zeb and one of the senior construction teams over to the research facility to first introduce them to the heat crystal powered stirling engines. I decided to split their crash course training into two parts. Theory, then practice. Since I'm the only one who doesn't need to sleep, each day they'd go home, then return the next day to learn more. I also required that they agree to some amount of secrecy. While I won't really be able to hide the stirling engine design from simply being looked at, I can have them agree to not discuss how we make them or how to maintain them.

The first four days were spent teaching them the basic mechanics involved, alongside how to assemble the engine from parts, and replace any worn out parts. I also showed them the sizes of stirling engine we have available, alongside the heat plates. Most of them were pretty quick on the hands on portions, but most of them struggled with understanding the theory behind how engines work. I suppose I shouldn't be that surprised, it's actually a little bit complicated. A windmill is straightforward, wind pushes the blades and turns them. However, the concept of hot air expanding, and how pressure and temperature are linked is multiple steps more complicated. It gets even more complicated when you try to explain how you're harnessing that, and why things like a regenerator help significantly with efficiency.

Ultimately though, the theory portion wasn't really that necessary for the tasks they'll be doing, and I only taught about it while they were already working on each component it was related to. The second half of their crash course ran for the remaining six days in the year, and involved determining what size engine is needed for particular applications. I figured if we worked together on the most complicated mechanical building, the paper mill, it would be the best place to start.

The paper mill has two large windmills powering it, with multiple gearboxes sending the windpower to different machines. The building is a bit of a mechanical nightmare as a result. There were two options for retrofitting it. First, simply replace the two windmills with powerful stirling engines, and leave everything else in place. While that would increase the uptime on the paper mill, it wouldn't resolve much of the other potential problems inside the mill that should be considered for retrofitting.

I didn't describe this to them, but I like to think of the ambient mana as wireless electricity, and these stirling engines as electric motors. Thinking of it that way, each machine should simply have an appropriately sized motor, which would simplify the layout of the building. How I went about describing it to them was that the complicated gearboxes add complexity that requires additional maintenance and repair. So a balance needs to be struck between the maintenance schedules for the engines, gearboxes, and any torque shafts in the building. For this particular building, I'd probably switch to a handful of engines, each dedicated to either a large machine, or one engine to a handful of smaller machines, such that the total amount of maintenance is lower.

I didn't forget to remind them that the engines are designed to have replaceable parts, unlike most of the other mechanical components here. So the stirling engine repairs will be quite simple by comparison. Though after I explained this to them, I pulled Zeb aside and told him that I'd probably want to get a few low level stoneshaping demons in the near future that I could train to be maintenance workers who just go around and do regular maintenance on these engines. He rolled his eyes again, but agreed to send some newbies my way after we're done.

[Vol.6] Ch.36 Magic Ovens

With a week of time to give basic training to a repair team, and the mechanics team set up to begin retrofitting the old buildings that were still reliant on wind power, I was free to resume work on my own projects. Unfortunately, since I'll be waiting a while until a construction team can help me excavate the area for the new mana crystal growing area, I needed to find a new project to preoccupy myself with at night. During the day, I'm working on the cableway, but at night, maneuvering around the ridgeline to cut trees isn't exactly very safe.

I've completed a small stairway down to the level I want to build this new mana crystal area at, but I actually need the construction team to do quite a bit of excavation for me. First, the final crystal that I want to grow is 16 feet diagonally. Meaning the stairwell is too small to move the crystal out. Either we'll need to widen the stairwell, or we'll need to make a crane and shaft down to the growth room. Either way, the construction team will be busy for a while with the project, and spending all that time myself would be a waste.

So, instead, I've decided to try to using the copper fluorite to make lightstone from the base rock that we normally hand process. I've already seen that I can acid wash our processed lightstone, and it seems to leave us with a less reactive version, though very little material got removed in that process. By comparison, even the red-tinged rock from up the mountain is still not majority lightstone, and that lost material would have to go somewhere.

The previous lightstone acid treatment had quite a bit of water compared to the amount of lightstone, and there was a small amount of fine sediment like powder at the bottom of the container, though I couldn't tell if it was just loose particles of lightstone, or an actual chemical product due to the acid. So, to start out, I plan on testing three different things: the sediment-like leftovers from lightstone, the effect of our acid on the red-tinged precursor stone, and the effect of our acid on the more common basalt-like stones that we can still get a little lightstone out of.

Since Zeb wants more heads up, I decided that I should try to schedule the construction of pylons for the cableway sometime in early fall, about half of a year from now. So, I made a trip to the city to make a request to Zeb and to hire some demons for hauling all the trees I've been cutting to make way for the cableway. Zeb appreciated the heads up and said he'd schedule two teams for me then, since a portion of it takes place above the snow line.

Since I was hiring new demons anyway through the city hall, I took the time to check in with the demons who I'd left heat plates with, to see if any had come up with any useful contraptions. Most had ended up with very mundane uses that were honestly more dangerous than they were helpful. Two had put the heat plate under their bedding with some rocks around it so it would be warm at night, which sounds comfortable initially, until you think about the fact it's using ambient mana, and the second I bring a large crystal back to town their bed will probably catch fire.

Another three told me they thought they could use it to keep their food warm all day while they worked through different contraptions, and then they could come home to hot food only to find that some food dried out to the point of inedibility, and others rotted. All three gave up on that idea. Two of them cleverly worked together and managed to make something resembling a magical oven for cooking. I purposefully had only used the smallest plates that weren't quite ambiently hot enough to burn most things. However, by putting two plates on either side of an enclosed space, they could get the temperature inside up to a hot enough temperature to cook foods.

I marked that one as a success and told them I'd like to pay them to implement their idea in the various kitchens around the city. While I don't want there to be too many mana draining plates about, the ovens are actually quite manageable in size, and if built well, have a fairly good efficiency. Plus, it would severely reduce the amount of wood we're consuming for cooking, which would drastically reduce our land demand for sustainability.

The remaining five acted cagey initially, but eventually revealed that they had built a secret bath area since they had missed the old public bathhouse with it's warm water. They did mention, however, that this one didn't feel nearly as good, and while it did clean them, they never felt rejuvenated afterwards. Considering the heat plates probably drained all the mana from the water, that was about the opposite of how the mana crystal resulted in the water feeling warm.

So, while it would relax the muscle somewhat, it didn't actually replenish and overcharge their mana, so it didn't quite feel the same. While they had enjoyed the hot water, they didn't really consider it that much of a success. In fact, two of the five stopped even using it before I came asking questions. The others didn't seem too upset that I wanted to take the plates back either, so I suppose it could be considered a failure.

Ultimately, I paid the two who came up with the oven idea a handsome sum of money. Specifically, I paid them enough money to cover basic living expenses for three years each. I then tinkered with their design for a day to add some features that would be helpful. First off, I added in two removable metal racks that can be cooked on and cleaned. Then I designed it to allow the heat plates to be locked in place or removed with a handle for cleaning.

Most of the oven is made of insulating stone, so I'll pass the idea on to Zeb and perhaps the mechanics team or someone else will get around to retrofitting the kitchens in the near future. I also made casts for the metal racks for our casting area to produce them. When I get a large mana crystal made again, I'll probably need to have the plates removed from the city temporarily, and we'll probably need to redesign the ovens for safety reasons.

I worked on the cableway and the lightstone research for a few weeks until I was in the second month of the year, and I'd had some interesting results worth pursuing further. The sediment like leftovers seemed to be a clay like material, though it also still had some fine particles of lightstone embedded in it. Using the darkstone source was practically impossible for the purposes of getting lightstone with this method, as the majority of the stone dissolved away, and what was left was a fine sand of various stones.

I even attempted stoneshaping that sand back into a solid object to dissolve it again, but ultimately, too much material was left over or precipitated out again that I couldn't really use it for lightstone manufacturing. Our reddish stone, however, showed some promise, though the process was somewhat convoluted and needed a lot of water, and produced a lot of waste water.

I found that if I cut the reddish stone into plates itself, then submerged it I could get it to react at a decent rate. To make it manageable however, I had to finetune quite a few different features. First, I needed to manage the acidity, which for this project meant adjusting the total water amount to the copper fluorite plate size. Then, I needed to adjust the total amount of the reddish stone to water, as well as the duration the stone spent in a single bath.

If I put too little stone in the water, it'd break down too much, and if I put too much stone in, it wouldn't dissolve enough of it at once, though too little was far worse than too much. If I let it run for too long, the plates would break apart as well, and that mess was very difficult to clean, since the plates would become so brittle, they'd break into small parts and mix with any sediment that formed along the container bottom.

However, by keeping a constant ratio and duration, what I found I could do was acid bathe the rock for a period of time, remove the enriched but more brittle plates out, then reform them into new solid plates. By repeating that cycle five times, I'd be left with fairly pure acid washed lightstone. Unfortunately, all that water ended up being highly acidic and full of dissolved minerals.

I wondered if the precipitate would be useful for anything if I boiled away the remaining water. I quickly realized that it was composed of far too many elements in too many different forms to have an easy use for. It might be possible to come up with a multi-stage process to recover it, but I'm not planning on doing that any time soon.

Ultimately, the speed that stoneshaping can reform a solid plate from a partially acid etched one is at least ten times as fast as I can manually remove lightstone, and is probably a hundred times as fast for someone without practice at it. Meaning that this process would allow us to make very pure lightstone much faster than previously, as long as I could design a facility to properly handle such a task. Of course, the downside to any such facility is that it'll require more stoneshaping demons, which is still something we're lacking.

[Vol.6] Ch.37 Lightstone Production Plans

Unfortunately, any facility that is designed to process bulk lightstone would also produce a large amount of very nasty liquid pollution. Pollution that would very likely damage the ecosystem around our island if released into the ocean. There is at least one way to mitigate it somewhat, though it's not that much better. If we evaporated off all the liquid, we could then remove the remaining solid waste, and bury it in underground areas that have been mostly sealed off from water. It's close to 80% of the original reddish-rock that gets eaten away by the acid baths, so there is a lot of solid waste left over after it precipitates out.

Considering I still have a few months until the first construction team shows up to help with the new mana crystal growth area, I may as well take the time to design out such a facility. After all, if I'm needing to give Zeb more of a heads up, actually having a rough idea of what I need done would let me ask him far in advance of when I actually would want the facility worked on.

So, between doing work on the pylon areas and going up the mountain to use our argon that we stored up over winter, I also worked on a design for a facility for mass producing lightstone from good precursor rocks until summer finally came. I can see how doing this in advance actually is quite helpful to Zeb and his teams, since I made multiple revisions and changes to the various designs, adding on new buildings as I went. If I'd done this spur-of-the-moment, I'd have probably needed to get the construction teams back over at least two additional times. Honestly, good planning saves a lot of work over time, even for myself.

In the past, however, most of the projects were straight forward enough, with only a few stages, or a single piece of complicated equipment. Even our cryogenics facility is technically a bunch of batch processes, rather than a continuous one, so adding things in piecemeal wasn't as big of a deal. However, with this facility, I initially thought I'd just pull water out of the stream to use. Between the acid water, copper fluorite, water demand, and physical pollutants though, I thought it'd probably be best to locate this facility further away from our food and population areas.

Unfortunately, that meant relocating it to somewhere without as much of a constant fresh water supply. Salt water could work, but it also has quite a bit of dissolved salts already which interact with the free protons and rock in their own way accelerating certain dissolution while simultaneously making it harder to dissolve more material into the water. Ultimately, that meant I needed a way to make fresh water, which was something we actually already built, at least to some degree.

We have the greenhouses that collect the freshwater from salt formation, though I don't want to haul that freshwater all the way to my planned site. What I'm thinking of doing instead is building a facility along the craggy coastline in one of the thin valleys. We'll build a seawall to protect it, just like the other valleys have, but it'll be serviced by one of the new roads that we're building along the coasts around our island.

There, we'll pump in seawater into large smoothed rock boiler chambers that have heat fluorite plates installed just under the surface periodically. There, the water will be brought to a boil to evaporate away, and condensed into freshwater for the facility. I want the boiler chambers supported by stone pillars, with a mechanical system that can lower the heat plates down away from the boiler and into a well-ventilated tunnel. That way, the plates are exposed to a large quantity of moving air even while they're working, providing extra mana. Then when the heat plates are lowered and the boiler is cooled to a satisfactory amount, the large amount of salt buildup can be harvested.

That lets us produce the freshwater we'd need for our acid baths, while also collecting valuable salt for potential trade in the future, or, failing that, replacing our need for salt from our old evaporation ponds opening that land up for farming. This would also give us a good use for our plentiful heat fluorite plates that we've been making. I decided to do some measurements of the volume of salt that is leftover from evaporating our ocean water, and what I came out to is about a 1% by volume yield of solid salt. So, for every 100 gallons of seawater, I'd get about a gallon of solid salt.

The collected freshwater can then be used for the acid baths made with the copper fluorite to process lightstone. Thankfully, this unique hydronium acid that we get from the fluorite can dissolve about 10 times the amount of rock material as compared to the amount of salt that was initially in the seawater. Though it also loses some of the water alongside the bubbling hydrogen gas coming out of the solution. That means that we ultimately get about 2 times as much high-quality lightstone as we make salt from the process, before considering water recycling.

The hydronium can then be drained into a well grounded tank to hold for a short while so that more of the hydrogen gas can be released and the acidity can drop somewhat in the liquid. In that tank, some of the materials will precipitate out as some of the protons form hydrogen gas and release more metal ions than the fluid can hold. After that, the liquid is again drained, this time to a boiler, where the rest of the liquid will be removed, and as it does so, more hydrogen gas is released.

The steam and hydrogen gas are then put through a condenser like the seawater was, but they're then vented to atmosphere with a fresh air fan, making sure that any trace amounts of volatile compounds and the large amount of hydrogen gas don't build up in the system. When all is said and done between multiple acid wash phases, about half the water can then be recovered and recycled, meaning we ultimately should get about 4 times as much high-quality lightstone as we get salt. That also means that we get about 20 times as much waste material as salt, so we'll be moving a lot of solids around. My guess is that we'll just store the waste material where we cut the rock for processing, though if a more convenient location arises, that can work as well.

By my calculations, we'll need about 50 cubic feet of feed water for every cubic foot of lightstone product. So, I plan on making four salt water boilers, and 20 byproduct boilers. The byproduct boilers are going to be quite a bit smaller than the seawater ones, but we need more of them since the acid washing happens in repeated smaller phases, rather than all at once. I'd like the feed boilers to be 20 feet by 30 feet, and filled with 6 feet deep of water, meaning every boil cycle in a single boiler would yield about 72 cubic feet of acid washed lightstone, alongside 36 cubic feet of salt. The byproduct boilers will only be 10 feet by 18 feet and have 3 feet of water in them.

After all the general building designs, mechanics, and devices were sketched out, I went to Zeb to discuss the idea. I opened the discussion by telling him that I wouldn't even want to start work on this project until mid-next year at the soonest, since I have so many other projects that I'm working on. Though I also espoused the usefulness of the acid washed lightstone as more pure hand-refined lightstone, being more acid resistant and a fairly strong construction material. Ultimately, it's useful in a lot of applications where metal isn't, especially because we have stoneshaping.

In fact, seeing how resistant it is, has made me rethink some of our previous inventions. For example, using thick resins for waterproofing wood. We could instead simply coat it in a thin layer of stoneshaped lightstone to achieve a similar result. Since it seems like humanoids can't actually shape stone at will, but rather cut the stone with magic, it makes sense that they wouldn't have developed this style of design. For us specifically though, we could coat the outer layer of large boats with an inch of the acid washed lightstone, waterproofing the whole thing while also preventing internal metals from corroding to a degree. Obviously, cracks could form along the hull, and we'd need to be smart about how we applied it.

Zeb, however, rightfully pointed out that to process the amount of lightstone I described, we'd need at least ten regular stoneshaping goblins working in the facility to keep up with lightstone production. This comes down to the repetitive nature of the acid washing, plus vacation time and work hours. All that is also assuming we average a single seawater boiler a day of production. If, however, there were a mana source nearby, that could be cut down to only four workers. The big issue comes down to the amount of mana spent on stoneshaping and waiting to recover the mana to continue. With our limited supply of mana crystals and ever growing population, I think six additional workers is probably cheaper long term than a mana source. Improved stoneshaping is 4 times as mana efficient as regular stoneshaping, but any demon that has access to that is far more valuable as a construction worker than as a lightstone producer, so they're out of the question as well.

Ultimately, we agreed that we'd start production of this facility two years from now, though they'll be starting with the sea wall as a project during off seasons, and only prioritizing building the rest of the facility once the sea wall is done. Once the facility as a whole is complete the saltwater boilers will run at full capacity, but we'll only have a limited lightstone supply until we have a surplus of stoneshaping goblins to fill all the necessary positions.

I'm quite content with this. Normally, I'd design a project like this over the course of a few months like it has been, but then I'd directly oversee all the construction and building of the facility, assisting with my much larger mana capacity and improved stoneshaping. If this goes relatively well without me, then I should be more free to design other projects, speeding up our overall production, rather than keeping me as a bottleneck for new things. In about two weeks time, I'm expecting the construction team to show up to help me get the mana crystal growth area dug out, so I'm more than ready to change gears and work on that.

[Vol.6] Ch.38 Population Musings

Working with the construction team to get the new mana crystal growth lab constructed has actually been somewhat difficult. Basically, because I wanted to keep the mana crystal growth process relatively secret, I could only have them help with the general layout of the room, while I would end up needing to wait to build the actual apparatuses myself, though it still saved me significant time over trying to make the whole lab myself due to the sheer size of the project.

Long term, I want to relocate all parts of the mana crystal growth process down to this area, meaning I need quite a lot of space cleared out. Specifically, I need a multi-layered room where I can house all the crystal growth apparatuses that I want. Some of the smaller ones are easy enough to fit on one floor in a corner, but others, like the apparatuses for the 8-foot, and the planned 12 and 16-foot crystal, take a significant amount of space, and have to breach between floors.

Add on to that the fact that I need a place to store the excess crystal slag, and we had our work cut out for us. Over time, we'll deplete our crystal slag supplies, but if we find a large deposit of mana crystals and were using all our apparatuses at the same time, we'd be producing far more slag than argon to consume it, so we still need to have the extra storage.

I also settled on how we'd get a 16-foot tall octahedral crystal out of here. I've made a request to Zeb for a construction team in a year or two to come back and dig a vertical shaft 20 feet in diameter from the surface down to the center of the room, near where I'll situate the largest growth chamber. We're exceptionally far underground here, and that's on purpose to limit mana flow. Digging this shaft will interfere with the reason we built so deep, but I have a plan for it.

I want to dig two ladder shafts on either side of the main shaft opening to periphery floors. Every 15 feet, we'll place a 5 feet thick floor comprised of two halves and a mechanical system to retract the floor into the walls, opening a layer of the pit. We're pretty much out of quartz crystals, and haven't yet found a new supply of them so we can't use them to insulate the pit, but what we can do instead is surround each section of the pit with our Zinc fluorite lighting to attempt to use up as much of the mana as we can, similar to the heat fluorite being used for the air supply underground. After all, even in the cave I still had some mana regen, so it probably doesn't need to be perfect.

Ultimately, we'll put a crane above the pit, and that'll be how we lift the massive crystal out from underground when it's done. We'll need some kind of mechanical system to even move such a large crystal away from this facility and to it's final location, so I'm going to start planning that out now, so that I can let Zeb know in advance.

For now though, I'll wait until winter to start building the new apparatuses. The construction team just barely finished before fall with excavating the lab space, and I need to turn my attention to our cableway construction next, since I'll have two teams to direct for that project.

At the end of fall, the cableway still wasn't up and running, so I had to ask Zeb for another round of construction on it, which he'll send during next spring, but it will delay the lightstone facility's construction as a result. Basically, the problem came down to the logistics of recharging mana. The further we got to the middle of the path up the mountain, the longer we'd have to wait to recharge our mana to resume construction, since after a while the time it would take to passively recharge mana was faster than the time it would take to walk all the way back to a recharging area at either the lab or the cave.

So, ultimately, we only finished about two-thirds of the pylons, with the remaining third being in the center. It will probably take as long to finish the last third as the first two-thirds took, if not longer. At this point, I'm starting to get a bit nervous about having the cableway done before the mana crystal in the cave is ready for transport down to the new area. I estimate that we'll have it grown to 8 feet in size by sometime next fall.

At that point, I plan on setting it up temporarily to get the rest of the dwarves that are marooned here home over the winter before growing it again. Come springtime I'll let them know that is my plan, so they can get a ship ready. I won't force them to leave, but I will let them know that they'll only have one season to get back, otherwise they'll need to wait another 6 or 7 years before they'll be able to return.

Over winter, I started work on the 12-foot crystal growth chamber, and while I didn't quite finish it, I'm getting close to completion. Unlike the previous chambers, this one is designed to be opened from the side for both adding and removing the crystal. However, to maintain structural integrity, that essentially means I have to stone shape the side off.

The change in design was largely the reason it took me so long to work on, as I had to constantly retest how well it held up to the eventual vacuum in the chamber. As for moving the crystal around, given how large it'll be, I'm thankful I've started doing so much work with the cableway so I should be able to make temporary hoists for moving it using metal cables.

As spring approached, I went back to the city to take a little bit of time exploring to see how things are coming along before I let the dwarves know that they'll be able to return home. It's actually quite interesting exploring the city properly. On a fairly regular basis, I would visit and go to the central ring to handle administrative tasks, but I hadn't really explored around all that much, other than checking on particular portions of the city, like the dwarven refugee area.

Honestly though, walking around the city, it all really seems the same, like block housing in suburbs. There is the same general blueprint stamped over and over of apartment style buildings facing a central road. Periodically, there will be some other building, whether it's a public outhouse connected to a sewer, or a workshop for clothing. There are now three markets around the city as well, which I found to be quite interesting.

I wasn't sure what to expect, but it seems like the original market facing the ocean has completely become a fish market. One of the markets has finished goods stalls, ranging from tools and cooking implements to clothing and accessories. The last market has non-raw fish food products. That includes, interestingly enough, fish oil for frying, but also breads, grains, and even Bargas meat. They also have a handful of stalls selling fried-on-demand dishes, which I thought was pretty neat.

Honestly, I'm not sure if it's because the markets were just designed later, or if it's because they were likely influenced somewhat by the dwarves, but they are far more fun and interesting than the drab layout of the rest of the city. That said, the drab layout of the rest of the city allows us to build out housing much faster than if we tried to make each building unique. Even with design touchups going on by the architecture team, it doesn't fully suppress the feeling that you're walking through cookie-cutter areas.

I chatted with Zaka on one of the evenings to get a feel for our total population now, and he said that, including our two outlying villages and my facility, we just crossed over having 5,000 residents. After some discussion, it became quite clear that we're ultimately rate limited in growth due to Zaka being the only demon we have who can summon imps. Given my prior theories on that, I decided to take a day to check around at the two other villages, to see if any of the demons there had gained the ability to summon imps, and none of them had the ability.

If we planned on growing our population faster, we'll either need to start experimenting with the process that Zaka's been doing to summon imps, to see if we can establish a more efficient system, or we'll need to start experimenting with existing goblins to try and induce them to develop the ability to summon imps. Honestly, we should probably do both, since having a single point of failure for summoning new population is one of our most glaring weaknesses right now.

However, I won't be able to work on either of those projects for a little while, since I have a backlog of higher priority projects to work on first. While having a higher population is nice for a variety of reasons, it's also less necessary now than it was five years ago, before I figured out the magically powered stirling engines. Magical machines can substitute for some amount of raw workforce power for a large amount of daily tasks. When demand for labor outstrips population growth, this is the result though, machines are made to replace people.

[Vol.6] Ch.39 Homeward Bound

I told the refugee dwarves about the plan to send them back at the very start of spring. I also told them we'd do our best to support them in their endeavor to return home, but we'd leave the choice to them for their method of transport. I also presented them with two other options, if they were interested.

First, wait six or seven years, and return to the dwarven continent at that point. Second, become a citizen here and stay on the island. While I doubted any would take me up on that offer, I figured it'd be worth presenting, given how many years they've been here working and contributing to our success. I also told them that I wanted each individual to make their decision to either leave, wait, or join us by the end of the month so we could have an accurate count of how many people were going to need to fit on whatever transport they choose.

Obviously, many of the dwarves were ecstatic to finally be able to return home. Also interestingly, a few of our regular residents, like Karsh, said they wanted to send their now grown children back to the dwarven continent to learn and make a life for themselves there, rather than here. I'd agreed to that previously, so I was alright with it, as long as they were comfortable with the risks involved. There was, after all, no promise that everything would go according to plan, and that travel may not actually be safe.

While I waited for them to ultimately mull over their decisions, I went back to supervise and assist with constructing the remaining pylons on our cableway, while also trying to complete the mana crystal growth apparatus at night.

At the start of the month, I got the final counts for all the dwarves. As I expected, the majority of them wanted to go back to the mainland. In fact, we're sending back more total dwarves than there are refugees. We have six dwarves who used to be children who are now grown who are heading back with the refugees. We have five dwarves who are staying here, well, really there are four, and then also Shasta who is staying until the last of the refugees leave.

Those four all plan on returning to the mainland later, but after talking with Shasta, they're afraid that it won't actually be a safe journey. Apparently they were quite skittish when they were told they were going to be stationed on Kao's island as well. In fact, there were others like them, but most of them could be talked into returning, it was just these four who held out. Shasta told me that normally, they'd just be forced to comply and go back with the rest, but given how the last group's journey went, it was decided that they could stay until the next opportunity.

Somewhat interestingly, there was at least one other dwarf who apparently had similar concerns, but they were a higher level individual, and they decided internally that they were too important to be left here, meaning we'll essentially be left with four grunts and Shasta. I'm sure that'll slow down on our construction quite a bit. We do, after all, have dozens of dwarves that have been helping with some of our projects, with most of them being assigned to the tunnel project.

I expect it'll start slowing down well before they actually leave as well, since they've decided they want to make a proper ship to leave on, rather than just longboats. I'd told them we'd help them, and after a bit of discussion with Zeb and Zaka, we settled on only charging half as much for their ship construction as we would normally charge for all the goods and labor. They're welcome to use their own labor, obviously, but if they need ours for anything, it'll still cost some amount of money. I've also shown them a place on a map where they can cut trees to use for wood on the other side of the island that would ultimately be beneficial to us as well if they cut them down.

Given the political situation between the dwarves and us, I also stated that they wouldn't be able to take our money with them. They can trade it in for dwarven currency at a discounted exchange rate in our favor, or they can take trade goods with them that we've been stockpiling at full price. We have an excess of salt and paper that has been building up that I'd like to get rid of, after all. In the very unlikely event that they somehow manage to actually buy all our trade goods and still have leftover money, then they can get dwarven currency at full price.

Similar to last time, I'll be sending them with a chest for Kao with enough dwarven coin for sending a message back to us describing their journey and any current happenings in the world. Their trip will probably use up the rest of our waterproofing supplies, but given our reduced need for it, I think that's fine as long as they actually pay for them. They've worked hard, and while I don't know exactly how much wealth they've stored up, they tend to party and eat a lot so I really don't know exactly what to expect.

I ended up working on the pylons for the remainder of spring, and finished the 12-foot mana crystal growth apparatus. With the crystal apparatus done, I'm no longer on a crunch for time for that. While the cableway isn't quite done yet, at least the pylons got finished, but having it finished isn't a requirement to get the crystal down from the cave, and in fact, I think I'm going to avoid bringing it down the cableway, just for safety reasons. The only things left to build before the cableway is ready to test are the bullwheel, tensioner, and the two stations, and to then string the cable between them. In between the seasons, I checked in on how everything has been going with the dwarves.

As it turns out, they did, in fact, have quite a bit of money saved up. Ultimately, they'll almost certainly have enough money saved to fill their ship with trade goods, and after talking with Shasta, I agreed that as long as their ship is reasonably sized, then the remainder of their money could be exchanged at full price after they stock up on paper first. I did some snooping and found that while they did party quite a bit, a lot of it was in their gambling hall which, as I think about it, they ran, meaning they kept the wealth from it, along with any wealth that they probably won off of demons who were using the facility.

That's actually going to end up being a nightmare to maintain once they're gone. On the other hand, if we just let the gambling hall go unmanaged or into disarray, it's hard to say what the demons who've developed an addiction to it will do. Some will probably get better, but others might get violent, that's also ignoring the fact that a large amount of our dwarven citizens could occasionally be seen there, though I'm not sure how much of that was just due to having a large amount of new dwarves to talk to.

If I get the cableway up and going before winter, I'm going to start testing it by hauling down a lot of the spent crystal slag from before. Then, given the situation we find ourselves in with the dwarves leaving, I think I'll detour to doing a little bit of testing with better methods for imp summoning.

I've been thinking for a little while now about the nature of summoning imps, as well as the situations I found myself in when I was an imp. Now, there are some differences, because I seem to be an aberration when it came to my imp form. All the other demons I talk to only have vague memories of emotions and hunger from when they were imps. Almost all of them were only an imp for a day or so, which probably contributes to that.

I've got a few tests I'd like to conduct on the matter such as summoning them in isolation with a plentiful supply of food, or, if possible, in an area with a mana infused pool of water. Ultimately, there are dozens of tests that could be conducted to see how the imps react, and whether it could improve our efficiency at turning imps into productive members of society. Currently, we only really get about 1 goblin out of about 6 or 7 summons, though they do end up a goblin pretty quickly.

Meanwhile, I didn't become a lesser earth demon for an entire year, and that was only after having killed one of our giant lizards. There is probably a balance to be struck related to that, and it'll probably be quite the long experiment as a result. We really don't need thousands of imps sitting around eating food for a year or two before becoming productive members of our society, which is what would happen if they all just waited to evolve until they were forced to do so and we summoned at our maximum rate.

[Vol.6] Ch.40 Mana Burned

Construction actually went much smoother than I expected for the remainder of the cableway, in large part due to Zeb having anticipated I'd need the workers for more than one season, so I essentially had access to a lot of labor until the cableway was finished. That sped things up a lot, since I could direct their work while I built out the bullwheel and it's drive using stirling engines. By mid-summer, the whole thing was ready to test.

While it wasn't without some hiccups, after two weeks of troubleshooting and some minor changes, the cableway was ready for some initial tests. So, I started tests by loading rocks into the carriers on the line. While I was initially nervous, after a few hours without a problem with dozens of carriers on the line having made two round trips, I started to get less worried.

After a few more days of similar tests, I considered it safe enough to ride along myself, which ended up being quite the interesting experience. While most of the view was obscured by trees flanking the lift, higher up the mountain the lift rises higher than the trees to help prevent the copious snowfall from damaging the cableway. As a result, I got a pretty neat view for the last half-mile or so, overlooking the valley where our city and two villages are located.

From here, it's very clear that we've actually done an incredible amount of work, thinking back on what the valley was decades ago. From the artificial tidepool, the sea wall, the salt evaporation ponds, and a few mechanical facilities by the ocean, then to the fields flanking the road to the city, the research facility, and the terraces along part of the valley, and even further up where the dam is and the villages are located with their own fields cleared. It's a lot to take in, and it's a hard view to see normally.

Once I made it up to the top, I took two hours, went and grabbed a container of crystal slag, and rode the cableway back down. Afterwards, I took another three days inspecting the cable and all the pylons for any points of concern before deciding that the whole thing was ready for use. The 8-foot crystal will be done growing at the start of fall, so I decided I could use the cableway to start sending down the spare crystal slag that I won't need.

Since I'll need more facility workers anyway to start handling mana crystal components moving forward, I decided that I should take the time to hire them now, and have them help me move the material as their first job. They, just like all the other demons working in the research facility, were required to move to the facility, and keep everything confidential. Ultimately, the process of moving crystal slag took just over 12 days, and most of that time was actually manual transport to either end of the cableway. I had a demon at either end doing loading and unloading, and then a few that would transport the material to and from either station.

Then, after we had completed that task, I informed them that we'd be hauling the 8-foot crystal down the mountain manually in a few days. For good measure though, I also asked Zaka and one of the demon gorillas to help, given their exceptional strength. Just like previously, my plan is to extract the crystal, then coat it in a layer of stone so that we can more safely transport it. Though I did think of something interesting that I'll try and test with a smaller crystal after we move the big one down to the old bathhouse.

Thankfully, moving the crystal down to the bathhouse went off without a hitch, and before long, you could feel the familiar warmth spread back into the city, as it had before the mana surge broke all our surface crystals. It's almost tempting to leave it here and work on a new crystal instead, given how nice it feels, but that's just asking to waste all this material again if another mana surge occurs. So, while it pains me to do so, after winter ends, I'll be removing it from the bathhouse to continue growing it.

As for the thing that I wanted to test, it came out to be a failure. I had tested on one of our smaller 2-foot crystals whether or not my thermal regulation would let me pull directly from large mana crystals. The result was far worse than I had imagined would be the worst case. I had thought, at worst, maybe I'd get shocked, or feel some pain, but that would be it. Instead, I seem to have damaged my ability to store mana slightly. As soon as I noticed what was happening I pulled away from the crystal.

In short, my thermal regulation didn't actually prevent some other form of damage, but it did help prevent me from feeling the heat which would probably have normally been hot enough to indicate I was being hurt. Since I essentially had an unlimited supply of mana, I could keep up with whatever heat was building up in my body as a result of the massive surplus of mana. It did not, however, prevent whatever in my body that handles mana from getting damaged.

<LAVA DEMON>
Level: 20
HP: 4769/4769
MP: 2211/2211 (2289)
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance, Partial Sleep
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands, Pulverize, Thermal Regulation

I should normally, at my current level, have 2289 maximum mana, but instead, it's sitting at 2211. I'll be keeping a close eye on it, to see if it heals, or if I've irrevocably damaged my mana supply. I don't regret the test though, since the positive payoff that could have occurred would have been significant. If thermal regulation had prevented any injury in the matter, I could have directly wielded an extreme amount of mana at a time, which would have let me do all kinds of things that would normally be impossible.

On a lighter note, the dwarves have completed their ship already, and there is still an entire season before they head out. So, while quite a few of them are just relaxing, more are working than previously, trying to earn a bit more money for themselves before they head out. Since so many things are ahead of schedule, I'm going to talk with Zaka about trying some new imp summoning ideas.

Zaka was surprisingly opposed to a lot of my ideas for imp summoning. After some discussion, I understood why, though I didn't agree with it fully. He has better memories of being an imp than most of the demons on the island even though his memories of it are older than others. While they're still somewhat blurry, he remembers being in a small cage being fed minimal scraps for what probably equates to a few weeks before he became a goblin.

That description alone makes me think that, indeed, without the fight or flight survival instinct, many of the imps would actually choose to prestige at least once before becoming a goblin, or even something more. However, he seems to have some trauma related to being trapped in a small cage with minimal interaction. I find it quite illogical though that he then decides that the better alternative is a fight to the death with other imps, though he does value individual freedom quite a bit, which is probably also a consequence of those traumatic memories.

If we get an opportunity to talk to other demons from the demon continent at some point, I'd be very interested in seeing what their actual culture looks like. Zaka lived in it for a minimal time before coming here, so while he knows some of it, our culture is probably significantly distinct from theirs.

I'm beholden to all of his demands, since he's the only summoning source we have. I eventually convinced him to let me proceed with some imp summoning tests, though getting things prepared for them is going to take a while. In order to get him to agree to some isolation related tests, I had to also agree to make the conditions exceptionally comfortable for the imps. Meaning they're essentially getting summoned in a room with as much space as a goblin would get in an apartment, and they'll be provided more food than they need, as well as barred windows to see other imps and/or whoever is going to be watching them around the clock to make sure they have enough food.

These stipulations do remove one important aspect of the test that I wanted to do, which was related to full isolation. My concern is that if the imps see each other evolve, it'll influence them to choose to evolve as well, or seeing other, bigger demons might also cause the same desire. Though I suppose we actually do want them to evolve quicker on balance, so that probably isn't a big problem.

So, for our first test, I want to excavate an area underground where we can have 12 fairly large chambers surrounding a central stairway where we can watch them. Each chamber will also have the ability to see into the other chambers in a few places, and we'll provide plenty of food through a lockable flap into the chambers. Thankfully, Zaka didn't also demand that we provide them with plates or anything, saying "They're still imps, they eat each other on the floor, they can eat provided food there too."

[Vol.6] Ch.41 Preliminary Summoning Experiment

I built the imp summoning experiment underground in the centermost ring of the city , where our important infrastructure sits. I'd asked Zeb for permission to start work on an area for testing there, and he'd given me the go ahead. I didn't ask him to send any construction teams to help me, but he sent a team anyway after I'd been working for a few days on my own, so the area was completed in just under nine total days. In that time, my maximum mana recovered a single point that had been missing due to the previous incident. Meaning I still had 77 missing points of max mana, and it'll take over a year to fully heal at the current rate.

There was still a few months until winter when the dwarves would be leaving, so I decided to take a little time to directly oversee the imp summoning experiments. It's unfortunate that I'm being prevented from having imps summoned in an isolated environment, because it would've been a good data point to compare the different environments to. Instead, I'll only have two types of data points, the fight pits which are similar to the cave, and the new summoning chambers.

Over the course of just over two months, I kept track of data related to the imps and resulting goblins. For this study, I'm treating the fight pit goblins as our control, since it's essentially how our entire population was already summoned. For this particular study, I've set it up so that a maximum of twelve imps will be summoned in each environment each day if available. So, we'll summon twelve in the twelve rooms we made, and also twelve in the fight pits. If the rooms are still occupied, then we won't summon any there, but we'll still summon up to the maximum amount. If, somehow, the fight pit also still has a remaining imp in it, then the same rules would apply.

The study is going to have to go for a few years, and keep track of the performance of the various demons as they live their lives in our city. The reason being that if we summon three times as many demons, but they only work one quarter as much as the fight pit demons, then it's actually more beneficial to summon the fight pit demons, since they're more motivated over their lifetime. I thus needed to put that extra work onto someone, and I chose the goblin who has been managing the job academy. However, I did tell them they could hire up to two assistants to help them, since this is a decently larger work load.

As for the actual resultant numbers of new citizens that were summoned from each environment over the seventy days I watched over the experiment, we had 85 goblins from the fight pits and 115 goblins from the experimental summoning style. While the numbers were close, there were two very easy to identify differences about the resultant goblins from the two styles.

First, the goblins that came from the fight pits evolved fairly regularly within the same period of time. The only reason we didn't end up with exactly 70 was because a small portion of the summoning events would end up with two goblins, rather than just one. By comparison, the other goblins would occur at fairly random intervals. Some would evolve within about a day, but we had one individual that stayed an imp for 37 days, holding up one of the cells for a very long time, preventing any more summoning there.

Second, the mindset of the goblins that came from the fight pit was pretty uniform, they were obedient to those they perceived as more powerful than themselves. While the experimental style had more individuals that had varying personalities. The ones that evolved quickly exhibited the same obedience as the fight pit goblins, but the ones that waited to evolve had more varied personalities, and they were usually more entitled, demanding food and other things be done for them.

I have two hypotheses for why that might be the case, that would require further testing to identify. The first hypothesis is that the strength respecting imps are simply the most likely to win the battle royale in the fight pit, while unlikely, it is an option. The second hypothesis is that the format of the new summoning option instills a sort of belief of the rights to food and service, because that's essentially how we're treating them in the new area.

For the time being while I go see off the dwarves, I'm going to tell Zaka to only use his old summoning method. I want to make sure that we actually know what the long term impacts of this new method might be on our citizenry before we continue using it. After a year or two, I'll look over the longitudinal data we'll have collected on the various goblins that we now have, and I'll make some modifications to the experiment if it seems worth it to continue pursuing it.

There is at least one merit to this new summoning method though. If we were to build out more areas for them to be summoned in, we actually could be creating many, many more goblins, since a large reason that we didn't create more was because the area was at capacity a lot of the time. With the old method, only a little over 1 in 8 summonings would actually result in a goblin, where as every summoning with the new method does. Though the new method is more labor intensive. As I said before, if their personalities end up difficult to deal with though, it's actually bad to have more.

The send off for the dwarves was quite extravagant. They kept enough money on hand to throw a huge banquet in their gambling hall on the night before they began the trek to the other side of the island where their ship was built. Over the last month or so, they took it on trial trips around our island, being sure to stay close enough to shore, just in case any leviathans actually showed up.

I went with them to the other side of the island to see them off. I gently reminded them that there wouldn't be a return trip, since we were going to be taking the crystal down after winter, or whenever we get a message that they made it back. This was more of a warning to any military higher-ups on the mainland that the trip would still be dangerous and trying to invade us would be foolhardy.

I also wanted to evaluate the tunnel progress, and see just how much stone we'd stockpiled on this side of the island. The answer was that they'd stockpiled a lot of stone. When they were digging the other half of the tunnel, the stone wouldn't last very long, as it'd get picked up for construction projects. Here, I can get a pretty good scope of the actual volume being extracted.

A large amount of the extracted stone is in the form of cut blocks, so it's piled up into a few different triangular prisms. Some are very regular in size and comprise a single prism, which I assume was cut using the dwarven stone cutting magic. The others aren't quite as regular, and as such, aren't quite as naturally stable, leading to portions that look a bit weird. There is a final pile that is comprised of odds and ends which would take a lot more effort to build nice buildings from, but if we have need for another jetty, it would make good material for it.

As for the tunnel, the scouting tunnel is almost to the midpoint now. I shouldn't be surprised, given they didn't run into any detours on this side to mine anything. However, I still did some basic checks with tectonic sense over the course of 15 days. Technically, the dwarf that had access to that kind of magic should have been doing it as well, but I can never be too sure that they didn't miss something. We've been out of quartz for quite a while now, and I actually do have projects that could use the mana insulative properties.

Unfortunately, I didn't find anything along this side of the island with my own checks. As an upshot from that, it does mean we'll probably get the tunnel completed sooner than later. I expect that they'll reach the midpoint area sometime next year, and at that point I'll be using tectonic sense to help link the two tunnels together. In the meantime, I'm going to spend some time around the city this winter while I await a message from Kao as to how the dwarves' trip went.

[Vol.6] Ch.42 Demon Behaviors

With most of the dwarves now gone, Shasta has a lot more free time. She acted as the liaison between the refugee dwarves and our country, as well as their de facto leader, meaning she previously was quite busy. Now though, I had the opportunity to talk with her more casually about a few questions that I'd thought of in the past month related to demon behavior.

Based on everything I'd heard second hand, it seems like the dwarves, humans, and elves had done some study of demons, even gaining a rudimentary understanding of our language. So, given how our society in Kembora is an outlier because of our origins, getting an outsider's opinion on how demons normally behave should give me potential insights into more baseline behaviors of different kinds of demons, and might give me insight into ways to better orient our population growth.

Unfortunately, she didn't have any direct data on hand, but she could share a bunch of stories of adventurers and soldiers who had fought against demons in one context or another. While there are some minor differences between stories, I did get some pretty decent data. There are three overarching contexts that the anecdotes take place in. One is the context of initial landings of demons at the beginning of an invasion. The second is large scale combat during the middle of an invasion. The final context is between invasions, because it takes quite a bit of time to uproot and remove all the demons that invaded.

During initial landings, things are chaotic. Due to the demons generally arriving in long canoes, they're hard to spot from a distance, and they generally arrive spread out over a few hundred miles of coast, all arriving within a few days of each other. All those stories portray demons as absolutely ravenous monsters that devour everything that moves and is alive, even their own on occasion.

Based on what Zaka had told me of his journey here, cannibalism is very common among demons, and when starved, they get quite aggressive. By the time they arrive, quite a few have usually died and been eaten. So, while it's not surprising, I also couldn't gleam much new info from any of those stories.

The next set of anecdotes focused on combat from the war. It seems that some time after arriving and gorging themselves, the demons organize and usually stake a claim, taking over the emptied towns and building rudimentary defenses. Usually, they organize around a handful of powerful demons, and will even overwhelm local defenses in small cities, organizing themselves into a makeshift kingdom. Depending on the initial invasion size, they tend to either hole up and grow their numbers quickly, or expand rapidly and claim even more territory.

As for how Zaka or myself would measure up to these 'powerful demons', we'd be called them, but we aren't anywhere near the power of the actual demon lord, at least not individually. We're somewhere near the power of a demon who would rule over a large town, or perhaps a small city during an invasion. Most of the individual anecdotes came from the last invasion, though some date back hundreds of years. I trust the newer ones far more than the older ones, since oral tradition tends to exaggerate over time.

As such, other than the last invasion, with Gokura, I didn't trust any of the descriptions of the 'demon lords'. Gokura's description as a demon towering three times the height of a man, with two pairs of arms with three fingers to each hand, and who could throw boulders hundreds of yards, already sounded something like an exaggeration, but I could imagine it being real. Perhaps it's something above an ogre or a troll?

The main piece of info on demon behavior that I could gleam from war stories was that while most weaker demons seem to serve more powerful demons, it also was rare that you'd ever see a lot of powerful demons in one place. For a large army to be seen, it usually needed an incredibly powerful demon on top. In fact, it seems that most of the historic demon lord defeats from their oral tradition claim that victory was assured when the lord fell in battle, and the demon armies would scatter. The remnants could take anywhere from a few months to a few years to clean up, but the tipping point was always that the most powerful demon died.

Hearing that, I'm glad that Zaka, Zeb, and I have all been dedicating adequate time to focusing on leveling. Thinking back to our own society, we put down an insurrection when a second hobgoblin rose in power to the point where they matched Zaka. Perhaps I should have Zaka focus on training even more than he currently does, for the sake of keeping things in order. I really don't want to think about what kind of uprising would occur if all the fisherdemons suddenly became more powerful than us.

Or perhaps I should do a show of military force through technology to keep them in line. I don't know if their obedience is actually instinctual or not, but we actually do have the ability to develop some absolutely devastating weapons right now, which would probably keep anyone from trying anything funny. I've already been thinking over a weapon to potentially slay leviathans. If we were close to a dying leviathan, I'm almost certain we'd each max out our levels in a single day. In fact, if we killed a leviathan at sea, we'd potentially all drown because everyone on the ship would feel the same exhaustion related to reaching max level at the same time.

As for the weapon, it's actually a straightforward application of existing technologies we've made. Grow a moderately large silver doped fluorite crystal, then encase it in a lead artillery shell. Then, all you need to do is fire it into a leviathan, and wait a few days. If you can manage to do that, I'm almost certain the beast would die to radiation poisoning. Based on everything I know, I bet that magical healing would probably make things worse, since you'd be applying mana near the crystal, increasing the amount of radiation released. Of course, the carcass would be completely ruined, and you'd essentially be dropping nuclear waste in the ocean afterwards.

The last context that the anecdotes fall in, between invasions, gave me some better insights. After a demon invasion, inevitably, there are stragglers who survive in remote areas. The three main continents are all fairly well populated, but there are still some moderately sized forests, or remote valleys where demons can hide. Anywhere like that can take months to years to find and properly remove the demons. Usually, after the majority of the demons are eradicated, there will be word every so often of a goblin village that has been found, that needs to be eradicated.

In those villages, there are always one to three hobgoblins, a few dozen goblins, and a dozen or so cages full of imps. Sometimes, there will be other villages nearby with similar numbers. There are rumors that in the distant past, demons had a decent foothold on the human continent, in their largest forest, and a demon lord native to the human continent attacked from the forest, without invading from the sea. I don't know how much I trust that story, but it's at least interesting.

Mainly though, it's interesting to hear that these villages seem to keep imps in cages, and that there might be a few of them within a moderately small area. Whether that means that we might be so lucky as to get more imp summoners if we settle a little further from the city is hard to say. Perhaps they also had limiting summoning capabilities, and the cages were a way to move imps from the summoner to the new villages.

Shasta did make a point that there were some differences between the way our goblins behave, and the way that other adventurers have described them though. According to her, it's something like the tone of their obedience. Most other goblins seem to obey more from fear, rather than from respect for power. Which is why they've been able to capture and study them. Higher demons, however, usually resist to the end, preferring to die in combat rather than be captured. Those that are captured rarely ever give any info, claiming it'd be dishonorable.

Our goblins, by comparison, seem to have more of a respect based obedience. I'll have to keep an eye on how our new goblins from our summoning experiment behave for more insights. My current hypothesis is that the imp stage for demons is something like an aggressive toddler stage where a lot of their temperament gets set. In this hypothesis, the fight pits instill a sense of respect for other demons who survived the pits, and an admiration for those more powerful than themselves, the cages instill fear of their superiors, and the rooms we set up seem to drive some amount of entitlement. Though the natural tendency in general seems to be obedience, at least in goblins, since that is the baseline in all the imps that evolved within a day's time from summoning. Though that does bring up biological questions as to why demons evolved to have a variable length imp stage to begin with that would influence their personality so heavily...

[Vol.6] Ch.43 Communities

Based on my conversations with Shasta, I decided to keep an eye on the new goblins until I got word from Kao that the dwarves' ship arrived. I'm glad I did decide to keep track of all of them as well, since I doubt anyone else would have caught on to some of the subtleties of what was happening in the various goblin enclaves. Since we create housing, then fill it almost instantly, it's uncommon that new goblins get placed in older communities, though it does happen occasionally due to a previous resident evolving, and thus needing to move into a bigger space.

As a result, we basically ended up with a few distinct situations and behavioral patterns that arose, dependent on the makeup of any particular goblin community. Our new goblins came in three types, the fight pit goblins, the one-day evolved goblins from the test summoning area, and the spoiled multi-day imps that evolved into goblins after some time.

The one-day evolved goblins seem to be able to be swayed heavily by their surroundings, with a weak personality and lack of in-built drive. If they ended up in old communities, they pretty much ended up the same as any other goblin, which was good. I'd be interested if, longitudinally, they develop stronger convictions after some time of being in those communities, or if they remain easily influenced. If they ended up in a community with two or fewer fight pit goblins for every spoiled goblin, they'd all become spoiled, including the fight pit goblins. Though the sample for that was only two communities, so it's not definitive that this is the case, but it's still a worrying result.

Thankfully, they don't seem to remain spoiled for too long if you separate them into existing communities with good work ethics. I didn't want to cause some kind of epidemic of lazy individuals though, so I filtered them out two at a time, and kept a close eye on the communities they moved to. Unfortunately, even moving a spoiled goblin into a community of hard workers did little to change their opinions, at least over the month or so I watched over them. Thankfully, it didn't damage those communities either.

The lazy communities, when they existed, quickly realized they needed money, and all sorts of undesirable behaviors arose. Some resorted to crime, while others begged and borrowed from those who had money. Zaka had to get involved a few times due to theft being committed, but he was shocked when the goblins simply shrugged off his punishment, and didn't do what they were told. So, two of them are now sitting in a jail cell. That at least motivated a few of the others to actually follow through with the punishments that Zaka gave them, though they still did the absolute minimum.

Fundamentally, this brings up two bigger fundamental problems. One of which we've already somewhat addressed with the dwarves. The first problem is that when people of different belief systems try to live in one place, there will be some amount of negative consequences. Now, with the dwarves, those negatives were outweighed by the positives. The biggest downside of the dwarves joining us were their various vices. With them came alcohol and gambling, and both had generally negative effects on some amount of the demon population. On the flip side, they brought lots of new food cuisines, as well as knowledge and skills from the mainland, and an expanded workforce.

It's possible to look at these lazy goblins as a different culture, to an extent. They're lazy, arrogant, and have no respect for authority. As a result, they just place pressures on our society as a whole. Thanks to all the different infrastructure we've built, Kembora is something like a labor paradise. While some goblins work a lot simply because we have a culture of hard work, any individual would only need to work about two days out of every five to earn a comfortable living. The bare minimum though would only require one day of work out of every ten.

Right now we only have a few dozen lazy individuals, and that number is decreasing after having redistributed some of the goblins out of lazy communities. If that number was instead increasing, we'd have to make a few hard choices as a society, and I don't know if Zaka is up to it. If the percent of lazy individuals increases and we wanted to support them, then everyone else would have to work harder to make up the slack. Now, we do have quite a bit of slack, so we could support some non-working individuals, but too many and we'd have a problem. It'd also slow down our other work, since we'd have less of a free labor pool to pull from for new projects.

Ultimately, if there were too many we'd either have to choose to let them starve, kill them ourselves, or exile them. I would also have trouble making that kind of decision, so I'm going to try to prevent that from being the case. Ultimately, I do feel obligated to some degree to take care of the spoiled ones, since it was sort of the environment I set up for their summoning that caused their rotten behavior. So as long as the number remains small, that's fine. Since they're lazy, I also won't have to worry about them becoming too physically powerful to deal with.

On an unrelated note, I also caught wind that Elora has been asking around about our magical ovens, and has been seen near to some of our retrofitted facilities with sterling engines. I was concerned something like this might happen, so I've asked Zaka to double the amount of guards at the lab. Ultimately, the guards wouldn't be able to stop her if she tried to force her way in, but if they at least discourage her from trying to sneak in to discover our secrets, that'll be good.

It'd take a lot of effort to actually convey everything necessary to reproduce our technique for making artificial fluorite as well, and I doubt the elves could do it from language alone. I expect that, even if Elora herself went back to try to reproduce what she'd seen exactly in the manufacturing area, it'd take a few years for them to replicate at the minimum. Her window is also rapidly closing to even be able to leave if she were to try to overpower us and steal it, and I doubt she'd do that. The elves seem to generally think in terms of decades, rather than years, so I'm sure she's more than content to wait until an opportunity arises to do anything.

Their natural pace is so slow as compared to our technological development, that I think she might not actually grasp the actual magnitude of what we're doing. To her, both the oven and the stirling engines that were retrofitted probably seem like minor improvements over existing systems. After all, we were just using a windmill before, and this is only a minor improvement, and the ovens are barely a replacement over wood.

She's probably also somewhat aware of our cryogenic liquid facilities, both old and new, but it probably just seems like a way to help grow mana crystals and mine fluorite. Of those things, growing the mana crystals is probably the most interesting thing from her perspective, but we've been doing that for a long time. Our fluorite, however, is probably the more important of the two, and it's the harder of the two to replicate. The mana crystal gives an incredible source of mana, but if you require individuals to convert that mana to be useful, you're still limited by population. If, however, you can use fluorite to convert that mana to something useful, then those large mana crystals suddenly become exponentially more useful.

In any case, the longer I can delay information leakage of our technology to the rest of the world, the longer we'll be safe. The unfortunate reality of being an island nation is that the rest of the world simply has more resources and population to work with. Meaning that any of our technologies that they take can be turned against us and used in larger numbers faster than we can use them ourselves.

At the end of the second month of winter, we got word from Kao that the ship had arrived safely. Though there were a number of other problems that seem to be happening. The three continents started preparing for the next demon invasion last year. According to historical records, we've reached the most likely time for an invasion to occur, or at least, the next fifteen years or so fit that timeline. Sometimes they come more recently, and other times they take longer, but something like 70 percent occur in this time window, so they take some precautions to defend themselves.

Knowing that, we'll also start taking precautions. I haven't found any evidence on this island of occupation prior to us being here, but between mudslides and other erosion, it could just be infrequent, and that evidence has been buried. Kao also said that all the paper that the dwarves brought as trade goods was burned, and that their king is worried that sympathies for any demons might make the invasion worse, so he's been putting out a lot of heavy propaganda. After burning their goods, he's been telling people that we used them for slave labor, and basically only paid them a meager wage in the amount of dwarven coin we sent them.

Kao and the soldiers themselves know that isn't true, but given the state of things, going against the king would be dangerous, so they're keeping their mouths shut. Considering the anti-demon fervor that seems to be spreading, I'm going to remove the crystal ASAP and put it back underground to continue growing it. Even if the dwarves are only preparing for a defensive war, I'd rather just have them be fully discouraged from trying to invade us, and the leviathans should do a good job of that. I think it's worth considering putting even more of our population into a military just in case of any threats, be they demon or otherwise.

[Vol.6] Ch. 44 Manascope

Since the refugee dwarves made it back to their homeland safely, I packed up the mana crystal and moved it to it's chamber in the new lab where I'll grow it for a few more years until it's 12 feet tall. We've moved most of the crystal slag down the mountain already and we'd slowly built up a stockpile of argon, so I was ready to do testing on the new growth apparatus and grow the crystal. Thanks to having dedicated helpers, things went well, and after 10 days, I'd used up a few months worth of argon production.

We've been producing a steady supply of cryogenic nitrogen and oxygen, and that has drastically improved the rate of fluorite mining, to the point where our stockpile of crushed fluorite is getting pretty big. Even with years of growing artificial fluorite, we won't get through all of it. The fluorite is mostly being stored in it's crushed natural form, with a growing stockpile of clear fluorite glass powder. In short, each stage of processing is incapable of keeping up with the previous stage.

We're mining much more than we can initially process, then the initially processed stuff is also outstripping the production of artificial fluorite. The only stage that is easily keeping up is the crushing of natural fluorite, which I purposefully designed to be very large, if only so that the natural fluorite wouldn't overheat the area and drain all the mana.

As long as we actually have places to store everything, I don't expect this to be an issue, but I'll keep an eye on it. They haven't resorted to using the intermediate stockpile area down near the artificial fluorite growth area, so we've still got quite a bit of space. For all I know, the deposit might run out before the stockpiles fill up.

While I was looking over all the fluorite facilities, I noticed Tiberius was in a lot of different places, but rarely was actually down near the actual fluorite testing lab I made for him. I put off investigating that until I had finished looking over the other facilities, but when I finally went down and checked, I saw why. There were four holes, about the size of the crystals he uses for testing, blown through the wall separating the innermost testing area from the intermediate room. Inside the room, the walls were nearly completely destroyed, and lots of damaged quartz lay scattered about.

Basic testing of my mana regen rate showed that, indeed, the innermost room now had higher natural mana levels, to the point where testing new things would be dangerous. An interrogation later and I found out why. I had previously tasked Tiberius with ways of determining exactly how the lead doped fluorite crystals worked, and he did that. Over the course of a few weeks, he'd figured out that, essentially, they increase in mass when exposed to mana, up to a point. That point, as he later discovered, is based on the ratio of lead to fluorite in the doped crystal, and the total crystal size.

The larger the crystal, the higher the upper limit on mass multiplication, and there is a sweetspot of doped lead. Too much or too little lead, and the multiplication decreases. After getting the details of that he, somewhat unsurprisingly, decided to start trying to weaponize it. He tried letting mana into the room while the crystal was spinning on the end of a string. The string would snap and the crystal would usually break on impact, along with a chunk of the wall.

That... is concerning. More than the weaponized aspects, I'm more concerned about conservation of mass and energy. How does an object suddenly get more mass? When it does so, and breaks, losing some of it's mass, why wasn't there a massive explosion? That mass had to go somewhere, right? Why was it only a kinetic impact?

As I briefly thought about those questions, Tiberius mistook my silence for intrigue about his weapon ideas, and started to elaborate about all sorts of ideas he has for it, interrupting my train of thought. Most of his ideas were... inadequate, but I did pitch him an idea, just to give him something to do rather than work on his hairbrained ideas of trying to make isolated mana sources for trebuchets, and other convoluted schemes.

If you could come up with a way to encase a lead fluorite crystal in two halves of quartz crystal and in the shape of an artillery shell, once the shell leaves the barrel, the two halves of quartz will fall off, and the remaining shell can gain a significant amount of mass due to exposure to ambient mana. That's a way to actually weaponize these. The difficult part is figuring out how much of which part you need for it to actually be better than just a plain lead shell. Though, thanks to the lower mass inside the barrel, it should have a much higher exit velocity as well... Either way, I gave him some ideas, and he can salvage what quartz he can from the damaged room to try to make it work.

From what I recall, artificially grown quartz is a bit of a pain. It was used a lot in the semiconductor industry on earth, and required high heat and pressure to actually grow, and it took a long time. On the other hand, it actually would be useful to have for various purposes. However, we'd need a lot of it. We'd also need a lot of soda ash, which is something we're already using a lot of and have a limited supply of. If we weren't a volcanic island, then we'd potentially be able to convert limestone into a larger supply. Given our lack of trade partners though, that's unlikely. So, any artificially grown quartz is going to have to go on the wishlist, rather than anything I could work on currently.

After a few days of thinking about it, I don't think the crystals violated conservation of mass. The mass was artificial to begin with, sustained by an outside source of mana. The mass didn't disappear, it's just that mana stopped being converted into it. As to why that mass is only temporary, I have a really, really far flung theory about it.

Given that most of the other physical laws seem to be the same as earth, my guess is that through one mechanism or another, the lead doped fluorite is somehow interacting with the Higgs field, and causing the particles in the area to have a heightened mass. If I combine that with relativity, an object travelling at a constant velocity is indistinguishable from one that is stationary, so increasing the mass of the in-air projectile doesn't actually slow it down, but it does multiply its kinetic energy. Though a spinning object is under acceleration, and as such, does appreciably notice a change in force when its mass increases, causing the strings they were tied to to break.

Beyond that, there is actually a very, very cool application for these crystals. If I can cut a particular sized wafer of the crystal, and also make an equal mass counterbalance, I could use these crystals to make a meter that measures mana. If I can mass the crystal in a mana free environment, then I could make the meter only measure positive values of mana by measuring the displacement that a balance sees based on the increased mass of the wafer.

Since the testing chamber is already damaged beyond repair, I can salvage a bunch of the quartz bricks to make a chamber that will be relatively mana free where I can try to get an accurate mass measurement the wafers to make counterweights. A functional meter for reading ambient mana levels will be invaluable for a lot of projects. Especially when it comes to very low values where I'd have to wait for a significant amount of time to see how quickly I regenerate mana. Even then, biological processes might make my internal mana readings less accurate than an instrument that's only purpose is to measure the levels.

So, that's what I'll try to make next. It's unfortunate that a manometer is a device for measuring pressure. Manaometer doesn't really roll of the tongue either. I guess I'll go with manascope for the name.

[Vol.6] Ch.45 Mana Readings

Tiberius's many tests with the lead doped crystals didn't show any signs of health risks from operating the crystals, other than the risk of it as a projectile, so I felt confident we could try to grow a larger crystal that I could cut smaller pieces out of. So, I set up to have a 12-inch fluorite crystal grown, while I worked on getting the smaller quartz chamber made to measure the mass of the crystal more accurately.

The quartz chamber ended up taking a couple of days to make, since I wanted to use the most transparent quartz I could for one of the sides, so that I could see inside for balancing purposes. By the time the chamber was done, the lead doped crystal had grown. From the ambient mana alone it was very heavy. It's density was easily twice that of lead, or at least, that's what it seemed to be. That perceived density dropped in the pieces that I cut out from the larger crystal. In all, I cut out eight 2-inch cubes to use for the first set of manascopes.

Since each of the eight cubes was cut from the same original crystal, they should all have roughly the same properties. I even took the time to line them up and file their sides down at the same time to ensure they were as identical as possible for our current technology. I also then stoneshaped a stone cube to use as a reference size for any future lead doped crystals I might want to grow. Then, I took the time to start getting a mass for one of the cubes.

That process took a day, since it took a lot of re-opening the quartz chamber to add or subtract a small weight from the balance inside, then waiting for any mana that got in to be consumed before checking a new reading. Eventually, however, I did get a mass value for one of those cubes. Knowing their mana-free mass was important for calibrating any manascope I tried to make.

The scope itself was actually fairly straightforward. I went with a triple beam balance scale as the basis for the design. After taking a cut crystal cube to the surface, it seemed like it about doubled in mass, so I set the scale's three bar weights up such that the largest weight was half the weight of the cut crystal cube, and the two sizes under it were one-twentieth, and one-two-hundredth respectively. For the purposes of accuracy, only the smallest of the weights can move freely, where as the other two weights have notches they sit in which mark precise multiples. To make things simple, I then labeled the scale in "crystal units" or "CU", based on the mana-less mass of the crystal.

Operation is then relatively easy, one just moves the weights on the bars until the balance's needle marker reads as balanced. That then lets us get a reading for the ambient mana values in an area with fairly high accuracy, in crystal units. I built four of them, since I feel like having them available in certain areas for making readings would be useful.

I took a few days just making readings of mana values in different areas, and at different times of day. While the mana values don't change quickly at any given point in time, they aren't stagnant, and I quickly found that if I just left a balance that was level alone on the surface for about fifteen minutes, it was visibly unbalanced again. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised though, since I know that at night time our mana regen rate is lower than during the day.

The highest ambient mana values during the day are at noon, when the twin suns are overhead. Then, the mana value from the manascope reads 2.315 CU. The lowest ambient values, excluding eclipses which I haven't yet had an opportunity to measure, occur at midnight, at 1.12 CU. I've known about those differences ever since I've been out in the world regenerating mana, however. I've even seen it in action plenty of times with the stirling engines working slower at night than during the day. Unsurprisingly, there is a sharp drop off after sunset, where the mana value drops 0.31 CU in just a few minutes as well. Though interestingly, it seems like a little more than half of the ambient mana value comes from the smaller of our stars.

Underground however, the mana values move much less based on the day night cycle, though they do move a little. The mean value in the fluorite growth room is actually higher than I expected, despite only being 1/1000th the mana regen rate. If it was 1/1000th the daytime rate, I'd have expected 0.002 CU, which would have been unreadable. Instead, I measured 0.095 CU, or about 1/20th the level. It was quite a bit higher than I expected, so I was worried that maybe the room wasn't as mana proof anymore. So I tested my own mana regen again in the room, and got the same value as before, about 1/1000th the surface regen.

That would explain why the fluorite we grew down there would still exhibit properties as if exposed to significantly more mana than I had thought. On one hand, I'm glad that I actually did try to measure this accurately with a mechanical device, on the other hand, it's opened up a whole bunch of new questions. I'm regretting that the testing lab down here is partially dismantled and destroyed, because I'd liked to have seen what the ambient mana in there was, by comparison.

My working hypothesis is that our bodies actively use a certain amount of mana, and so the value of mana I see as a stat is only actually free mana that I can use, minus some flat value that my body uses. Though it might not even be flat. It could be survival based, where the body uses more mana if it can, but only keeps vital systems going in low mana situations.

It's a shame I didn't have the manascope developed before I took the surface crystal away, because I'd liked to have seen how it affected ambient mana levels on the surface. I could, at least, verify that the mana levels near our 2 foot crystals were higher than the areas further away from them, but underground crystals generally don't leak that much mana into the air, and we usually use them in conjuction with water as a conductor for the mana.

I did, in our laboratory setting, submerge one of the scales to very slowly try to determine the crystal reading there. As it would turn out, the balances I had made can't read the value. I maxed them out. I'm not that surprised though, as the mana regen rate when touching a mana crystal is incredibly high normally. I'm going to make a balance with larger weights to try to measure the mana crystal values next.

For the high capacity manascope, I took two days to make it and the precision ends up a bit worse in order to keep it compact enough for transport. I ended up getting a reading of 15.6 CU for the the 2-foot mana crystal and water setup. Which comes out to about 6.8 times the noon mana regen rate. Of course, that all assumes that this ends up being accurate for larger mana rates. I've seen some evidence that fluorite crystals, especially smaller ones, can seemingly level off in their effects at higher mana amounts, when they are seemingly saturated with mana.

For similar reasons, I'm now second guessing the readings in the fluorite crystal growth area. It could be that the crystals also have an outsized effect at low mana levels, and that their efficiency simply drops the higher the ambient mana is. I have devised an experiment to gain insight into that. I'm going to use a heat fluorite crystal, a bunch of quartz blocks, a thermometer, and a large piece of metal.

My plan is to use the heat fluorite to heat the metal for a fixed period of time in a chamber of quartz blocks. That chamber will be set up like the old freezer design, where I can pull a full side off quickly. I'll check the temperature after a period of time, and then let the metal cool after recording the temperature. I'll then remove some of the quartz blocks, and repeat the experiment. I'll perform it on the surface at the same time each day, deep underground, and partially underground, to get multiple locations of data.

Then, I'll plot the various data points to see if there is any difference in the linearity of the data. It's not foolproof, but it should at least provide me with some amount of insight into what's happening.

The whole experimental process at all the locations ended up taking just over two months time. Ultimately, the lower mana environments seem to be fairly linearly linked, showing no signs of any change as the mana level rose. On the surface, however, I did notice a very slight downward curve in my data readings, but given the ambient temperature changes day to day, it's hard to determine if that data was just noise or not. I'd need to have the experiment run for months on end to try to get the noise out.

It did, however, make me fairly confident that in low mana environments, the lead doped crystal is probably reading accurate values. Meaning our fluorite growth area is most likely getting more mana than I had previously thought.

[Vol.6] Ch.46 Artillery Experimentation

I passed on a manascope to the goblins who were making astronomic readings as another piece of data for them to collect over time. While they made readings I decided that I should work on finishing constructing all the mana crystal growth apparatuses in the new lab area. I still had the 16-foot crystal growth apparatus to make, in addition to all the smaller apparatuses to replicate from the cave. I also took a few days to bring what remained of the crystal slag down the mountain, and seal off the portion of the cave where all the old apparatuses are in a way that makes it look semi-natural, to hopefully keep out any would-be spies.

It felt a little sad to do, since this was the first time it really felt like I was leaving the cave for good. I couldn't quite bring myself to actually destroy the apparatuses, even though it would have probably been the smarter thing to do. I'd gone back to the cave over the years for one thing or another, but I've slowly been moving more and more things away from the cave, and this was the last of my original reasons to come here. The only remaining reasons to come that far up the mountain are for the mana poison plants, the scouting towers, and to go to the peak. Ultimately, it felt like I was moving for good.

I ended up working for a few months on the new apparatuses, and while I haven't finished the 16-foot apparatus quite yet, I thought of a few other projects that I'd like to work on temporarily based on information that others have gathered. I still have a few years before I need the 16-foot apparatus, so I'm not in too much of a rush. First, Tiberius has figured out there are a few problems with using lead doped fluorite for weapons.

The biggest one being that the lead doped fluorite is very light compared to lead and to make the shells worth it to actually make, the fluorite crystal ends up needing to be five inches across at least. Due to the variable nature of mana between day and night, the effectiveness of the shell also changes. Realistically, you need an eight inch in diameter shell in order to house the necessary amounts of quartz and fluorite, and it needs to be composed of a lot of different parts. The quartz and fluorite frequently crack during the actual firing of the shell, reducing their effectiveness. So, I'll lend him a hand for a few days to help troubleshoot and solve some of his problems.

The second bit of information that is drawing my attention is that the goblins who I trusted one of the manascopes to have been using it to make their own readings beyond just passive daytime values, and their results have intrigued me. I had told them about the values I had gotten and where I'd gotten them, and my thoughts on the matter. They'd decided to retest some of my points, and while their manascope readings were the same, they noted that their mana regeneration rate actually was zero while deep underground, rather than just slow like mine was. So I've got a few ideas to follow up on with that matter.

Tiberius had done multiple tests with different sized crystals to determine all his values and, smartly, he had used smooth bore scale pieces for testing, rather than potentially damaging our actual artillery pieces. Our current artillery shells are only about 2 inches in diameter, so the existing artillery would be incapable of using any hypothetic shells to begin with.

Much like the heat fluorite, lead fluorite seems to get more efficient the larger the crystal is, and as such, once we reach a crystal 6 inches across, during the daytime, the crystal becomes more dense than lead. Ultimately, that's about a three and a half fold increase in mass, which on it's face would appear to be a three and a half fold increase in kinetic energy of a projectile, it's actually almost a thirteen fold increase under perfect conditions, since the initial velocity of the projectile would also be faster, due to the lower initial mass. The issue is that the explosive power of the shell results in the crystal materials breaking.

So, after some discussion and tests, I proposed two changes to the initial shell design, to hopefully help mitigate some of the problems. First, two halves of copper should be placed around the outside of the shell to allow plastic deformation to hopefully mitigate any cracking of the quartz. Second, a solid jacket of lead should be put around the fluorite crystal in the center for a similar reason.

After some testing, we got the sizes and locations of the amount of metals figured out, and we ran into some new problems as a result. While the jackets did cause the crystals to stop breaking, they also added more mass. Considering the quartz and the copper jackets fall away in the air to allow the inner shell to gain access to mana, we're losing quite a bit of mass as compared to the initial shot, meaning the fluorite crystal needs to be larger to compensate.

With a two inch quartz shield, the fluorite is about 50% denser than normal, which we also need to consider. Ultimately, to allow for decent plastic deformation, we'd need a 3/4 inch copper jacket, then the 2 inches of quartz insulation, then another half inch of lead, and then finally the central fluorite shot. So, after a bit of math, for a 12-inch shell, minus the black powder, the weight comes out to 1667 pounds. When exposed to mana, however, the central lead and fluorite part comes out to 2626 pounds, or about a 1.6 times increase in mass, even after shedding the outer shell.

For a comparison we also tried increasing to a 14 inch shell, with a larger fluorite crystal which resulted in a larger initial and final conversion rate, results in an initial shell weight of 2681 pounds, and a final projectile weight of 5014 pounds, or a 1.87 times increase in mass before and after firing. Since the resultant kinetic energy is squared beyond the shell just being heavier, it also results in better returns on the initial explosive power.

However, the ratios of components was hardly optimized. After eleven days of experiments, those were the main two numbers we came up with, and while I'd like to say that's great, both sets of shells are too heavy for us to do anything with in our current situation. However, I'm confident I could develop assisting weapon systems to allow their use, if we can make them worth our while to use. From scale testing, I could tell that the shells have some unique properties on impact. Since the crystal causing the increased mass breaks on impact, it results in the projectile rapidly losing mass, however, it's not quite instantaneous, resulting in the kinetic damages seen in the lab.

Essentially, once the initial impact is finished, the remaining material blasts through whatever surface it hit. If the surface is too thick, the shrapnel bounces backwards, along with a decent chunk of whatever it hit. Ultimately, it functions as a quasi explosive round. It's probably a bit less effective than an actual high-explosive round, but it's quite a bit more stable and the shell itself is relatively simple.

So, after taking an additional seven days explaining the math to Tiberius, I left him to do optimization for three different sizes of shells, so that we could have the data to approximate optimal ratios of components for any size shell. He'll need to gather data on various ratios of quartz and fluorite crystal thicknesses alongside the relevant amounts of metals. I also told him to experiment with using brass instead of copper for the outer portion of the shell.

The two inches of quartz we used is a good approximate starting value, but it's not optimal and as those numbers change, we'll probably find that at various different sizes of shell the thickness of the quartz portion should change. If we extrapolate those values, he should be able to figure out the optimal portions of each shell to maximize the mass increase of the final projectile compared to the initial shell.

After I set Tiberius on his new research path, I turned to investigate with the manascope again, since my internal mana regen values weren't matching up with the goblins who attempted it. I brought in a few other goblins, and all their values also didn't agree with mine, but did agree with each other. I was starting to get frustrated after eight days of trying to figure out why this would happen, so I consulted Zeb. He came along with me, and he found that his values agreed with mine.

With two data points in agreement with me, I started to think through all the relevant information before I had an idea. I brought a lesser earth demon that had gained mana affinity from working with mana crystals frequently to test his values, and they matched mine as well. A few more tests confirmed it. For whatever other affects mana affinity has, it also seems to be playing a role here. Whether we're better at accessing the mana, or we're just utilizing the mana we are getting differently, I can't think of a safe way to test that. These results, however, do make me want to use the manascope for any future mana measurements rather than my own internal values, since it seems like the biological systems for it are more complicated than I had initially thought.

[Vol.6] Ch.47 Underground Mana

I went back to working on the mana crystal growth apparatuses for a few more months. By mid-summer, I had finished the 16-foot crystal apparatus along with the two smallest apparatuses that I needed to replicate from the mountain. It was at that time that I'd received news that the tunnel had reached the calculated length, but the two halves hadn't actually met up yet. I expected that to some degree, however, because the odds of getting the angle absolutely perfect between the two tunnels was very low, meaning I needed to go and make some final adjustments.

So, I made my way over to the far side of the island, and after going to the end of the tunnel, I used tectonic sense to try to find where the other half of the tunnel was. Unfortunately, I couldn't find it despite how far my range was. So, I ended up working with them for another month, until we found the other tunnel, and connected the two. Ultimately, we were about 100 feet away in total, and most of that distance was horizontal. However, to make everything connect well at the same height, we dug forward an extra 40 feet, and then connected the two tunnels.

I think everyone was quite pleased with the fact we could now travel directly through the mountain in a pretty nice tunnel, though the work that needed to be done was far from over. The tunnel on this side still needs to be widened, and now that I know exactly how much space we're working with in the center area here, I have plans for how I want to expand it. I want this central area to be a rest stop as the half-way point between the two sides of the island.

As such, it needs to be carefully carved out to expand to meet both halves of the tunnel, complete with large support pillars, places to rest, and some amount of lighting. I went and got a manascope to see exactly how much ambient mana there exists this far under the mountain. The value came out to 0.006 CU, which means there is so little mana here that we probably can't even use fluorite lighting. This does, however, give me an opportunity to test something that I've wanted to test for a little while now.

We've had a 2-foot mana crystal in the lab area for quite a while, and neither Tiberius nor myself have used it for any new research in a year at least. So, I want to relocate that crystal to the central area, and let it sit for a few months while people drain it for construction and mining. As they do so, I want to take readings of the ambient mana levels and see if the crystal actually amplifies the ambient mana, or if it can even reasonably recharge this deep underground.

Back when I was an imp, I found that the mana crystals did recharge deep underground, but they recharged much faster near the surface, but I haven't had a good chance to test how that actually affects the surrounding area. It could either amplify the mana through some unknown mechanism, or it could drain the mana from the area, concentrating it in the crystal itself. I doubt it's the second option, based on the extra ambient mana on the surface when we install large crystals, but it just as well could be draining mana from further away, while amplifying the local area. In either case, it's something worth checking out.

After bringing the 2-foot crystal to the central area under the mountain, I periodically checked the mana levels at a few different pre-selected points while the other demons worked to carve out the area I'd designated. I measured right next to the crystal above the small water pool it was submerged in, about twenty feet away, where each tunnel meets the central area, and a few hundred feet down each tunnel.

I found some interesting results. Over time, the central crystal dimmed more and more, and it recharged incredibly slowly. While it was bright, the central area had very elevated levels of mana with the highest levels being concentrated right above the crystal, which was expected. As it dimmed though, an interesting pattern emerged. The central area continued having somewhat amplified mana levels even after the crystal was essentially drained, reaching ambient levels of 0.012 CU, though the real interesting results came from a difference between each of the two tunnels.

The tunnel that was coming from the far side of the mountain had much lower mana values than the other side. That had two obvious reasons that it could be happening. The first was that there was some form of cardinality to the way mana flows, which I thought would be unlikely. The second was that we currently had another 2-foot crystal sitting near the entrance to that tunnel, along with a few trays of smaller crystals.

So, I did an easy test, and moved the second 2-foot crystal along with the trays into the opposite tunnel, and gave it a few days for the mana values to settle into a steady state. Sure enough, now the opposite tunnel had a lower ambient mana value. What it seems like, to me at least, is that the mana crystals seem to act like a magnet for ambient mana. I also already know from experience that mana seems to flow more freely through air than rock.

I thus concluded from those two observations that it's likely that the mana crystal in the tunnel is essentially vacuuming up all the ambient mana that potentially would be coming through that tunnel. In the opposite tunnel where there are no other mana crystals in the path, the ambient mana level forms a gradient along the tunnel, with the highest mana values near the surface which slowly declines within the tunnel until you reach the central area. Interestingly, near the central area, the mana values climb again until you reach the mana crystal itself, almost like the mana is pooling around that central point.

That brought up another question though. If I move the other mana crystals to the central area as well, how would the mana in that area be affected? How would the two crystals interact overall? So, I did just that. Obviously, all this moving of mana crystals did slow down the construction rate somewhat for the demons who were working to both expand the second tunnel and build the central area out, but the results of these experiments should help us be more efficient in the future with underground construction projects, so I think it's worth the delay.

What I found after another month of letting the second mana crystal slowly drain was that the ambient mana levels in the central area had nearly tripled from when there was only one crystal, up to 0.032 CU. While that was still less than 3% of the surface mana values at night time, it did give me some idea as to how mana crystals affect ambient mana. The gradient towards the central area was similar to when there was only one crystal, although the final mana level when entering the central area was higher, and it now had two tunnels feeding it, rather than one.

What was more interesting, however, was that the large crystals themselves actually seemed to charge at about daytime mana values, meaning each crystal could essentially recharge a single demon at normal surface regen levels reliably. The smaller crystal trays, however, barely recharged at all, mirroring the lower natural values. So, I tried out a mixed method. I kept the two 2-foot crystals in the central area, and moved the mana trays back to the charging area in the far tunnel.

The central area did show a small drop in ambient mana, down to 0.026 CU, and the two crystals charged a little slower, but the trays themselves were recharging fast enough to keep up with the tunnel expansion, and the central crystals let the demons working on the central area work a little more efficiently. I was a little intrigued by a new idea a that point, however. What would happen if I periodically placed the small mana crystals from the tray along the length of one of the tunnels. Would that increase or decrease the central mana? Would it form a kind of conduit for the mana, or would it absorb most of it?

Despite the grumblings of the demons who's work I was disrupting, I tried that out as well. It took two days to space out the dozens of mana crystals along the tunnel length, and what I found was that when spaced out like this, it seemed to have about the same effect as when they were all centralized, and I was getting a reading of 0.032 CU in the central area again.

Whether that is because small crystals individually have a negligible effect, and only start to do something when tightly grouped, like magnets, or because of some unknown factor, I can't say, but I can say that the small crystals do still seem to recharge mana faster than a demon would, so we could periodically place them in contact with zinc fluorite to install basic lighting down the tunnel, though it would probably negatively effect the central mana if we did so.

Perhaps if we find another pocket of mana crystals, I can attempt to grow a 4 or 6-foot mana crystal to put in the central area to see how much that affects mana levels, by comparison. For now though, I returned all the small crystals to their charging trays, and left the teams working on the tunnel and the central area in peace to finish their work.

[Vol.6] Ch.48 Tunnel Touchups

I worked for a few more months on the handful of remaining crystal growth apparatuses to try to finish the new lab space. By winter, I was down to only one apparatus left to complete. After it's complete, I should be able to theoretically grow a mana crystal from a tiny seed all the way up to the 16-foot size of the largest apparatus. I was interrupted, however, by a construction team notifying me that they were going to start work on the crane and pit above the mana crystal lab that I'd previously planned out.

Since their work is going to take a few years, I'm glad they're starting on it now so there won't be any trouble when it comes time to move the 16-foot crystal out of the lab. If my calculations are correct, that crystal will weigh close to 100 tons, so I'm glad we've already started making steel cable to handle that.

At the same time, Zeb has also sent a construction team to get started on the construction of the lightstone facility I discussed with him. Or, at least, the sea wall portion of that facility. He's reached the point of adding another construction team again, so more projects can happen at the same time. Additionally, with the majority of the dwarves having left, we had quite a bit of surplus housing available, so there is less pressure to build it quite as fast.

After I finish up with this last crystal growth apparatus, I plan on going back to the city for a little bit. I want to talk with Zeb about new projects related to the tunnel, and check in on how the goblins we summoned in the tests have been adapting. If things are manageable, I have a few new ideas to try out to see if we can increase our effective population growth rate.

After a month of work, I'd finished up the last of the crystal apparatuses, and I'd given the construction crew working on the pit enough instructions that they'd be able to work on their own for some time without any problems. I discussed with Zeb plans for improving the tunnel through the mountain and beginning work on a new city on the far side of the island.

Previously, there were multiple good reasons to build a city on the far side of the island. Now, however, the reasons distill down to basically defense and resource access. We no longer have any trade partners, and with the dwarves not being an option anytime soon, future trade will be limited. That is still the side that we ship off in our longboats to have soldiers periodically hunt the giant lizards on the far island and there is a lot of unused land, so there are advantages to having a village over there at the very least. My idea of having a merchant capitol designed to be impressive and attractive to foreigners, however, has evaporated.

I find myself a little frustrated that we're basically being pigeon holed into developing more military weapons to keep ourselves safe. The dwarven king clearly views us as a threat, at least some humans view us as dangerous, and the elves are using us for their own purposes. I'd like to think that when the next demon invasion occurs, maybe the demons themselves could be something of an ally, but based on how Zaka and Shasta have both talked about them, I doubt that will be the case. Our society is quite the distant offshoot from what would be considered normal demon culture. If we want access to mainland resources, I can only think of three options we have left.

First, try to find an obscure trade partner in some small human country that we can use as a middleman to get what we want. I'm not a big fan of that, as it still opens us up to growing negative sentiments, and the middleman can just as easily be cut off if our trading is discovered. If I can make a large list of items I'd want to buy a lot of to last us a significant amount of time, we could potentially make it work for a few years though.

Second, try to have a large impact in the next demon invasion on behalf of whichever side seems more amenable to future trade. If we're making new military technology anyway, the line between offense and defense can get quite blurry, so this could be an option. Even if it doesn't repair our image entirely with mainland countries, it'd send a message that we can't just be ignored. If we have a large impact, any smart nation would probably not want to be outright enemies with us.

Third, stage our own invasion to claim territory. This is the option I'm least attracted to, but it could be an option. It's honestly more of a follow up to the second option, if push came to shove. Ultimately, while we've got a fairly resource rich set of islands, they're still islands, and what resources we have are more finite than any continent would have. Further, since these islands are volcanic, we've also been quite limited in our specific ores and metals we have access to. Who knows what effect new metals would have when infused with fluorite, and that's only scratching the surface of what sort of magical effects might exist out there.

We've been doing a good job of converting what we do have into useful items, but not having access to trade has started to really wear on me. The dwarves and humans that I've worked with have been a good source of knowledge from their homelands, but most of them aren't specialists in the fields that I'd like to get more info on. For example, are there any other specialty ores or metals on the mainland? Could we, for example, get access to nickel or cobalt? Cobalt, could potentially be found in similar deposits to the ones we've been mining, but the technology level of the rest of the world is a little odd.

They already have hand powered centrifuges, for example, but also seem to have settled largely into late medieval tendencies. Perhaps these pure metals are known, but their usefulness is so limited with the rest of their technology that only a small number of specialists know of, or use them. Even if I found Cobaltite, I'd be hard pressed to recognize it or even refine it.

In any case, having a village of some kind on that side of the island is a strategic asset, at the very least. Given the large bay, it's the easiest location for an enemy to invade us with a large scale assault. Having a static population, complete with food and housing, makes stationing more soldiers on that side of the island logistically easier for us.

Ultimately, Zeb wasn't that keen on trying to build a whole new village over there, but I was able to talk him into starting the work for it. That side of the island is a bit wider close to the sea, so building a sea wall over there is quite the large undertaking. Thankfully, there is already a massive amount of stone stockpiled from building the tunnel.

The tunnel also reduces the travel time from one side of the island to the other to less than a day, and the travel itself, while dark, it actually quite easy, with a very smooth gradient and flat ground. Which then brought me to the second thing I wanted to talk with him about, the tunnel construction teams.

Soon, the central area will be complete under the mountain, and a year or so from now the other half of the tunnel will probably be widened all the way to the center. I know he'd probably be glad to convert these mining teams back to construction teams, but I've got a list of things I'd like done in the tunnel. I'd like for a moderately sized sewage pipe to be excavated under the pathway. We already drain a considerable amount of water out of the tunnel, so I'd like to set up small rest stops throughout the tunnel. Ultimately, in a dark place like this I'd hate for it to slowly build up filth.

So, I want travelers to be able to go to the bathroom, and that be separate from the water that drains out of the tunnel. We'd just redirect a small amount of the water into the sewer pipe, and that should help keep the running water clean and available for drinking. That project is actually quite a bit smaller than the overall undertaking of digging the tunnel, so it should only take a couple of years to complete. The other project, which is much bigger, is that I'd like to dig two flanking tunnels from the central area, perpendicular to our existing tunnel's path.

These would only be the size of the initial scouting tunnel, and would ascend, rather than descent towards the surface. The reason I want these two new tunnels are two-fold. I want to have new scouting for mining is the primary reason, but secondarily, it would add more water flow into, and eventually out of, the tunnels and to our city. Long term, I'd actually like to expand the central area slowly, until it can house something of a population itself, if we can get reasonable lighting in there.

Zeb was far more hesitant to agree to those two projects than he was to the idea of a new village. The benefits of the sewer pipe, compared to its time cost could at least have some benefit as the tunnel gets used more casually over time. The idea of new scouting tunnels, however, wasn't worth it in his eyes. After some back and forth, I had a pretty good understanding of why they aren't worth it to him as well.

Outside of hitting a pocket of mana crystals or iron, any resource we find is basically just going to get stockpiled. We still have large stockpiles of lead, zinc, and copper just sitting unused. By comparison, we do have dozens of construction projects lined up that would have short term payoffs. If either situation changes though, he's more than willing to discuss the issue again at that point. For now at least, we'll only be getting the sewer pipes put in, unless conditions change.

[Vol.6] Ch.49 New Summoning Method

The goblins that were problematic before haven't gotten any better. In fact, they've all become jailbirds. After I struggled finding them anywhere around town, I'd asked Zaka about them, and quickly found out that he's had them placed in jail indefinitely. They were in and out of jail repeatedly for various petty crimes, and he was at a loss as to what to do with them. One of them suggested just leaving them in the jail, and apparently both parties found that to be an amicable solution.

The goblins get meals for free and a place to stay, and we get... them not committing crimes. I mean, it's not great, but I suppose it's better than nothing. They've all been kept in their own cells after one strangled another a few months ago though. They're psychopaths. Honestly, I almost want to make a special prison for them, just to keep them from making other prisoners behave worse. If this is the final solution Zaka is comfortable with, then it's probably a good idea to actually keep them isolated.

This did lead to a wider discussion about summoning imps, to which Zaka is even more reserved to any new techniques than he was before. Considering how much of a headache it sounds like he's been getting from the few bad eggs, I can't blame him. Though the other goblins seem to have adapted well and don't show any outward signs of bad behaviors. The influence of their neighbors seems to have either fully converted them to productive individuals or at the very least, keeps them from acting out any bad desires.

After some convincing, I got Zaka to agree to a new round of tests after I build some more facilities out for it. For this round of testing, I want the imp's chambers to have some form of work they have to do to get their food. For the most basic chamber, it'll involve moving a heavy rock out of the way to be able to grab their food. Once they've gotten the food, a guard will be able to use a pole to drag the rock back into place safely from outside. However, since we've already had some imps choose to prestige instead of evolve, I'm going to be ready with a new set of chambers to move any prestiged imps into.

Under the first set of chambers will be another set of chambers of varying difficulty. Rather than let the prestiged imps continue to use up valuable summoning space, they'll be moved down a floor to the new chambers. Some of the rooms will feature heavier rocks, while others will have basic puzzles to solve to get their food. This area will require more active management, and I'll need to recruit some demons to handle the puzzle management, as well has having more guards for the area. If these imps evolve into goblins with higher strength, it could be dangerous if the guards in the area aren't at least hobgoblins.

I'll also talk with Zeb about digging out a permanent prison somewhere under the city. Unlike the cells in the existing jail that have natural light coming in from above, these will be built further underground. I've grown more cold to the other demons, but in reality, it's simply closer to how they view each other. We'll surround their cells will metal, just like the other cells in the jail, though rather than iron, I think we'll use brass for this, since we have more excess zinc and copper than iron. Unlike the jail, we don't expect many new people to come in and out of this area, so we'll need to make a pit for excrement under the cells that can be cleaned occasionally.

Unlike the jail though, less labor should be needed overall for maintaining order, since the cells won't be able to be opened easily, and the way in and out of the prison itself will be a single locked path. These goblins may not want to escape now, but that doesn't mean future inhabitants of the prison won't want to. If we get errant invading demons during the next invasion, Zaka might prefer permanent imprisonment to killing them if any surrender but later act out. So I want to be prepared for that possibility.

Unlike last time, where Zeb eventually sent a construction team to help me with expanding the new summoning area, this time I had to build it myself. As a result, it took me 29 days to build. Being as large as I am now does come with some advantages for tasks like this that largely involve excavating large areas, since I can cut and carry much larger blocks of stone than the average demon. After a bit of explanation, Zeb did pick out a location for the prison, and he sent a construction team to start working on it.

He had some good ideas that I'd neglected to think of initially, which shows how him focusing on infrastructure and construction all this time has really made him quite adept at city planning. Rather than build it somewhere under the city, he recommended travelling uphill about an hour along the road, and then digging down there to build the prison. That way, you could connect sewer pipes in to handle excrement from the cells, while simultaneously also reducing the initial threat any mass escape would have.

Since brass also has a decently low melting point, rather than casting plates to install we'll just directly cast the floors and walls of the cells with molten brass. That should also make the cells far more sturdy long term. Additionally, it should be good use for a lot of our zinc, which we have in excess currently. I've left the rest of the details for Zeb to work out.

The new summoning area area is, on the surface, just a duplicate of the floor above it. Twelve rooms, situated around a central area opening with a large square stone on a rail which is situated in front of a meal box. However, closer inspection between rooms on the floor above and this floor reveal some irregularities. First, the floor below it is actually about 20% larger in all dimensions to compensate for imps growing larger with each prestige.

Second, the rock weights placed in front of where meals are deposited are disproportionately larger for some of the rooms, and for other rooms, they're entirely removed, and replaced with interchangeable locking mechanisms designed to work as a puzzle for those inside. Imps will spend a maximum of three days on the first floor. If they evolve into goblins, they'll be let out into society. If they prestige into uncommon imps, then they'll be forcibly hauled down a floor, and potentially moved about on that floor based on their abilities. After I find new workers to handle this floor, I'll stick around to assist for a month.

If we can make this work well, then we might be able to start purposefully steering our summoned demons towards particular jobs. For now, that basically means them focusing on increased strength. If we can devise ways to get them to develop other traits early, like earth manipulation, they'd be primed for becoming construction crew members with a much better trajectory for success over their life. Honestly speaking though, even just increased strength would lead to a general improvement in quality of life for those who prestige early as imps.

The first few rounds of imps all became goblins right away, and they seemed to be fairly normal. Though, so did the previous test batches. It was only after being exposed to bad apples did it become clear that those goblins weren't quite the same. So, in anticipation of that potentiality, new goblins are distributed into existing communities, rather than all going to new ones. It has required a bit more logistical oversight from city hall, but we've been managing so far. Since it does give us a higher overall population growth rate, it should be worth it, as long as we can keep it from shuffling around residents too often.

After fifteen days, we had our first imp that chose to prestige instead of evolve. So, we moved them down to the floor below to continue testing. After another twelve days, we got a second imp that chose to prestige. By this point, it seemed clear that the number of imps that prestige rather than evolving was significantly lower than before. It really does seem like there is a correlation between the perceived difficulty of life for an imp, and their impulse to evolve vs prestige.

Finally, after 33 days in total, the first of the two prestiged imps evolved. While they weren't as entitled as the first batch, their behavior was a little different than a normal goblin. After five days of observation, if I had to say exactly what was wrong, it was that they were very short term goal oriented. It's probably due to the nature of the puzzles and weights we made them move to get food, but they seemed quite impulsive and borderline hyperactive.

They were able to do certain tasks well, but any task that required a lot of effort before you see any payoff frustrated them. So they'd gladly haul rocks from point a to point b, but they didn't like when both rock piles would be emptied and replenished after each cycle of hauling, such as hauling from a quarry to a build site. There are plenty of tasks that they can work on where they see results, so if there are only a handful of these goblins being created every year, it won't be a problem. Considering the other goblins were pretty normal too, this minor inconvenience that a few goblins have makes this new summoning method far more productive than the old fight pits. I'll discuss my results with Zaka in another month after continued observation.

[Vol.6] Ch.50 Low Yield

The trend continued for the newly summoned goblins into the next month, so I discussed shifting our summoning efforts to this new style of summoning with Zaka and Zeb. Using it, we could expand our summoning capacity to triple the current values, but we'd also need to triple our housing production to accommodate that many new demons. Zeb was previously the one pushing for us to summon as many new individuals as possible, but this time he was actually advocating for slowing down our summoning.

His reasons for slowing down made a lot of sense. We had basically frontloaded a lot of the infrastructure necessary to support a growing population. Now though, our artificial tide pools are getting closer to reaching capacity, and we haven't been expanding the fields much because we no longer have easy relocatable mana crystals for rapid construction in remote locations. As such, more of our construction labor is actually going to need to be dedicated to building up our food infrastructure to support a larger population.

Zeb showed us a new map with his various planned construction projects. Among them, I noticed a plan for three new villages. Two in the neighboring valley, and one on the far side of the island. His plans were also organized by approximate payoff time for the amount of labor needed. The two villages he has planned for the neighboring valley are pretty high up the list, and lie on existing roads, making them fairly high payoff projects with minimal startup time.

We ended up following a secondary discussion of the purpose of expanding our population. We'd previously discussed the need to expand for both productivity and defensive purposes, but both Zeb and Zaka have noted that a lot of our population is idle now-a-days. Back when we had mana crystals all over the place, a large amount of the population would be busy assisting with construction or other tasks done by demons using magic. Now, with a much more limited mana supply, there just isn't as much labor necessary.

Labor that uses mana is still incredibly useful, but having spare work that demons can do to actually gain access to magics that can use mana effectively is an issue. Even simple tasks like mining end up needing demons with stone shaping to do some amount of cleanup after, limiting the amount of trainable population. While the general population is slowly gaining levels passively, most of those who end up prestiging aren't getting very useful traits. That problem compounds on itself when we actually only have a handful of sources for levels, and we're already using quite a few of them to maximum capacity to ensure that our guards and military are as strong as possible.

After some amount of back and forth, we decided to slow down the amount of leveling that our military soldiers would be doing by a modest amount. Currently, a lot of the fish killed in both artificial tide pools are killed by soldiers each day to help keep the soldiers ahead of the levelling curve in the city. Now, the soldiers will only do that in one of the two tide pools. The other tide pool will be used by the construction teams. Zeb will be in charge of determining what teams go there and when to gain levels, with the idea being a more rapid expansion of the number of demons capable of doing construction work.

Since levels have become such a valuable resource, we decided to also take the time to determine what our upper limit for most individuals should be. It seemingly gets exponentially harder to level up to max every time you prestige or evolve, so expending valuable levels on individuals who might take years to prestige for miniscule improvements seems like a waste. For the military, we determined that reaching hobgoblin status with at least two combat helpful traits and one combat oriented magic would be the upper limit. Beyond that, only military leaders would be allowed to continue active levelling for the sake of making themselves hardened targets.

Likewise, for the construction teams improved stone shaping will be set as the upper limit. Though for both the military and construction teams, exceptions can be made in either direction at either Zaka or Zeb's discretion. If someone shows particular promise for a new ability that could be beneficial, they could continue levelling, and likewise, if someone is already a high tier demon but shows no promise, they can be cut off. It'll require more bureaucracy to keep track of these things, but with limited resources available, dedicating work to their effective use is better than what we've been doing.

We had all those discussions only to essentially come to the conclusion that for the next few years, we don't need the new summoning method that I've developed. We'll still use it due to it's lower time commitment on Zaka's part, but we won't be using it at full capacity. Having it available for the future should still be useful, however.

After our meeting, I was at a bit of a loss as to what to work on next. It'll still be a bit of time until the lightstone production facility begins construction proper, since they're still building out a sea wall at the bottom of that craggy valley. Looking towards things we'd like to have in the future, a more ready supply of metal would be ideal, particularly iron.

Our needs for it aren't quite as high as a typical industrializing country would expect, thanks to multiple different magical processes, but there are still a lot of items that benefit from the ductility of metal over stone as well as the thermal conductivity of it. We do actually have a potentially large source of iron sitting right under our feet, it's just difficult to recover. A lot of the volcanic rock making up the island seems to be basaltic. As such at least 1%, if not more, of the rock is probably composed of iron oxides.

The difficulty comes in separating that iron oxide from other materials. Thankfully, we actually already have a process to handle that in the magnetic separator at the dam, though we might actually need to scale that up to make it effective enough. We'll also need a much larger pulverizer to actually process a large enough volume of rock. In addition to the pulverizer being larger, we'll also need it to make finer particles than what we've been making, since the minerals are more finely distributed in rock, as compared to ore.

So, what I'm thinking of making is a series of crushers designed to first break the rock down to pebbles, then two large ball mills to produce a very fine powder from the rock. After the rock is powdered, it can be run past a magnetic separator to pull out any magnetic impurities that exist in small amounts. I can't say for certain that the only magnetic material will be iron oxide, but we can do batch vibrational bed separations to striate the different magnetic materials if there are multiple kinds, and then figure out what each is.

The remaining non-magnetic material should contain a number of minerals, but exactly what each mineral is I'm unsure of. I can either analyze it for useful properties later, or we can apply a small amount of it to our crop fields each year as a volcanic fertilizer. The remainder will just build up as a waste product that we'll either need to flush into the ocean, or find other uses for. If we worked with concrete it could be used as a filler material, but as it stands, the majority of it will just be waste.

I wanted to do a proof of concept first, to make sure that what I planned to do could actually work at a larger scale. Thankfully, a lot of the work was already done to do small scale testing since we already have rock crushers and the magnetic separator, so the only thing I needed to make was a medium sized ball mill capable of powdering enough basalt for doing trials.

I took seven days to make a ball mill, and then it took a few days of trail and error to make a batch of steel balls capable of grinding down the rock to a fine powder, and I did end up grinding it in back to back batches using a larger and small ball size. Normally, I'd be a little concerned that the steel balls might break down over time, but since the primary function of this mill is to make iron, we'll be recovering any shards of iron from any balls that break anyway.

For the purposes of my test, I powdered about 50 cubic feet of basalt over the course of five days to ensure that I'd be able to actually tell if I was recovering any magnetic material. I wanted to make sure that it wasn't just shards of metal that may have come from either the crushers or the ball mill if they got damaged and I didn't notice.

I quickly found that due to the small amount of magnetic material in the basalt, I had to run the powder past the magnetic drum multiple times before I actually extracted all of it. By the end though, I had just over 3 cubic feet of magnetic powder, which honestly was more than I expected. Considering how much stone we extracted from the reservoir over the years, we'd have produced many tons of iron. Of course, I'll actually need to determine what exactly our magnetic powder is, and whether further processing needs done first before we proceed.

[Vol.6] Ch.51 Fine Dust

I shouldn't have been surprised that when I went to actually smelt the magnetic powder we recovered, the iron we recovered was far too brittle, and even repeated melt cycles with added flux didn't fix the problem. Twenty-two days of troubleshooting and problem solving got me a few answers. I had previously run the powder past the electromagnetic separator a few times to get everything out, but if I instead only melted down the first pass's powder, the iron was relatively fine. When I melted down the extra pass material separately, the result was a moderate amount of incredibly brittle iron that was full of impurities, and a particularly dense slag material.

As part of troubleshooting, I realized that despite how finely ground the powder was, it was actually comprised of different sized particles, and that those particles were likely comprised themselves of multiple materials. I came to this conclusion after attempting to do a vibrational test on a container of the powder, to separate it into different density strata. If the particles had been roughly the same size, and each particle was homogenous, I'd have expected clear layers to form. Instead, I got three vague layers.

It's clear from the layers I found that there probably are at least two, but likely three, separate clusters of density within the material comprising the rock that have significant difference from each other. However, the individual particles are probably still too large, and are made of different materials, meaning that any particle could have varying density based on it's own composition. Additionally, larger particles in a shaken bed can act like more dense particles, obscuring the result even further.

My guess, which could be wrong, is that the magnetic particles are also dragging with them other bits of material, and the very pure particles experience a stronger net attraction, yielding a much purer iron. If that theory holds true, then finer grinding would increase the total yield of good quality iron from the stone, as each particle is likely to be of a higher purity.

The issue with testing that is that making even smaller steel balls than I've already made would require a lot more work, and an entirely different setup. So, I'm left with a choice. Either we leave it be, and end up with a volumetric yield of about 0.5% for iron, or I do some experiments with making smaller steel balls and a stirred ball mill, and see if we can increase our yields. Since I don't have any other pressing things to work on, this seems like a decent project. Even if we don't get a higher yield from the rock, having access to even finer grinding methods could give us better access to other chemicals down the road.

I tried a lot of really dumb ideas for making small steel balls over the course of twenty days before I realized we've already pretty much developed everything we need to make it work. I was trying things like grinding and casting, when what I should have realized would be the best option for us is actually just cold pressing steel cut from a wire into the shape of a ball, then grinding that down in a standardized way. We already pull hot steel through a die to make wire for our cabling, so we're already part of the way to what we need.

I took two more days making a few test apparatuses, using a large lever arm to compress a cutting of wire down to a ball shape, then ground it down to make a nice and neat ball that was only a few millimeters in size. After some heat treatment it became quite tough and difficult to polish, and while it didn't have a mirror finish the abrasiveness of the particles of rock should smooth them out while in use in a ball mill. I'll have to work out a lot of details before we're at the point where I can actually test that, however.

With balls this small, I'll definitely need a stirred mill, and the particles coming in will need to be pre-processed. If I want standardized steel balls of different sizes, all we would need to do is up or downscale the production. For anything smaller than an inch or two in diameter this method should work. That means we will probably need to use rock crushers to break rocks small enough to the point where we can run them through a regular mill once, filled with whatever our largest size steel balls are, then into the fine mill before we magnetically separate it.

Before I try mechanizing anything, I wanted to make sure that the process would actually be worth upscaling. If it turned out that it wasn't worth it now, I could just pocket the project to continue later when it was actually needed. As a result, I hired on three goblins to use my rudimentary press to make hundreds of very small steel balls a day while I assembled a small stirred ball mill and a stirling engine to hook into it to get it up to high enough speeds.

The principle is pretty straight forward. In a regular ball mill, as the drum rotates it brings material up the edge until it falls, and causes collisions, breaking up the material. The limiting factors there are the kinetic energy achieved by whatever size ball we're using, the contact surface area of those balls, and the gravitational force exerted by our planet. What that sums up to is that you need to accelerate small balls manually to achieve even finer grinding. By essentially spinning the whole mill with stirring rods at high speeds, we can take advantage of centripetal force to increase the kinetic energy of small balls, and thus achieve that finer ground product.

In practice, there were a lot of problems to solve to make a stable stirred mill. I turned it vertically, and made the whole frame and drum stationary, but even then I had to stoneshape it's frame into the ground. The reason being that as I ran small test runs, it was clear that the medium would occasionally get off balance internally, and that would impart a decent amount of force on the sides of the drum of the mill, wanting to spin or flip the whole thing. Other than that, the design is pretty straight forward, with a handful of steel rods rotating about a central axis to impart the energy to mill the materials.

So, after thirteen days and a few unstable designs, I had one that I was comfortable trying at full capacity. That capacity was actually fairly small, at only five cubic feet, but it was enough for basic testing. So, I loaded the powdered material in from the previous milling alongside over a thousand small steel balls, and then ran the mill for a day.

If the material going in was powder, then this was a fine dust. When the lid was opened to the mill, the air disturbance alone threw a small amount of the dust up into the air. I backed away quickly and exhaled as I waited for the dust to settle. That dust is almost certainly a health hazard, given how fine it is. In the other mill, the amount of dust it put in the air at the end was a lot less than this, so I was less concerned about long term exposure being a problem.

In either case, after the dust settled, came another difficult step, separating the steel balls from the dust itself. Which made me realize I should probably just fill the mill drum with water before it's opened to both prevent dust from getting in the air, but also to let me easily separate the dust from the steel balls. If we pour a slurry of the dust and balls through a screen to catch the balls, what comes out the other end should be just dust filled water. That could then be dried before going through the magnetic separation process. Speaking of that process, it will also need to be upgraded to help handle such fine dust.

The upgrades should be fairly straight forward though. We'll just be installing some glass between where observations happen and the actual electromagnet does the separations. It was already quite dusty in there, and it needed to be cleaned regularly, but now it'll get so dusty that it'll probably need to be cleaned daily. A large amount of the dust is so fine that it practically floats on the air, so the glass separator should provide the necessary physical barrier to protect operators. Though I'll also need to make a device to allow dusting off the glass from the other side, but that should be pretty straightforward.

After another five days of preparations, and working on details to make sure things were relatively safe, I went ahead with trying magnetic separations for the new dust. What I ended up with was a much higher yield than I expected. Nearly 15% of the dust was separated on the first go, and a negligible amount was separated on a second pass.

However, when I melted that dust, what I got was once again a very brittle iron. Intrigued, I went through the trouble over three days of making another batch to test. This time, despite the potential risk to my health due to dust inhalation, I slowly moved the chute further and further from the electromagnet as the dust was poured out. At a certain point, the dust started to separate into three batches: dust that went all the way to the electromagnet drum before falling off, dust that didn't react at all to the electromagnet, and dust that clearly was deflected but didn't actually make it to the drum.

If I moved the chute too far away, the strongly attracted dust would also start missing the chute well before the weaker attracted dust would stop deflecting, meaning I had a fairly small sweet spot to try to collect all three different lines. So, another three days, and a bit of rigging to try to collect all three different kinds, and I'd gotten a sample of the three different kinds of dust.

The strongly magnetically attracted dust ended up making a good quality iron, which is about what I expected. The lesser magnetically attracted dust mostly made slag with a small amount of brittle iron, and while some of the non-magnetic dust melted into a slag, some of it remained solid throughout, which might end up being useful for separating it in the future. As for final yields, the good quality iron made up about 9% of the initial dust, the brittle low quality stuff was 6%, and the remaining 85% was non-magnetic.

If we hadn't ever mined actual iron ores before, 9% by mass yield wouldn't seem that unreasonable as plenty of ores have lower yields than that on earth. However, iron ores are usually only quite high yield at 40% or more. With our limited resources however, a 9% yield over a large amount of rock on the island actually does seem quite good. The next step for me is scaling everything up, and industrializing it. If we can automate a large amount of this process, then we can actually get a bunch of our demons back to work breaking rocks, with those rocks just ending up ground down for metal, so they won't actually need to be adjusted with stoneshaping at all.

[Vol.6] Ch.52 Upgraded Dam

I've started the process for upscaling all the different production lines to allow us to produce a meaningful amount of iron at a time, but it's taking a long time. I've started with the peripheral production of three gauges of steel wire to be used as a precursor for steel balls. That production is being added onto the side of the existing steelworks casting area in the lab compound. Adding on the extruder machines, new stirling engines to support them, and the additional building space took me 26 days. The ball presses are going to be made and automated in a new building in the lab compound, but everything else is going to end up built at the dam, and the electro-separation facility is going to be completely rebuilt. All in all this project is going to take quite a bit of time, and I've already put in a request from Zeb for a construction team to help at the dam.

The reason I'm going with three gauges of wire to start, rather than just the two we need for milling, is because I also want to have a particular intermediate size of ball bearing for use and replacement in our existing assemblies that use bearings. There are quite a few bearings being used in a few different locations, and while the blacksmiths can keep up with their production thanks to various machine assisted methods, I think it'd be better for us long term if we can instead mass produce them with minimal effort.

Designing a mechanically automated system to cut steel wire, move it to a die, compress it into a ball, then move that ball to a grinder to remove deformities like burrs from them, all took quite a lot of time. From doing some model testing to building the final automated production lines, I spent 97 days. Each line ends up producing about the same mass in completed steel balls each hour, since the the smaller balls take less mechanical energy to shape. The only work that any demon working here needs to do is bring in steel wire, feed it into an initial wire feed, and inspect completed products for defects.

We can make up to 400 2-inch steel balls an hour, which is just under 500 lbs of steel processed, per assembly line, per hour. Each line is powered by 3 of the largest size stirling engines we make, meaning it draws a lot of mana from the air, much like a lot of the other facilities in this area. Rather than use fire to heat the balls before tempering, we use large ovens also powered by fluorite crystals to get the metal hot enough for quenching.

I knew the facility would end up using a lot of mana, so I built it as far as possible from the other buildings that use mana, while still remaining inside the walled in area. Until the lab area can have it's own above-ground crystal again, this is probably the extent of mana I can pull from the air here. On a stagnant day, or a day where the wind blows in a line between any two of the major mana using buildings, we experience the equivalent of a brown out, and production slows quite a bit.

The final product out of the building is smooth enough to be used in a ball mill, but it's not yet polished enough for use as a ball bearing. For that, I have another planned production line. When using these balls for milling, the balls that come out end up being quite a bit more polished than the ones that went in, and a large part of that is that some of the minerals in basalt have a higher hardness than steel. So, for a ball bearing production line, I intend to utilize the abrasive nature of the leftover crushed basalt in a final polishing step in a machine before the waste powder is dumped in the ocean.

Since we added the aqueduct there is a significantly larger total flow rate of water through the dam and reservoir, so I'm not too worried about using too much of our water on the process. We'll also be recycling a considerable amount of the water we use through multiple steps in my planned processes, so I don't think we'll be causing too much strain on our water supply. If we make enough iron and it ends up being an issue that we're using too much water, we can relocate aspects of the facility to the ocean instead, and use sea water, but that would be far more complicated of a process, as we'd need pumps.

The first stage of this new construction was dismantling the old hydroelectric facility and draining the reservoir to allow for expansion and reconstruction on the dam to accommodate my plans for the new construction facility. Safely draining the reservoir took three months, leaving me with just under four months to build everything we'd need. There would normally be a large amount of water still draining through the reservoir, but I took a month making a diversion for the stream and aqueduct so that we could fully drain the reservoir.

I ended up pulling five construction teams to work on the project, since this will probably end up being one of the rare chances we get to make improvements, expansions, and inspect the dam and we only have until spring to actually make those improvements. The first of the major changes to the dam were the new drainage pipes that I installed in the reservoir that would be funneled directly into the various parts of the processing facility I have planned. These were quite massive tubes that didn't actually drain water from directly next to the dam, but instead pulled from a minimum of 20 feet of depth in the reservoir itself, which for the current dam would be half the depth.

However, over the years, as we've cut more and more into the mountainside to expand the reservoir, it's also resulted in more and more of our work going to cutting stone from the hillside that doesn't result in any expanded capacity. So, one of the big plans is to heavily reinforce the dam, and expand it's height up to 60 feet, which will greatly expand it's existing capacity, and let us operate it comfortably above 20 feet of depth year round. Meaning that if we have a drought one year, we'll hopefully have enough water to last us quite a while.

In addition to the extra height, we're replacing the old valves with multiple new valves. We're adding multiple redundant valves, along with emergency spillways, large grates in multiple places to prevent large sticks and debris from building up, and other similar safety measures that were lacking previously. When I first built the dam, the purpose was to improve safety within the valley after torrential rains flooded everything out. Back then, if the dam failed due to excessive rains, it was essentially the same outcome as if there wasn't a dam there. Now, if it were to fail, it'd be far more catastrophic, so it really does need to have more of it's own safety measures installed.

Overall, the dam and reservoir should be able to better regulate the downstream flow while also easily providing the planned facility with all the water it needs to operate for at least a few months a year.

With the help of so many construction teams, we were able to get the necessary changes done two months before spring. Afterwards, I had only one team left to help build the actual processing facility. Regardless of how useful it would be to have stirling engines run everything, it'd be a waste to not take advantage of the large amount of water that we have access to to power machines when we already need to use some of the water for a few steps in the process.

The facility plan consists of multiple stages of production. I decided to use the water power to drive the first stage which consists of rock crushers. I chose that, rather than having it power the electromagnets, since the rock crushers are the component that we will likely use the least, reducing the demand on water overall. In a lot of ore processing situations, we were already crushing rocks in crushers before transporting them, so I expect that trend will continue.

The second stage are the two very large ball mills. While a continuous process would have a better throughput, for an operation this size, we lack a lot of the necessary control equipment to easily manage such a process, so everything is being done in batches. Each mill is a large rotating cylinder with an internal diameter of 12 feet and a length of 30 feet. Each will be charged with about 36,000 2-inch steel balls for grinding material, should be able to grind about 650 cubic feet of rock down at a time, and will run for 18 hours per batch.

Once the rock from one large mill is ground down it will be strained to remove the grinding balls, then transferred into four smaller stirred mills where it will run for 42 hours. That means we'll have sixteen of the smaller mills to keep up with production. Each of the small mills will have access to water to be sprayed into the tank before they're opened and similarly strained to recover the balls.

Then, it will be moved as a slurry to one of eight large, flat, conical drying chambers which will have fluorite plates installed to aid in evaporation of the water. Once the water has been completely evaporated, it will be released through a chute to be run passed an electromagnet to be separated into one of three lines: magnetite, unknown magnetic material, and non-magnetic. Extra care will be taken in designing the electromagnet area to allow as little dust escape as possible, so that our valuable mechanical components aren't damaged, and that workers aren't harmed.

After magnetic separations, all three kinds of dust will once again be wetted before sending them to their final destinations. Magnetite will be sent to be smelted into iron, the unknown magnetic will be stockpiled until I can figure out what it is, and the non-magnetic material has two planned destinations.

The first destination is actually to be used as polishing material for bearings. A small additional facility is planned to be attached that will polish the 1-inch steel balls to make bearings. The balls that came out of the test mills were far shinier than when they went in, so it reasonably follows that we can probably use that to purposefully polish them if we're smart about it. Any excess non-magnetic material, and any that has already been used in at least one pass of polishing, will be sent down a planned buried stone pipeline and released into the ocean.

A small amount of it though will be kept in some storage tanks. Specifically, I plan on making some crank operated spreader machines that can throw out the wetted dust so that farmers can put it into our crop fields. We don't want to put too much in, but finely ground minerals are a good source of various hard-to-get elements and I've already seen how using pulverize in our fields improved their yields.

It'll take me a year at least to get the whole facility built, given the scale of the process, and that estimate is if I have constant help from at least one construction team. However, my rough estimate on final product is about 45 cubic feet of useful iron a day. Normally, I'd be worried that the wear and tear on the steel balls would eat up a significant amount of that iron production, but given our separation method, most of it should be recovered and recycled.

[Vol.6] Ch.53 Iron from Stone

The project started out at a pretty good pace. Although, since the dam had changes to it, working in it's shadow through spring as the heavy rains and filling of the reservoir occurred made me a little nervous. If any component failed on the dam, it'd be a scramble to fix it, but thankfully everything worked as intended. I spent less time at the dam than the construction team though, so if anyone should have been actually worried about issues it was them. I was spending a lot of time at the sand casting area at the research facility designing the various components for the machines that will go in the facility.

Since I had a pretty good idea of exactly what machines I needed, it made it relatively easy to design the building first, then leave the construction teams to start leveling the earth and building the building before I actually had the machines fully designed. The way the facility is getting built, we're going to have three levels to the facility, but all will be on the ground, just cascading down the hillside, to take advantage of gravity to transfer water.

The highest floor will consist of the rock crushers that are driven by the dam's water. This floor will be built at the base of the dam, just like the old hydroelectric facility. Outside of this floor will be where the rock is kept that needs to be processed. After that, the floor will drop about four feet and be cut slightly into the earth. That is where the two large ball mills will be located, along with the drying cones for the final product. Then, after another four foot drop is where the stirred mills and electromagnetic separators sit. The bottom floor will also hold the small storage tank for powdered rock to be used for crop field enrichment. After going through the stirred mill, the wet material will have to be conveyed back up a level to the drying cones to continue their processing.

Ultimately, at the end of the bottom floor I want to put a large drainpipe that runs underground to the ocean. That will be where our wastewater goes. That way, on any stage or floor where we need to add water to the system, we can create smaller drains that feed the large pipe. I am a little worried about potential sediment buildup in the pipe, so I plan on having the pipe be six feet in diameter, with a small internal ledge for walking on, in case it needs inspected or cleared at some point.

Only four days into summer, the construction team had finished building the building, and I'd gotten casts for most of the components made as well as having gotten many of the stirling engines assembled minus their crystal plates. I've instructed the construction team to begin digging the slurry drain. I'm going to need to take a few days to move the growing mana crystal to the 16-foot apparatus to continue growing it. We're still a few years from completion now, but the end is within sight.

As I've been working on the stirling engines more and more, I've realized that I should probably rename them. Stirling was a last name of the person who invented them, and while I'm technically using a lot of his original designs, these aren't designed to work on any source of heat, they're specifically optimized for using fluorite heat plates that consume mana. Since there is no history of Stirling in this world, from now on I'm going to be referring to them as mana engines.

This came up because an inquisitive goblin who was helping me move many of them to the milling facility asked me why I have such a weird name for them. We were speaking in demonic, but I was essentially just saying 'stirling engine' in English when I referred to them. Now, I'm using the demon word for mana while still using the English word engine. The demonic pronunciation of engine isn't too far off, so I feel like it will integrate fine as a borrowed word.

I transferred the mana crystal to the last apparatus at the start of summer, and since then I've either been assembling or moving machines into the building at the dam. I've been holding off on two of the hardest parts, saving it for the end. The two large ball mills and the electromagnetic separator are both going to be the hard parts, given their sheer size. They'll still be brought over in parts, but those parts are going to be heavy to keep total part count down. When the time comes, we'll need a lot of labor to pull them up to the dam, even with carts.

It's now the end of summer, and my current estimate is that we'll be able to start the facility up sometime in winter if we don't run into any issues. My biggest concern currently is that we won't have the slurry drain done in time, so I've already asked Zeb if he can spare another construction team to help. Whether or not that help comes will probably determine the exact start date.

Zeb sent some help, and so we were able to get the facility up and running at the very start of the last month of the year. I hired on a few dozen demons to run the facility, and spent nearly a month training them before we started the facility up. Processing 650 cubic feet of rock a day isn't actually all that much depending on your perspective. In a year, the facility will process just under a quarter of a million cubic feet of rock. The rock we excavated for the drainage tunnel was about that much, so we have enough rock currently to run the facility for a year. That puts the expected iron yield annually at about 4000 tons.

As long as we stay on top of things, it shouldn't be a problem to keep a steady supply of rock for the facility to process. Whether that be by expanding the reservoir, or by hauling stone here from other excavation projects, the actual total processing power of this facility isn't nearly as large as I initially envisioned. The reason being the sheer scale of machinery necessary to actually process the rock. The sheer amount of energy necessary to do this limits the size of the facility, given mana density issues for mana engines. Though now that we've done it once, we could always build more facilities in other locations in the future if we end up needing them. 4000 tons of iron a year will probably be enough to supply a lot of our industrial plans, so we probably won't need any new ones in the near future.

I still need to take a few weeks to design a hand cranked device to spread the powder on fields. I'd expect it will increase the quality of our crops, and we should only need to do it on any field once every few years, so we shouldn't need too many of the devices. The full construction of the tunnel through the mountain will be done soon as well, and it seems like the sewage drain for the tunnel is also going to be done in the near future. With that being the case, Zeb has informed me that he'll probably have construction begin on the lightstone processing facility soon, since he'll have more construction teams available again, so I'll have that project to work on soon.

I'm going to have another discussion with Zeb about doing exploratory mining. While I've somewhat solved our iron issue, what I'm interested in finding now are either quartz crystals or mana crystals. Either of those would accelerate us forward in different areas. Finding mana crystals would let us finish the large mana crystal far ahead of schedule, and quartz would allow us to resume fluorite research, which could yield very new technologies.

My new discussion with Zeb went a little better than before, given our discussion with Zaka about stagnating our population growth for a while. We're still about 4 years from completing the new large mana crystal, and potentially reducing that time by a year would actually speed up the other construction projects that he has planned. Rather than bring out both of the mining teams working on the sewer in the tunnel when it is complete, we'll keep one in the tunnel digging the exploratory mining shafts out from the center.

He had one main restriction though. For the time being, the tunnel itself is the only thing being dug. Any deposits of materials we find, other than specifically mana crystals, will not be mined at the current time. We can mark them off in some way to make them easy to find, and potentially divert the tunnel to go around them if we need to, but we won't be mining them. Finding new mana crystals is the main concern.

I agreed to those terms, since that seemed to be a reasonable requirement. We aren't hurting for any metals currently, and while I'd like to stop to mine quartz, finding a lot of mana crystals could easily accelerate all of our projects, so it's reasonable to focus in on only what we currently need.

[Vol.6] Ch.54 Haber Process Part 1

I took eleven days getting the designs laid out for the lightstone and salt production facility for the construction teams to work on. Unlike the basalt processing facility, a lot of the constructs for this facility are assembling simple components. There are a few notable exceptions, like the mechanism to lower the crystal heating plates away from the boilers, but most of the construction is made of stone, so I have a lot less work I need to do to actually make everything.

As that facility started production, I took three days to also oversee how the large opening hole was coming along for the mana crystals. They'd already completed a couple of the floors, but hadn't actually tested that the floors could open yet, to allow removing the crystal. So, we tried to open the top layer, and it failed to work. Needless to say, steel and stone weigh a lot, and that hadn't really be considered to the degree it should have been in the initial design. I'd only really come up with a general idea for how it should work, and the construction team had done it's best with that idea.

So, I've given them a much more detailed plan that should allow this to be opened up more successfully, while also making the whole design somewhat more stable. Rather than two half-moon plates that pull outward, we'll be going with 16 slices that do the same thing. Additionally each of the slices will have a support beam at the end, which rides along the floor below it. The lowest level floor will then also have the option to remove those support beams after the floor is opened, allowing the crystal to be lifted out. It'll take the construction team some time to try to implement the new design I gave them, but I expect this one should work.

As both of the previous projects marched forward, I then took a few days to see what solutions Tiberius has come up with for our optimization for lead fluorite rounds. While it seems like he initially started out on the original path we'd worked together on, he seems to have quickly switched over to a tangential research idea.

We had been trying to condense the quartz shielding and the lead fluorite all into one singular shell. Rather than continuing to optimize those shells, Tiberius switched over to a new idea. Rather than waste valuable weight on the shells, he wondered if it would be possible to get the firing area to be devoid of mana, similar to the underground labs.

In practice, however, he'd run into quite a few roadblocks. To make a facility like that, he'd need a lot of different things. Quartz shielding around the bunker to minimize the amount of mana getting into the bunker itself, and a second layer of quartz shielding around the artillery piece to further reduce mana leakage into the chamber. Then, you need a lot of fluorite crystals consuming mana inside and outside the bunker to continually remove all the mana that leaks into the area. Right now, the option for fluorite crystals to consume that mana in a non-detrimental way is limited to lead fluorite itself.

If you make a bunker in that manner, and you fire the shell out from the bunker, it'll gain mass as it escapes the low mana zone, making more of the overall mass of the projectile useful. Overall, it'd let even smaller sized shells be useful, with the only downside being that you'd need a fairly stationary defensive position, and that the position would be somewhat weaker to enemy attack than a normal bunker, since the bunker itself forms the mana insulation. If a wall were to be punctured by an enemy cannon or artillery, the lead fluorite shells would become worse than regular lead shells.

If we are clever with the design for both shells they could be interchangeable in the artillery piece, so even after the bunker is damaged they could switch to standard shells. It is worth considering as a functional upgrade to our existing defensive bunkers, though retrofitting them would take a considerable amount of time and effort. The main consideration is how much payoff this could potentially provide. With our current quartz shortage, neither the bunker nor shell design is possible. There is an argument to be made about quartz savings over time with a permanent defensive structure. In practice though, I think I'd prefer both options. The portable shells are obviously useful in any sort of mobile unit, whether that be pulled artillery, ship, or a tank.

Rather than just retrofitting our old bunkers though, I think there is something to be said about building a special artillery firing base a few thousand feet up, which is specially designed with exceptionally large artillery. There, you could easily spot ships further in the distance, and take advantage of the exceptional range you could get from these shells. If we could make the shells large enough, they could also pack explosive material inside while maintaining their mass, allowing for exceptional damage at range, especially when compared to regular cannons or even regular artillery.

After some brief discussions about safety and risk assessment, I left Tiberius to continue working on whatever he wanted. I'm starting to really feel like a manager with how many different projects I'm juggling all at once right now. I have a few ideas of things that I'd like to be looking into, but I don't know how much I'll be able to actually do so while I'm managing both the moving floor project and the lightstone facility.

Every night, I found myself with time to work on my own project. What I've started working on for the past month is a large pressure chamber. We've essentially produced all the necessary components to try to use the Haber process to produce ammonia, so I'd like to try my hand at that. We have a ready supply of liquid nitrogen, hydrogen gas, heat, and finely ground magnetite. With stone shaping, it's relatively easy to make a very thick walled chamber that I can reinforce with iron rings to handle the necessary pressures for the process.

In a normal situation, compression of gas to reach the pressures necessary to drive the Haber process would be difficult to achieve without good sealants, but with access to liquid nitrogen, we can actually use the liquid nitrogen as a reservoir of pressure in a chamber that we heat to maintain a set pressure throughout the system until the liquid nitrogen has boiled away, essentially keeping the system at pressure equilibrium.

The process layout requires more than just one chamber, since we're handling liquid nitrogen as well. There are a lot of details that I'll have to work out once I've got the general system laid out, but I think I can probably get it close enough that I can try to fine tune it over the course of a few months to a year to actually produce a meaningful amount of ammonia.

In two months time, I'm pretty confident I'm ready to try out a first test of some portions of the process. The component I've tinkered with over the past few months has been a system for maintaining relatively constant pressure though the system. The Haber process turns high pressure gaseous nitrogen and hydrogen into liquid ammonia, resulting in a pressure drop with the assistance of a catalyst. High temperatures and pressures must be maintained for the process to proceed, so I needed a way to maintain both nitrogen and hydrogen gas at pressure to the system.

What I've settled on is a bit of a complicated process. Hydrogen gas is being produced by copper fluorite, then dried, similar to the other hydrogen production facility. This time, however, it goes into a much larger chamber, designed to be kept at very high pressures. Nitrogen is provided as a liquid, and is used as the pressure regulator for the system. A pressure triggered valve drips liquid nitrogen into a boiler chamber whenever the pressure drops below about 200 atmospheres of pressure, thus keeping pressure at a controlled value. The hydrogen has a similar system of a few valves designed to regulate pressure in the reaction chambers.

Right now, I'm operating everything as small as I possibly can, which isn't that small at all given I still had to make all the valves. However, the manometers I made to read the pressure in the various chambers indicate that pressure is holding about where I want it to, meaning I can try to move on to the next stage, making the catalyst and attempting to actually react everything.

[Vol.6] Ch.55 Haber Process Part 2

The new method for opening floors to remove the extra large mana crystal seems to be working, and we were able to open the two highest level floors as a test. So fthe construction team working on that project can mostly handle it themselves with little oversight for the foreseable future. The lightstone facility has reached a similar stage where we've managed to make the first boiler work, including lowering dummy plates, so they'll be able to replicate that construction a few times before I'm once again needed to help over there.

All that to say that I'll be able to start tinkering with the details on the Haber process. There are three different component portions for me to work on before I try to run my next test. First, I want to embed a fan inline with the reactor and storage loop to drive gas through the reaction chamber. I'll be driving that fan electrically with embedded copper wire, and powered externally with a stirling engine. The second component that I need to work on is adding catalyst to the reactor. I recall that fine magnetite was used as a catalyst, but it had some additives and some treatments done to it in the reactor as part of the process, so I'll have to do some tinkering to dial it in and make it more efficient.

The final thing I need to add are heat plates around the reactor itself to bring it up to temperature. I believe that the temperature I need to get the reactor to is about 800 degrees Fahrenheit, which is about the melting point of zinc, meaning I should have a relatively easy way to test if I've reached a hot enough temperature.

Adding in the fan was a relatively easy process and only took six days. Similarly, getting a batch of finely powdered magnetite to use as catalyst also only took a few days, and a large part of that was carrying it from the dam to the area where I'm working on this project. I chose to build it in the valley behind the lab, close enough that I could easily make the hike each day, but far enough that it shouldn't be affected by the amount of mana drain the lab experiences.

However, adding enough heat fluorite plates to the reaction chamber to melt zinc ended up taking a considerable amount of time, and I had to try multiple different things before I could settle on a design that actually got hot enough. What I ended up needing was custom cut heat fluorite from large crystals, rather than the precut plates. By using fluorite of the large heat fluorite crystals, cut in half, and then a curve cut into them, I could put eight pieces around the reactor chamber, allowing it to reach a high enough temperature.

Getting those custom heat fluorite pieces took four months though. In the meantime while I waited, I did a ton of testing at the condenser side of the reactor exhaust, where the ammonia should settle out as a liquid for recovery. Even without the reactor getting up to quite a hot enough temperature, I was still able to do some amount of testing as to whether I could fully cool the reacted gases or not.

Thankfully, I shouldn't actually need to cool them too much, as at the pressures we'll be working at, even after the pressure drop in the reactor, ammonia liquid should condense well above ambient temperature. The main issue is that our pressure vessels are extra thick and reinforced with stone, meaning they don't have great thermal conductivity. However, I was able to come up with a good solution, though it required a near complete redesign of the layout. We're already bringing in liquid nitrogen, and then attempting to heat it in the boiler to gasify.

So, I installed a counterflow heat exchanger from the reactor exhaust to the liquid nitrogen tank. That should provide adequate cooling for the ammonia to condense, as long as I'm careful not to let the temperature get too cold in the heat exchanger. This solution required that I also installed a large stirling condenser in the liquid nitrogen tank to re-condense any nitrogen that boiled back up the tank. I ran multiple tests again on the new design to ensure that it also held up to the pressures involved.

Once, I was confident that everything was working again, I charged the reactor with the magnetite powder and started the first full trial run. While it wasn't the most exciting thing ever, I did recover a small amount of ammonia. I didn't actually have a good way to collect it in atmosphere, so when I opened the collection chamber, I just smelled the strong scent of ammonia with no liquid present, as it instantly boiled away at atmospheric pressure.

To properly collect it, I'll probably want to dissolve it in water to form aqueous ammonia. That process is quite exothermic, so I'll want to be somewhat careful about how exactly I'll perform that process. The general amount of ammonia I recovered was also quite low, so I'll be tinkering with the catalyst for a while to see if I can increase the overall yield as well. Though finding a proper way to measure the volume of yield will be important as well.

I came up with what I think is a somewhat clever solution to both problems at the same time. The same pressure mechanism that releases new liquid nitrogen into the boiler when the pressure gets too low could also be used to drip water in parallel to the ammonia collector. Whenever liquid nitrogen is dripped into the system to replace lost nitrogen in the form of ammonia, water will be dripped in parallel into the collector. The more nitrogen reacts, the more water is put into the collector.

Using this method, I was able to easily determine what helped or hindered ammonia yields whenever I changed something in the system. Over the course of four more months, I tinkered with the catalyst. I tried adding and removing all sorts of things, and even tried reacting it in a few dozen ways. The best results that I found involved two steps. First, a small amount of the waste powders needed to be mixed back in with the magnetite. Second, before being used, I needed to bring it up to temperature in the reactor while the whole thing was charged with hydrogen, but the fan was off. After cooking it that way for about six hours, it was done.

Each of those processes on their own increased yield, but both together had the largest effect. Ultimately, the yield was high enough that I realized our liquid nitrogen production will be outstripped by this reactor. It's capable of reacting around 25 gallons of liquid nitrogen in a day, which results in almost 500 gallons of our ammonia solution in water.

However, we only produce about 5 gallons of liquid nitrogen a day, and the hydrogen production for this facility is quite small as well, meaning realistically, it'll only operate in batches. Of the liquid nitrogen we produce, we use some of it for mining the fluorite deposit as a cooling agent. Based on those limits, we can really only produce about 50 gallons of ammonia solution a day without upscaling both the hydrogen and liquid nitrogen production.

The ammonia solution itself has three immediate applications. First, by diluting it heavily, it can be used as a fertilizer. The second use is as a nitrogen source or as a base in research applications. Finally, the third use is as a cleaning agent. With a little extra work, we could also use it for nitriding our steel. Unfortunately however, the process to turn ammonia into nitric acid requires platinum as a catalyst to be efficient, so that's off the table. Otherwise, we could use it to produce ammonium nitrate for explosives, or even just as a source of nitric acid itself. There are alternatives that we could attempt to produce nitric acid from ammonia, but given our limited supply of ammonia, we'd probably be better off using the Birkeland-Eyde process to produce it, even if it's inefficient.

For now, most of our ammonia will probably be used as fertilizer and as a cleaning agent. I still need to train some demons to operate this facility, and determine the amount of ammonia to use as fertilizers for the plants. Nitrogen sources like ammonia are quite rare and difficult to produce, but it opens up a ton of options moving forward.

[Vol.6] Ch.56 Details and Data

In the time where I was getting ammonia production set up, the tunnel was fully outfitted with it's sewer and bathroom stops, and one of the teams began digging the new tunnel I'd designated for them. As I'd previously discussed, they continued using the level and other tunneling tools, but they dug upward and out from the central area, perpendicular to the existing tunnels. Ultimately, they transported stone down to the central area out of their tunnel, and Zeb hired on other demons to haul the stone from the central area out to our city.

They've been making quite good progress with two 2-foot crystals and a handful of crystal trays at their disposal, but only one team using them, they're able to work at a faster pace than I expected. Some of that can also be put on Zeb having the opportunity to send different construction teams to grind for levels every so often, meaning they generally have more workers with improved stone shaping and larger mana pools on any given construction team.

They're still only about half of a mile from the central area, but I'd figured they'd be about half that distance in this time, so it was a pleasant surprise. So, I took a few days to use tectonic sense to see if there was anything of note, and unfortunately the answer was no. They hadn't made it to layer change in rock yet, so I'm not really surprised that we didn't find anything.

Following that, I went back to the research lab to do some designing for fertilizer sprayers that the other demons can use to spray ammonia on the fields as a fertilizing agent. While a simple watering can could work, I figured that we could make the process a little easier for the goblins by using spray nozzles and backpacks. I'd like for the ammonia to get spread onto the fields when the spring rains start.

I took a month getting the spray systems designed as well as the molds for the various parts that were necessary for them, so we should have a few systems ready before the new year, which is ten days away. I've started to notice an appreciable problem with my own memory lately related to information from earth. I shouldn't be that surprised given I've lived here over three decades, but a lot of the detailed information that I would have previously known is mostly just approximate knowledge now.

For example, I can recall the three major strong acids, nitric, sulfuric, and hydrochloric, but I can't for the life of me recall any precise numbers for things like enthalpy of formation of various compounds. Rediscovering those sorts of lists of data would take multiple lifetimes, which unfortunately means proper chemical engineering is basically out the window. Any project I work on will either need to be reactions that I do remember working, or I'll have to tinker with them for some time to find a working model.

I've sort of started to alleviate some of that work for myself, but I really do need to step it up a few notches. I have a few goblins collecting and monitoring celestial bodies with the telescope and collecting atmospheric readings, others collecting information on the population's prestige traits, and Tiberius is doing some amount of military research. I had previously intended the lab area to be dedicated to research, but it really has ended up as a military-industrial park where we do strategic value research.

Technically speaking, all research is strategically valuable, even the study of celestial bodies, since it could give us insight into upcoming solar phenomenon. However, if we try to monopolize all information, not only does that drive a wedge between us and other countries, it also makes them less likely to share with us. Unlike some people, I'm not opposed to the concept of brain drain either. If we actually formed a true research university that attracted talented individuals from other countries, it provides us some amount of protection, as long as their research is publicly available.

Obviously, right now it's practically impossible to reach our island from the mainland safely, but in the coming years that will change with the completion of the extra large mana crystal. There are many examples of things that I'd like to have data researched and tabulated for me that could also potentially attract the best and brightest from other nations.

We're two relatively simple processes away from having access to hydrochloric acid, sodium hydroxide, and nitric acid. Add on our ability to already produce small amounts of sulfuric acid, and ammonia, and we've got the workings for a lot of data collection and testing related to minerals and chemistry. Being on a volcanic island is mostly downsides resource wise, meaning we need to take advantage of what we do have access to effectively.

Thankfully, what we do have access to a lot of is sea water, atmosphere, and to a lesser extent mana. Those are really all we need to produce hydrochloric acid, sodium hydroxide, and nitric acid. I can easily make some more stirred mills to be used in a lab space, and essentially just let loose some researchers mixing away at various powdered rock samples to see what they can produce. While the majority of the rock on our island is basaltic, there are obvious flows that occurred at different times which had other compositions. If I live to the point where true tectonic research can be done, I'm very interested in what sort of tectonic process formed this island chain to allow these different kinds of rock flows.

Beyond mineral research, just straight chemical research can be useful, and having strong acids and a strong base can help with that. For example, I do recall that some amount of modern gunpowder is made by using nitric acid and sulfuric acid on cellulose to make an explosive, and that is further treated to make it more stable. From that as a starting point, it'd probably be possible in a few years time with a skilled team to produce a facsimile of modern gunpowder.

Physics data could be properly collected and tabulated, meteorological research could be done, mathematics developments, zoological studies, all sorts of areas of research could be done but I just don't have the time to do it. What I can do, however, is give valuable insight that can encourage rapid breakthroughs, while leaving the individual research to others. At this stage, that's probably one of the best things I could do. Finding a proper location for such a grand multi-discipline research facility will be it's own challenge, though perhaps the port city could also support it.

Though, there are two far more pressing matters that actually need to be taken care of in the next couple of years. First, we need a much larger bathhouse area for housing our new crystal when it's finished. The old bathhouse's crystal housing is actually too small to even handle the gargantuan beast we're growing, and with a much larger population, having a large bathworks to utilize it even more effectively seems like a good idea.

The second problem is something that I'll want to ask both Karsh and Shasta about. In all likelihood, when we install such a large crystal, we're going to get eagles back on the island. My concern is that we'll attract a lot of eagles, and it could be very bad if we attract a lot all at once. Our previous crystals on the island were 8-foot crystals, and we attracted an eagle or two a year for some time until things stabilized with a single eagle, which eventually left in search of a mate. Once our crystals were gone, so were visits from eagles.

Besides the coastal region on the dwarven continent, many eagles settled around the dwarven capitol where Par-Tor sits. From descriptions given, Par-Tor seems to be around 14 feet in size. If our crystal is bigger, I'm worried that we might attract a large group of eagles to our small territory, and they'll fight, and what sort of message that might send back to the dwarves if suddenly a large amount of their eagles leave, and a few come back after a month or two heavily wounded.

Basically, I need to know how territorial the eagles really are, and get an estimate of their population size. Dependent on the information I gather, we may need to do some prep work for handling the eagles as well. Despite our initial interactions with them, I'd prefer that we didn't have to kill more of them.

[Vol.6] Ch.57 The Eagle Problem

My conversation with Karsh was relatively short. Him and his family have lived here for about two decades, and while he has some memories of the eagles being somewhat territorial with each other at certain times of year, he doesn't have many details on the specifics of what that looks like. Shasta, on the other hand, had multiple insights that were actually very helpful as to what we should expect.

The eagles living along the coast are pretty territorial, and usually only allow their mate onto their mountain or in the air in the surrounding valleys. During mating season they'll pair bond, and stay bonded until their juveniles leave their territory, at which point the male usually also leaves the area.

If that was the only info we'd gotten, it'd seem like my concerns would have been assuaged when it comes to setting up an exceptionally large crystal here. However, she went on to describe how the eagles in the mountains surrounding the dwarven capitol, with Par-Tor as a feature, behave differently. Those mountains each have over a dozen eagles nesting at different altitudes. The capitol has offering grounds to the eagles set up at the base of each mountain. When the offerings are placed, the eagle that lives highest on the mountain eats first, and then each eagle eats in descending order based on the altitude their nest is built at.

In other words, with an abundance of food and mana, the eagles become less territorial, and we will have to come up with a good way to handle many eagles showing up on our mountain again all at once. To further complicate matters, when the eagles near the capitol enter the breeding season, even just going to bring food to them becomes a somewhat dangerous task, and travelling up any of the mountains where they nest becomes extremely dangerous.

I had Shasta give a rough estimate for where the feeding point would normally be constructed, and above which height they nest at. The results were not good. While we don't need to go up our mountain proper that often, the level where a feeding area would normally be built at is already below the level where one of our villages is built, and our road around the outside of the island goes above that height for a while. The nests would be generally found above those levels, but could easily also be found along the ridges descending beside the valleys, including some of the areas that we've terraced.

The dwarves, who farm their lowlands and have been digging tunnels and mines through their mountains for millennia have learned to coexist with the eagles. There is a non-zero chance that part of the reason they're as underground focused as they are is because of the threat from the skies that the eagles posed to early groups of dwarves on the continent.

Losing access to that much of our land is unacceptable for us though. We could maybe learn to live without having access to the least useful of our land, high up on the mountain. Giving up a large amount of our island, including developed portions, however is something we can't really afford to do. The eagles represent a very unique problem to us, as a result.

We can't simply ignore feeding them to drive them away, as they'll immediately just begin feeding on our citizenry. Unfortunately, they're also too intelligent and powerful to simply drive away by annoying them using something like irritants. They'd either learn to hate whatever creature brought the irritant to them, or they'd destroy whatever system we used to deliver the irritant to them over a distance.

By the same measure, they're too large and powerful to corral into some kind of bird sanctuary where we could keep them isolated. If that would work, we'd just keep them on a different island and that would be the end of it. That, or we'd forcibly relocate them to the highest point on our mountain, and just make them live in whatever situation that causes amongst themselves.

I voiced my concerns with Shasta on the matter. If it was just us demons, I'd simply use large artillery pieces to put the birds down at a safe distance, and that would be the end of it. However, the dwarven worship of the eagles makes the topic far more complicated. Killing a dozen or more of them would basically put an end to any future dwarven relations. Just the fact that dozens of eagles would potentially fly out to sea never to be seen again would be too suspicious for the dwarves to accept.

Giving up a large amount of our land is also unacceptable. Likewise, we know just how much more productive we become while having a large mana crystal available. Our crops grow better, our people are more robust, and construction happens at a breakneck pace. So simply giving up on that idea is a no-go.

There is one very low probability option that would leave everyone happy, though it would be dangerous as well. After I thought of the idea, I asked Shasta some more questions before I was willing to even utter it out loud. I asked about how often eagles around the capitol re-nest, and if there were any other unique properties they displayed while nesting.

The eagles, it seems, have to spend a lot of effort building nests. As such, it's rare for them to ever actually abandon a nest. Along the coast and around the capitol, it's common for eagles that lose out in a contest of strength to give their nest up to the winner. The loser either settles for the old nest, uses one of the dozen other abandoned nests, or builds a new one. In the rare years where they have extreme rain, whole trees will frequently flow down the mountainsides as old neglected nests wash away.

So, I then voiced my plan to Shasta. We'll build a few dozen nests around the upper most parts of the mountain, and maintain decent trails up to each nest area. We'll look over what is left of our own old and abandoned eagle nests, alongside any information any of the dwarves might have, and try to make the areas enticing, while also reinforcing them to help keep our higher rainfall from destroying unoccupied nests.

While our feeding area will be higher up the mountain, there are still multiple concerns related to the eagles arriving. What if they don't choose our nests? What if they start harassing our citizens? The reason we want paths to all the nests is a hint to that. I've been thinking about making diethyl ether for a while now. It's a fairly useful substance for various reactions. An interesting property of diethyl ether is that it was used as an early anesthetic. It's not that powerful of an anesthetic though, so actually successfully drugging them will probably be a fight in itself.

If we can manage to drug the eagles that cause problems by nesting in the wrong areas, we can clip the feathers in their wings, and relocate them to the nests we want them in while they're unconscious. For a while after clipping they'll be unable to fly, and we'll need to bring them food to their nesting area. The hope would be that in the time where they are recovering from having their wings clipped, they'll become more dependent on their caretakers, and become more compliant with living where we tell them to.

Shasta seemed very impressed with the solution I'd devised. However, I was quick to warn her that it wasn't actually a solution, just a plan that could easily fall through. If we can't drug the eagles for some reason, or they refuse to use our nests, or become violent after drugging, or any number of other problems, then we will need to put them down. I told her that, in my estimation, the most likely outcome is that less than 20% of the eagles end up behaving in an acceptable manner, and within a year, the other ones will be dead.

If I lied now and simply said it will all work out, then when the time comes to do what needs done, we could face far more backlash. I did give another silver lining though. In all likelihood, any new eagles that are raised on the island will be far more compliant, and they'll be used to having us around, and we can curb their behavior from a young age. So after the all-too-likely initial purge, most of the eagles should be fine from then on.

After that portion of discussion ended on a bit of a somber note, I asked Shasta to join me in talking with Zeb about planning out the grand bathhouse where our crystal will be situated. The discussion was mostly about aesthetics and scale, with very little need for actual detailed design of the pools. For the most part, we already have the necessary components figured out.

The main purpose of bringing Shasta along for this discussion was to lighten her mood, and remind her of one upside of the tradeoff that was likely to result in a few eagle deaths at a minimum. Though when I phrase it like that myself, it almost seems petty. The actual main upside is multiplying our available mana that can be used by our citizenry and machinery. We've used small mana crystals in the caves paired with zinc fluorite to make rechargeable flashlights, and when we briefly installed the 8-foot crystal in the old bathhouse to let the majority of the dwarves return home, some of the ovens nearby to the bathhouse became unusably hot.

Following that logic, I imagine that such a large crystal will probably increase the general mana in the area to a level where we'll need to rebalance all the ovens in the city, and might need to revisit some of our closer mechanical installations to make sure they aren't overheating due to excess mana. However, that also means that we'll have increased industrial potential around the city, which is something I've been somewhat desperate for. I've thus far had to be quite careful about overusing local mana to not starve the area of what mana it has, meaning most of our workers have long commutes to industrial areas. This could potentially allow us to set up something like a textile manufacturing area or similar mechanical factory producing citizen grade goods near to the city.

[Vol.6] Ch.58 Nesting Patterns

It was easy to describe what I wanted to do with the eagles, but actually getting it all laid out is an entirely different story. I had to wait twenty days until the snow thawed before I could climb high enough on the mountain to find the old eagle nests. It's been a significant amount of time now since we've had any eagles on the island, so the few nests that existed were very derelict. However, there was enough similarity between the few sites that I found that I could at least piece together an idea of where the eagles prefer to build and what their nests look like.

I was surprised that all the nests were above the snowline, and after another twenty days of exploring to find the few neglected nests, I returned to the city to ask Shasta about how the eagles handle snow. Our eagle stayed through winters and its nest was above the snow line. Apparently, they do a good job of keeping their nest clear of snow, despite it being a nest built on the ground. There have been a few incidents where strong, long lasting blizzards resulted in some eagles freezing to death in the highest nests, but those situations are rare on the mainland, and practically unheard of on our island.

As for location, the eagles like to find ledged areas that overlook a cliff that is at least a hundred feet tall, and then build their nest back from the cliff a little ways. Their nests consist of both tree trunks and larger branches, resulting in something that looks reminiscent of a beaver dam rather than a nest. They also seem to break the trees between their nest and the cliff, as there were shattered tree stumps leading the way to the cliffs.

Which means building out nest areas for the eagles is going to be a real pain. The areas are exceptionally remote and by their nature difficult to travel to. That makes the idea of hauling one of these giant eagles while keeping it unconscious all the more difficult. Further, getting all of this, a diethyl ether facility, and the bathhouse area ready in the next two years before the crystal is done is all really stacking up to be a difficult endeavor.

However, I think that with clever use of the population, we can make something work. I'd already expanded the workforce that was in charge of making trails, collecting downed tree limbs, and building rock dams. I think that we can probably quadruple that workforce, and have the existing demons train the new ones with this new directive. Then, after a year or so, split them into two departments, ones in charge of managing the new eagle areas, and the original workforce in charge of managing our forests and valleys.

Since the existing forest management group is more familiar with the general terrain of our island, it should be easy to describe the sort of areas we want to build artificial nesting grounds at. I'll try to convince Zaka to lend a few of our strongest military soldiers to assist occasionally with downing the trees and building the nests. Since the locations are somewhat remote, it'd be best if the the nests can be built quickly, so having incredibly strong individuals who can break down a tree in a single blow, and help move it to the nesting location will speed things up drastically.

I expect I'll probably need to spend a bit over a month or so to get all this set up, but then I should be able to move my attention to building out the necessary facilities to make diethyl ether.

It was easy to put an application out for the workers I wanted at city hall, the issue was that the sheer number I requested was very high, and there is a lot of conflicting and confusing information floating around the city related to the eagles. Most of our population now has never seen an eagle. A very small portion remembers the initial eagle fights we had, a larger portion remember our singular eagle that we kept around for a number of years, and most have heard stories from both of those factions and folk tales from the dwarves about the eagles.

In other words, to most of the population, the eagles are an enigma, seen more as a force of nature rather than an animal that can be tamed. So getting new employees willing to work on exactly that problem was difficult. It ended up taking just under two months to actually get the workforce filled out. For the first few weeks, I worked with the existing forest management demons to show them what I had planned. They actually had better insight than I did on nesting locations and what seemed to be the eagle's patterns and nest shape.

The ground birds also build nests on the ground, and most of the forest management goblins have a quite deep, if instinctual, understanding of nature. The majority of my time working with them was mostly spent on describing how I planned on managing the eagles long term, and relaying the info I'd learned from Shasta.

Apparently, I'm not the first to do re-nesting on the island. The forest management goblins have been re-nesting ground birds for a while. The ground birds apparently like building their nests on shallow sloped areas, but they get confused when small pools form near rock dams, and build their nests near by, despite the slope being higher than normal. While the forest management goblins occasionally just hunt some of the ground birds that do this, they've also started relocating nests to more appropriate areas.

What they found is that the best way to do it is to fully relocate the entire nest, and the bird will just recognize it's own nest again, and as long as the area is somewhat appropriate for it, it'll stay there instead. Obviously, the eagle nests are too big to manage that way, but they suspect that bringing along the down feathers from the eagle will probably work, and that they'll experiment with some ground birds to see how effective it is.

Since I was clearly out of my depth when it came to these subjects, I left it to them to do most of the project planning. I wasn't quite ready myself to go off to work on the first stages of my next project, so I worked with Zeb, Shasta, and a couple of the forest managers to determine the best place to set up the eagle feeding area. According to Shasta, each mountain around the dwarven capitol has it's own feeding station, so we probably only need one.

They have dozens of large carved bowls for the eagles, along a slope, and fill the bowls in descending order. Apparently, they've built a stone building alongside the bowls so that the dwarves carrying the food aren't able to be easily attacked by the eagles, with the bowls being partially covered by the building. For solo eagles along the coast, a simple offering pad sufficed which is what we used previously, With so many eagles in one place though, things can get a little more dangerous, especially during mating season, so you want to keep the food hidden until it's time to eat.

Basically, we'll need a whole facility for storing the food that the eagles can't break into, and then a path for us to put the food in the bowls without the eagles being able to attack whoever is in charge of feeding. Ultimately, the location we settled upon is in the other valley. We'll build a new road up the mountain off the existing road, and build the facility there. I asked Shasta how many eagles live on any particular mountain around the capitol, and she said anywhere from five to fifty, it just depends on the size of the mountain and it's proximity to the city. In other words, we'll want to prepare for even more than fifty, just in case. It's an astronomical amount of food, since the eagles tend to eat about ten times as much as the average demon, though I suppose if we have that many eagles on our island, it's basically a way of converting our excess food into powerful, albeit unreliable, military defense.

I'd gathered everything I needed to begin my next construction project shortly after we'd finally filled out the workforce for building artificial eagle nests. I had copper tubing made, along with plenty of copper cable and other components. What I'll be attempting to redevelop is the Birkland-Eyde process, which is a method of using electric arcs to generate nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide. From that, you can then produce nitric acid, but you can also use the nitrogen dioxide as a catalyst in the lead chamber process to produce sulfuric acid. It isn't very energy efficient, but it doesn't require any rare catalysts, so it should be a little more straightforward to build.

If I can get it working, and we can produce both nitric acid and sulfuric acid, the sulfuric acid can be used as a reactant with ethanol, and that should let us produce ether readily. As an added bonus, we could also produce ammonium nitrate using the ammonia and nitric acid, which would also open up nitrous oxide as a better anesthetic to use. The ether will be useful to initially knock an eagle out, but nitrous oxide will be safer to use for the actual transport process. Even if this fails to be useful on the eagles, I wanted to produce both nitric acid and sulfuric acid, so this project is a definite win if I can get it working.

Table of Contents

[Vol-2] Ch.1 Goblin Village
[Vol-2] Ch.2 A Cold Muddy Night
[Vol-2] Ch.3 Hunting Party
[Vol-2] Ch.4 Hieroglyphs
[Vol-2] Ch.5 Predator or Prey
[Vol-2] Ch.6 Search and Rescue
[Vol-2] Ch.7 Plans for the Future
[Vol-2] Ch.8 Pavilion Construction
[Vol-2] Ch.9 A New Name
[Vol-2] Ch.10 Tree Experiments
[Vol-2] Ch.11 Palisade Plans
[Vol-2] Ch.12 Home Sweet Home
[Vol-2] Ch.13 Old Routines
[Vol-2] Ch.14 Renovations
[Vol-2] Ch.15 A Wild Storm
[Vol.2] Ch.16 Public Waterworks
[Vol.2] Ch.17 What Makes a Village?
[Vol.2] Ch.18 Dammed Plans
[Vol.2] Ch.19: Status Windows
[Vol.2] Ch.20 Survey Results
[Vol.2] Ch.21 Learning Process
[Vol.2] Ch.22 Metallurgy
[Vol.2] Ch.23 Crystal Experiments
[Vol.2] Ch.24 Artificial Growth
[Vol.2] Ch.25 The Growing Process
[Vol.2] Ch.26 A Crystal Test
[Vol.2] Ch.27 A Hot Topic
[Vol.2] Ch.28 Feeling the Burn
[Vol.2] Ch.29 Magical Material Properties
[Vol.2] Ch.30 A New Path
[Vol.2] Ch.31 Specializations
[Vol.2] Ch.32 Dam Construction
[Vol.2] Ch.33 Ocean Observations
[Vol.2] Ch.34 Regrowth
[Vol.2] Ch.35 New Chambers
[Vol.2] Ch.36 A New Face?
[Vol.2] Ch.37 What’s Another Year?
[Vol.2] Ch.38 New Shops
[Vol.2] Ch.39 Road Work Ahead
[Vol.2] Ch.40 Finally, An Answer
[Vol.2] Ch.41 One Whole Year
[Vol.2] Ch.42 Bathhouse
[Vol.2] Ch.43 The Siege Part 1
[Vol.2] Ch.44: The Siege Part 2
[Vol.2] Ch.45 Goodbye Goblin Village
[Vol.3] Ch.1 Moving Forward
[Vol.3] Ch.2 The Summit
[Vol.3] Ch.3 Hiking Trip
[Vol.3] Ch.4 Winter is Coming
[Vol.3] Ch.5 Weathering the Winter
[Vol.3] Ch.6 Anti-Air
[Vol.3] Ch.7 First Shot
[Vol.3] Ch.8 Mercy Killing
[Vol.3] Ch.9 Recovery
[Vol.3] Ch.10 Surgical Procedure
[Vol.3] Ch.11 A Conversation with Zaka
[Vol.3] Ch.12 Insurrection
[Vol.3] Ch.13 A New Village
[Vol.3] Ch.14 Construction Standards
[Vol.3] Ch.15 Blood Magic
[Vol.3] Ch.16 Village Upgrades
[Vol.3] Ch.17 Mixed Bag
[Vol.3] Ch.18 Tide Pool
[Vol.3] Ch.19 Destruction Part 1
[Vol.3] Ch.20 Destruction Part 2
[Vol.3] Ch.21 Village Plans
[Vol.3] Ch.22 Uninvited Guests
[Vol.3] Ch.23 Prisoners
[Vol.3] Ch.24 Fo Paux
[Vol.3] Ch.25 Silent Treatment
[Vol.3] Ch.26 Siege Engines
[Vol.3] Ch.27 New Information
[Vol.3] Ch.28 A Conversation with a Dwarf
[Vol.3] Ch.29 Dwarven Lore
[Vol.3] Ch.30 Dwarven Skills
[Vol.3] Ch.31 Meeting the Elf
[Vol.3] Ch.32 Leveling Sickness
[Vol.3] Ch.33 The Improved Village
[Vol.3] Ch.34 Complications
[Vol.3] Ch.35 Trouble Knocks
[Vol.3] Ch.36 Warfare
[Vol.3] Ch.37 Morale Crusher
[Vol.3] Ch.38 Terms of Peace
[Vol.3] Ch.39 Looking Forward
[Vol.4] Ch.1 Return to the Village
[Vol.4] Ch.2 Trade Negotiations
[Vol.4] Ch.3 More Infrastructure
[Vol.4] Ch.4 Economics
[Vol.4] Ch.5 Freshly Minted
[Vol.4] Ch.6 Innovation
[Vol.4] Ch.7 Strategic Work
[Vol.4] Ch.8 Thermal Hands
[Vol.4] Ch.9 Overheating
[Vol.4] Ch.10 Kembora
[Vol.4] Ch.11 Migrant(s)
[Vol.4] Ch.12 Rocky Start
[Vol.4] Ch.13 New Blacksmithing Area
[Vol.4] Ch.14 Low Tech Solutions
[Vol.4] Ch.15 Windmill Part 1
[Vol.4] Ch.16 Windmill Part 2
[Vol.4] Ch.17 Moving Costs
[Vol.4] Ch.18 Bureaucracy
[Vol.4] Ch.19 Handing Off Work
[Vol.4] Ch.20 Written Word
[Vol.4] Ch.21 Freedom
[Vol.4] Ch.22 Wire
[Vol.4] Ch.23 Paper and Glue
[Vol.4] Ch.24 Sea Plants
[Vol.4] Ch.25 Paper Mill
[Vol.4] Ch.26 A Messenger
[Vol.4] Ch.27 Politicking
[Vol.4] Ch.28 The Elven Emissary Part 1
[Vol.4] Ch.29 The Elven Emissary Part 2
[Vol.4] Ch.30 Shifting Attitudes
[Vol.4] Ch.31 Winter Work
[Vol.4] Ch.32 Basic Mineralogy
[Vol.4] Ch.33 Glassmaking
[Vol.4] Ch.34 Class Schedule
[Vol.4] Ch.35 A New Coin
[Vol.4] Ch.36 Calendar
[Vol.4] Ch.37 Traits and Spells
[Vol.4] Ch.38 Gone Fishing
[Vol.4] Ch.39 Fishing Jetty
[Vol.4] Ch.40 Float Vine Harvesting
[Vol.4] Ch.41 Mangalloy
[Vol.4] Ch.42 Framed!
[Vol.4] Ch.43 Battle Plans
[Vol.4] Ch.44 Final Plans
[Vol.4] Ch.45 The Battle for Kembora Part 1
[Vol.4] Ch.46 The Battle for Kembora Part 2
[Vol.4] Ch.47 The Battle for Kembora Part 3
[Vol.4] Ch.48 The Battle for Kembora Part 4
[Vol.4] Ch.49 The Battle for Kembora Part 5
[Vol.4] Ch.50 The Battle for Kembora Part 6
[Vol.4] Ch.51 Chemical Attack Aftermath
[Vol.4] Ch.52 A Confusing Encounter
[Vol.4] Ch.53 Elloetta’s Aid
[Vol.4] Ch.54 Turning Tides
[Vol.4] Ch.55 Terrifying Presence
[Vol.4] Ch.56 King Besmond III
[Vol.4] Ch.57 Castelet Marionnettes
[Vol.4] Ch.58 Power Struggle
[Vol.4] Ch.59 Demands
[Vol.5] Ch.1 Reconstruction
[Vol.5] Ch.2 Safety in Numbers
[Vol.5] Ch.3 Rathland’s Refugees
[Vol.5] Ch.4 Lab Space
[Vol.5] Ch.5 Well Water
[Vol.5] Ch.6 Mana Drain
[Vol.5] Ch.7 Procurement
[Vol.5] Ch.8 Fishy Research
[Vol.5] Ch.9 Gypsum
[Vol.5] Ch.10 Salvage
[Vol.5] Ch.11 Maiden Voyage
[Vol.5] Ch12 Recycling
[Vol.5] Ch.13 Troublemaker
[Vol.5] Ch.14 Troublemaker(s)
[Vol.5] Ch.15 The Fate of Rathland
[Vol.5] Ch.16 Electricity Part 1
[Vol.5] Ch.17 Electricity Part 2
[Vol.5] Ch.18 Electricity Part 3
[Vol.5] Ch.19 Crystal Clear
[Vol.5] Ch.20 Teamwork
[Vol.5] Ch.21 Expansion
[Vol.5] Ch.22 Sea Wall
[Vol.5] Ch.23 Wintertime Woes
[Vol.5] Ch.24 Seasons of Change
[Vol.5] Ch.25 Coat of Arms?
[Vol.5] Ch.26 Auction Part 1
[Vol.5] Ch.27 Auction Part 2
[Vol.5] Ch.28 Auction Part 3
[Vol.5] Ch.29 Auction Part 4
[Vol.5] Ch.30 Homecoming
[Vol.5] Ch.31 Months of Work
[Vol.5] Ch.32 Sulfide Ores
[Vol.5] Ch.33 Crystal Trade
[Vol.5] Ch.34 Ore Roasting
[Vol.5] Ch.35 Lead Refining
[Vol.5] Ch.36 Aesthetics
[Vol.5] Ch.37 Trigonometry
[Vol.5] Ch.38 Tunnel Tools
[Vol.5] Ch.39 Second Auction Results
[Vol.5] Ch.40 New Crystal Properties
[Vol.5] Ch.41 Fluorite
[Vol.5] Ch.42 Hurry Up and Wait
[Vol.5] Ch.43 Checking the Record
[Vol.5] Ch.44 Deep Forge
[Vol.5] Ch.45 The Mining Tunnel Part 1
[Vol.5] Ch.46 The Mining Tunnel Part 2
[Vol.5] Ch.47 Rising Tensions
[Vol.5] Ch.48 Dwarven Civil War Part 1
[Vol.5] Ch.49 Dwarven Civil War Part 2
[Vol.5] Ch.50 Dwarven Civil War Part 3
[Vol.5] Ch.51 Dwarven Civil War Conclusion
[Vol.5] Ch.52 Isolationism
[Vol.6] Ch.1 Rescue
[Vol.6] Ch.2 Basic Astronomy
[Vol.6] Ch.3 Seasonal Insight
[Vol.6] Ch.4 Freezer
[Vol.6] Ch.5 Sulfur Hunt
[Vol.6] Ch.6 Fluorite Deposit
[Vol.6] Ch.7 Cutting Crystals
[Vol.6] Ch.8 Refocusing on Mana Crystals
[Vol.6] Ch.9 Cryogenics Part 1
[Vol.6] Ch.10 Cryogenics Part 2
[Vol.6] Ch.11 Cryogenics Part 3
[Vol.6] Ch.12 Cryogenics Part 4
[Vol.6] Ch.13 Argon
[Vol.6] Ch.14 Industrialization Plans
[Vol.6] Ch.15 Managerial Interlude
[Vol.6] Ch.16 Artificial Fluorite
[Vol.6] Ch.17 Gambler’s Hall
[Vol.6] Ch.18 Fluorite Growth Lab
[Vol.6] Ch.19 Magitech Heat Source
[Vol.6] Ch.20 Fluorite Research
[Vol.6] Ch.21 Fluorite Impurities
[Vol.6] Ch.22 Fluorite Processing Facility
[Vol.6] Ch.23 Radiation Poisoning
[Vol.6] Ch.24 Secret Lab
[Vol.6] Ch.25 Stirling Facility
[Vol.6] Ch.26 Technological Musings
[Vol.6] Ch.27 Lights
[Vol.6] Ch.28 Lava Demon
[Vol.6] Ch.29 Hydrogen facility
[Vol.6] Ch.30 New Cryogenics Facility Part 1
[Vol.6] Ch.31 New Cryogenics Facility Part 2
[Vol.6] Ch.32 Cableways
[Vol.6] Ch.33: Galvanized Steel
[Vol.6] Ch.34 Cableway Progress
[Vol.6] Ch.35 Mechanics Team
[Vol.6] Ch.36 Magic Ovens
[Vol.6] Ch.37 Lightstone Production Plans
[Vol.6] Ch.38 Population Musings
[Vol.6] Ch.39 Homeward Bound
[Vol.6] Ch.40 Mana Burned

[Vol.6] Ch.41 Preliminary Summoning Experiment

[Vol.6] Ch.42 Demon Behaviors
[Vol.6] Ch.43 Communities
[Vol.6] Ch. 44 Manascope
[Vol.6] Ch.45 Mana Readings
[Vol.6] Ch.46 Artillery Experimentation
[Vol.6] Ch.47 Underground Mana
[Vol.6] Ch.48 Tunnel Touchups
[Vol.6] Ch.49 New Summoning Method
[Vol.6] Ch.50 Low Yield
[Vol.6] Ch.51 Fine Dust
[Vol.6] Ch.52 Upgraded Dam
[Vol.6] Ch.53 Iron from Stone
[Vol.6] Ch.54 Haber Process Part 1
[Vol.6] Ch.55 Haber Process Part 2
[Vol.6] Ch.56 Details and Data
[Vol.6] Ch.57 The Eagle Problem
[Vol.6] Ch.58 Nesting Patterns