I let Zeb know about my plan to build a temporary bathhouse over by the second artificial tidepool construction site. He gave me a cautionary warning that I should move the crystal somewhere else before springtime, on the off chance we have another major storm this year. I agreed that would be a good idea, so as I worked on the bathhouse, I started thinking about where I would build another bathhouse to make the crystal useful in springtime.

I had a lot of trouble deciding on a spot for the crystal in springtime. The four places I'd prefer to put it, the two valley coasts, the dam, and the harbor, are all at risk or not usable in spring. Ultimately, I couldn't really come up with a good new location for it to move during spring, but I did think of something that I figured might be nice. I recalled that the dwarven capitol had their bathhouse upstream from the waterways in their city. From the sound of things, it made the capitol a nicer place to live, so I spent a day carving out a small pool a hundred feet downstream from the dam, and I'll plan on submerging the crystal there in the spring, and letting the spring stream bring the mana through the city.

It probably won't have a huge impact on things, but considering the plants and animals in the city seemed to respond positively with the existence of the bathhouse, it might help our crop yields as the stream flows down through the valley. If it ends up being very useful, then I'll probably need to make another giant crystal and leave that one in the stream.

That said, the temporary bathhouse in the other valley only took four days to make, and I noticed a rapid increase in the rate that stone was able to be cut from the future tide pool over the following six days. With that done, the winter months are only a few days away, so I'm going to make sure everything is gathered up and moved to the other side of the island to the warehouse for trade, then I'll work on some more infrastructure over there to pass the time while we wait.

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After four days in the city getting the most recent items ready for transport, myself and about fifteen goblins made the two day trip to the other side of the island while hauling goods. Once there, it was another sixteen days before our first visitor arrived. In that time, I built part of a second warehouse for storing trade goods. Ultimately, we're still producing more than we can trade with our one merchant, so we're going to build up a larger and larger stockpile unless we can entice more merchants to the island.

I'd start work on a harbor myself, but honestly it should only come after we've gotten sea walls built in the two valleys near our city. After that, our population will likely be large enough, and our goods output high enough, that building a port will be the next most productive large scale project, and we can then move the secondary crystal to this side of the island alongside a construction team to begin work. Until then, I'll just have to continue building out some of the other infrastructure, like warehouses.

The first visitor was the dwarven merchant, alongside Shasta. In recent years, Shasta's importance as a translator has gone down for interactions like this, as the merchant and I have picked up enough words of each other's languages to be effective at trade without her assistance. The merchant unloaded the goods we traded for last year, and then we began new negotiations for this year.

I negotiated with the merchant for a bunch of items, and requested a second trip to our island this winter at a discounted rate on our goods. We have a significant stockpile of gypsum, salt, and paper that is filling our warehouse, and even if we're selling it at a cheaper rate, it's better than it just sitting and doing nothing. In exchange, we're getting a bunch of new waterproofing supplies to more than replace what we used because of the storm, and then also importing some iron to help supplement what we're getting from salvage. Our iron demand has slowly been climbing alongside our population, as more individuals want steel tools and cookware.

After negotiations with the merchant concluded, Shasta had other things to discuss on behalf of Kao. In the last few years, it had become apparent that the large crystal we gave to Kao, which was installed in the mountains in his territory where the eagles are from, was increasing the productivity of the small communities nearby. Those communities have slowly been growing in population as dwarves migrated during the occasional bad season.

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It wasn't just apparent to Kao though, as other dwarven groups have noticed the increased productivity, and eventually the cat was out of the bag that we provided a giant crystal that was the cause. Kao is keeping as much information from leaking as he can, but it sounds like other dwarven leaders are greedy for their own crystals. The Dwarven King isn't that interested, likely due to already having his own crystal, so we don't need to worry about any sort of grand invasion.

Shasta did warn, however, that we'll probably want to start considering producing the giant crystals to use for negotiations and trade with the other dwarven warlords. We don't need to worry about being invaded directly, but if another war were to occur, other dwarves might join in on the opposing side at the prospect of potential riches being won.

So, after thinking on it for a night, I decided on a potential solution. If Kao will help facilitate, for a fee of course, I'd like to run an auction on his island next year for a large crystal. To be upfront about the situation, I'll also inform the participants that the next auction will be three years after the first one, so they should plan accordingly. For fairness purposes, those who already have a crystal will be excluded from the auction.

Shasta told me that the idea would probably work out as long as we don't have another war in the next ten years or so. Though she wasn't able to make any promises as to Kao's willingness to participate in the ordeal. Since we want the auction to happen next year, rather than negotiating at a later date, I told her what we're willing to pay Kao to facilitate the events, even if we're overpaying.

I told her we'd be willing to give him a second crystal, to be paid a year after the first auction's success, and each following auction we'll give him a 5% cut of any trade goods or currency we receive for the auction. In exchange, it'd be up to him to promote the initial auction to the other dwarven factions, and get his island ready to receive such a retinue, including security to protect against any problems. Ultimately, by having it on his island, it should help prevent espionage and any potential trickery that might occur if the dwarves all travelled to our island for the crystals.

We'll plan on having the auction in the dead middle of winter, on the fifteenth day of the twelfth month. That gives us time to transport the crystal to his island, and time for the dwarven retinues to make their way there safely, and return safely to the mainland. Ultimately, I don't want to disrupt the power symmetry on the mainland, or make any enemies in the process, so I'm going to keep the crystal sizes to 6' and not go much larger. I don't want this to be perceived as any kind of threat to the Dwarven King's power, though propping up Kao in comparison to the other warlords might not be a bad idea. Perhaps the crystal I'll pay him with will be a bit larger, if he accepts.

All this being the case, I'm going to need to grow another crystal this year, so we have it available for the auction. If things don't work out, then we'll just have a third large crystal that we can use ourselves. I was quite hesitant in the past to doing something like this, but if we can negotiate defensive agreements as part of the exchange for these crystals, then it'll help us drastically reduce our risk of war.

If that was the end of our visitors this year, I'd have said that it was very successful, but unfortunately another ship from Elloetta arrived eleven days after the merchant left with Shasta. According to Elora, Elloetta overruled the lowered price negotiation, and challenged us to 'make enemies with the elves if that's what we choose to do'. I'm really not a fan of the way the elves are behaving, but Elora has been useful to us, so I suppose I can view this as payment for her services, though I'm not actually going to think of them favorably.

So, we ended up sending them off with even more trade goods. After the merchant returns near the end of winter, we'll have pretty much emptied our warehouse of goods on this side of the island. The whole process with the elves took a few days, because we had to send a messenger to fetch Elora, then have her calculate the value of what we sent, and write and sign a note attesting to her assessed value of the goods we sent. I had her sign an additional document for ourselves saying that with this the initial trade agreement was fulfilled, and that any additional requests made by Elloetta for goods would be classified as 'extortion' and we could use that document plus the blackmail we had tried to leverage before to cause some real problems for them.