Raw materials were the limit.
Now that I had the full endorsement of the military, I had access to money. Not unlimited budget but more money than I could imagine.
If alchemists were too costly I could always train commoners for the job, grinding charcoal and others into powder didn't require a trained alchemist for the task.
Onder's reports were mixed. The Troll chief miner said sulphur wasn't a problem, there were a lot of accessible deposits near underground “chimneys”, signs of volcanic or tectonic activity. Coal was a possibility too. He was reluctant because the “fire spirit” had a bad reputation among miners but he would bring some back if tasked to (and paid to). The rock was easy to crush and there were veins not too far from the surface, they would just have to reopen tunnels that were sealed. With a few light crystals to light their way down and manpower to keep any threats at bay, they will be operational.
The main choke-point for further development was also the main ingredient: Niter.
There was none to be found in great quantities down in the mines. My best guess is that the flooding kept humidity levels too high for ammonia deposits from any source to last. No bat shit or monster shit available for me. Going to search the mountains for caves was even less of an option. Such places would be teeming grounds for monsters, the manpower and military force needed for such exploitation would undermine the idea of gunpowder. It could end up requiring more soldiers than it created.
I hadn't forgotten the vision Shinpilo sent me, with Mr. Turner's documentary talking about the “shit-farms”. I was going to have to find out how to extract Niter from faecal sludge.
* * * * *
Before this nasty task, I had a more urgent problem on hands: what last name was I going to take?
Gel had the same issue but her solution was easily found. “I'll just take the same name as you, we'll be battle-siblings.” I couldn't refuse her demand without her pestering me endlessly. Melodi was threatening to become a martial hero too just to take on the same name too...
This only put more weight on my decision.
Should I follow this world's custom and take the city's name or the Shieldom's name? Or take my former last name from Earth?
Should I take one of our great scientists' names as a tribute and become Telerios Einstein or Telerios Newton or Nobel? This sounded a bit pretentious and would just weird out everyone else.
Should I go for something funny like Telerios Far-sight or Superman?
I've pondered for a long time, between both worlds' meanings and sonorities. In the end, I decided to take our great river's name. I was going to be Telerios Awanui, the large river, slowly but irrepressibly carving its way to the horizon.
Gel agreed with the idea and the princess and lord Iroto also approved of my choice. It wasn't our city's name as they would have preferred but it was still something regarding the Shieldom.
Now I was left with the most unpleasant of task unless you are a two-years-old: experimenting with faeces.
* * * *
I really wanted Niter and I meant it.
How else would I justify spending days experimenting with faecal sludge? Unsurprisingly, no one volunteered to help me with this task...
Since I was working for the military, I managed to get assigned a few helpers. Soldiers ended up here more as part of a punishment rather than to be helpful. I guess the military still doesn't understand how my work with faeces is crucial in gunpowder making.
Among those soldiers I grabbed the two smartest ones, or rather the two least useless, as my assistants.
The first one is a young recruit called Tajni. He comes from the eastern district just like we do and is of commoner's origin just like we do. He could pass out for Balout's older brother, they share the same dark blond hair. He ended up having to help me because he smuggled food rations during last year's winter and is still being punished since then by either dangerous affectations or disgusting ones. A few fresh scars on his arms are proof that he never backed away from his punishment.
The second one is a middle-aged porcupine Beastkin. Her name is Kaota. She is clumsy and as good as the spikes on her back favours her on the battlefield, she tends to wreak havoc in the camp... Dumping her on me was a way to get rid of her for her officer in charge.
Like most clumsy people, she is shy and nervous. Her pointy nose always trembles in fear or expectation and she looks as nervous as Sansho during a heatwave. What redeems her a bit in my eyes is that she is curious and the questions she asked shown she understood a bit what I was striving to do here.
With this team of misfits, I installed a small workshop near the stables of the palace. There, we found a pack of Tojas more or less big and flamboyants and a brigade of flying beasts. They will be our source of manure.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
I'm not sure about the exact process to extract ammonia from their feces but I can deduce part of it.
The potassium ammonium I'm after will be found in both feces and urine, dissolved in water. My goal is to slowly increase the concentration under controlled evaporation to have the solute crystallize. A bit like how salt is extracted from seawater.
The main difference is the amount of waste and organic mater that will contaminate the solution.
It isn't pleasant work. It involves harvesting all dung and draining the urine of all beasts. To manage that feat I had the beasts parked on a duckboard lattice above drainage to collect the liquid when they relieved themselves.
Both excretions are mixed together with a bit of hay and my two assistants are to stir the disgusting mixture under the heat of the sun or of a heat crystal when it gets too cloudy and cold in this winter.
The military managed to secure the help of a priest of Fusaad and Charavatkeh to help me. They both sprinkled what I believe to be strains of bacteria on the pools to help with the degradation of the organic matter. They know what they are doing when it comes to composting, I just hope it won't interfere with the ammonia concentration.
The stench around the pool was horrendous. Even the beast's grooms didn't dare approach our working station. It was ten times worse than kemcha and made me feel like throwing up every time I'd enter the room. I've smelled tons of disgusting things be it in this life or the previous, but this is among the top three worse.
I retched once.
When Kaota somehow found the way to fall into one of the pools of shit she was stirring... Even after bathing dozens of times I think some of the liquid still remains between her spikes and she now carries an awful smell around her. I felt a bit sorry for her and will buy her a bottle of perfume from the alchemists.
The process was excruciatingly long. It took two months to see the first crystals appear, a powdery white outcrop like the one naturally forming in caves where bats or others birds would defecate, mixed in the black earth resulting from the composting.
I had made niter.
Problem was that it was mixed among the black earth and still had a high amount of salt among it.
Now I had to refine it, find a way to purge it from the impurities. By harvesting only the superficial outcrop we would have a black earth fertilizer left at the bottom of the pool and a fraction of concentrated niter. I hadn't the faintest idea of how to achieve this.
I knew common salt and niter solubility in water weren't the same depending on temperatures, but nothing in my memories would be of help to deal with a practical way of doing it or on how to deal with other impurities.
* * * * *
To further purify this niter I needed someone's help.
“So, I want to know if you think you can help me in this task,” I asked the blonde Elve.
The Elven court alchemist, Raiya, listened to my request with care. She knew I had come up with something incredible to deserve my promotion, yet she wasn't aware of the existence of gunpowder. The sample of niter I was presenting to her wasn't looking impressive.
“Of course I'll help you to the best of my capabilities,” she answered after weighing her options. She had more to gain to be aboard my train. “I know of saltpetre, a rarely found salt in monsters' dens.” This caught my attention, so there were some deposits out there. “But I didn't know it could be 'made' from wastes... Is it useful?” she wondered.
It was hard to lie to her. She was going to help me and will probably learn of gunpowder one day or the other. I was going to need alchemists to help me at some point anyway. “It is useful. I can turn it into an explosive powder and it can also be used to make some acid.” At least she knew about nitric acid even if they only called it “yellow water”.
“Explosives? You mean like a firecrackers?”
So firecrackers did exist somewhere. “Yeah, just bigger.” I tried to stay evasive on the true power of niter. She'll get to see it with her own eyes in time, I didn't want to spoil her reaction.
“Fine bring your sample and we'll see what we can do,” she proposed in a comely manner. Her golden eyes weren't beaming with interest but at least her answer was a polite one.
Her lab was far more impressive than my workstation.
It was a real lab. Not by Earth's standards but she had a few glass vials, a decanter, an alembic, all kinds of powders and elixirs, and of course the crystals to make all of these work.
“So, you say your product is contaminated with salt and organic impurities?” she asked for conversation's sake.
“Yes. I want to take out as much as possible, but have no idea on how to do it.” In fact I had some ideas, just that I had none of the reagents needed, nor the apparatus. What I needed was to see how she would manage to do it to get some inspiration on how to do it too.
“Taking away impurities shall be the easiest part,” she explained. My sample was put in a flask of water heated by a crystal. When the solution started to boil she added her reagents.
“It is common for us to extract poisons and other reagents from beasts and monsters, I know how to deal with this, look.” She added what looked like translucent slime, an ashy powder and... was it blood?
Her sun-ray laugh came out when she saw my face. “Glue, wood ashes and blood. The fresher the better, I always have some in the lab,” she explained with a smug smile. “They tend to react with any organic remnants and will bind them, look.”
At the top of the pot, a froth was coming up, red-brown and ready to be skimmed. This scum had adsorbed most of the organic impurities. “If needed we just renew the operation one or two more times, but this should be enough.” Indeed, once the froth was taken out and the liquid poured in another glass container to cool down, there was only a slightly turbid liquid remaining, like brine. It was in fact brine, just with both salt and niter in.
Now we needed to split apart the common salt from the saltpeter. But also from magnesia, nitrate of lime and also potassium chloride.
“Saltpeter is known to stay in the water more than salt. It is said that though Amidea received all the salt of the world from Arteus, she's ready to cast it away at the first occasion.” She said in a learned tone, like I was one of her young apprentices. Though she was only partly right, crystallisation of salt will occur at lower temperature than saltpeter in boiling water, but niter will crystallize more easily in cold water.
She was going to induce crystallisation at higher temperature to skim through the rest and only then use the remaining ley water to extract niter.
The pot she was using was a large copper bowl with a stirring wheel in it. The heat source was a fire crystal rather than a flame. This was both because fire was a source of explosions in a lab but also because the heat was easier to control with a crystal. This made the process only usable by Chi users though, not the best if I was to scale things up. I wasn't going to have to boil a small pot, but whole pools. Fire crystals would be too costly and I didn't want to rely on Chi users. I'll have to work on a solution using only firewood or coal.
She started to heat the solution until it reached boiling point. Then she carefully let water evaporate to slowly increase the concentration in the solution. She must have sensed one way or another that a threshold was reached because she stopped the stirring and crystals started to appear at the bottom of the bowl. Common salt, but also potassium chloride. With a straw and a suction bulb, she took out all the crystals.
The brine we were left with should contain mostly niter. “Now we just cool it down.” She said with the ease of an expert. This was her domain. She might not understand why I wanted niter, but she knew how to get some.
As the liquid was slowly cooling down she offered me tea and pastries. Our discussion was more about my new status as a free citizen than about the current experiments. She carefully avoided probing too much about the incident with the princess. Either because she knew the truth or because she had been advised not to question me. Or just because she knew that ignorance was bliss in such cases.
As the liquid was cooling down, the powdery white crystal would appear once more but with fewer impurities this time. It wasn't pure niter but close enough.
“You can always repeat the whole process once more to separate even more the simples. They have been concentrated so it will only be easier,” she explained.
She was right, it was going to need multiple iterations to get purer niter. But it was doable and there was room for improvements. For one the apparatus could be more effective, especially if it was going to be a daily gig.
I will also need to find a way to make thermometers. I believe that just knowing the exact temperature will help to control the crystallisation process, just how it is done to produce sugar for example.
Thermometers were just one more thing to add to the to-do list.
I'll still have to reflect on how to make the best large-scale laboratory for the process but at least I had a way to do things.
Now, provided enough shit was coming at me, I could supply a whole army with gunpowder.