With a week of time to give basic training to a repair team, and the meics team set up to begirofitting the old buildings that were still reliant on wind power, I was free to resume work on my own projects. Unfortunately, since I'll be waiting a while until a stru team help me excavate the area for the new mana crystal growing area, I o find a new project to preoccupy myself with at night. During the day, I'm w on the cableway, but at night, maneuvering around the ridgelio cut trees isly very safe.

  I've pleted a small stairway down to the level I want to build this new mana crystal area at, but I actually he stru team to do quite a bit of excavation for me. First, the final crystal that I want to grow is 16 feet diagonally. Meaning the stairwell is too small to move the crystal out. Either we'll o wideairwell, or we'll o make a e and shaft down to the growth room. Either way, the stru team will be busy for a while with the project, and spending all that time myself would be a waste.

  So, instead, I've decided to try to using the copper fluorite to make lightstone from the base rock that we normally hand process. I've already seen that I acid wash our processed lightstone, and it seems to leave us with a less reactive version, though very little material got removed in that process. By parison, even the red-tinged rock from up the mountain is still not majority lightstone, and that lost material would have to go somewhere.

  The previous lightstone acid treatment had quite a bit of water pared to the amount of lightstone, and there was a small amount of fine sediment like powder at the bottom of the taihough I couldn't tell if it was just loose particles of lightstone, or an actual chemical product due to the acid. So, to start out, I pn oing three different things: the sediment-like leftovers from lightstohe effect of our acid on the red-tinged precursor stone, and the effect of our acid on the more on basalt-like stohat we still get a little lightsto of.

  Since Zeb wants more heads up, I decided that I should try to schedule the stru of pylons for the cableway sometime in early fall, about half of a year from now. So, I made a trip to the city to make a request to Zeb and to hire some demons for hauling all the trees I've been cutting to make way for the cableway. Zeb appreciated the heads up and said he'd schedule two teams for me then, since a portion of it takes pce above the snow line.

  Since I was hiring new demons anyway through the city hall, I took the time to che with the demons who I'd left heat ptes with, to see if any had e up with any useful traptions. Most had ended up with very mundane uses that were holy more dangerous than they were helpful. Tut the heat pte uheir bedding with some rocks around it so it would be warm at night, which sounds fortable initially, until you think about the fact it's using ambient mana, and the sed I bring a rge crystal back to town their bed will probably catch fire.

  Ahree told me they thought they could use it to keep their food warm all day while they worked through different traptions, and then they could e home to hot food only to find that some food dried out to the point of inedibility, and others rotted. All three gave up on that idea. Two of them cleverly worked together and mao make something resembling a magical oven for cooking. I purposefully had only used the smallest ptes that weren't quite ambiently hot enough to burn most things. However, by putting two ptes oher side of an enclosed space, they could get the temperature inside up to a hot enough temperature to cook foods.

  I marked that one as a success and told them I'd like to pay them to implement their idea in the various kits around the city. While I don't want there to be too many mana draining ptes about, the ovens are actually quite manageable in size, and if built well, have a fairly good effibsp; Plus, it would severely reduce the amount of wood we're ing for cooking, which would drastically reduce our nd demand for sustainability.

  The remaining five acted cagey initially, but eventually revealed that they had built a secret bath area sihey had missed the old public bathhouse with it's warm water. They did mention, however, that this one didn't feel nearly as good, and while it did them, they never felt rejuvenated afterwards. sidering the heat ptes probably drained all the mana from the water, that was about the opposite of how the mana crystal resulted ier feeling warm.

  So, while it would rex the muscle somewhat, it didn't actually replenish and overcharge their mana, so it didn't quite feel the same. While they had ehe hot water, they didn't really sider it that much of a success. In fact, two of the five stopped even using it before I came asking questions. The others didn't seem too upset that I wao take the ptes back either, so I suppose it could be sidered a failure.

  Ultimately, I paid the two who came up with the oven idea a handsome sum of money. Specifically, I paid them enough moo cover basic living expenses for three years eabsp; I then tinkered with their design for a day to add some features that would be helpful. First off, I added in two removable metal racks that be cooked on and ed. Then I desig to allow the heat ptes to be locked in pce or removed with a handle for ing.

  Most of the oven is made of insuting stone, so I'll pass the idea on to Zeb and perhaps the meics team or someone else will get around to retrofitting the kits in the near future. I also made casts for the metal racks for our casting area to produce them. When I get a rge mana crystal made again, I'll probably o have the ptes removed from the city temporarily, and we'll probably o redesign the ovens for safety reasons.

  I worked on the cableway and the lightstone research for a few weeks until I was in the seonth of the year, and I'd had some iis worth pursuing further. The sediment like leftovers seemed to be a cy like material, though it also still had some fine particles of lightstone embedded in it. Using the darkstone source ractically impossible for the purposes of getting lightstoh this method, as the majority of the stone dissolved away, and what was left was a fine sand of various stones.

  I even attempted stoneshaping that sand bato a solid object to dissolve it again, but ultimately, too much material was left over or precipitated out again that I couldn't really use it fhtstone manufacturing. Our reddish stone, however, showed some promise, though the process was somewhat voluted and needed a lot of water, and produced a lot of waste water.

  I found that if I cut the reddish stoo ptes itself, then submerged it I could get it to react at a det rate. To make it manageable however, I had to fiune quite a few differeures. First, I o mahe acidity, which for this project meant adjusting the total water amount to the copper fluorite pte size. Then, I o adjust the total amount of the reddish stoo water, as well as the duratioone spent in a sih.

  If I put too little stone ier, it'd break down too much, and if I put too much stone in, it wouldn't dissolve enough of it at ohough too little was far worse than too mubsp; If I let it run for too long, the ptes would break apart as well, and that mess was very difficult to , sihe ptes would bee so brittle, they'd break into small parts and mix with any sediment that formed along the tainer bottom.

  However, by keeping a stant ratio and duration, what I found I could do was acid bathe the rock for a period of time, remove the enriched but more brittle ptes out, then reform them into new solid ptes. By repeating that cycle five times, I'd be left with fairly pure acid washed lightstone. Unfortunately, all that water ended up being highly acidid full of dissolved minerals.

  I wondered if the precipitate would be useful for anything if I boiled away the remaining water. I quickly realized that it was posed of far too many elements in too many different forms to have an easy use for. It might be possible to e up with a multi-stage process to recover it, but I'm not pnning on doing that any time soon.

  Ultimately, the speed that stoneshaping reform a solid pte from a partially acid etched one is at least ten times as fast as I manually remove lightstone, and is probably a huimes as fast for someohout practice at it. Meaning that this process would allow us to make very pure lightstone much faster than previously, as long as I could design a facility to properly handle such a task. Of course, the dowo any such facility is that it'll require more stoneshaping demons, which is still something we're g.