The Way Ahead

Though it was tricky, Edwin was eventually able to properly give copper the mana-conducting properties he’d been aiming for. It was quite the ordeal all told, with significant amounts of trial and error, where each experiment had a tremendous amount of cleanup. At least copper and molai had drastically different densities even when Refined, so it wasn’t too hard to separate them out.

After so long, he couldn’t help but feel satisfied watching- sensing, rather- his drops of mana soaking into the metal on contact, then radiating out again over the course of a few seconds. During that whole process, it became impermeable to other types of mana, like the behavior of the metal without the conductivity trait imbuement.

Now the only problem was making sure it would only ever accept wind mana. While he thought of several ways he might be able to accomplish that, most of them still required a mage to keep a battery topped up. For obvious reasons, that wasn’t an acceptable compromise. Instead, he needed to make a self-sustaining filter.

The next step…

The next step would truly test his resolve and skills, he knew.

He read through every Almanac note that he had from both the Zosiman Grimoire and his time in Panastalis alike, and all of it had led to a single, horrifying conclusion.

He could do this. Attuning an object to a type of magic was a well-documented field, and copper was especially easy. It probably wouldn’t even be that technically challenging.

He’d just… need to use Panastalin alchemy techniques.

Naturally, given the fact he’d never successfully completed a single potion using the directions their tradition had created, this also presented a bit of a problem. However, he felt that there were just a few tweaks he could make to the procedure to make it compatible with his own brand of alchemy.

The theory was simple: he’d take some of his filter-copper and attune it to wind mana permanently, by essentially alloying it to a substance which was itself air-attuned.

...except it wasn’t actually an alloy despite using one in construftion, and what he was using for attunement was just the air itself, or at least condensed air mana and… Well, it was complicated.

Condensing air mana was in theory relatively straightforward. He’d had a lot of practice making a manaclave at this point, after all, and a condenser was just the reverse of that. Of course, because making something hot was much easier than making it cold, especially when using Basic Thermokinesis as a base, it was nowhere near as nice and neat as it should have been.

If his mana were a gas, this would be so much simpler. Then he could just create a mana-heat pump and make a mana-refrigerator. Manafrigerator. Manerator. Manainator. Manarefrigeratorinator.

Refrigerators worked by taking a gas and almost squeezing heat out of it, putting it under immense pressure. Charles’ Law did as Charles’ Law did, raising the temperature of the compressed gas, and then thermodynamics did as thermodynamics did and let that heat bleed out of the system. That way, when the pressure was released, the gas expanded back to a larger volume, and heat would be pulled back into the system, cooling its surroundings.

If you had the right setup, you could make sure all the heat was dumped into the air away from where the cooling was happening, and that gave you a heat pump, the basis for refrigeration, air conditioning and efficient heating units.

Unless…

Well, his mana did behave like a liquid most of the time. Perhaps he could set up a heat pump… mana pump. Yeah, he liked that way more than manarefrigeratorinator. If he set up a mana pump based on a liquid, it might still work, he’d just need to pull a vacuum around a drop of liquid… which he totally could do with Apparatus, actually. Huh, yeah. That might actually work. It might not be as effective though… but what about if he used a liquid that was just shy of being able to boil? Or that boiled at room temperature?

His potion-mana was flexible in that regard- he’d made it both flammable and non-flammable at different times when trying to make his manaclave- so a liquid with a high heat capacity that boiled at just barely above room temperature would be an excellent refrigerant… probably.

Actually, come to think of it, weren’t there liquid refrigerants? Memory pulled pentane to mind, as it boiled at about 35 Celsius, but he couldn’t remember if it was an actually good refrigerant.

It was a pity he couldn’t exactly synthesize the mana-equivalents of specific chemicals with his visualization yet, but he might get there one day. For now… well, he could definitely Visualize a potion that heatlessly boiled and bubbled within its container. That would work for his purposes, he felt.

Now, he just needed to do it.

“You know what I don’t get?”

Inion looked up, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Well, with this,” he indicated the partially-assembled refrigerator, “Mana is this weird thing that doesn’t seem to care about pretty much any laws of physics, but it can be manipulated like it’s a gas.”

“It’s your visualization.”

“What?”

“Your science stuff, and alchemy? Ya, you act as though it’s a ‘thing’ in the world, and it behaves like it should.”

“Wait, it applies to mana that isn’t mine?”

“How did you think artifacts work?”

“Like magic items, artifacts? I mean, I guess I assumed they were a trophy Skill or something, or the result of a Skill like Mana Infusion,” he shrugged. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a properly enchanted item that might not just be the result of a Skill… no wait, Lefi has that one tooth necklace, but it might still just be a Skill. But… well, actually I suppose this is a magical item, isn’t it?”

“Look at my little alchemist, all grown up and making artifacts,” she teased.

Edwin grinned, “I’m glad you’re proud of me, mom. You know, for someone who claims to not know anything about magic, you sure seem to have a lot of experience with it.”

“Comes with age, if you’d respect your elders.”

“Elders? Forget respect, you belong in a museum.”

“Oh now I’m supposed to go in the museum, mister I’m-not-from-this-world?”

“At least I’ll have company.”

“Oh believe me, you’ll...”

Because nothing involving magic was easy, it took Edwin nearly two days of work before he actually managed to properly Visualize a mana pump that actually worked the way it was supposed to. Even then, it took a ton more work before he got it working at the proper scales. He could at least make it somewhat easier on himself by making a crystal apparatus to mirror his mana manipulation.

Of course, since he wasn’t actually using any liquids or the like for this experiment, it all looked empty to the eye, but he could feel just how brimming with mana the entire contraption was. A tightly-wound coil of hollow apparatite encircled a funnel and corresponding pipe. In theory, air- and air mana- would be cooled by the mana pump, condense along the surface, and run down into a waiting collection jar.

Working with so much lab-like hardware reminded him a bit of his research, actually, which in turn idly made him wonder how people back on Earth must have been getting on without him. It had been a couple years now, after all. It was just… it was just…

Edwin stopped and set down the apparatite pipe he was working with. He closed his eyes, clenching his hand into a fist as he took a deep, deep breath. He breathed out into his hands as he reached up to wipe away some of the wetness around his eyes. He was fine. He was here, he was happy… ish. At least as happy as he’d been back on Earth, anyway. He was doing his dream job, he had friends- or close enough- he could do this.

He was fine.

He was fine.

He dried his hands with Basic Thermokinesis and picked up the pipe he was working with, holding it in place while he slowly summoned the connecting piece that would hold it in place. It was important that this was a completely airtight seal, because while it wasn’t technically effective in holding in energy, his mana wasn’t energy, was it? It was a potion. In this case, a near-boiling potion, but a potion nonetheless. So, airtight seals would definitely help keep his potions in place.

Edwin had actually found that he was able to manipulate far more mana than his extremely-restrictive Basic Mana Manipulation strictly allowed for, but only in very specific circumstances, among which this counted. After all, he saw mana as a potion, as an actual thing which could be manipulated. That was why this should work. If he did this with a physical setup, he’d be basically making liquid nitrogen and oxygen, probably with a fair amount of ice… condensing a snippet of the entire atmosphere.

How else would you condense atmospheric mana?

Finally, he got the contraption set up in its entirety. On one side, a reservoir with plenty of surface area awaited being filled by refrigerant mana. It was in turn connected to a set of tubes and pipes which snaked around the entrance to his collections flask which it would pull heat from. Then, all that would work together to condense atmospheric mana and let it drip onto a specially prepared molai flower that he was using as a makeshift battery for this experiment.

To keep the pressure differential up, and thus allow for actual transmission of heat, there were two valves attached to the entrance and exit of the reservoir, and at the entrance of the reservoir (where mana would flow after completing the full course of pipes) he combined a ball-bearing one-way-valve with a tesla one-way-valve to, well, only allow mana one way through the piping.

His role in the entire setup was serving as the vacuum pump, pushing mana from the tubing through the valves and back into the reservoir, re-pressurizing the gas into a liquid and squeezing ‘heat’ out of the mana through a combination of spatial expansion and contraction (thanks to Improbable Arsenal) and raw mana ‘muscle.’

He double-checked all of his connections, ensured that everything was in working order.

He triple-checked everything to make sure nothing was out of place.

He let loose the valves, letting the mana vaporize, felt it draw in heat from its surroundings, and started repressurising mana as fast as he could manage, shoving that accumulated heat back into the reservoir..

Nothing happened.

Hmmm.

It didn’t seem to be a problem with his theory- he could definitely feel ‘heat’ being pushed out of the reservoir, and his vacuum pump setup was working… about as well as he could hope.

Well maybe if he…

Crack.

That… probably wasn’t good. Still, it could be worse.

Hiss.

At least it didn’t explode?

Three design iterations later, Edwin finally had something that should work. Instead of trying to condense air as it passed through an open-topped container, he had a closed and sealed vessel, which he had filled with air while expanded with Improbable Arsenal. When he dismissed that Skill, it of course put the gas under pressure- about seven atmospheres if his math was right.

He wasn’t sure that putting the air under pressure would make that much of a difference, but considering he was Visualizing air mana as behaving like actual air, higher pressure should result in a higher dew point for the mana.

The core mechanism of the pump remained intact, but had a few key differences, mostly centered around the actual cooling side.

The most obvious difference was that it was made out of copper. While the apparatite pipes technically worked, and were really easy for him, they didn’t have the greatest thermal conductivity as well as not always being able to withstand the intense temperatures and pressures when made super thin, breaking relatively easy and wrecking a lot of hard work.

He’d thought that it shouldn’t make a difference because there was no actual temperature or pressure manipulation going on, just magical equivalents like when working with his manaclave, but it seemed as though he’d been mistaken for some reason. Maybe this was just too many levels of abstraction from his actual mana that he was directly controlling? Something to test in the future.

He also made a note to himself to really, really delve deeply into what the ‘loosened limits’ of Sapper’s Apparatus did at such a high level once he left Sheraith. It was entirely possible he could get something super-strong and super-conductive if only he knew how, but copper was easy enough for now. To make his tubing, all he needed to do was create a mold out of apparatite, and pray that it didn’t shatter from the thermal shock of melted copper being poured into it- though apparently Lefi had a Skill for that, because of course he did.

With the copper tubing thus formed, it was simple enough to substitute it into his existing design, but instead of being wrapped around the outside of his container, he’d made it into a protruding shape from the top of his container. He wasn’t actually sure if it made a difference in terms of how effective the condenser was, but it at least removed a layer of insulation and was, critically, easier to make. It also should drip directly onto his molai blossom as well, which was a bonus.

Moment of truth…

Edwin filled the reservoir with refrigerant-mana, and he could immediately feel the volatile ‘potion’ begin to boil. That was put to a quick stop when he pressurized the container, but came back with a vengeance as he opened the exit valve.

It really was kind of impressive, the amount of force he was able to put his mana under. To do this for real, he’d need a really strong air pump and chemical refrigerants he didn’t even know how to start trying to synthesize. But here he was, able to compress a refrigerant ‘by hand’ and manually run an entire mana pump. His Skills definitely helped, but he felt rather proud of himself nonetheless. He supposed that this was what his mana was really good at. He couldn’t use it directly most of the time, but he could use it as a lever for even more impressive feats.

Speaking of impressive feats...

Within just a few minutes, he felt a buildup of air mana along the copper heat sink. It slowly coalesced, shining brightly to his arcanaception and feeling like so much air, so much wind compressed into a shining drop of mana. It felt like gentle breezes and violent hurricanes, vicious tornadoes and encouraging updrafts, the gentle warmth of a summer evening and the charged atmosphere of a thunderstorm. It carried a depth that was well past what Edwin had anticipated but was absolutely perfect for what he needed.

He looked on with wonder as the miniature atmosphere condensed, collecting into a single drop of natural potion-like mana at the end of his copper condenser and falling with a satisfying drip onto the waiting petals of the molai beneath it.

The flower greedily slurped up the mana, and the process started anew.

Edwin held in his whoop of triumph. It was working! Actually, truly working! He had spent… so long on this stupid little contraption, but this was proof! He could work with atmospheric mana like it was a physical substance, even if only in limited circumstances. He could make what he needed for his mana accumulator, he…

Another drop of air mana fell into the molai, vanishing without a trace. To work properly, the molai would need to be almost at saturation, and when it was filling in at the rate of one drop per minute at most...

...He’d be at this for hours.

I really should update my level-up window, Edwin mused, playing with the notification as he laid in bed that night. He’d initially included the ‘average level’ in his pop-up to help reassure him he was getting closer and closer to his goal back when he was trying to hit tier 2, but it didn’t really measure his progress towards the next tier anymore. After all, he was at least waiting until Alchemy hit level 120 so he could get the Alchemy Specialist path and possibly even beyond that, if he decided he wanted to take more 90-point Paths this time around.

Because Specialist paths were 90 points, that was two right away that he definitely wanted to take. Then after that, he’d absolutely need Essential Alchemist, and he wanted to take Realm Traveler this tier. Oh! Scientific Revolutionary as well, and of course Material Scientist. Then Physicist and Schooled Mage- he hoped that one might help Prototyping and his Visualization interact in some way- and…

No, bad Edwin.

He wanted all the Paths. All of them. Oh, right, he also needed to earn the Artisan path to get Dexterity, and probably take Scholar at some point because it was likely to unlock Intelligence. Oh, but what did he want to evolve Stamina Manipulation with?

Cough.

Right, right. He’d cross that bridge when he got there. He just wanted all of the Paths, was that really so bad? But to get all of the Paths, he’d need to know how many he could afford…

Edwin flexed his Status skill, removing the ‘average level’ marker he usually kept up, replacing it with the level of Stamina Manipulation, Alchemy, and how many 60-point Paths he could afford with his current Skill Point total.

Oh, should he subtract sixty from that to account for what he’d evolve Stamina Manipulation with? That might be a good idea.

Oh, and-

Keep it simple.

He couldn’t help but grumble at himself slightly, but he did eventually keep the setup relatively straightforward.

Level Up!

Skill Points 1142→1147

(Alchemy: 99; Stamina Manipulation: 19; 13/25 60-point Paths)

Yeah, that would work just fine. His Alchemy might nearly be breaking into the triple digits, but he knew better than to think it meant he’d have an easy time getting it to 120. He’d been gaining levels in the skill blazingly fast by his normal standards, at nearly one a week at times, but that was because he was diving headlong into the wonders of alchemy essentia for the first time.

Well… he had time. He hadn’t fully decided what he would do when they left Sheraith, but hopefully Lefi and Rillah would be traveling together towards the coast. That way, he’d be able to keep traveling with them while he went to get abysite and visit Farport.

That was a problem for another day. Future-Edwin could deal with that when he was older and wiser. Current-Edwin really ought to get to sleep. He idly wondered if blue ‘light’ from System text had the same impact on brains as blue light normally did, in that it caused it to wake up slightly.

Maybe not? So far as he could tell, System messages were entirely hallucinatory, with no physical or optical component. Pulling up a System message should then be the equivalent of imagining a blue sky, right?

He was getting distracted again.

Okay, no more messing around, he needed his rest.

Sleeping.

It was time. After days of experimentation and hours of constant work, Edwin had finally managed to saturate his molai blossom with enough atmospheric air mana to attune his filter-copper to the local air magic.

He’d tried a few related experiments with Rillah’s wind mana to get some practice, so he knew he wasn’t going to waste the precious atmospheric mana to some stupid mistake. So long as he followed his notes and his Alchemy skill, it would all go fine.

He couldn’t use Rillah’s personal mana for his actual experiment for a few reasons, most notably that it didn’t actually match atmospheric mana all that well. It was permeated from top to bottom with the sensations of motion and change, and while good enough for the tower’s enchantments to accept it as a power source- they could accept anything- using it as the filter for his mana accumulator would result in almost no mana actually being accumulated.

He’d checked.

Extensively.

At least the filter-copper was reusable- the attunement process involved flushing out all lingering traces of mana anyway, which included all previous attunements. He could even reclaim the gold used… but he was getting ahead of himself.

Before him, an apparatite sphere rested over a powerful but tiny flame, and within rested his ingot of filtered copper. In turn, his molai flower sat atop the copper ingot, covered ever so gently by a small disc of gold leaf, draping over the petals like a stiff cloth. The entire contraption was at as good of a vacuum he could pull- which was actually pretty impressive these days- to prevent the blossom from catching on fire as he heated it all to absurd temperatures. Wilting was fine, but burning was not.

Lefi had been kind enough to provide him with the needed coins, not that he needed that much- about one gram of gold was enough for the gilding, which was in turn about a sixth of a penny-sized grai. His half-kilo of copper came from about fifty ves Refined into being proper filters, and then melted together.

Ah, gold-based economies. It made acquiring precious metals so easy.

His entire setup was apparently leaning fairly heavily into alchemy essentia, which wasn’t nearly as intimidating as it had once seemed. It was all about changing the structure of a substance, and while it wasn’t quite the same as chemical bonds… it wasn’t entirely different either. While the more advanced forms of the discipline were the equivalent of editing atomic nuclei, this was far simpler and crucially, possible at his current skill level (and Skill level).

Because gold and copper were so alchemically similar to one another (both of them being colored metals with similar melting points and in the same column of the periodic table- which Edwin felt was important even if it wasn’t listed in Zosiman), when they alloyed there was a brief moment where the magical structure of the copper loosened to allow ingress to the gold and its magical structure, of the sort he could induce in his manaclave. However, unlike with his manaclave, there were no traits being removed, just the synthesis of pre-existing ones.

By placing the molai between the gold and copper, he was including the flower in that reaction, sensitizing the gold to another type of mana, and when the metals mixed, the gold would carry with it just enough wind mana to replace its normal purity. In Panastalin terms, he was creating a potion with copper as the base, gold as the primary, and molai as the tuner.

It would work even better if the flower was gilded, but Edwin was sure that his setup was sufficient for his purposes, and didn’t involve risking his molai blossom in yet another fiddly alchemical reaction that could burn up all his hard work in an instant if he messed up.

There was more going on, and he was determined to figure out what, but for now the reaction had shown that it worked, and that was ultimately what mattered at the moment.

Edwin kept stoking the flames as he waited for the gold to melt. He was very glad that Apparatite just didn’t melt, and was borderline immune to damage from temperature. It definitely became more brittle with extreme heat or cold whether magical or mundane, but it never shattered or melted so long as he didn’t expose it to too much thermal shock. For this, he was using a magnesium fire and slowly lowering his apparatus into the crucible.

After his experiment was suspended five centimeters above the fire for a few minutes, Edwin sensed the change moments before it happened, and he quickly wrapped the entire system in a thin layer of mana to help isolate it. He barely finished when the gold leaf began to melt, completely enveloping the dried, shriveled molai flower.

He could feel there was still atmospheric mana trapped in the remnant, whatever property of the flower that made it so good at absorbing magic still holding true even as it was heated to unreasonable temperatures. But, as the gold melted over it and, a few moments later, the copper began to melt and mix, he felt a brief flash of intense magic.

It faded away almost instantly, but left behind a faint sense of… potential. An endless sky, shapeless but full of possibility. Edwin released his mana isolation grip on the system, and the liquid metal immediately turned almost invisible against the normal air’s mana.

Success.

In an effort to maximize the surface area of his newly-finished copper, Edwin once again enlisted Lefi’s aid in metalworking to beat his ingot of copper into as thin of a sheet as possible. By the end of it, he had a disc nearly as thin as paper and about a meter and a half in diameter. That was good, but still not sufficient. A copper circle did a lot to block wind, after all, not harness it, so Edwin then found himself using Construction and Alchemical Dismantling to cut and shape the metal into approximately the shape of a fan, then reinforced it with some apparatite and copper supports.

It all went… surprisingly well. It was just mechanical cuts and fastening and the like, which while not something he had a ton of experience in, was far simpler than the alchemical problems he normally found himself dealing with.

He even had Rillah test it, having her unleash a relatively anemic gust of wind at the contraption. While the amount of wind mana was low, the fan worked admirably as it spun on its mount. With every rotation, more wind mana was allowed to pass through and the more the fan picked up. Because the density of atmospheric mana was higher in the air than in the copper, it was drawn into the metal and radiated out closer to the floor, where it could then be absorbed into the tower’s enchantment. The enchantment was actually pretty impressive, or so Edwin felt, because of just how readily it absorbed any kind of air or wind mana to power itself, like an eternally dry mana sponge… if the sponge was then used to run a hydroelectric power plant.

He couldn’t help but feel that the mechanical side of his creation worked great, at least once he liberally cheated with magic, both in the Skill sense- using Prototyping for perhaps the first time in the context it was meant for and leaning on well-used Construction techniques- and in the alchemy sense.

He might not have had slipstone, that magical mortar variety that had basically no friction- though he probably could have made more lime if he had really tried- but Infused sand still acted pretty much like a superfluid, meaning it made for an almost perfect grease once he had it properly contained. Everything that should spin did, and everything that shouldn’t, didn’t. Because of how much he was using Sapper’s Apparatus, it looked more crystalline than metal, but he didn’t really see that as much of an issue, particularly when it let him explore his more creative side when decorating the supports.

That everything went so well on the mechanical side of things just made his failures on the magical part of the device all the more frustrating. It wasn’t even a true failure in any particular area either- all of the individual components of the device worked just fine. The ‘windmill’ filtered atmospheric mana and transmitted it to a copper wire running to the floor, the filter-copper successfully radiated mana… it just wasn’t radiating enough in the relevant section, so the enchantments stayed underpowered.

What Edwin eventually diagnosed was that there just wasn’t a reason for the copper to radiate mana preferentially near the floor over any other surface- and it had a lot of surface area. He’d need some way to keep the relative mana density lower near the enchantments, that would create a bit of a vacuum and thus radiate more mana in the appropriate area.

Refining was no help, still. The solution was bound to be in molai, but the flower continued to eat all the mana he sent its way unless it was specifically corrosive- and in that case, the mana storage trait was ruined, rendering it useless for this.

Ultimately, classic alchemy came to the rescue. Molai still worked just fine in potions and everything that didn’t involve Refining, and if his Alchemy skill was good at determining how he could use Refining, it was fantastic at potions. It only took a few tweaks to his overcharge-barrier potion to bring it back to mana-sensitive, and by adding a few touches of Refined copper and ground glowleaf, sealing it all in with a rousing boil, he created a slightly luminescent, milky-white potion held within an apparatite crystal custom-made to fit into the gaps between his mana engine and the corresponding section of the enchantment.

Personally, Edwin couldn’t help but feel particularly satisfied with his ability to take a potion meant to temporarily inhibit mana from running rampant through his body and turning it into a mana sink that was actually useful in real life!

It was always such a fun feeling.

It was amusing how much the final device had in common with his initial prototype. He had his copper turbine as the wind mana accumulator and filter, the potion as his storage, and then a small container meant to aid in the transfer. When the wind blew, the minuscule amounts of mana it carried with it would be blown across the fan and absorbed. It would then be carried through the copper and be absorbed into the molai potion. Once the potion hit saturation, it overloaded and emptied completely, charging up the enchantment. Then the cycle would start anew.

Edwin allowed the system to run a few cycles, wind blowing through the open top of the tower as the turbine spun to face the wind. As the air’s speed increased, so too did the rate of charge and discharge… the enchantment was accepting the new source of mana no problem, there weren’t any creaks and groans…

He stepped back, put his hands on his hips, and looked with satisfaction at his creation.

Success.

Congratulations! For imbuing a substance with an elemental affinity you have unlocked the Elemental Alchemist path!

Congratulations! For fashioning a useful device primarily out of metal you have unlocked the Metalworker path!

Congratulations! For completing a lengthy, complex, personal project utilizing your own Skills you have unlocked the Artisan path!

Congratulations! For creating a complex magical device combining multiple disciplines you have unlocked the Artificer path!

Congratulations! By crafting a mana accumulator you have unlocked the Mana Harvester path!

Level Up!

Skill Points 1142→1156

(Alchemy: 100; Stamina Manipulation: 21; 13/25 60-point Paths)

Alchemical Analysis Level 47→48

Alchemical Dismantling Level 55→56

Alchemy Level 98→100

Improbable Arsenal Level 43→44

Prototyping Level 45→48

Refining Level 46→49

Ritual Intuition Level 54→56

Sapper's Apparatus Level 67→68

Stamina Manipulation Level 19→21

Unbound Tether Level 29→30

Name

Edwin Maxlin

Age

2

Race

Extraplanar Human

Class

Alchemist-Errant

Attributes

Health 25

Impact 7

Mana 37

Perception 19

Stamina 30