Character Information - Who is who?
Because I have created quite a variety of characters, I will now create little cheat sheets before a chapter for the characters who will appear in the chapter, but not for those who haven't. Please open the spoiler if you need some reminders. (Be careful, it can be a spoiler for the chapter!)
Alexander K. Leonandra (Wolf-kin)
* Transmigrated from the Earth and the MC
* The fourth child of the current Leonandra household
* Golden eyes
* Snow-white fur and hair color
Aurum (Swan-kin)
* Son of Salyna Leonandra
* Specialized in accounting, economy, and finance
* Blue eyes
* Snow-white feather and hair color
Important note
I will only write down the needed chemicals, how to procure them in Alexander's environment, and what he does with them.
Please, by god all mighty, don't even attempt to try it! Most of the stuff described here is highly toxic and/or can conclude in a volatile exothermic reaction (explosion)!
The same goes for the processes, as most are very sensitive, and for Alexander's literal planning in bathtub cooking, he would be shitcanned.
Also, note that I have not included the reaction equations, how to calculate the weight, the correct apparatuses, etc., as it would become more of a technical manual than a fun fantasy novel.
Furthermore, I decided to have a bit more creative freedom in terms of some technical aspects, so everyone with a little knowledge is free to point things out ;)
...
Alexander sat in his office later that day after the meeting. He needed a lot of time to write everything down as what he proposed to create was a spontaneous and barely developed idea that he thought would be easy to make. After 20 minutes of going through everything, he realized something important, 'I fucked up.'
He gnashed his teeth as he couldn't lay down the common sense he had cultivated for years on Earth. It became a headache when he realized that he couldn't call a distributor and ask them to deliver everything to him, and there were no supply chains for the chemicals he would need, 'Ok, where the fuck do I need to start?!'
He canceled the training with Lorient/Sarah and the lesson with Anastasia, as he needed at first to organize everything he needed for papermaking. Not only where he would get the trees since their estate had a large enough forest or the apparatus since they had multiple blacksmiths working for them and maybe one or two glassmakers.
The chemicals were the problem. Alexander had no way to procure them, and the literature/documents in front of him showed it, 'Fuck Saly, she was so giddy as she shot down everything.'
After the meeting concluded, he visited Salyna, and as he listed what he needed in concrete terms, he was denied almost everything. For every chemical he needed, he would need to make them himself, but she was at least nice enough to give him some books and documents on what the region and markets had to offer regarding chemicals.
At least, through his [Reading] skill, he could go through them fast, and with his old reading techniques where he jumped over every other word, he was quickly done. He laid down the last book and sighed, "Huuuuh, I am so fucked..."
'I need to start at zero. There are no suppliers for what I need.'
Papermaking in itself was easy. Alexander learned partially about paper making when he volunteered in schools and did fun chemistry projects with the students. When researching fun experiments, he would also look up the industrialized processes as he would give out materials and work through the theory of it. He didn't emulate the industrialized process for obvious reasons and chose to make paper out of old newspapers with the kids.
He could give up and choose another product, but he was stubborn, and as he remembered Salyna's smug smile, which he wanted to shove up her ass, 'Ok, where do I start then? Let's think about which process to choose.'
This was his only saving grace. His memory was incredible, and thinking about something from long ago, even from something from his previous life, felt clearer. It felt like he switched from a Pentium III to an I9 PC, 'Come on, dear brain, remember all the shit you researched for the kids!'
He concentrated and started to write everything he remembered down. After an hour, he found the only process which would fit everything he wanted to do.
What he absolutely wanted to avoid was doing everything by himself. Besides the products available to him, he also looked at the process itself. Initially, it would be fine to be a one-man factory, but he wanted later to get some workers who could work by themselves, and him only occasionally showing up and inspecting them. That's it.
Alexander chose a chemical process, which was much easier than the alternative: Mechanical ones. They were much more complicated since they used relatively complex machinery. He would need machines that needed much time to be built and tested for the mechanical process. Not like he could call a company and buy it.
He could, later on, change the process, but for a start, he would need to consider the local chemical production and what he could procure. They weren't a hot commodity; thus, barely any supply was available, not to mention the meager amount of variety. However, what he decided on would generate an excellent product even though the byproduct was horrible, 'The smell will be terrible...'
He shrugged inwardly, hoping to learn some spells from Green in the coming days, as she would visit tomorrow and bring more materials for him to learn. Otherwise, he would need to find certain beast-kin with very unique [Mystic Skills] or another way to avoid certain risks and negatives like the byproduct.
He could already have the solutions if the world had been a little more STEM-oriented, but this was not the case. Most of the world, or at least where he lived, concentrated on skills, magic, and a bit of alchemy, so in terms of STEM, they were far behind. Another problem was that he only had the books and documents given by Salyna, but if he wanted a better picture of the situation, he would first go out and see everything for himself. In his opinion, discarding treasures as trash was easy if one was unfamiliar with the potential value.
Alexander sighed and stretched while his ball of ink was writing everything down perfectly, 'Damn it, this will be a loooooong day.'
While doing some stretching, he thought that this situation he was now in had some positives, though. If he made most of the things in-house, he could monopolize it for much longer than if he just bought everything. Earlier or later, the process would become known, and other products would hit the market, but if everything was made inside the estate and held as hidden as possible, he could hike up the price and milk his buyers, who would mostly be rich either way. When the process was known, he would already have other products ready to hit the market.
He returned to the task at hand and started organizing the next step: Chemicals, 'So, what do I need exactly.'
Alexander needed five main ingredients to start making paper:
* Sodium Carbonate (Na_2CO_3)
* Lye (NaOH)
* Chlorine gas (Cl_2)
* Sodium Sulfide (Na_2S)
* Sodium Sulfate (Na_2SO_4)
Sodium carbonate was available as it was used for glassmaking and was really cheap, so there was one down. It was called, luckily, almost the same as on Earth: Washing ash, so he found it rather quickly as he saw what it was used for in the records.
Two more of them were basic to make: chlorine and lye. For this, Alexander needed to electrolyze saltwater. He already knew how to do it, but this was for later, as he already had an apparatus in mind.
Then there was sodium sulfite, which he could produce easily with dirt-cheap mountain salt and sulfuric acid. It was too bad that he needed the acid, which wasn't cheap and very hard to come by as it was mostly sold in the djinn territory to the southeast on some islands, so he needed to make it himself as he was on a time crunch. Later, he would buy it in bulk, so he wouldn't need to go through the hassle of creating it first, even if the process would run the danger of getting exposed much faster.
This was his MO: Keep it as simple as possible. Alexander had many other ideas, and holding onto some invention and keeping it a secret was nonsensical in his mind for multiple reasons.
One, he could fasten the process of science in the world or, specifically, his territory if he showed what methods were possible without magic and alchemy, thus creating a positive feedback loop to discover other inventions.
Second, since he was a noble, the territory in which the inventions were made would become a hub for all the talents who were unlucky in their legacy but nonetheless showed determination in their pursuit of knowledge and thus would flock to them and create a gigantic and novel industry. Which would also mean that they would be flooded with taxes.
Alexander shook himself awake from all the future plans and went back to his parchments, 'One step at a time.'
He returned to his documents and wrote down the thing he needed to make the acid in the first place: Sulfur. It was relatively easy to get and pretty cheap. It was used as a disinfectant for the poor who could not afford a healer to remedy their wounds. Funny enough, it was also used as a disinfectant on Earth going as far as thousands of years ago.
Alexander would only need to burn it and catch the sulfur dioxide (SO_2) gas inside the water. It would become sulfurous acid (H_2SO_3). Sadly, pumping more gas into the sulfurous acid solution wouldn't make it sulfuric acid (H_2SO_4), as sulfur dioxide was already in an equilibrium reaction with water. Thus, if the air were pumped in, it would just escape.
It was possible to do it, but only with UV light, pure oxygen, and a slight temperature increase, but this would be too much of a hassle if he wanted the workers to do it later. Alexander wanted to prepackage everything they needed so they could throw it all together like a cake-ready mix.
Alexander closed his eyes and thought about what to do to create sulfuric acid out of sulfurous acid, 'I need a potent oxidizing agent, fuck.'
He couldn't think of anything he read in the documents Salyna gave him, so his only solution was to go a step back and create a chemical to make another chemical to make a chemical, so he could make paper. Alexander now knew why he hated chemistry and didn't choose that career path.
After an hour of going through every geography book he had ever read at the estate, he decided that he would need to produce potassium permanganate (KMnO_4). Not because it was so good or anything, no, there were much better reagants to get for his papermaking business, like hydrogen peroxide, but for this, he needed to make sulfuric acid first.
At this moment, he thanked his old and great chemistry teacher, who really liked to teach the practical uses of chemistry and history. Otherwise, he would've needed to figure out where to begin in the first place, 'Though he smelled very much like marijuana... well, I am not judging.'
With the combination of indirect descriptions in the literature he read and the documents Salyna provided, he had decided on a specific ore, which was very cheap since nobody knew what to do with it. Pyrolusite (MnO_2).
Pyrolusite was only used to clean glass in restaurants and other establishments. It was only unearthed on the side, and they actually had some of it at the estate.
But to create the potassium permanganate, he needed to get potassium hydroxide, and for this, he needed a specific salt, which was luckily available for cheap, potassium chloride (KCl). Creating it was the same as making lye, so there were no problems.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Now with the potassium permanganate, it was possible to produce sulfuric acid and, thus, sodium sulfate. From this, it was easy to produce sodium sulfide as sodium sulfate only needed to be reacted with coal under heat.
With this plan, he was, at least theoretically, ready to start making the chemicals for papermaking.
Alexander looked proudly at his little schematic plan and the notes beside it.
*Notes not included
[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kiruschka/kiruschka.github.io/main/Chapter_34_Papermaking.svg]
Now he was done with noting down all the that was needed in the chemicals department and what to do with them, but now came the next problem: How to set something up that not only he could work with.
It was fine to help here or there, but creating all the chemicals in batches would make it a full-time job for him. After the ordeal of getting his bloodline under control, he wasn't too hot on working as a factory worker, so he would need to create easy-to-use apparatuses.
The apparatus for the electrolysis came first, and it was pretty easy to make. Get something akin to a bathtub, two giant sticks, copper, and zinc. Done.
If he wanted to make the chloralkali process as efficient as possible, he also needed a diaphragm, a semi-permeable gate between the two metal sticks made out of asbestos, so as the electrolysis process was going on, chloride ions couldn't react with other ions and create undesirable molecules.
This brought him to a dilemma he didn't even consider: Was asbestos as toxic to him now as to a human from Earth? He was much more physically robust than ever in his previous life, but would it also mean he was more resistant to certain poisons or substances? He noted it down to be careful as he would never know if it was actually the other way around.
Now came the most crucial issue: voltage. How would Alexander create energy without doing it himself by utilizing magic or alchemy? He leaned back in his chair and rubbed a place between his brows, 'I think I chose the wrong product.'
He didn't think the product was terrible, but all that went into creating it was a lot. All the chemicals and, as someone from Earth with all the products readily available, he needed here to start from zero. Worst case, this whole project would all be trial and error. Even with skills, it would take a lot of work to get it right if luck wasn't on his side.
Alexander sighed, 'Enough whining, so which method should I choose to create voltage?'
Again, he had different possibilities and new ones he found very interesting but wanted to try later after gaining more knowledge about them since there were better ways to die than blowing himself up with an unstable and highly reactive mana stone.
'Even if I wanted to experiment with some mana stones, nobody would give me any.'
As the name suggested, it was a stone with a very high internal mana density found in mana mines. His mother made it clear to everyone in the estate that it was prohibited to give any to him, no matter the reason. She wanted to get him to his tenth birthday before he tried to blow himself up. At that point, she hoped that he had a strong enough body to survive his future experiments.
There were also mana gems, which were just gems with high mana density, and other natural resources with the prefix mana, which signaled that they were structurally able to hold mana in them as they absorbed it over time.
Mana cores were also a thing. Monsters usually had one, and this was how they differentiated between sapient races like humans, beast-kin, dwarves, draugr, and so on. The core was fundamentally the monster's heart and had different uses, as the cores also had diverse structures. Again, nobody was allowed to even let him hold a mana core.
The same applied to all other natural resources: Mana trees, mana fluids like very small and isolated lakes, mana metals, etc.
Alexander decided on something less fun: a battery. He wanted to make a galvanic cell through electrolyzing. Not much was needed: Thin plates of zinc and copper, salt water, and some old fabric. This, he needed to stack on each other, and he could create the old-fashioned voltaic pile.
There were obviously better options, but this one was the easiest. Alexander only needed to instruct some people to work on this and make safety features, and he would be done.
'So, what's next? Right, wood, the most important thing!'
He tried to remember the estate's layout while looking into Salyna's documents to see if they had enough of it here.
[https://github.com/kiruschka/kiruschka.github.io/blob/main/Chapter_34_Leonandra_Estate.jpg?raw=true]
He raised an eyebrow as he found all the information needed, 'At least we have more wood than we want.'
The Leonandra territory had a sweltering and dry climate. Thus, wood was only used sparingly since clay, mud, etc., was much more cost-effective, faster to build, and more pleasant to live in. So it was much more used than stone, bricks, wood, or whatever.
Funny enough, trees grew like weeds without any problems. Alexander guessed that mana somehow influenced this phenomenon. Also, he had no idea about civil engineering or agriculture/forestry except for some superficial concepts. Hence, everything he thought about was more or less pure speculation.
This is where his otherworldly knowledge stopped, and he would need to catch up heavily, but nonetheless, he could make educated guesses about certain things. Like, the material used for building houses was also heavily used in cities. It thus was built more horizontally rather than vertically, except for notable buildings, which needed other materials for better stability.
According to the documents he was reading, Wolfsteeth, for example, thus had no actual center but had multiple ones, as travel through the giant city would become a hassle, 'I need to become older much faster and see everything for myself. Only extrapolating information from written documents is such a hassle.'
Alexander ignored that he would need to wait to go out into the world and noted everything he would need and what to do since this whole situation suited his plans for once, as he needed a fundamental material, wooden chips, to make paper.
He would put them in a basic apparatus, a pressure vessel with a metal net in-between, and cook them with all the chemicals together under certain conditions.
Alexander wrote everything down and had no idea which size he should instruct the blacksmiths to make for him, 'A little bigger should be ok, I guess?'
The apparatuses would be handmade for him by the estate's blacksmiths, so he could splurge a little and didn't need to first make some small prototypes to test them first.
With all this, he could make paper, but he wanted to add a bit of quality to it, and for this, he needed to bleach it and get the lignin out. Afterward, he could wash it and bleach it multiple times. For this, he also required numerous containers, but nothing too complicated.
Alexander sat and drew for hours more apparatus and described everyone in detail from which material they would be needed to be made and in what dimensions.
After he was done, he needed to determine how to specify the quality and quantity of the chemicals. Quality, if it was the chemical and quantity, how much there was.
Testing PH was impossible. He didn't have any Litmus and couldn't build a PH-meter. So this flew out of the window.
He also couldn't test if the chemicals made were what they were. He required other chemicals and apparatuses, like a burette for titrations, to test them. So, this was gone too.
Only the physical observations were left, like color, smell, etc. If his old teachers heard about how he conducted himself here, one would applaud him, but the others would probably smack him till he stopped, as it was hazardous to test everything in such a way.
But a new problem appeared absolutely unknown to his previous life: Mana density and how it affected the chemicals and/or material properties. He needed to ignore this, too, since he had no clue how it could affect anything and only built contingencies like having a healer around while he tried to make paper for the first time.
The preparations to prepare the chemicals and apparatuses to make paper was ready, and he went to the swan-kin youth, which he saw at the meeting, with this list. It was already evening, though, and he hoped he didn't sleep.
Salyna told him that her son, Aurum, would tend to his every need this month when he made the paper. She had a mischievous grin as she told him that, which meant to Alexander that she was up to something, 'Not like I care as long as he does his job.'
He decided to deliver it himself since he wanted to walk a little. The warm air hit his face as he went out. It was a much warmer climate than the other countries he lived in on Earth, and he loved it. So, while walking, he was enjoying himself.
Outside, he walked to another manor where Aurum lived. The estate was gigantic as it had multiple mansions where all of them lived but differed strongly. The villa in which Alexander, Narsiz, and their personal servants lived was small compared to others but beautiful.
He looked farther away and found himself a little spoiled, as he considered this small. The apartment he lived in with his siblings was tiny compared to the room he used as an office.
'Well, I live together with Narsiz and my personal servants in there, but it made it not less large.'
It was also evident that it was built in mind that someone would have much more servants. So, most of the time, general servants came over to clean, cook, and so on since both boys had barely any compared to what was needed.
Janina, Lorient, and Sarah lived together in his mother's mansion. Lorient for apparent reasons, as when she went crazy, somebody could stop her and notice it quickly. Janina because she was young and their mother wanted to be close to her. On the other hand, Sarah moved there because she got annoyed in his mansion by all the background noise Alexander produced.
Aurum lived with his mother, Salyna, in the mansion specially built for personal servants of the lord and lady. It was also fully packed with higher-ranked soldiers and other high-value estate workers.
He came over and nodded to some guards, who nodded back and were obviously bored by their job. This guard position was usually held by newbies, so they would train their discipline, and as a whole, it was useless to even have guards here.
Nobody would dare to attack a noble directly. Otherwise, a whole crusade would start. If a third party attacked them, the nobles would start to help each other. If they didn't, and the attacked party survived the ordeal, they wouldn't help others and even, out of spite, would help future attackers. A vicious feedback loop would be created.
But if they helped, they would be compensated with better trading deals or preferential policies between each other territories. The incentives were much stronger to act as a knit-tight group. But if they attacked each other, others would start to choose sides to get the most benefits.
Alexander remembered that he had read about a big event that actually happened some decades ago when some crazy nobles bound together and started attacking their neighbor to the north, the Nine-Fire knightage, which had precious mana stone mines in their territory.
First, they started with closed-off operations to sabotage their production and afterward tried to buy it out, which didn't work. Then they blatantly wanted to blitz rush with their strongest and kill the lord and lady. Later, they wanted someone to inherit the knightage title, which was more friendly to their cause.
Too bad they were stopped with the help of the previous lady of the Leonandra estate, who was there for a visit. His grandmother joined the defense, and it resulted in a brutal massacre. Afterward was history since the noble houses who sent their people ceased to exist as did their offspring.
In other societies on this continent, they would be taken as slaves. Still, less to say, slavery was a really touching subject for beast-kin, and even debtors, who his mother bought, were not slaves and had a sliver of freedom.
It was possible and preferable that they could gain freedom again for multiple reasons. The first one was that an overarching empire law existed that put the debtor into this situation to a maximum sentence of ~50 years. They would be branded by some kind of tattoo which made them work till their debt was cleaned off.
The tattoo gave them a massive debuff to skills, attributes and strained their mental psyche with different illnesses. It was a little like an automated curse that could be temporarily turned off so they could work and pay their debt off.
If they ran away, the tattoo would activate automatically after some time, and with that, the debuff. Alexander had no idea how it worked but was promised by his mother that he could research it at some point.
Alexander didn't know how to call this, but slavery implied something indefinite without any chance of escaping. This system was at least temporary, even if the time variable was pretty relative.
Even though 50 years sounded like a lot to him, this was nothing too much for beast-kin, who could live from ~150 - 500 years.
There were obvious other implications like the renewal of the tattoo and multiple sentences, which could make this ordeal much more indefinite, but again, who in their right mind would risk breaking the empire's law to have some unproductive worker who one would need to feed and provide housing?
The risks were too significant for anyone who had anything to lose, while the debtor's life was pretty much worthless in the first place. However, he heard from servants that some morons risked it, and it didn't end well for them.
He was brought out of his thoughts as he found a servant who instantly bowed after seeing him, "Where is Aurum?"
"Please follow me, Mr. Alexander."
...
Later, inside Aurum's room
"This is... not a lot, huh."
Alexander was sitting on a chair beside Aurum's desk. His room looked basic: A couple of chairs, a bed, a bookshelf, and all the stuff some servants had in the mansion he lived in.
"Yeah, how long do you need to get all the stuff?"
Aurum rubbed his chin, thinking, "I guess... four to six days at most. You don't care if it is not newly made or other things are repurposed, right?"
"Repurposing is better. I don't need something brand new. I want to make it as cheap as possible for my first batch. This comes later after I show you all some miracle."
Aurum said reflexively, "If you can do it."
Aurum suddenly opened his eyes wide open and wanted to apologize, but Alexander laughed out loud, "Haha! Don't worry, it will work..." he jumped down from the chair and went towards the door, "...as long as I get what I need."
When Alexander left, all he had in mind was going to sleep as he was tired. Aurum, on the other hand, dodged an arrow. He was tired, too, as he discussed with his mother why he should help this brat.
He was an accountant with almost the same legacy as his mother, but he wanted to work with someone more inclined to help commoners and poor people. Someone with the same ideals as him.
On the other hand, the so-called archmage puppy seemed like an insane mage who would take the poor for experiments. Aurum sighed, 'Let's get it over with. After he fails or succeeds, I can go to Wolfsteeth and work there.'
He was held back by his mother to wait and observe all children so he could become a retainer, but all he saw was disappointment. Lorient and Sarah weren't interested in anything related to the ruling of the fief. At the same time, Narsiz, as the only option, was incredibly isolated and needed first to get over his trust issues. Somebody who couldn't trust his loyal retainers wasn't an option for him, and he would only look for the best-suited one.
Aurum was arrogant, but it had its reasons since he was that talented. Worst case, he would become a wealthy merchant while doing philanthropy. Not as wealthy as if he would work as a retainer for the new lord or lady but rich enough to make a difference.
This was the young swan-kin dream. He wanted to make a difference, as what he saw in the past sickened him to the core. The side of his mouth rose in disgust, 'I would rather die than serve some trash.'
For now, though, he would need to help Alexander, heed his mother's advice, and observe him, as it was the least he could do for her, 'So, where do I find all this?'
Aurum sat at his desk the whole night and cross-referenced prices from vendors with his [Mystic Skills] while writing it down, so he could visit them tomorrow and haggle the price down as much as possible.