With a week of time to give basic training to a repair team, and the mechanics team set up to begin retrofitting the old buildings that were still reliant on wind power, I was free to resume work on my own projects. Unfortunately, since I'll be waiting a while until a construction team can help me excavate the area for the new mana crystal growing area, I needed to find a new project to preoccupy myself with at night. During the day, I'm working on the cableway, but at night, maneuvering the ridgeline to cut trees isn't exactly very safe.

I've completed a small stairway down to the level I want to build this new mana crystal area at, but I actually need the construction team to do quite a bit of excavation for me. First, the final crystal that I want to grow is 16 feet diagonally. Meaning the stairwell is too small to move the crystal out. Either we'll need to widen the stairwell, or we'll need to make a crane and shaft down to the growth room. Either way, the construction team will be busy for a while with the project, and spending all that time myself would be a waste.

So, instead, I've decided to try to using the copper fluorite to make lightstone from the base rock that we normally hand process. I've already seen that I can acid wash our processed lightstone, and it seems to leave us with a less reactive version, though very little material got removed in that process. By comparison, even the red-tinged rock from up the mountain is still not majority lightstone, and that lost material would have to go somewhere.

The previous lightstone acid treatment had quite a bit of water compared to the amount of lightstone, and there was a small amount of fine sediment like powder at the bottom of the container, though I couldn't tell if it was just loose particles of lightstone, or an actual chemical product due to the acid. So, to start out, I plan on testing three different things: the sediment-like leftovers from lightstone, the effect of our acid on the red-tinged precursor stone, and the effect of our acid on the more common basalt-like stones that we can still get a little lightstone out of.

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Since Zeb wants more heads up, I decided that I should try to schedule the construction of pylons for the cableway sometime in early fall, about half of a year from now. So, I made a trip to the city to make a request to Zeb and to hire some demons for hauling all the trees I've been cutting to make way for the cableway. Zeb appreciated the heads up and said he'd schedule two teams for me then, since a portion of it takes place above the snow line.

Since I was hiring new demons anyway through the city hall, I took the time to check in with the demons who I'd left heat plates with, to see if any had come up with any useful contraptions. Most had ended up with very mundane uses that were honestly more dangerous than they were helpful. Two had put the heat plate under their bedding with some rocks around it so it would be warm at night, which sounds comfortable initially, until you think about the fact it's using ambient mana, and the second I bring a large crystal back to town their bed will probably catch fire.

Another three told me they thought they could use it to keep their food warm all day while they worked through different contraptions, and then they could come home to hot food only to find the food that some food dried out to the point of inedibility, and others rotted. All three gave up on that idea. Two of them cleverly worked together and managed to make something resembling a magical oven for cooking. I purposefully had only used the smallest plates that weren't quite ambiently hot enough to burn most things. However, by putting two plates on either side of an enclosed space, they could get the temperature inside up to a hot enough temperature to cook foods.

I marked that one as a success and told them I'd like to pay them to implement their idea in the various kitchens around the city. While I don't want there to be too many mana draining plates about, the ovens are actually quite manageable in size, and if built well, have a fairly good efficiency. Plus, it would severely reduce the amount of wood we're consuming for cooking, which would drastically reduce our land demand for sustainability.

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The remaining five acted cagey initially, but eventually revealed that they had built a secret bath area since they had missed the old public bathhouse with it's warm water. They did mention, however, that this one didn't feel nearly as good, and while it did clean them, they never felt rejuvenated afterwards. Considering the heat plates probably drained all the mana from the water, that was about the opposite of how the mana crystal resulted in the water feeling warm.

So, while it would relax the muscle somewhat, it didn't actually replenish and overcharge their mana, so it didn't quite feel the same. While they had enjoyed the hot water, they didn't really consider it that much of a success. In fact, two of the five stopped even using it before I came asking questions. The others didn't seem too upset that I wanted to take the plates back either, so I suppose it could be considered a failure.

Ultimately, I paid the two who came up with the oven idea a handsome sum of money. Specifically, I paid them enough money to cover basic living expenses for three years each. I then tinkered with their design for a day to add some features that would be helpful. First off, I added in two removable metal racks that can be cooked on and cleaned. Then I designed it to allow the heat plates to be locked in place or removed with a handle for cleaning.

Most of the oven is made of insulating stone, so I'll pass the idea on to Zeb and perhaps the mechanics team or someone else will get around to retrofitting the kitchens in the near future. I also made casts for the metal racks for our casting area to produce them. When I get a large mana crystal made again, I'll probably need to have the plates removed from the city temporarily, and we'll probably need to redesign the ovens for safety reasons.

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I worked on the cableway and the lightstone research for a few weeks until I was in the second month of the year, and I'd had some interesting results worth pursuing further. The sediment like leftovers seemed to be a clay like material, though it also still had some fine particles of lightstone embedded in it. Using the darkstone source was practically impossible for the purposes of getting lightstone with this method, as the majority of the stone dissolved away, and what was left was a fine sand of various stones.

I even attempted stoneshaping that sand back into a solid object to dissolve it again, but ultimately, too much material was left over or precipitated out again that I couldn't really use it for lightstone manufacturing. Our reddish stone, however, showed some promise, though the process was somewhat convoluted and needed a lot of water, and produced a lot of waste water.

I found that if I cut the reddish stone into plates itself, then submerged it I could get it to react at a decent rate. To make it manageable however, I had to finetune quite a few different features. First, I needed to manage the acidity, which for this project meant adjusting the total water amount to the copper fluorite plate size. Then, I needed to adjust the total amount of the reddish stone to water, as well as the duration the stone spent in a single bath.

If I put too little stone in the water, it'd break down too much, and if I put too much stone in, it wouldn't dissolve enough of it at once, though too little was far worse than too much. If I let it run for too long, the plates would break apart as well, and that mess was very difficult to clean, since the plates would become so brittle, they'd break into small parts and mix with any sediment that formed along the container bottom.

However, by keeping a constant ratio and duration, what I found I could do was acid bathe the rock for a period of time, remove the enriched but more brittle plates out, then reform them into new solid plates. By repeating that cycle five times, I'd be left with fairly pure acid washed lightstone. Unfortunately, all that water ended up being highly acidic and full of dissolved minerals.

I wondered if the precipitate would be useful for anything if I boiled away the remaining water. I quickly realized that it was composed of far too many elements in too many different forms to have an easy use for. It might be possible to come up with a multi-stage process to recover it, but I'm not planning on doing that any time soon.

Ultimately, the speed that stoneshaping can reform a solid plate from a partially acid etched one is at least ten times as fast as I can manually remove lightstone, and is probably a hundred times as fast for someone without practice at it. Meaning that this process would allow us to make very pure lightstone much faster than previously, as long as I could design a facility to properly handle such a task. Of course, the downside to any such facility is that it'll require more stoneshaping demons, which is still something we're lacking.