I khat attempting to grow fluorite would be hard, but after a month I don't feel like I'm any closer than I was when I started. Each time I recycle the fluorite by melting and solidifying it, it's color ges ever so slightly as well, which means that something is happening with whatever material is the inclusion in the crystal. I only noticed that after one of the rger natural crystals directly o the most ret batch of failure syics.

  That is making me a little worried, as color is about the only way we currently tell if the crystals are safe or not. All the syics attempts I've made have been failures, aher gss, or just clusters of very small crystals, so they don't have much of a magical effeyway, but I'm a little ed what might happen if I succeed in growing a rger crystal from this recycled material. Oher hand, using non-recycled material would be a huge waste of our natural resources.

  I said that I feel like I'm not making any progress, but that's not teically true. I've found a bunch of ways to not gre fluorite crystals. It's nearly insoluble in water, so despite the fact it robably grown naturally via hydrothermal methods, that process would take far too long to grow crystals artificially. I also do know that I at least get small crystals from the molten fluorite, so I should be able to use that method to grer ones, as long as I actually figure out the details of how to do so.

  Since a month has passed, I o go spend a few days fishing to get some levels, then I'll go do some more teise scouting in our tunnel. It's been a while since I did so, so I expect that I'll have quite a lot of scouting to do. The hydro facility has also gotten through their backlog of hematite and it's mid summer, so it might be worth draining the reservoir down to extract more stone a more stone shaping goblins.

  After a few days of leveling, I took a few days to use teise iunnel. With the dwarves assisting them, the scouting tunnel has made it quite far uhe mountain. In ahree years, maybe a little longer, I think they'll reach the middle se of the isnd, and we'll have to start digging from the other side. The team widening the tunnel is still quite a ways behind the much smaller scouting tuhough.

  As I went dowunnel, I noticed a few ges in the rocks as I went, and ultimately, the stohey dug into most retly he end of the tunnel looks very simir to the stohat made up the bulk of the cavern. Teise didn't show anything of i in almost the entire mile that they had dug. However, at the very end of the tunnel, I detected a few empty pockets. They were small, but present, which hopefully means there are mana crystals here.

  The extra crystals will help with speeding up mining, because crystal trays be transported into the mier recharging, allowing one mio work for aeime, rather than having to walk almost the whole tuo recharge their mana at the crystal. Obviously, I only io keep a certain number of crystals in a charging room, rather than the bulk of the rge crystals. We'll only keep what's needed in the charging room, in case another mana surge happens, shattering all our intermediate crystals.

  Unfortunately, I did break my smallest apparatus frowing mana crystals while trying to grow fluorite in it, but I do still have a few intermediate crystals in our ste, so if I io grow any rge crystals, we could start that process at any time. Though that's a whole different ordeal now, since I don't want to stop at six ht foot crystals. I want to get it up to sixteeall, as to prevent it from breaking to mana surges like ParTor. I don't know if we'll eve enough crystals to do that with. A sixteen-foot crystal has the same volume as eight eight-foot crystals.

  We couldn't make that many from our initial deposit, meaning we might still be uo make ohat rge. Plus the amount of waste that I gee in the apparatuses grows with their size, due to the amount of the captured gas I have to charge them with. Realistically, it might take ten to twenty times the raw material of a-foot crystal. A way around that would be figuring out what the gas is, and using it frowing the crystals. We have literal tons of the waste solid stored away that could be reused if we could figure out what the gas is.

  I do have a few hints to start looking into what gas it is, should I decide to start that process. I'm sure I've inhaled a lot of it over the course of the time I've been w on crystals, meaning that it's likely not toxibsp; The tainers I've stored crystals in, as well as the pockets that we mihem in don't seem to be altered chemically, meaning that the gas doesn't seem to be reactive with stone. Add in that the gas doesn't seem to have a st, and it's likely that it's very chemically stable.

  Crystalliices are generally repeatable patterns of a material. Sihe gas seems to be both forward and backwards patible, since I reform crystals from broken crystals, it likely means that the gas isn't f any new molecules from being in the solid crystal vs the gas. Since I he gas to actually grow the crystal, it means it's probably not just trapped in the crystal, but instead is integral to it's structure.

  I'm not certain what the atmospheriposition is here, but it's likely not too far from what Earth had, given the simirities in what life looks like. Carbon dioxide be ruled out as the mystery gas, si's two different atoms. Nitrogen and Oxygen should be plentiful withimosphere, making them unlikely as the culprit. I'm almost certain it's not nitrogen given it's reactivity, but oxygen has an easy way to rule it out since I should be able to attempt to burn something using the gas. The gas seemed colorless, so that rules out a handful of gasses like chlorihough again, chlorine is highly reactive, so I wouldn't expect it.

  Fact in all those things, I'm left with a single n of the periodic table, and it's somewhat surprising, the noble gases. Almost every as forms a diatomic molecule with itself otherwise. Once a diatomic molecule is formed, it's unlikely it would want to break back down into the crystal form. It's not impossible, and the heat being added when we melt the crystal material might be enough to ence the molecules to break back down, but if that was the case, then it'd o be a gas not present in rge amounts imosphere, since I wasn't able to grow the crystals in atmosphere. They were grown in a partial vacuum filled with the mystery gas.

  If the gas is a noble gas, that means there is some odd chemistry going on that is beyond my earth knowledge. Some of the extremely heavy noble gases like Xenon be enced to form molecules, though a crystal structure is basically out of the question except at very high pressures. If Radon was the culprit, I wouldn't expect ParTor to have existed for hundreds of years, sihe radioactive half-life of radon is days. So, in all likelihood, this is some magical effebsp; That would also expin why the crystals seemed odd to me, and I didn't reize them. They aren't a crystal you could find oh, because the underlying physics would be impossible there.

  I'm actually a little upset that I didn't reason this out sooner. Though even if I had, we've only just gotten to a teological point where that could potentially even matter. If it is a noble gas, as long as it's not helium, then we could potentially try to harvest it from the atmosphere by liquefying the air, then use fraal distiltion to collect the noble gases. That would also get us closer to being able to synthesize ammonia by using trated nitrogen in the Haber process.

  I nning on just going back to work on fluorite, but now, even if those pockets don't tain any mana crystals, I think I want to attempt to liquefy air and separate it to attempt to grow mana crystals. The process will be somewhat difficult, but it's at least something I'm a little more familiar with, as pared to growing fluorite.