New beginnings

As I came out of the mediation I began to review the memories of my past life to better understand why his life was bleeding into mine. In my past life I had been a great scientist studying the soul and what happens after death. I had been part of the golden generation of scientists and magicians that lead a great renaissance of scientific and magical achievement.

In my past world magic and science had been successfully merged and lead to the creation of a great utopia. Allowing the perfect environment to quietly make scientific breakthroughs. The breakthrough that allowed me to gain worldwide recognition, and   differentiate me from the other members of the golden generation was that I proved the existence of the soul. That all creatures are born with a soul. For a long time, the existence of a soul had been a matter of great contention among people.

In my most ambitious experiment designed to test whether a soul is destroyed or sent somewhere, to be reincarnated, find their judgment, or something of that nature. During the experiment something went horribly wrong and my soul got mixed up in the resulting explosion that caused my death. Because of my experiment soul was able to keep the memories of my past life and remember them in this life. This has some interesting implication but I don’t have the time or resources to explore them.

With my new knowledge I was able to recognize some of the bigger problems faced by humanity surviving in this cavern. The biggest in my opinion is that we have no alert system. We are completely blind to anything beyond our walls. We need an alert system, something that will allow us properly prepare for the monsters when they decide to attack. The monsters always mix up their attacks with faints and fake attacks that cause large amount of stress and fatigue to build up in our troops. “I have a few ideas but I need to a few days to make sure that I don’t jump the gun on such an important decision.” I thought while I rushed off to explore a few of the options.

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In my time of researching, the only viable option seems to be one of the most extreme. The first step would be to create the catalyst needed for the what I will be calling operation foresight. The ideal catalyst would be liquid mana synthesized from high grade monster blood. However, that would be next to impossible for me to obtain. So I need to do this the hard way. There is only one type of mana beast that I can make use of to fulfill my needs the ruby-eyed rat.

The ruby-eyed rat is one of the few monsters that lived naturally in the cavern. They have more use that they do harm so humanity never eradicated them from the cavern. Their eyes can be harvested, and treated in a special method to preserve them into a jewel. The meat can be sold at rock-bottom prices; even if you can’t afford anything else you can often afford rat meat. Ruby-eyed rats need surprisingly little amount of food, so they don’t have too much of an impact farms.

If my math is right and I don’t make many mistakes in the distillation 100 rats should be able to produce 10 drops of semi-pure liquid mana, and 5 drops of pure liquid mana. I need an ounce of pure liquid mana which is about 500 drops. So I will need the blood of 10,000 ruby-eyed rats.

In order to get the blood, I need I asked about working at a rat processing plant. Hunters will bring the rats to the processing plant for cash. The plant will do the dirty work turning the rat in to meat, jewels, and any other usable products they can make with the rat. I found out that the plant processes about 111 rats a day. At that rate it will take about three months to gather the needed blood and with the wages I’ll be able to afford some of the other material need for operation foresight. As for the distillation of the blood, I’ll test into an apprentice alchemist position at the alchemist institute, then I’ll have access to all the glass wear and facilities I need to prepare.