Near the end of winter, the merchant arrived with a large quantity of quartz sand and some metal. By that point, I'd finished the two flanking roads around the bay, and had started building the new jetties, though I hadn't made it very far on either of them. After the merchant left, I spent a week getting all the goods shipped back to the city. When goblins would come to drop off stone for the jetties, I'd send them back with a cartload of quartz sand. Once most of it had been shipped back, I travelled back to the city alongside a few of the goblins hauling the remaining goods.

Once back in the city, I noticed that they had resumed using two teams for building new residences, which meant that the new tide pool was likely finished. I checked in with Zeb, and he confirmed that it's up and operational, though the need for it isn't there quite yet. The new artificial tide pool is actually bigger than the old one, and it might be worth considering expanding the old one in the future, just to increase food production.

We've also noticed a few trends related to the tide pools. Despite the existence of much larger fishes, the tide pools really only catch medium and smaller fish. Very occasionally, a larger sea creature gets caught, but those are rare events. My guess is that the larger fish generally hunt further from shore, and so there are fewer there to begin with, then they also leave the tide pool well before it's low enough to capture them. I know they're out there though, thanks to all the fishing that Boggs had done around the island.

After getting all the traded goods settled in their appropriate locations, it was finally time for me to go check the tunnel with tectonic sense. Every time I use it after having not done so in such a long time, I'm forced to contend with headaches, which given I was using my full mana pool for each check resulted in splitting migraines for the first ten days or so. Even after that, I was dealing with regular headaches for some time. Each pulse gave me a bit over 40 feet radius of information, and I would pulse from the bottom of the tunnel every 20 feet or so.

In the time that they've been mining, they've made the tunnel about a mile long, and I ended up doing a few hundred pings in total checking for points of interest. The first few days were quite slow going, on account of the migraines, so in total I spent about twenty-five days doing a tectonic sense survey.

For the amount of effort and pain I went through, we had very little payout. Near the current deepest part of the tunnel was the only location with a ping of any interest. A tiny blip at the very edge of my detection range, about 40 feet down. Due to it being near the current end of the tunnel, I figured the best course of action is to leave a simple marker, and have them keep digging. If it's a major boundary change, it should slope up towards the tunnel as they dig further into the volcano, so digging down to investigate would be a waste. If it isn't a boundary change, then we can always come back to investigate it in the future.

If I hadn't set such strict requirements for the tunnel's construction, the mining team would easily be three times as far as they are currently, but given our trade surplus and a stone-shaping shortage, it seems to be a better use of their time to work on infrastructure in addition to mining. After all, our consumption of metal on a regular basis is actually somewhat low, and my projects are some of the bigger consumers of the stuff.

Even things like gypsum and quartz are things I use more than the general population does, but over time that will likely change. Even now, we've integrated glass into our buildings, which has made it significantly easier to prevent buildup of dirt, dust, and water inside. Most of our cookware is either iron or copper as well. Eventually, we might even consider something like indoor plumbing, though that would require a considerable amount of retrofitting to apply.

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After giving myself two days to recover from the headaches caused by tectonic sense, I decided to check in on how Tiberius was doing. If I'm honest, I didn't quite understand what was going on at first sight. If definitely seemed like he had gotten tired of doing blood mix testing, because there didn't really seem to be much blood around. However, I was wrong, or at least partially wrong.

Despite my initial surprise that he was using a hand-operated wooden centrifuge, it turns out they've been invented for some time in this world, despite the seemingly medieval standards of living across the board. Though their normal use is apparently for making expensive meals for nobility by separating milk. He's been spinning blood and then separating off the layers, which seem pretty normal at first glance to me.

There is a layer of plasma, blood cells, and a thin layer in between which houses everything else. What he's been working on has been using the plasma. It seems that's where the magical effects come from in the blood itself. He even demonstrated to me that only the plasma actually produces any effect when affected by mana. I'm honestly impressed at his application of a centrifuge to do this.

What he's currently working on is determining how long dried plasma hold's the properties before going bad. Which isn't actually a bad idea. If you could make the material last longer than it does in blood, and store it more densely as a solid, then it'd be possible to utilize it for all sorts of uses, including many I figured to be infeasible. If it bears any fruit, I might consider designing a refrigeration system, since storing certain types of magical properties could prove invaluable, and if it drastically increases the shelf life of a highly concentrated form, then it'd be worth it.

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Since we received the extra quartz sand, I've decided to start measuring it out, and getting a proper estimate of how much we need for future housing, versus what I can use for more of those greenhouse salt ponds. Surprisingly, it seems like it doesn't actually matter what season it is, the greenhouse works at about the same pace, which means it actually produces about 12 ponds worth of salt, rather than one. In total, we have about one hundred ponds, which means that the one greenhouse is actually making up about 10% of our total salt production. Adding more greenhouses then could actually provide us with a sizeable tradeable income.

After I did the estimates, I set aside enough quartz glass to get us through the next year, and then still had enough left over to make another greenhouse, so that's what I worked on for the springtime. It was a good project to work on while I waited for the mining team to dig deeper into the mountain.

Another useful aspect of salt trading is that it's a practically unlimited resource for us. Despite the windfall of dwarven currency from trading giant crystals, it also felt like I was trading away our physical resources for temporary gains. By increasing our salt production, we can use that to buy more permanent resources, like quartz glass or metals to improve our conditions.

Good quality quartz glass trades at about five times the cost of salt, which when everything is factored in, means it'd take us about 7 greenhouses to produce enough salt annually to trade for the quartz sand to make another greenhouse. They also use a small amount of iron, so I should really bump that up to 8 greenhouses. Of course, if we find more quartz of our own, then we can accelerate the process. Alternatively, if we end up with a massive surplus of stone-shaping goblins, we can manually extract the silicon dioxide from other rocks, or I could start working on the classifier and separator to mechanically do the processing as well.

I built the second greenhouse next to the first one and connected the water pool underground, so it could be pumped and emptied from the same screw pump. After that, I went back to the miners, given they had a few months more to dig, I was interested to see if there was any change in the slight ping I got before.

I found two things in the extra few hundred feet they dug. First, the previous ping I got does seem to be a new boundary layer of rock, though in the distance they dug, it's only closed half the gap between the bottom of my detection range and the tunnel floor. Close to the new end of the tunnel though, I got a slightly different ping down at about thirty feet, ten feet under the boundary change. This new ping has a higher slope angle, so it could contain some new deposit of some sort. I've decided to help the mining team dig forward for a few weeks so I can get another few pings, and potentially determine if we need to dig down to investigate.