The first four months back at the cave have been pretty standard work. I worked on growing the crystal after checking everything was intact from winter. Zeb worked on building the path out further, while keeping up with my charcoal demands. Zaka visited periodically, and left with 7 new goblins. The work has gotten so repetitive that if this crystal can't survive the surface, I'm done with it. I'm already regretting not being done with it at the 4 foot crystal. Even including the crystal bubbles that I've periodically been finding in the exploratory tunnel, I've had to start using a larger size of crystal for melting, because I've exhausted all my smallest sizes. With all the extra bubbles of crystals I've added though, I have so many of the larger sizes, it's less of a concern than it used to be.
Zeb's path building has gotten to a zig-zag area last month, so he won't be needing much stone from me for a while, and he can really get the path going. At the current rate of construction, I don't think the cart path down the mountain will be done for at least another year, but given how strong Kaga is, I'll have to ask Zaka to bring him along on the last visit of the year. I should have the crystal grown by then. If it can survive outside on it's own, I'll encase it in unreactive stone, and we'll have to have all of us try to assist Kaga in moving it down the hill through the sections that don't have path made.
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It's been three and a half more months, and the crystal is about where I want it, and I want to make sure that I have enough time to properly test it on the surface, so I'm going to call it here. I can't imagine waiting another year to make it just a little bigger. If that ends up being the problem, then history can laugh on me for being so close and stopping.
The first observation I make is that it's, well, heavy. Very heavy. We'll need some kind of sled for it to go off-roading. Even Kaga can't carry something like this. Heck, it took both Zeb and I to get it up the cave on a cart, and we had to use stone shaping to take breaks frequently. That said, I made the executive decision to move it directly into the vacuum chamber right away, rather than attempting any testing on it beforehand.
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The crystal has now survived ten days on the surface. I'm fairly confident that this one is stable. Zeb and I were awoken again tonight by a lizard making a fuss outside the cave. Considering winter is just around the corner, I'm not that surprised, and we quickly dealt with it. While I'm on the subject, the crystal seems to crackle at night time. It's fairly subtle, but I can hear a faint noise coming from the chamber, and I can feel the extra mana leaking into the air at that time. During the day, we get more mana than we do at night, which leads me to believe it's coming from the suns. I wonder if the crystal has such high capacitance for mana that at night it's literally discharging directly into the air?
Hopefully a few inches of stone encasing it will help prevent any of us from damage from touching such a heavily charged crystal. The alternative is death, I'm almost certain of that. Even at full mana I'm pretty sure touching this thing would instantly kill any living creature.
During the day, Zeb and I have been working on the path down, trying to get it as far as we can in the remaining days. The previous zig-zag section is now finished, and there is another straightaway that we've had to dig an intermediate quarry to allow us to work effectively. Overall, if the goblins have gotten to the zig-zag section I told them to stop at, then we're probably about halfway done with the path. The remaining half has three more zig-zag sections, which are going to be a concern when it comes to moving the crystal down the mountain, but I hope we can handle it.
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Tomorrow is when Zaka, Kaga, and the other goblins will come to help us move the crystal down to the village. I've spent the last few days building carts and the sled we'll use, and getting them all to their necessary locations. We had another lizard guest last night, which we quickly dispatched. I'm glad in the last few years that we haven't had any of them break into the cave, although solid stone is a challenge for any beast to break through if it isn't determined enough to do so. After nightfall, I started remotely stone shaping a stone shell around the crystal until the crackling stopped, and then I doubled the thickness, for good measure. Tomorrow, I'll raise it out of the vacuum chamber for transport.
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We decided to wait until the next morning to take the crystal down to the village, to give us as much daylight as possible, which ended up being a good idea, because by the time we made it back down to the village, the sun was setting. The carts were invaluable, and honestly, if the path was completed, we'd have made it in two hours or so. Unfortunately, moving the crystal on a sled, through a forest, in mountainous terrain, was very slow. Once we finally made it back, we moved the crystal to the pavilion area, and I stayed up until late putting a wall around it, so no one accidentally damaged it, or worse...
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The past five days, I've been building a facility to properly house the crystal. In short, its a bathhouse. The idea will be a large central tank where the crystal will be lowered. That will have stone tubes with propellers to mix water through baths, which will be some degree of wood infused water. Then to recharge your mana, you can just go and soak in the baths for a while. The propellers will all be connected mechanically, and I'll hook that up to a waterwheel on the stream. I'll need Kaga's help to build the waterwheel and the initial shafts for transferring power, since wood is lighter than stone, it should reduce power loss within those segments. Ultimately, the water wheel will have a low power output due to the stream's overall flow rate, but it's better than nothing for automatic mixing of water in the baths.
There will be four baths in the design. Two small baths, which should have higher mana recharge rate due to mixing more quickly, a larger bath, which should be able to have a few people in it. The fourth bath will be for cleaning off before you get in the other baths, and won't actually mix with the crystal at all, to hopefully prevent needing to clean the crystal chamber often.
Once I get the mechanics all set up, and the wood infused water made, the facility should be ready to go.
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Six more days, and we've gotten everything set up, the only thing left to do is lower the crystal into the chamber for it, and unsheathe it. For safety reasons, we're using diluted wood water. Even then, there is a concern about internal arcing, but I'll have to deal with that when it comes to it. The distance to the baths is far enough that I think it'll just arc within the water, and not all the way to the bath. I'll be the one to test it first though, just in case.
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With some help, we got the crystal into position and, using stone shaping, I removed the sheath I had placed around it. The first thing that happened was a lot of arcing within the water. It reminded me a lot of a tesla coil, where it arcs out and dissipates after a certain distance. After a short while though, the arcing slowed down, although it didn't fully stop.
The next test was to use the bath, which I was a little nervous about, since I was missing mana. I was pleasantly surprised for two reasons. First, the water was warm, which I'm assuming was thanks to the arcing, but second, it warmed me up. How it warmed me reminded me of when I would sleep on the crystal pile as an imp, and I imagine that it's working on a similar principle. My mana also regenerated about twenty times faster than it would have in the air, but I did have most of my body submerged. If I was less submerged, I'm sure my mana wouldn't regenerate quite as fast.
After I showed it was safe, some of the other goblins gave it a shot, and they all seemed to enjoy it. Apparently a few of the other goblins in town have started to gain access to magic of their own, so it won't just be a handful of us who find it useful. That said, it'd be relaxing even if you didn't need to regenerate mana, so I'm sure it'll become quite the popular location in town; I mean, it's practically an artificial hot spring. It hopefully will help speed up any mana related work that needs done in the town as well.