It was very tempting to stop expanding the demesne.

It was very tempting to stop going out to the edge of the demesne to practice and study forming beads

It was very tempting to just stay in her newly—and probably permanently—claimed alcove in the second level and devote her time to studying the now-opened bead. The substance inside, the white Iridescence as Rian had dubbed it, was fascinating, and defied her expectations of what it should act like, given what she knew had come together in the creation of it. How had it become like this? Was it like this for all kinds of beads, or simply wisp beads? How could she use this?

The questions and frustrations posed by the white Iridescence in the bead was a need she wanted, wanted intensely, to satisfy with answers.

She pushed back the temptation with experience. Admittedly, it was harder than pushing back the temptation to spend her money on honey bread or sweet rolls or new books, but she managed it.

While the bead was interesting, and the material information from it would probably be potentially useful, it was only potentially. Forming beads, and developing a method to mass produce beads, would definitely be useful. Likewise, expanding her demesne was a long-term investment that only she could grow.

So, tempting as it was, studying the material of the bead could not be her priority. Also, when she calmed down and the excitement wore away, Lori was able to realize that none of what she was likely to learn would be new information, frustratingly strange and counter-intuitive as they were. Someone would have decided to break open a bead at some point, and there was no one more likely to do so than the people who could make them: the Dungeon Binders of old.

That still made it information she needed to know, as a Dungeon Binder, but the realities of her situation meant that it was not her primary need. That didn't mean she wouldn't do it, just that she had to do it in moderation. Bead forming and expansion was a greater priority. And now that she had the resources, she also needed to learn how to make bound tools—at least, Whispering-based bound tools—so that she could take advantage of her ability to make beads…

Besides, it was lunch time. They needed to eat, and afterwards she needed to go to her room and expand the demesne as she was scheduled to, because that was certain and sure and needful. It was the responsible, mature thing to do.

"Yes… yes, that sounds like a sensible set of priorities," Rian said as they finished putting away all of her instruments and glassware into the padded box and covered the large bead full of white Iridescence with a protective stone cover to keep out moisture and prevent accidents

Lori gave him a flat look. "You want to do more experiments on the bead, don't you?"

"…so much… but I understand. You're a Dungeon Binder, I'm a lord, we have responsibilities… even if it would be really nice to just spend time trying to understand more about the white Iridescence inside the bead…" Rian sighed. "So… we're going to prioritize trying to mass produce beads… that means we're going out to the edge every day?"

"Until I know more, yes."

"The edge that will keep moving slightly every day, so we can't even build a little hut to stay warm in." Rian sighed. "Ugh, I'm going to freeze."

Lori rolled her eyes. "You don't have to come, you delicate flower."

"Of course I do. What if you need notes taken? Besides, you'd have to talk to people without me."

She supposed she would. "I'll need a jar."

Rian blinked at the sudden declaration, then followed after her as she left the alcove. "A jar?" he said as he stepped out of the alcove, and Lori sealed it behind him, the stone flowing to seal the opening. It wasn't very thick, and someone stomping on the wall would be able to crack it eventually, but it was a sufficient deterrent for casual investigation of her bead.

"Yes," she said, not elaborating. Having some sort of sealed, relatively watertight container for Iridescence to crystallize and grow in would help her in growing more beads. So far she'd been relying on the little that had been mixed in among the gaps of air in the snow, but that needed careful handling lest the snow melt to water and take the colors with it. The thought of deliberately trying to grow Iridescence made her shudder, but it was needed. As she'd slowly been finding out, the substance clearly had more uses and interactions with magic than she'd been led to believe.

It was probably deliberate. The inherent danger of being in Iridescence, the increased difficulty and rate of degradation of any sort of magic performed in it, and the possibility of instantly being executed for treason would have probably been enough to deter people from experimenting with the substance normally. Lori had certainly never considered doing so when she'd been in school. This probably allowed Dungeon Binders to reasonably restrict the information.

She was starting to suspect there were probably more uses than simply creating dungeon cores and beads…

"A jar," Rian said, nodding as she led the way her usual table. "Right. Got it. I'll see what I can find. What do you need it for?"

"Making beads, of course," Lori said.

"Oh, tomorrow you expect to make so many beads you need a better container to bring them back in so they doesn't accidentally fall off the sled?"

Lori paused. "Make it two."

So useful.

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Routine set in, despite the cold. The next morning, Rian took Lori to the edge, where she left one of the jars some distance away from the edge of her demesne, well outside even her most optimistic estimate of her current rate of expansion. Then she made beads.

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From the previous several days of doing so, the basic components had become obvious. A bit of Iridescence was claimed by a heavily imbued binding, and the two would amalgamate, forming a bead. The size of the bead was mostly dependent on how heavily imbued the binding was, though the absolute minimum size seemed to be set by the volume of the Iridescence that was claimed. Water had to be kept away from the process, but that was just to keep the colors from being washed away. Once the beads were formed, there was no longer any need to worry about them, beyond them getting dropped into the snow.

The one time that had happened it had been a rainbowed pain to find the bead again, since it had been cloudy white on white snow.

Leaving the jar outside of the demesne to allow Iridescence to crystallize inside it overnight allowed her access to more substantial amounts of Iridescence than what was currently available from the environment, especially after she started leaving a binding of firewisps inside it. The Iridescence quickly crystallized from the heat and from trapping the imbued wisps.

She didn't even need to extract the Iridescence from the jar to start binding. All Lori had to do was create bindings of wisps, heavily imbue them, anchor them to the frost on her belt knife, and stick her knife inside the jar so the bindings reached the Iridescence. The metal of the blade acted as a conduit for her, letting her initiate claiming the Iridescence. It soon became a process of finding what level of imbuement created a bead of what size. Even so, the finished products contained small but noticeable variations in size, even when she used bindings that were of equal levels of imbuement. Presumably, the size of the Iridescence 'seed' was what affected the end result.

Lori tried claiming, binding and imbuing the beads after they had been formed to increase their size, but it was a futile endeavor. The beads were devoid of wisps to her, just as beads had been all her life, and felt like glass under her fingers touch, even when she finally got back to her demesne where it was warm. She tried it anyway, both inside and outside her demesne, in case that made a different, but other than appearing as a void in her awareness of wisps, it made no difference.

She'd even tried pouring her blood on it and, when that had resulted in no effect, using waterwisps from her blood in the binding to make a bead. Their affinity allowed her to imbue the binding outside the demesne, confirming the connection, and she was still imbuing when she had the binding claim Iridescence, but as soon as the bead fully formed, it was like someone had overridden her claim, the wisps just coming out of her control, and there was only a bead, devoid and glassy.

Despite those failed experiments, she managed to increase her bead production. She was now coming back from the edge of the demesne with a jar that, if not exactly full, usually contained at least five to ten beads of a size close to the largest denomination, give or take a few chiyustri. It was a decent improvement over coming back with three small beads that barely reached the smallest standard diameter, or a single large bead just a little bit past the largest size.

Lori supposed she would likely have to go to some effort to make them closer to the standard diameters, if only so that they'd fit into the bead receptacles of bound tools without modification. Beads came in four standard sizes, starting at ten chiyustri in diameter at its thickest points—denomination marks would be a fraction of a chiyustri less—and increasing in increments of five. While modifying the bead receptacle would be easy—she'd seen it done once, with a metal lockbox wired to a bound tool—most owners of bound tools would probably be wary of such modifications. She'd never worked for a bound tool maker, but she'd heard enough stories to know they did not look well on those tool owners who made such modifications. Few actually refused to repair the bound tool in question, but steep surcharges were not unheard of.

Several new containers in her room slowly but steadily began to fill with cloudy white beads, each container filling with beads more or less the same size, or at least within two chiyustri of a standard diameter. It was another number for Rian to track, but Lori wasn't exasperated by this. These were potential saleable goods after all, and keeping track of inventory for sale was important!

Eventually, she started experimenting with trying to use molds and forms to try to get beads of the same size. Rian suggested to make them bigger than they needed to be and then just use seepage to reduce their size. The wastefulness of the idea made Lori shudder, but unfortunately it was the most efficient and effective idea she had to work with.

The distaste made her put the idea aside for a while, as she decided to focus on ways to increase her rate of production. There had to be a more efficient way to mass produce beads. At the rate she was making them, she would never be able to produce enough to make up for the amount of beads a demesne managed to consume with its bound tools in a day, which older demesne clearly had to be able to do to keep their economies running while still using bound tools! Lori reminded herself to not make the same mistake twice, to find a way to produce beads smarter, not harder…

This became part of her morning routine after breakfast. Fortunately for her delicate flower of a lord, it didn't take very long. Simply going out to the constantly moving edge of the demesne, retrieving the jar that had been filled with Iridescence overnight, making beads, and anchoring a binding of firewisps inside the jar, before securing it somewhere she'd be able to find it later. A pair of branches crossed together over the jar helped when there'd been a night's snowfall.

The rest of the morning she was able to use to maintain her demesne. The waste desiccator had slowly grown full, and the noxious air within it had to be vented, but the remaining powdery substance thankfully looked and smelled nothing like what had originally gone in. Not exactly pleasant, but given what it had stared as… Well, definitely an improvement.

The desiccated waste was temporarily stored in one of the curing sheds where the planks that had been moved into the dungeon had been stored, where it would be kept until spring to be used for fertilizer, or turned into fuel far earlier. As long as it wasn't spreading noxiousness and disease in her demesne, Lori didn't really care what happened to it. This also allowed more waste to be put in the desiccator, meaning their latrines could still be used.

She also performed maintenance on the other bindings maintaining the demesne. Not imbuing their bindings, but making sure they functioned as intended. In the case of bindings with firewisps, she had to make sure the temperatures were stable, and to destroy any excess heat, especially when it was heat that had been generated by firewisps. All she had to do was invert the firewisps. When she could, she simply moved the heat elsewhere, since it was winter.

In the afternoons after lunch, Lori expanded her demesne at least three times. Sometimes, when she felt capable of it, she did so four, or rarely five times. Once, when she managed to reach a particularly comfortable rhythm, she managed to do seven, but that led to her being sleepy and distracted at dinner, and passing out immediately when she got to bed. She didn't manage to find time to perform any experiments on the broken bead and its white Iridescence then.

Most days, she managed to at least find some time to open the alcove and pull back the protective stone cover over the broken bead. Rian was always there, taking notes, which she'd later transcribe into stone tablets that joined the rest of the other notes she'd transcribed over the months. It also took her an embarrassingly long time to try and claim the white Iridescence in an attempt to use it to make beads, but the attempt resulted in failure. While her wisps could anchor to it, she couldn't claim and bind them like she could the colors.

It took her an even more embarrassingly long time to notice that, half a week later, the binding of wisps was still anchored to the white Iridescence she had tried to claim even after the imbuement had long run out.