After 37 days of fishing and cutting down trees, I finally reached level 100.
Level: 100
HP: 4369/4369
MP: 2179/2179
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance, Partial Sleep
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands, Pulverize
This time when I reached the cap, I only had the option to evolve, and with that, I only had the same two choices from last time. Ogre, or Lava Demon were the options. We have a couple of ogres in the city, some enterprising fishergoblins, or I suppose, fisherogres who used to be hobgoblins. So, given I haven't got a clue what being a Lava Demon is, I was interested.
It seems like when you first become some species, you usually gain either a magic or trait related to it, and it seems to similarly occur when you reach Apex. So, finding new species could end up as a vital expansion to our economy. It's unlikely, but I'd hate if I missed out on that opportunity.
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I was a little worried before I fell asleep, so I asked if I could stay with Zaka for a few days. I ended up sleeping for 20 hours, and not needing more time to evolve. I was glad that I stayed at Zaka's house, because I grew a foot taller, and also became bulkier. My scales are thicker and larger, and have taken on an obsidian shine. I've also gained three parallel ridges down my back, which also seem to be made of scale.
Level: 0
HP: 4369/4369
MP: 2179/2179
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance, Partial Sleep
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands, Pulverize, Thermal Regulation
Thermal Regulation: Spell. Variable Cost. Allows regulation of internal body temperature in extreme thermal environments, while providing some degree of thermal protection to the body as a whole as well. Cost per second scales exponentially with thermal gradient maintained.
The scales on my back seem to be related to my new magic, Thermal Regulation, which seems to be similar to thermal hands, except it only lets me keep my body temperature regulated as compared to the environment, rather than manipulating something beyond that. The mana cost seems to be similar to what I had to expend for thermal hands.
It's not actually all that useful, as compared to say, just passive heat resistance, but I suppose there could be survival or combat situations where having sudden immunity to either freezing or burning could prove useful.
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With that out of the way, I went back to resume work at the facility. Since I looked entirely different from before, it actually was a little confusing to prove who I was. Which led me to realize a glaring flaw in our security over here. Unlike with a single race of stagnant beings, demons prestige and evolve, meaning that we change appearance. So while our security is still pretty good at preventing unwanted visitors from non-demon races, it'd be fairly easy for a demon to infiltrate security. They'd simply claim they evolved or prestiged, making them look and sound different, and then waltz into wherever it is they aren't supposed to be.
As an extra detriment, any demon at the same prestige with the same traits and magic look like twins, making it even harder to do identification. At the very least, we should probably start giving paper permission to demons leaving the facility to go to the city, which they need to present to return. I'll also probably need to create some form of temporary work badges that we can give to temporary workers who are either hauling materials or doing other work. All that can wait until the walls and security guards are actually in place, but I have a feeling it won't go over well with the workers here.
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I initially wasn't quite sure how I wanted to build out the hydrogen facility, and I was quite hesitant to keep and store large amounts of hydrogen due to the explosion hazard. I also have a much larger problem, which is that I don't have an off switch for production for the method I intend to use. My intent is to use copper doped fluorite to produce the hydrogen gas. However, if I decide to go with that method, I'll have to deal with a continuous production of hydrogen. Even if I keep the actual hydrogen production deep underground, it'll still have some amount of hydrogen it's producing, which would leak into the environment and be a hazard.
So, rather than risking that, I think it'd be better to make a flare stack to burn off the excess hydrogen that we don't use. I do want to do some small scale experiments to determine the behavior of the hydrogen crystals as well, before I settle on a larger industrial scale design, so that's what I'll work on first.
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I started by asking Tiberius to do some more rigorous health studies on the copper fluorite crystals. Over the course of a few days, it seemed like the only hazards involved were the hazards associated with hydrogen gas itself, so I moved on to my next phase of testing. I had a larger crystal grown in the 12-inch apparatus, but stopped part way to give me a 5-inch crystal for testing with.
The main question I was trying to solve was whether I could displace enough air with the hydrogen produced by a crystal that I could skip the bubbling through water step, which let me more easily isolate the gas. So, I made a small chamber out of stone, with a long and thin outlet line, and then placed and sealed the crystal inside.
What I quickly realized, however, was that we weren't actually making hydrogen gas. We were making protons. At first, I thought it was potentially monatomic hydrogen, since the chamber started to rise in temperature quite quickly, which made me think that the hydrogen atoms were forming diatomic hydrogen and releasing heat. While that was also true, we had an even bigger issue.
Since the chamber was made of stone, and filled with air initially, there were a few loud pops, which quickly settled down, followed by a small plasma jet forming out of the exhaust line. Stone and air are reasonably good insulators, and the chamber was sitting on open ground, and the plasma jet was actually crackling with small electrical discharges. In essence the crystal was producing a large amount of positive charge buildup, which was getting ripped from the air at the exhaust as well as internally from the walls of the chamber.
The chamber didn't last much longer either, cracking and falling apart within a few minutes. Inside, the crystal had also formed dozens of cracks throughout itself. Lone protons are the reason acids break materials down, and they cause all sorts of trouble in other environments too. In essence, our previous crystal was somewhat smaller, was less pure, and was never really kept in an environment meant to keep it completely isolated to build up it's own gasses. Even the wooden box with padding that I'd received the previous crystal in had appeared to be shoddily made, but looking back on it, that was probably done on purpose.
The water that I had submerged the previous crystal in had worked as both a thermal and electrical conductor, distributing the heat and electrical buildup across the entire water chamber, preventing this sort of thing from happening. However, thinking about it, that crystal was also not in a pure octahedral shape. Instead, it was thinner and longer with multiple points where it had been cut. My guess, and it is just a guess, is that it had cracked in places like this crystal, and so the owner had smoothed down the cut edges to make the crystal more presentable.
At a certain thickness, quantum tunneling and charge restoration probably reduces the amount of self-degradation that the produced protons cause. I actually hadn't planned on cutting these crystals into plates like the heat crystals, but now, I feel like cutting them into half-inch plates might actually be very beneficial. So, for my next test, I'm going to have an approximately six inch crystal grown, and then cut into half-inch thick plates. I want to try holding the crystals in copper plates, which might help with charge imbalance, since it's a conductor.