Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

Today I began by tinkering with a crystal charging apparatus. From my prior experimentation, I recall that when crystals have faces touching each other that they tend to balance out their internal levels, but for it to be useful here, the crystals need to be roughly the same size.

It's unfortunate that octahedrons do not fill space, so I can't just puzzle them into a larger crystal. What I can do though is make a sheet of them, since face on they're basically two triangles on top of each other. So although the contact between two faces won't be complete, it will at least be partial, which should let them balance their levels between each other to a small degree.

Basically, what I'm trying is a tray that has divots to lay the crystals in such that they touch on their faces. It's not going to be easy, since I'll need to sort crystals that are very similar in size to make the grid work. Even then, it's going to be imperfect because if crystals are even slightly smaller, then they won't touch properly.

A solution to that though is to just accept that I cannot make a perfect grid, instead I should make lines of the crystals, because that won't be reliant on perfect crystal size. I can make it a long chain by making the ends of the chain from the largest crystals, so it can chain along in an S shape.

Which means the first thing I need to do is start sorting my empty crystals. I begin putting them into five different buckets. Smallest to largest.

That ends up taking about half the day, because I end up re-sorting part way through as outlier crystals are found that make me redefine my size groupings.

Now that I have my crystals though, I begin making my tray. I start by taking a small cutting from a wall to make the tray from. I've made sure it's thick enough to properly embed the crystals in without them rattling about. Which means right now, it's really heavy. It'll get lighter as I shave out the place for the crystals, and the crystals themselves are significantly less dense than stone, so it should be fine.

Next I grab one of the largest crystals, and begin using stone shaping to carve out a matching hole for the crystal. It ends up taking quite a while, and when I finish, I've come up with a better method. Instead of trying to shape the hole first, I should just make the hole bigger than what I need and add material in around it until it snugly fits the crystal.

Doing the new technique multiplies how quickly I can add crystals to the chain, and it ensures that each crystal is nice and tight against its neighbors. By the evening, the first tray is done, holding 33 crystals. Satisfied, I lay down to go to sleep. As sleep begins to take me, I realize one small problem I'll have to resolve tomorrow.

As I wake up, I remember the issue I thought of last night. The tray in its current form can only recharge exactly the crystals currently embedded in it, and only exactly in the order they're in, otherwise contact might be interrupted. Then when I finish using a crystal, I can't just put it back in its tray, or it'll drain the rest by a small amount.

The solution to this, unfortunately, is that I need to make a duplicate tray. Crystal by crystal. That way I can place the depleted crystals in the new tray as I use them. Then it's ready to charge when it's full.

It takes just under half a day to build the duplicate tray, and I mark the corner of both trays with a number one so I don't mix them up in the future if I make more trays. Which, if these work, that is exactly my plan.

With the tray loaded up, I begin carefully making my way up towards the surface, all while watching the crystals.

I slow down as I get close to where I had crystals break before. When I look at the tray, it's barely beginning to charge the crystals. I expected as much, given the crystals in the middle are likely getting significantly less mana flux than the ones on the outside, but they're all sharing the charge levels.

I begin to slowly creep more towards the surface, keeping careful watch over the crystals. As I get further up, I note that the big crystals on the outside seem to be brightening faster than the middle crystals. I'm a little concerned about it, so I head back down some of the way until the crystals equalize in brightness.

I sit and carefully watch the tray until the crystals are almost charged, and begin hauling the tray back. I don't want any of the crystals to overcharge, so if they're a little undercharged that is ok.

All in all, the hauling and waiting took about an hour. Which is a decent amount of time for 33 crystals. I can easily go through double that in any given day. Just making the tray went through five, and this is precision work, which takes a lot less mana than bulk work.

That said, I don't have a better system. One thing that might be a little better though is if I get a lot of the crystals in trays, and store the trays a little bit away from each other then I might be able to passively charge some without needing to haul them.  Unless the trays were stored closer to the surface, I doubt they'd passively charge enough to matter. After all, many of the expended ones have been so for many many months, and are still nearly dead.

Either way, more trays does mean I can make bulk trips to charge crystals. Considering the charge time is a little longer than the time it takes to make a round trip, I could be hauling all day bringing charged crystals back, which sounds much more reasonable. I'll just need to be careful that I don't leave any up there, or I'll lose a lot of crystals at once.

Well, then the only thing left to do is start making more trays.

Over the last five days, I've completed seven more pairs of crystal trays. Each with their own specific crystals to go in each. All in all, I've got 255 crystals in trays designed for them now. I specifically use empty crystals, so that all eight trays would be packed with empty crystals for charging initially, and today I'm going to try charging all the crystals.

I haul the first tray part of the way up to the entrance, set it down near where I charged the first tray before, and begin making my way back down, and I grab a second tray, bringing it up. By the time I return, I end up waiting about 15 minutes before the first tray is charged enough to remove.

I repeat the process, and by a little past noon, all eight trays are filled with charged crystals. Which is, to me, a nice accomplishment. The crystals in these trays are all from the middle size and larger of crystals. I've kept all the small and smallest crystals separate, mainly because I don't want to have to deal with swapping them out into trays, which would take a long time for much less payout. The downside to this is that the small and smallest crystals actually make up more than half of my total crystal mass, so I'm actually losing out on a lot of potential crystal battery power.

All in all though, I'm quite happy with how things turned out. Unfortunately, right now I just have a bunch of trays of crystals sitting all over the floor. So for the rest of today, I'm going to go over to where I cut the stone out of the wall to make the trays, and try to make a rack that the trays can slide into in the wall, to hold all of them.

By mid-morning the next day, I've finished the racks for the crystals in the wall, and now my floor is relatively clean again. Unfortunately, now I need to do a few tasks that I've been letting pile up. Namely, the corpse pile I burned before needs cleaned. It's ash and charcoal and needs removed from the cave, and while I'm accomplishing that goal, I want to bring sticks back with me to start building up my stockpiles again.

So, for the next few days, I'll probably be repeating the process from before of cleaning up the burn pile, and distributing it out in the wild. This time, I'll probably deposit it much closer to the entrance to the cave, just to limit how long I'm outside for.

It took three full days since I started cleaning up, but I've gotten the cave clean enough to not be noticeable anymore, and in addition gathered enough sticks and twigs to keep my stove fire going for many, many weeks. I even had to build a large bin in the storage room to fill with sticks, since I couldn't fit all of them in my room.

Now I'm very tired though, since all of today was finishing up cleaning, so for today, I go to bed, and check my status as I do.

<MYTHIC IMP>
Level: 10
HP: 254/254
MP: 95/95
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Mighty Imp
Magic: Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense

Oh yeah, I should probably start experimenting with tectonic sense. I almost completely forgot.