There are definitely periods of work on the island where things are calm, where we're just waiting around for the next thing to happen, but this last month was anything but that. Before I could head back to the fluorite mine, Tiberius wanted to show me his ongoing research progress. He'd neglected or forgot to inform me that he'd managed to get the six foot fluorite crystal growth vat working, though it actually caps out at 5.5 feet. It takes a little over two months to grow a crystal from a three-foot seed crystal up to a 5.5 foot crystal, so he doesn't have that many crystals to work with.
What I didn't expect was the number of tests he'd already done in that time, and the amount of mana crystals he'd broken. I'd had help operating the mana crystal growth area in the past, and it seems like the workers there had figured out how to make the crystals with some help from Zeb. At some point or another when I was unavailable, Tiberius had requested some mana crystals be grown to continue research, and Zeb gave the approval and some amount of oversight to guide the growth. The smaller crystals, like the ones Tiberius wanted, are easier than the larger ones, so they managed to get it working in relatively short time.
While I'm glad that I won't personally have to oversee all mana crystal growth, it does open up the possibility of information leaking. I gave the hobgoblins who now know how to make them a stern talking to about the importance of keeping that information a secret, and telling no one how it's done. They then ratted out two more hobgoblins who work in the facility who they had chatted about the process with over a meal, so I ended up spending the better part of a day chasing down individuals and ensuring that they hadn't spread the information any further.
I really, really don't want Elora to get wind of it. While the process of pulling a sufficient vacuum as we know it requires stoneshaping, the other aspects of the process could easily be emulated by another nation, and they'd only have to problem solve that one hiccup before they can grow their own crystals. All in all, 11 individuals were sworn to secrecy about the matter.
After all that, I again had to ensure a bunch more information didn't leak, because Tiberius's work had bore fruit, or at least it seemingly had. Namely, he'd managed to create a hybrid mana-fluorite crystal that survived on the surface. Well, it survived until the water keeping it cool boiled away, then it melted and the mana crystal broke.
He has a lot of testing to do to determine the best results, but two different mana crystals, 1.5 and 2 feet in size managed to survive inside a 5.5 foot fluorite crystal until water boiled off and they failed. Tiberius was less excited with that result than I was. I spent three days devising various experiments for someone to do as soon as possible. I wanted to compare the thermal output of these larger crystals versus a control without a mana crystal, and measure ambient mana in the area as well.
In theory, the mana attraction effect of mana crystals could be multiplying the effectiveness of the fluorite, while also working something like a battery if you happened to go through a period of low mana, smoothing out the output of the fluorite. The design ends up being far more limited in shape, but the usefulness goes up quite a bit. The tradeoff is obviously that there is a risk of the hybrid crystal self-destructing without the thermal energy being removed. Other fluorite types would likely also experience the boost in output, but that comes at far more danger, whether it be UV light, radiation, protons, or extra mass, they're all far more dangerous in the combined format, and likely self-destructive.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
With the potential for revolutionary power output just around the corner, I had a long conversation with Zeb about dedicating some of the miners to the refining of the mana crystal rock to allow a larger production of crystals. Unfortunately, even if we separate out the mystery metal for making more mana crystals, we need more argon. Our existing production is too small, and the method we currently use also produces too little even when scaled up. We have also reached a point with compressor and piston development where I decided it's worthwhile to attempt using the Joule-Thomson effect to produce bulk liquefied air.
As a result, I spent the remainder of the month working on developing that process. In principle it is straightforward. Real gasses heat up when compressed, and cool down when they expand. If you cool down the compressed gas before you decompress it, it'll cool further during decompression. By decompressing the gas through a small enough valve, the effect gets amplified. With some clever design tricks like utilizing counterflow heat exchangers, you can get the efficiency of the whole process to quite high conversion rates.
The main issue that I kept running into, however, is that it works more efficiently in larger systems, meaning the small scale systems I've been tinkering with have a lot of difficulty actually reaching liquefaction. The problem has mainly to do with error tolerance for each stage of the system. Between compressors, valves, and heat exchangers, they all have error tolerances that generally scale with the surface area of the process. That means they scale with a dimensionality of two, while the volume operated on scales with a dimensionality of three.
What that means in practice is that I'll need to try making an intermediately sized pilot facility to see if we can actually attempt the process at an even larger scale. The laboratory sized tests simply aren't good enough. The month was rounded out by a second clam explosion which disrupted my research for a few days. The day before the explosion, we ran some preliminary tests using the new buoy system to ensure that the explosive would be sufficiently far away from the ship. After that cleared, we loaded it up, and dragged it into position. This time, unlike last time, the crew of the boat actually did gain some levels immediately in the aftermath of the explosion.
The surface effect from the explosion was much larger than the previous blast, though I imagine that was largely due to the difference in depth that the blast took place. The blast also triggered a small underwater landslide, creating a wave about 15 feet high that rocked the nearby shore. It wasn't tall enough to breach any of our sea walls, and by the time it reached the more populated areas it was already less than half the original height. The ship managed to make it out of the explosion and wave with only very minor damage. We'll need to be cautious in the future if we intend to explode clams closer to populated areas. If a larger landslide occurred, far more damage could be caused.
At the depth this clam was at, we could directly observe the results. A portion of it's shell was cracked and collapsed into a concave shape which was rapidly leaking fluids and mush from the interior. It seems like the blast may have partially liquefied the meat of the beast, especially closer to the explosion itself. Functionally, the blasts actually seem far more effective on the clams than they were on the more advanced leviathans. Though unlike other leviathans that can be killed by eliminating the brain, the clams probably require total catastrophic body damage, as they probably lack a central nervous system.
Over the next few weeks, we'll be keeping a close eye on the area around where the clam died, to see how nearby clams react. There were a lot more dead fish that floated to the surface this time compared to last time as well, so total ecosystem monitoring will also be of vital importance. Theoretically though, once the clams are gone, the food web in the area should settle into something more favorable to us. Though it might take years before we kill enough clams to see such an outcome.
