Working with the construction team to get the new mana crystal growth lab constructed was actually been somewhat difficult. Basically, because I wanted to keep the mana crystal growth process relatively secret, I could only have them help with the general layout of the room, while I would end up needing to wait to build the actual apparatuses myself, though it still saved me significant time over trying to make the whole lab myself due to the sheer size of the project.

Long term, I want to relocate all parts of the mana crystal growth process down to this area, meaning I need quite a lot of space cleared out. Specifically, I need a multi-layered room where I can house all the crystal growth apparatuses that I want. Some of the smaller ones are easy enough to fit on one floor in a corner, but others, like the apparatuses for the 8-foot, and the planned 12 and 16-foot crystal, take a significant amount of space, and have to breach between floors.

Add on to that the fact that I need a place to store the excess crystal slag, and we had our work cut out for us. Over time, we'll deplete our crystal slag supplies, but if we find a large deposit of mana crystals and were using all our apparatuses at the same time, we'd be producing far more slag than argon to consume it, so we still need to have the extra storage.

I also settled on how we'd get a 16-foot tall octahedral crystal out of here. I've made a request to Zeb for a construction team in a year or two to come back and dig a vertical shaft 20 feet in diameter from the surface down to the center of the room, near where I'll situate the largest growth chamber. We're exceptionally far underground here, and that's on purpose to limit mana flow. Digging this shaft will interfere with the reason we built so deep, but I have a plan for it.

I want to dig two ladder shafts on either side of the main shaft opening to periphery floors. Every 15 feet, we'll place a 5 feet thick floor comprised of two halves and a mechanical system to retract the floor into the walls, opening a layer of the pit. We're pretty much out of quartz crystals, and haven't yet found a new supply of them so we can't use them to insulate the pit, but what we can do instead is surround each section of the pit with our Zinc fluorite lighting to attempt to use up as much of the mana as we can, similar to the heat fluorite being used for the air supply underground. After all, even in the cave I still had some mana regen, so it probably doesn't need to be perfect.

Ultimately, we'll put a crane above the pit, and that'll be how we lift the massive crystal out from underground when it's done. We'll need some kind of mechanical system to even move such a large crystal away from this facility and to it's final location, so I'm going to start planning that out now, so that I can let Zeb know in advance.

For now though, I'll wait until winter to start building the new apparatuses. The construction team just barely finished before fall with excavating the lab space, and I need to turn my attention to our cableway construction next, since I'll have two teams to direct for that project.

----------------------------------------

At the end of fall, the cableway still wasn't up and running, so I had to ask Zeb for another round of construction on it, which he'll send during next spring, but it will delay the lightstone facility's construction as a result. Basically, the problem came down to the logistics of recharging mana. The further we got to the middle of the path up the mountain, the longer we'd have to wait to recharge our mana to resume construction, since after a while the time it would take to passively recharge mana was faster than the time it would take to walk all the way back to a recharging area at either the lab or the cave.

So, ultimately, we only finished about two-thirds of the pylons, with the remaining third being in the center. It will probably take as long to finish the last third as the first two-thirds took, if not longer. At this point, I'm starting to get a bit nervous about having the cableway done before the mana crystal in the cave is ready for transport down to the new area. I estimate that we'll have it grown to 8 feet in size by sometime next fall.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

At that point, I plan on setting it up temporarily to get the rest of the dwarves that are marooned here home over the winter before growing it again. Come springtime I'll let them know that is my plan, so they can get a ship ready. I won't force them to leave, but I will let them know that they'll only have one season to get back, otherwise they'll need to wait another 6 or 7 years before they'll be able to return.

----------------------------------------

Over winter, I started work on the 12-foot crystal growth chamber, and while I didn't quite finish it, I'm getting close to completion. Unlike the previous chambers, this one is designed to be opened from the side for both adding and removing the crystal. However, to maintain structural integrity, that essentially means I have to stone shape the side off.

The change in design was largely the reason it took me so long to work on, as I had to constantly retest how well it held up to the eventual vacuum in the chamber. As for moving the crystal around, given how large it'll be, I'm thankful I've started doing so much work with the cableway so I should be able to make temporary hoists for moving it using metal cables.

As spring approached, I went back to the city to take a little bit of time exploring to see how things are coming along before I let the dwarves know that they'll be able to return home. It's actually quite interesting exploring the city properly. On a fairly regular basis, I would visit and go to the central ring to handle administrative tasks, but I hadn't really explored around all that much, other than checking on particular portions of the city, like the dwarven refugee area.

Honestly though, walking around the city, it all really seems the same, like block housing in suburbs. There is the same general blueprint stamped over and over of apartment style buildings facing a central road. Periodically, there will be some other building, whether it's a public outhouse connected to a sewer, or a workshop for clothing. There are now three markets around the city as well, which I found to be quite interesting.

I wasn't sure what to expect, but it seems like the original market facing the ocean has completely become a fish market. One of the markets has finished goods stalls, ranging from tools and cooking implements to clothing and accessories. The last market has non-raw fish food products. That includes, interestingly enough, fish oil for frying, but also breads, grains, and even Bargas meat. They also have a handful of stalls selling fried-on-demand dishes, which I thought was pretty neat.

Honestly, I'm not sure if it's because the markets were just designed later, or if it's because they were likely influenced somewhat by the dwarves, but they are far more fun and interesting than the drab layout of the rest of the city. That said, the drab layout of the rest of the city allows us to build out housing much faster than if we tried to make each building unique. Even with design touchups going on by the architecture team, it doesn't fully suppress the feeling that you're walking through cookie-cutter areas.

I chatted with Zaka on one of the evenings to get a feel for our total population now, and he said that, including our two outlying villages and my facility, we just crossed over having 5,000 residents. After some discussion, it became quite clear that we're ultimately rate limited in growth due to Zaka being the only demon we have who can summon imps. Given my prior theories on that, I decided to take a day to check around at the two other villages, to see if any of the demons there had gained the ability to summon imps, and none of them had the ability.

If we planned on growing our population faster, we'll either need to start experimenting with the process that Zaka's been doing to summon imps, to see if we can establish a more efficient system, or we'll need to start experimenting with existing goblins to try and induce them to develop the ability to summon imps. Honestly, we should probably do both, since having a single point of failure for summoning new population is one of our most glaring weaknesses right now.

However, I won't be able to work on either of those projects for a little while, since I have a backlog of higher priority projects to work on first. While having a higher population is nice for a variety of reasons, it's also less necessary now than it was five years ago, before I figured out the magically powered stirling engines. Magical machines can substitute for some amount of raw workforce power for a large amount of daily tasks. When demand for labor outstrips population growth, this is the result though, machines are made to replace people.