he end of wihe mert arrived with a rge quantity of quartz sand and some metal. By that point, I'd fihe two fnking roads around the bay, and had started building the new jetties, though I hadn't made it very far oher of them. After the mert left, I spent a week getting all the goods shipped back to the city. When goblins would e to drop off stone for the jetties, I'd send them back with a cartload of quartz sand. Once most of it had been shipped back, I travelled back to the city alongside a few of the goblins hauling the remaining goods.

  Once ba the city, I noticed that they had resumed using two teams for building new residences, which meant that the ide pool was likely finished. I checked in with Zeb, and he firmed that it's up and operational, though the need for it isn't there quite yet. The new artificial tide pool is actually bigger than the old one, and it might be worth sidering expanding the old one iure, just to increase food produ.

  We've also noticed a few trends reted to the tide pools. Despite the existenuch rger fishes, the tide pools really only catch medium and smaller fish. Very occasionally, a rger sea creature gets caught, but those are rare events. My guess is that the rger fish generally hunt further from shore, and so there are fewer there to begin with, then they also leave the tide pool well before it's low enough to capture them. I know they're out there though, thanks to all the fishing that Boggs had done around the isnd.

  After getting all the traded goods settled in their appropriate locations, it was finally time for me to go check the tunnel with teise. Every time I use it after having not done so in such a long time, I'm forced to tend with headaches, which given I was using my full mana pool for each check resulted in splitting migraines for the first ten days or so. Even after that, I was dealing with regur headaches for some time. Each pulse gave me a bit over 40 feet radius of information, and I would pulse from the bottom of the tunnel every 20 feet or so.

  Iime that they've been mining, they've made the tunnel about a mile long, and I ended up doing a few hundred pings in total cheg for points of i. The first few days were quite slow going, on at of the migraines, so in total I spent about twenty-five days doing a teise survey.

  For the amount of effort and pain I went through, we had very little payout. he current deepest part of the tunnel was the only location with a ping of any i. A tiny blip at the very edge of my dete range, about 40 feet down. Due to it beihe current end of the tunnel, I figured the best course of a is to leave a simple marker, and have them keep digging. If it's a major boundary ge, it should slope up towards the tunnel as they dig further into the volo, so digging down to iigate would be a waste. If it isn't a boundary ge, then we always e back to iigate it iure.

  If I hadn't set such strict requirements for the tunnel's stru, the mining team would easily be three times as far as they are currently, but given our trade surplus and a stone-shaping she, it seems to be a better use of their time to work on infrastructure in addition to mining. After all, our ption of metal on a regur basis is actually somewhat low, and my projects are some of the bigger ers of the stuff.

  Even things like gypsum and quartz are things I use more than the general popution does, but over time that will likely ge. Even now, we've ied gss into our buildings, which has made it signifitly easier to prevent buildup of dirt, dust, and water inside. Most of our cookware is either iron or copper as well. Eventually, we might even sider something like indoor plumbing, though that would require a siderable amount of retrofitting to apply.

  After giving myself two days to recover from the headaches caused by teise, I decided to che on how Tiberius was doing. If I'm ho, I didn't quite uand what was going on at first sight. If definitely seemed like he had gotten tired of doing blood mix testing, because there didn't really seem to be much blood around. However, I was wrong, or at least partially wrong.

  Despite my initial surprise that he was using a hand-operated wooderifuge, it turns out they've been ied for some time in this world, despite the seemingly medieval standards of living across the board. Though their normal use is apparently for making expensive meals for nobility by separating milk. He's been spinning blood and then separating off the yers, which seem pretty normal at first go me.

  There is a yer of psma, blood cells, and a thin yer iween which houses everything else. What he's been w on has been using the psma. It seems that's where the magical effects e from in the blood itself. He even demonstrated to me that only the psma actually produces any effect when affected by mana. I'm holy impressed at his application of a trifuge to do this.

  What he's currently w on is determining how long dried psma hold's the properties befoing bad. Which isn't actually a bad idea. If you could make the material st lohan it does in blood, and store it more densely as a solid, then it'd be possible to utilize it for all sorts of uses, including many I figured to be infeasible. If it bears any fruit, I might sider designing a refrigeration system, si certain types of magical properties could prove invaluable, and if it drastically increases the shelf life of a highly trated form, then it'd be worth it.

  Since we received the extra quartz sand, I've decided to start measuring it out, aing a proper estimate of how much we need for future housing, versus what I use for more of those greenhouse salt ponds. Surprisingly, it seems like it doesn't actually matter what season it is, the greenhouse works at about the same pace, which means it actually produces about 12 ponds worth of salt, rather than one. In total, we have about one hundred ponds, which means that the one greenhouse is actually making up about 10% of our total salt produ. Adding mreenhouses then could actually provide us with a sizeable tradeable ine.

  After I did the estimates, I set aside enough quartz gss to get us through the year, and then still had enough left over to make anreenhouse, so that's what I worked on for the springtime. It was a good project to work on while I waited for the minio dig deeper into the mountain.

  Another useful aspect of salt trading is that it's a practically unlimited resource for us. Despite the windfall of dwarven currency from trading giant crystals, it also felt like I was trading away our physical resources for tempains. By increasing our salt produ, we use that to buy more perma resources, like quartz gss or metals to improve our ditions.

  Good quality quartz gss trades at about five times the cost of salt, which whehing is factored in, means it'd take us about 7 greenhouses to produough salt annually to trade for the quartz sand to make anreenhouse. They also use a small amount of iron, so I should really bump that up to 8 greenhouses. Of course, if we find more quartz of our own, then we accelerate the process. Alternatively, if we end up with a massive surplus of stone-shaping goblins, we manually extract the sili dioxide from other rocks, or I could start w on the cssifier and separator to meically do the processing as well.

  I built the sed greenhouse o the first one and ected the water pool underground, so it could be pumped aied from the same screw pump. After that, I went back to the miners, given they had a few months more to dig, I was ied to see if there was any ge in the slight ping I got before.

  I found two things ira few hundred feet they dug. First, the previous ping I got does seem to be a new boundary yer of rock, though in the distahey dug, it's only closed half the gap betweetom of my dete range and the tunnel floor. Close to the new end of the tuhough, I got a slightly different ping down at about thirty feet, te uhe boundary ge. This new ping has a higher slope angle, so it could tain some new deposit of some sort. I've decided to help the mining team dig forward for a few weeks so I get another few pings, and potentially determine if we o dig down to iigate.