Excavating the rooms for the high risk fluorite research didn't take that long because they were so small. All in all, I spent thirteen days building them. They aren't very rge, but I o be very precise with the quartz blocks and sliding doors to prevent as much mana as possible from entering the spabsp; I've used up pretty much all of the cut quartz as well, and while the mine isn't produg any more raw quartz, there is still a det stockpile that needs cut, so we aren't actually out yet.

  I also decided to mount some of the heat fluorite in each of the short hallways and small rooms, to hopefully e any mana that might leak in. It's not foolproof, but the growth room barely has 1/1000th the surface mana regen, and the testing room was about 50% lower than that. In fact, I wasted aire day just waiting for enough mana tee just to verify that the rate was that slow.

  As I've thought about it, I realized that a 4-inch crystal could still be incredibly dangerous, and I should probably hold off on building that mae until procedures are figured out. Instead, I'm going to build a tiny crystal grower, meant to only grow small, half-inch crystals. The way I've gone about that was redesigning the semi-funal grower that I initially made. By only using a 2-inch growth chamber, and having the heat source be removed faster than would be necessary to make a single crystal, I induce small crystals to grow. By ging the chamber shape, it should have multiple ion points as well. That way, Tiberius, or whoever does the research, also have multiple samples for testing, while still keeping them small enough that minor exposure hopefully won't be lethal.

  I built the small crystal growth chamber where I had po build the 4-inch chamber in three days, and gave it a test run. After a day of tuning, it was ready to grow crystals. That didn't mean it was actually ready though. Our fluorite source has an unknown impurity in it. From experience, repeated melting slowly seems to remove the impurities. There probably are better ways to remove it, but rather than experiment with that for a long period of time, instead, I'm just going to use one of our furo melt a rge amount of the fluorite repeatedly over the course of a few days to remove enough impurities.

  I pn oing enough that dozens, if not hundreds, of experimental growths be done from the raw fluorite. Though, to make enough fluorite gss for that, I'm going to o do some fluorite extra of my own. I'm hoping that by the time I'm done, we'll have enough of those mana filters pleted that I be fortable with the extra rge fluorite growth chamber being used.

  After twelve days of mining and refining, I've made all the purified fluorite gss material, which is transparent, that I wanted. As I noticed before, the gss of fluorite, even with impurities, doesn't seem to exhibit any maed properties, so I'm somewhat fident that I could mix the impurities into gss samples and use that frowing crystals.

  However, I've been saying for a while that I'd rather offer this research up to Tiberius if he wants it. It is magical effects, after all. We've also been in summer for over a month now, which means the reservoir is probably getting low. That means it's about time to take my first rge amount on up to grow a mana crystal. Since I should have a pretty good idea of the total amount on I use, I attempt to calcute the ratio on gas to added crystal volume, to determily how much argon we o grow a crystal of any particur size.

  The st six days have been filled with highs and lows, to say the least. Tiberius agreed to work on the crystals, since he's basically all but cluded his resear extracts. In the near future, I'd like to review his total findings, but in short, it seems like with the right ste equipment, we could have some very iing military equipment. Given we're on the verge of reliable meical power, we could potentially start paying any demon that fishes off any of our jetties for certain fish catches, siheir extracts could be valuable.

  If that was the extent of it, then it would be fine, but Tiberius demahat he "have han three assistants, and make sure they're disposable." That was ing to say the least. However, I did inform him of the potential risks, so I suppose he's just mitigating that risk in his own way. I talked it over with Zaka, and I was surprised that Zaka basically agreed that it would be fine, as long as the goblins agree to it willingly, and are paid well.

  I keep having to remind myself that there are weird disects in demon society's norms that I don't expebsp; I'm always the one who wants to memorialize the dead, and most of the demons don't even care that much for eai. Either way, it wasn't actually very hard to find goblins who gdly took on what would be sidered a very hazardous job in exge fh pay. The work itself is actually pretty light too, which probably tributed to the ease of finding them.

  After that was done, I took a day with Tiberius and the goblins, w oing impurities into the fluorite gss. Fluorite es in a lot of colors, and most of that is due to impurities, though not all of it. It follows, then, that most elements or basipounds actually fit one way or another within the fluorite crystals. So, after giving a brief lecture on the kinds of materials that are likely to work, we began using crushers to make the fluorite into fine powder, and attempted to add in a few of the ores we'd mined.

  Given our ck of information on what exactly fit within fluorite, we made multiple different gsses that they ter use for testing. We used pure metals of our avaible types, as well as both the sulfide ores and oxide ores. Iingly, two colors were eerily simir to samples I've recovered, and a third was close and worth iigating.

  The iron oxide from our hematite, and copper metal impurities were the close samples. The hematite sample was nearly the same color as our heat produg fluorite, and the copper sample was simir to the hydrogen fluorite. The third iing sample was the pure iron. It had a richer color pared to the hematite, and given the simirities in atoms, I thought it would probably be worth iigating.

  Ultimately, each gss sample took on a different appearance, and we made enough in two days that they should be able to grow multiple samples from them. I gave them instrus, and told them they could always ask the obliors whrowing the heat fluorite if they have any questions.

  After that, I went to check how things were going with the cryogenic produ, and was quite disappointed. A half of a gallon was all we had made on. I don't know if it's actually a lot or a little, because I don't know the exact atmospheritration, but I'm a little sad we didn't get more. The reservoir is too low to run the cryogenics facility here again, so I'm going to go grow what I with this argon, and then we'll decide what to do. It also, unfortunately, means that I'll be on fluorite mining duty in order to supply what is needed for making the fluorite heat ptes.

  My initial estimate of 700 years wasn't far off. In two days, I'd used up the half-gallon on, and grown the crystal by 0.9 cubic feet. Meaning that instead of 700 years, it'd take closer to 500 years. Uably long, in other words. However, if things go to pn aart growing the very rge heat fluorite, and it turns out that copper fluorite makes hydrogen, then I could easily make more facilities for creating and refining cryogenic air.

  Though I do o be somewhat careful. While our fluorite deposit is big, we only have the one deposit right now, and the crystals aren't going to be cheap. Plus, we've already seen what happens when we bee too reliant on a singur point of failure. I already see a future where the rge fluorite ptes melt during a mana surge. At least in that situation, I'd expect that we could reprocess most of the fluorite to repair the damage, as pared to the mana crystals, where we lost all the argon, and most of the fky solids leftover from the crystal breaking were washed away.