"Isn't that a little overkill for turning a light on and off?"
Cato raised an eyebrow. Now that was something one never expected to hear from Landar. She pointed at the mess of lines over the summary paper, sets of eight lines running everywhere. She partially understood what Cato was doing, but the whole setup was so complex and foreign that it made the most devious of spells look like an apprentice's practice exercise.
To Cato though, it was a diagram that reminded him of a particular piece of technology.
"We can do simple triggers with this, yes," Cato explained, "but it can do so much more than simple things. I had been thinking of this ever since I saw your magical circuit creator, it's not quite the same as electrical circuits on Earth but it should be possible. A general logic engine we called a computer. "
Landar frowned, "but why do you need one? Something this complicated will take far too long to create. Besides, anything that you can do with this, you can also do with a simpler circuit. I mean, why go through all this storage registers and instruction codes? Just make the logic directly!"
"That isn't always possible," Cato said, "take your robot as an example. The mechanism you made to make it take step only works if the ground if flat. And solid. The way you build the logic means that the logic can't be changed easily, it'll take a complete re-enchantment every time. "
"How does having a general logic engine help?" Landar asked, "whatever you put in the registers is still fixed. "
"You can use it to interpret external input and perform calculations before it changes the spell's behaviour," Cato said. He continued when she started looking skeptical, "sometimes you don't just want the spell to do only one thing and when the logic gets really complex, having the ability to write abstracted logic in terms of commands will reduce mistakes made. A bit like how your circuit creator helps you build your spells. Back on Earth, we used the instruction code to further make an abstracted language for describing the logic. I think we're onto the third or fourth layer now. "
Landar snorted. "I can't imagine what sort of thing you used it for. What hideous problems were you people working on that were so complex you can't just write it down?"
Cato grinned, "actually, many computers on Earth are mostly used to play games and watch moving pictures. "
The look on her face was priceless, but it would be just too cruel to leave her with that. "Just kidding, we use it a lot for work too. "
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The roar of flame around the rim of the furnace made talking impossible but the practiced signals of the master and the scurrying mass of apprentices coordinated them easily. The team of pakas lurched against the beams and with a groan, the furnace tipped over and the yellow glowing liquid steel poured out into the tranches carved across the pouring floor.
Once the roar had died down and the slag emptied out of the furnace, the waiting masters walked among the slowly cooling steel ingots, tapping them and shaving them to test quality.
"An impressive sight," Klaas said.
"The steel is third rate though," Elma said, inspecting a few nuggets of steel that were brought up to him by the masters. He held up a piece and concentrated on it. The glow of magic flared up and slowly dimmed to a constant level. "And it won't hold magic as well as steel should. "
Klaas pointed at the end nearest the furnace, where four masters and their apprentices were busy reforging a length of steel. "The hardness is still better than iron," he said, then he swung a hand across the rows of ingots laid out across the floor, "and look at the amount! The old method of baking the iron to form steel is gone!"
Elma nodded, "indeed, the quality should improve once we learn how to control the burn better. And with our secret folding process, we can still improve the quality of the steel, for far less total cost. The only problem is the high cost of the furnace. Thank Selna Cato didn't including folding in the book. "
They looked at the towering structure nearly twice as tall as a house. It had been rebuilt three times and reworked far more, perfecting the process of blowing hot air through the molten iron. This sort of large scale project was something that only the Ironworkers guild itself could afford to do, and even then it was not easy. The smaller and easier crucible method described in Cato's documents could be employed by the independent Ironworker smithies. It was somewhat of a race between the Ektal branches to see who could perfect the process first.
Elma didn't win, but he didn't stand much of a chance next to the large Minmay branch which had decided to setup an experimental steel furnace right next to Cato's so called university. Elma almost pitied Corbin who was still trying to make blast furnaces work. Their little agent should be paying her a visit right about now.
Indeed, many local unaffiliated blacksmiths in villages were known to be experimenting with making crucibles, but small local operations could never compare with the massive output of steel that the Bessemer process could create. The Ironworkers could suppress them with sheer market size.
"Why call it Bessemer though?" Elma muttered to himself.
Klaas shrugged, "that was what the book said. "
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Dear Tulore,
Your samples of the curse breaker have been very interesting. I have experimental evidence that the curse breaker is able to cure certain kinds of sickness, primarily those related to infected wounds and what you call bad blood, the notes regarding my experiments with deliberately infecting piyos and curing them.
I suspect that your curse breaker is related to what, in my world, we call a sulfa drug. Using the chromatographic process I mentioned last letter, I have managed to isolate the active ingredient at a specific retention time. With concentration by slowly drying the fraction, the drug's effect can be enhanced many times and the dose made far higher.
In fact, I have managed to sufficiently concentrate it that high doses begin to cause adverse effects in the piyos. Toxic effects are included in my notes, including potential allergy reactions and other complications. On the other hand, the higher dose is able to treat a wider range of infections and is thus more useful.
I have had some ideas on how to scale up your process as well as possible chemical derivatives, do please review them, I would appreciate your experience in its manufacture. If you are interested in a partnership, I am sure I can work out a deal with some of the local Minmay merchants to share profits with the Fukas in exchange for your recipe and input.
Yours, Cato
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Dear Cato,
Your distillation column works amazingly! The simple alcohol boilers simply cannot compare in the purity of alcohol produced, indeed your process is so precise that they become completely stripped of the odour from their source ferment. I have sent samples of various alcohols purified from a fermentation. You will note that I have labeled them in order of increasing boiling point, with smells and taste observations included. Piyo testing indicates that all but the second and largest fraction is toxic at high doses, thereby identifying it as ethanol. The only lower boiling fraction must be methanol. However, there are three remaining fractions boiling below the temperature of the water residue instead of two fractions like you predicted, the mystery third fraction is very low volume and seems to exist in a mix of solid and liquid form at room temperature. Any idea what that is?
The removal of these light alcohols should make reconstituted alcoholic drinks much safer to consume, and open up a wide range of high proof drinks.
The dry fractionation process for oil is extremely sensitive to temperature. The fat does not crystallize uniformly and a slight deviation in temperature or mixing will result in losing efficiency or failing to purify well. To date, I have only succeeded in two perfect runs, that with the cooler/heater magical device you sent me, the room temperature is simply impossible to control otherwise. The bad tasting residues made up of the solid fats can be used to supplement piyo feed.
The clarity and purity of the esquire seed oil produced is also beyond compare. Even when failing batches, so called 'B' grade oil, multiple rounds of cheap inaccurate fractionation will still result in tolerable quality, with barely any of the bad smell and bitter taste remaining. Indeed, using the 'B' grade as cooking oil is still cheaper and less prone to sticking the pan than paka fat. Mostly, I have been adding it to tins to boost the energy content of the food as well as prevent settling of the contents.
The 'A' grade, the perfect runs, I am dedicating to a new cosmetics branch. The clear oil is a perfect stabilizer for all sorts of creams, oils and anything that requires a thick medium that prevents settling. This ranges from toothpaste to gentle liquid soaps to near transparent cosmetic cream. The women and housekeepers of Ektal will worship your name, Cato, you must have had some idea of how useful the 'A' grade is. Once the first batches go on sale, I should have to consider building you a house made out of money as a present.
I have tried to recreate your margarine by crystallizing 'B' grade oil and adding paka milk but it remains too liquid to spread, and 'A' grade non-bitter semi-solids are too expensive to eat. I shall try mixing it with paka fat tomorrow, results follow next letter.
To good food and good profit!
Kalny
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Dear Cato, you are aware of the Ironworker's new steel. I am heading to Minmay personally to discuss a prototype steel framed building. Signed, Muller.
PS: Estimated price of steel Tine bridge, 400 Rimes and dropping
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Landar hunched over the pot, supplying the magic that kept the elemental Water from simply disappearing into thin air. Sitting here watching the column of water slowly drip down into the elemental Crystal pot with nothing to do other than watch some crystals grow was supremely boring. And because Landar was the person who was sustaining the elemental Water, she couldn't even sleep!
She hadn't realized just how long a half hour was until she had nothing to do while waiting. Reading was inconvenient when one had to keep an eye on the apparatus. More like impossible if she didn't want to screw this up for the tenth time.
Landar was the dean of magical research in Cato's university! Why couldn't she just order some unlucky alchemist to do this job? But Landar knew that she had kept what she was doing a secret from almost everyone else and anyone other than her would almost certainly not do this experiment correctly.
Sometimes she thought that Cato's Earth knowledge was cheating. She had racked her brains for days trying to think of a way to make a device that would add liquid slowly to the pot. Landar's final idea of using some paper to block the end of a spout had been overturned in ten seconds when Cato described a tap device at the bottom of a hollow glass cylinder. Something he called a burette.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
He had even dared to say that they would need to perfect the tap construction anyway since they would need it for 'proper chemistry'!
True, it worked better than anything she could come up with, but that was just unfair. That was why she stuck to studying magic.
She peeked into the pot and saw the grey crystals lining it. Oops, she had missed the crystals' appearance. Landar marked down the water level and opened the tap in a quick burst. There were no more crystals appearing or growing.
Gingerly, Landar placed the strainer over the mouth and poured out the mixture of water and elemental Water into the waste. Then she pointed the heat dryer at the pot and waited.
After the crystals were dry, Landar simply evapourated the pot with a field of disruption magic and placed the crystals on a scale. The other pan was already setup and as Landar placed the last piece onto the receiving pan, the weight pan was slowly lifted off the table. Then it just as slowly settled back down.
Almost equal. And the iron was weighed to be equal before she recrystallized it!
Landar grinned and went to go find Cato.
Elemental Water could be saturated and feeding most liquids into it could cause dissolved iron to crystallize out. Let's see Cato beat that one.
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It didn't take him long.
"Of course, the dissolution speed is governed by particle size while the preference order of dissolved material is governed by the entropy of solution!" Cato wrote down a set of squiggles at the bottom of the large board. The top sheet of paper was covered with little drawings that Cato claimed was representing the diagrams of the various materials they had tried to dissolve in elemental Water.
Landar sighed at the line of drawings. Just ten experiments, in which Cato took her observation and displaced one material with another, or failed to. In just ten experiments he had determined that which substances displaced with others could be represented as a single line, from small to big molecules. Whatever molecules were, those things were supposedly too small to see.
"Don't you see, it's just chemistry!" Cato said to her, waving one energetic hand over the paper summarizing their observations and the theory, "Water must be a small molecule or single atom that sticks to non-magical molecules very well! The materials made of smaller atoms, like metals, dissolve fast while long chains like wood and cloth can last for a long time. But because the dissolved materials exist in an equilibrium, elemental Water never completely releases the long chained molecules, making it impossible to displace!"
It was an elegant theory, Landar agreed. But there were so many things she didn't understand of his theory that she barely understood what question to ask first.
"You're assuming that everything," she pointed at the table, the air and a tub of water, "everything is made of atoms so tiny they can't be seen? And different materials have different looking atoms. "
Cato blinked at her for a moment, "oh. Yes. Yes, I am. " He rubbed his forehead, "there's no atomic theory in Inath? So that's why the chemistry book didn't spawn as many ideas. No one understood it. "
"And I'm the one who is supposed to have sparkling eyes," she grumbled.
"What?" Cato asked.
"Nothing," Landar sighed, "weren't you excited about the establishment of universal standard measurements this morning? What happened to that?"
Seeing his deflating mood felt like she was kicking a baby piyo. "The Ironworkers and Masons are disagreeing over how to make a standard measure for length," Cato scowled, "it turned into this vicious fight between the two guild masters. We could end up with two competing standards and goodness help us if the Recordkeepers want their own too! That defeats the point of having standard units! It's becoming political!"
"Ah," Landar nodded, "so you left Minmay to handle the discussion and came here?"
"Good thing I did too, I wouldn't have wanted to miss this discovery," Cato rubbed his hands, the grin coming back to his face.
Landar pointed back at the board full of squiggles, "so why are you so excited about this?"
"It's the missing piece of knowledge we need to make the composite crystallization work!" Cato said excitedly, "you need to make the materials co-crystallize and that means we need to control their concentrations! We have a clue of how to make it work now!"
She could feel his grin transferring itself to her face. They were going after the grand prize then. It was annoying the way he simply pulled all her ideas into his own orbit, but she had to agree that impressing Cato came with benefits.
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The clatter of wagons entering Minmay was nothing unusual. Hundreds of carts, wagons and travellers entered and left the city daily. But the large cage on the center wagon was what drew stares and gasps of shock. Inside the cage, six zombies sat or crawled over each other, futilely rattling the iron bars at the gawking onlookers. The third wagon also drew stares, it was radiating magic even though it looked like nothing more than travelling provisions.
"Six zombies," Mari said, as Cato and Minmay met them when they entered the university grounds. Arisacrota was there too, watching curiously from the side and having two burly knights in full enchanted plate armour to guard her from either side.
"How did you capture them?" Cato asked.
"We found a small group and ambushed them," Zaraan explained from the side. The adventurers who actually did the fighting were not here anymore, having collected their bounties at the Order branch, so it fell to the three alchemists to explain what happened. "These were the survivors. "
"They don't look very damaged though," Minmay remarked. General injuries and damaged flesh was expected of zombies but none of them were missing limbs or heads.
"There were seven," Mari explained by way of pointing at the remains in the corner of the cage, "they cannibalize each other. "
"We saw that happen in Wendy's Fort yes," Cato said, "so any sign of the black mist?"
They all shook their heads.
"Well, get them off the wagon," Cato waved the team of hirelings forward but they stared back at him incredulously. He sighed, "Landar? Do you mind immobilizing the zombies?"
Landar nodded and casted a spell over the cage that slammed all the zombies to the floor. The wagon creaked under the load and the hirelings rushed forward to drag the cage down.
"Besides the zombies," Landar pointed at the covered wagon behind. It was radiating magic. "Is that more mana crystal?"
Zaraan's face lit up cheerfully, "yes, we found a second mine. Without tremors. It's smaller and there is less mana there but it seems like these mines aren't that uncommon. We should be able to find many more throughout the Snow Wall. "
"I still find it strange that the First should leave behind mana crystal," Cato said, "I know you mentioned it in your report but whatever reasons I could come up all sound ridiculous. "
"If we can discover why the mines are where they are, the same way iron ore tends to appear in horizontal bands, there might be clues," Zaraan ventured.
They shared a sigh, why the mana crystals were where the mines were was not a simple question to answer.
"You know, it's strange that they're wearing these furs," Landar said, pulling out a tattered scrap of clothing from one of the zombies as the cage dragged past her, "It might be some sort of clothing?"
Cato looked at Minmay for confirmation and got a noncommittal shrug. "It's not piyo fur," Cato commented, the fur was far too thick and long, even after the wear and tear it had no doubt gone through.
"It may not be clothing that came from Inath," Landar ventured, "no one would wear such heavy furs. You'll be far too hot. " Mari and Zaraan nodded too.
Cato gulped, "if it's not from Inath, then where is it from?"
They looked at each other.
"We'll retrieve their clothing and ask if anyone has information on them," Minmay said, "let's not jump to conclusions. "
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The bolts zipped downrange to a clatter of wires snapping against barrels. The impacts against scrap shields and wooden targets at the end was quickly followed by the squeaking of metal cranks. Then after some time, another clatter sent another wave of bolts at the targets.
"Not very impressive," Minmay said, as the row of peasants struggling to reload their crossbows took at least half a minute to do so. "The shields work too well against them and Reki mounted knights will have ridden them down by now. "
"They require almost no training, you can't expect much," Cato said, "but with the Ironworkers' steel, you can make sufficient crossbows for large formations to pose a threat. In fact, you should note that the shields on the targets are normally considered quite strong and most of them are actually drained by now. "
Minmay peered at the targets, "but not many are hit. In the time between reloads, any knights down there would have patched up the shields already. "
"There's only so much you can do without magic, sir," Cato explained, "the upside is that they are cheap and they force the targets to use magic to defend themselves. "
He raised a flag and the recruited trainees pointed their crossbows down at a different set of targets. With a clatter, the bolts smashed into the soil and through the armour. Unshielded, not even steel armour couldn't stand up against crossbows.
"And of course, if you add magic, they turn into a bowgun," Cato waved a different flag and the trainees swapped out their bolts for the special set. The accuracy was much much better than the Wendy's Fort version, being made with steel and all the expertise of the Ironworkers. Even better, the metal shafts of the bolts carried enough power to aid loading, the new bowgun design could work with any non-magical crossbow and still draw and fire nearly as fast as a normal bow. With far less training required.
"On a battlefield, massed crossbows can pose a threat, even more so if they are in a defensive position," Cato indicated the rough earthern berms and trenches to the side, "and if it comes from a direction you didn't defend against, well, crossbow bolts are fast and hard to see in flight. There is a good chance of catching knights unawares and without defenses. "
"Doesn't this go against the limit on raising armies?" Minmay asked, it was quite without question that the line of recruited peasants was far far beyond any sane limit on adventuring parties.
Cato shrugged, "to pose a credible threat to Ektal, you will need new tactics. One that exploits the advantages you have, such as the mana tax and cheap steel. Besides, they're not adventurers, they hardly know any magic!"
Minmay snorted, "I doubt Ektal will accept that excuse. "