The controlled manuals under my own and my homunculus's direction were doing a rather fervent impression of a living avalanche, as they worked on assembling components made of freshly-cast ossium. Meanwhile, the middle-aged wood elf standing by my side kept squinting at their activities, as though he couldn't see what was so significant about what they were doing.

This was all the more remarkable given the fact that I had already told him, in basic terms, why I cared so much about it. An explanation that clearly hadn’t sunk in, given his repetition of his last statement to me upon seeing me walk at an urgent pace into the workshop already bustling with many-legged activity. “Just how much cooking oil could you possibly need for tools?”

I smiled ruefully. “Lubricants diminish the impact of friction on the transference of mechanical energy, which in turn increases the efficiency of the system. Vegetable oils tend to react to heat breakdown by converting into greases meaning they retain some efficacy even under high stress operation, and simultaneously are oxygen non-permeable meaning they act to reduce the rate of oxidation on exposed surfaces. For finer components, this can make the difference between proper function and breakdown of the entire machine.” My voice is distracted as I speak -- I’m largely focusing on directing my ant minions as they assemble the oil presses I was having them construct in order to cut through the acorns I had been growing largely as an alternative foodsource.

The best part was that the leftover crushed acorns could still be used to make flour for flatbreads or kibble for my various minions. The reason I was really so excited about what I had just been informed of was truthfully what I'd told the bemused sergeant. Well, it was more the implications of that truth, really. Power transference over multiple gears in complex systems is inherently lossy in nature. Without friction, one object moving cannot pass motion onto another, meaningfully. But that same friction tends to convert motion into heat, stressing components, causing them to wear out more quickly, and more importantly each loss to friction compounds on each previous loss.

There's a reason why even medieval hand carts needed to have lard spread over axles. And why modern cars need motor oil.

Having access to proper lubricant -- even if one not as durable as modern synthetic oils -- opened up a slew of possible uses for my clockwork schizotech. It also meant my current uses of quartzite power tools would be all that much more efficient. Most of the uses I could get out of a decent mechanical lubricant would be niche, really, considering how most of the things I was making recently seemed to be biological or ‘simple’ machines rather than things like the clockwork harnesses my homunculi were using. But a solid part of why I had been so limited was because I did not have the means to make machines that would be worth the effort… and lubrication was an element of that. To make any kind of useful mechanical devices I needed a few things. First, ready access to decent materials with which to build them. This was a big part of why I wanted that mining camp so badly: steel has its association with modern technology for a very legitimate reason. Second, I needed the means to repair or maintain the things made from those materials. It wasn't enough to simply make them: if I needed to completely replace a part after only hours of use, then there was no point in having it at all. Third, I needed a way to power the machines. For small, hand-held scale things I could use quartzite for that. But quartzite doesn't really scale well. Those smelteries I'd made thus far were only able to use it effectively because they were permanent fixtures, and relatively airtight. That, and I wasn't really relying on the quartzite itself for power there so much as I was transferring it. This would work for other processes, but not for portable or self-moving machines.

Still, though. Having a decent oil lubricant -- and the greases I could produce from it -- would go a very long way towards unlocking future technologies. As well as resources. To date I had yet to really do much with the most ubiquitous of resources at my disposal, except when I built my palisade. Everything I had structurally was made of stone or ossium. A major reason for this was that I had no real way of processing lumber. Can't make a sawmill without dealing with high revolutions per minute, or the friction that generates. Can't make planks without a sawmill. Can't make furnished wooden goods without planks. And so it goes.

Trisaldan's voice again broke me out of my reverie. "Okay, I guess. But your reaction seems to indicate this is some major breakthrough. I've seen enough of what you've made to know that you use different tools than we do, and they make your work easier. But with all of these… servants … you've got, hiow much more can you really accomplish by just giving them better tools?"

I blinked at his statement. It was just so… how exactly does one go about enlightening someone from what amounts to a sophisticated hunter-gatherer culture on the potential societal impacts of the machine age? I finally realized that he was thinking I was planning on using this stuff to make better quartzite handtools and maybe a better clockwork harness model for my minions.

And to be fair, I would definitely be doing just that. But it went so much further. Lumbermills, railways, flour mills… electrical generation… all the things electricity permitted… yeah. This was too big a conversation.

I allowed myself the briefest of sighs. "I … you'll just have to see it. It's a big deal. Not in itself, but it was a missing ingredient. And a big one."

He looked at me in a way that indicated he was skeptical but also confident I would surprise him. Which I had to admit was only fair.

~~------------~~

Training -- or programming, really -- another batch of controlled manuals to process all of the acorns I'd been growing using the new machinery, as well as upping the amount of acornvines I was growing, took most of the rest of that day. I could, and probably should, have left the work to my homunculi, but I just wanted to do it myself. It felt good to be making progress in a way that completely made sense, and bought me time to think about what I would do next.

I was at something of a sort of crossroads, in a number of senses. I was finally in a position to feel like I had a basic grasp on my newfound lot in life; I knew enough about the challenges I was likely to face to have an idea of what to do about them; and I had an array of options for how to build upon what I had.

Some of my choices I needed to make were easier than others. My neighbours, the alfar, were… well. I could've been dropped into far worse circumstances, as these things go. I didn't trust the alfar as a people any further than I could throw them. They were almost certainly justifiably xenophobic, which meant that their natural inclinations towards outsiders would at the most generous be to exploit them, and at worst to repel them. I'd begun walking that uphill battle, and given how I was situated it wasn't like I could afford bad relations with them indefinitely. But I equally couldn't afford to drop my guard with them. Not as a culture. So deepening my ties with them was going to happen, had to really -- but I wasn't ever going to put myself in a position of relying on their largesse for my well-being.

Throwing a bone to them of letting them have at any dungeons my development produced, so long as I could also monitor said dungeon's progression… I could leverage that for a lot of mutualism. That's the easy choice.

The harder choices were more complex. The biggest of those right now was… everything I built produced a certain amount of the pollution that made those dungeons in the first place. This meant that at least for now, I'd need to be choosier about how I developed. This would have long-term ramifications on the kind of infrastructure I built up and as a result would shape what I could accomplish. So did I really want to go down the tried-and-true path of the technologies I knew from Earth? I could easily advance more rapidly just by "researching" things I already knew, and there was plenty of that road I knew at least basically how to unlock, still.

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I was also in a fairly decent place, I felt, to continue to build upon the novel technologies I'd discovered since coming to this world. Biomodification and crystalline energy transfer technologies had absolute limits I knew I had only scratched at the surface of given what I was already capable of. Committing to deep-diving that path could be endlessly fascinating… and who knew what I could accomplish?

Lastly, there was the revelation of what Arcanism fundamentally was. This was the deepest mystery to me thus far, and I knew that its capabilities were deep in "here there be dragons" territory. It would be the hardest and frankly most dangerous path to progress in. But a certain part of me kept thinking, "no risk, no reward". After all: if you can choose to be a wizard, you must choose to be a wizard. Anything else was just plain lunacy. Only problem was, based on what the point-ears had told me, so was going down that road uninformed.

This, really, was the choice I'd been staving off when I actively avoided building the aeolipile. And while, yes, there was absolutely value in closing up my tech-debt, and building up what I already could so that when I expanded further in tech trees, I would have the resources to use what I learned… that only took one so far.

I was reaching a time limit on what choice to make, if only a self-assigned one. Happily, there was a way to make that harder choice a little bit easier. To date, I was largely constrained informationally about the world by what the alfar would tell me because of how endless the Treatied Wood seemed. But now that I knew in general a direction to go in order to exit the forest, it made sense to get some long-range scouting done. And I had a plan on how to do exactly that.

Said plan was taking the shape of the creation of yet another caste of my mining ants. It was a touch more different than the others in that I was not planning on adding natural triggers for its development within the colony. Overall aside from that this would be one of the simplest changes made yet. All I was doing was creating a sterile male ant. This might not sound like a major thing, but the advantage for my purposes was actually fairly significant: male ants could fly. It was with this trait in mind -- and the addition of a controller fungus to allow me to use the males' senses myself -- that I could hope to use one of my homunculi as a dedicated long-range surveyor and scout.

The idea was to see how far exactly it was to the edge of the forest. And from there how far to the nearest inhabited location. I couldn't really use the ants for making contact -- a group of three or four six-inch long flying insects showing up out of the blue could only be taken as a threat in a world that had monsters after all -- but I could certainly attempt to learn more about the world as a whole. Maybe even passively pick up conversations, assuming the alfar and any people I found spoke a language in common. Granted, the odds there were low, but the alfar's language had to be closer than English.

I couldn't help but chuckle a little as I thought about the fact that even with the force multiplication of my controllers, I was still feeling the pinch of the limit I had on the number of homunculi I had the ability to create. It was, in a way, ironic; I was getting by just fine when seven total minions before, and now that I had more like forty, I still felt like it just wasn't enough. Even with that number only doing tasks I hadn't automated away, like with the farming and growth-vat maintenance, clothing and paper making, and so on. Here I was at the point of setting aside resources for long-term projects like the connecting tunnel and long-range scouting, and I still felt like my capacity was severely constrained.

But hey -- at least I could finally make a decent soap to get clean with. Well, once I had one of my minions get the right combination of acorn oil and lye together that is. Ugh. So many projects, so little time. It was enough to drive a man mad … yeah, not a thought to be focusing on given recent revelations.

So. The sterile male ants. It took the better part of half a day to get them just right. You'd think it would be quicker given how small a change they were, but no. I'd needed to isolate anti-fertility myself because none of my minions had sufficient mana to accomplish it themselves. And then it turned out that something about ants made infertility create worker drones. I'd needed to go through another three iterations to get the balance right; I needed to target the anti-fertility to only the gonads of the ant. But I got my flyers, even if they required biomodification from stock each time they were made. Given their purpose-specific nature, that wasn't really that big of a deal. I did, however, make a batch of the flyers, in hibernation-stasis. I even sent off a batch to the mining colony. I figured they would make decent emergency messengers -- a flyer could make a one-way trip without resting in roughly a day. It would die of exhaustion in doing so, but that wasn't really a problem. The whole point of making the ants the way I did was that they would be largely disposable. Only the brain caste and queens were important.

~~------------~~

It was with my new cartographer busily transcribing what the new flyers were seeing to a halfway-decent regional map that I turned my attention to a new task. Something I didn't really trust my minions to work on. Or, rather, that I didn't want to trust to them, even though the odds were fairly high overall that my homunculi would gladly volunteer if asked if they would like to do so -- a fact I wasn't at all comfortable with due to the notion that I'd be asking them to for certain die, but for uncertain results.

So I found myself in the position of trying to accomplish a means of having my cake and eating it too: I needed, if it were even possible, a way to grow a sufficiently sapient critter as to work out how to develop a spirit bond like I'd accomplished with my ishuar, but sufficiently nonsapient as to not be the moral equivalent of human sacrifice. I had some ideas in that regard, but I wasn't at all certain it was going to even have a chance at working. The biggest reason I thought it might was the success I had in creating the Controllers' ability to transfer/retain memories for their current manual host. Program a Controller once, and every successive manual it infects would carry out the programmed tasks. This was acceptable because the manuals themselves were as close to brain dead as I could make them.

And it was the manner in which Controllers interfaced with the manuals that made what I was hoping to accomplish next even feasible. It would mean yet another iteration on the ant species to alter one of their castes -- along with the fairly tedious effort of modifying the existing members of the caste in question for the sake of uniformity if nothing else, but it should be worth it: copying the mycelial nerves of the Controllers into the mandibles of the braincaste so that they could directly interface with the manuals that had taken to using as beasts of burden themselves. By having a Controller programmed with the knowledge of how to get possessed by a spirit, and a little communication work, it should be possible to use the manual as a networking bridge between the Controller and the braincaste. There were three most likely outcomes here, each with a varying level of acceptability:

First, I might not actually get what it was I wanted at all, beyond the basic interface improvements between the braincaste and the manuals, which itself should significantly improve the productivity of the ants in general. Second -- and this would be the best outcome -- they might successfully interface with the Controllers as well, thus allowing the braincaste to get the manuals to undergo possession of various spirits without risking themselves, thus allowing me an aggressive expansion of cataloguing which spirits were affiliated with what phenomena and uses. Third, they might be able to interface with the Controllers as well but have to risk themselves directly.

While even the braincaste ants would be what I'd generally refer to as subsapient, I still wouldn't feel right sacrificing upon the altar of repetition to appease the great god Scientific Rigor.

The worst part of this all being, beyond differentiating between the first and latter two outcomes, I'd have no way of knowing which of the three outcomes I had achieved even when I finished upgrading the ants as a whole -- which ironically I could automate away thanks to the very thing I was now working with, once I finished making a basic prototype that was.

A not so trivial part of me was less than okay with the fact that I was crossing a moral line with this step. But at least I wasn't using my Guardians for something like this. With any luck some variant of spirit I could bond with after all of this might let me start training them in similar bindings. Because tool-using caveman-like two foot tall (while on all eights) giant spiders should have voodoo powers too, if only to round out the "Oh god why?!" quotient.

Never let it be said that I lacked in my completionist chops.