Sihe refugee dwarves made it back to their homend safely, I packed up the mana crystal and moved it to it's chamber in the new b where I'll grow it for a few more years until it's 12 feet tall. We've moved most of the crystal sg down the mountain already and we'd slowly built up a stockpile on, so I was ready to do testing on the new groaratus and grow the crystal. Thanks to having dedicated helpers, things went well, and after 10 days, I'd used up a few months worth on produ.

  We've been produg a steady supply eniitrogen and oxygen, and that has drastically improved the rate of fluorite mining, to the point where our stockpile of crushed fluorite is getting pretty big. Even with years of growing artificial fluorite, we won't get through all of it. The fluorite is mostly being stored in it's crushed natural form, with a growing stockpile of clear fluorite gss powder. In short, each stage of processing is incapable of keeping up with the previous stage.

  We're mining much more than we initially process, then the initially processed stuff is also outstripping the produ of artificial fluorite. The only stage that is easily keeping up is the crushing of natural fluorite, which I purposefully desigo be very rge, if only so that the natural fluorite wouldn't overheat the area and drain all the mana.

  As long as we actually have pces to store everything, I don't expect this to be an issue, but I'll keep an eye on it. They haven't resorted to using the intermediate stockpile area dowhe artificial fluorite growth area, so we've still got quite a bit of spabsp; For all I know, the deposit might run out before the stockpiles fill up.

  While I was looking over all the fluorite facilities, I noticed Tiberius was in a lot of different pces, but rarely was actually dowhe actual fluorite testing b I made for him. I put off iigating that until I had finished looking over the other facilities, but when I finally went down and checked, I saw why. There were four holes, about the size of the crystals he uses for testing, blown through the wall separating the innermost testing area from the intermediate room. Ihe room, the walls were nearly pletely destroyed, and lots of damaged quartz y scattered about.

  Basic testing of my mana regen rate showed that, ihe innermost room now had higher natural mana levels, to the point where testihings would be dangerous. An interrogation ter and I found out why. I had previously tasked Tiberius with ways of determinily how the lead doped fluorite crystals worked, and he did that. Over the course of a few weeks, he'd figured out that, essentially, they increase in mass when exposed to mana, up to a point. That point, as he ter discovered, is based oio of lead to fluorite in the doped crystal, and the total crystal size.

  The rger the crystal, the higher the upper limit on mass multiplication, and there is a sweetspot of doped lead. Too much or too little lead, and the multiplication decreases. After getting the details of that he, somewhat unsurprisingly, decided to start trying to o. He tried letting mana into the room while the crystal inning on the end of a string. The string would snap and the crystal would usually break on impact, along with a k of the wall.

  That... is ing. More than the onized aspects, I'm more ed about servation of mass and energy. How does an object suddenly get more mass? When it does so, and breaks, losing some of it's mass, why wasn't there a massive explosion? That mass had to go somewhere, right? Why was it only a kiic impact?

  As I briefly thought about those questions, Tiberius mistook my silence for intrigue about his on ideas, and started to eborate about all sorts of ideas he has for it, interrupting my train of thought. Most of his ideas were... ie, but I did pitch him an idea, just to give him something to do rather than work on his hairbrained ideas to make isoted mana sources for trebuchets, and other voluted schemes.

  If you could e up with a way to encase a lead fluorite crystal in two halves of quartz crystal and in the shape of an artillery shell, ohe shell leaves the barrel, the two halves of quartz will fall off, and the remaining shell gain a signifit amount of mass due to exposure to ambient mana. That's a way to actually ohese. The difficult part is figuring out how much of which part you need for it to actually be better than just a pin lead shell. Though, thanks to the lower mass ihe barrel, it should have a much higher exit velocity as well... Either way, I gave him some ideas, and he salvage what quartz he from the damaged room to try to make it work.

  From what I recall, artificially grown quartz is a bit of a pain. It was used a lot in the semiductor industry oh, and required high heat and pressure to actually grow, and it took a long time. Oher hand, it actually would be useful to have for various purposes. However, we'd need a lot of it. We'd also need a lot of soda ash, which is something we're already using a lot of and have a limited supply of. If we weren't a volid, then we'd potentially be able to vert limestoer supply. Given our ck of trade parthough, that's unlikely. So, any artificially grown quartz is going to have to go on the wishlist, rather than anything I could work on currently.

  After a few days of thinking about it, I don't think the crystals vioted servation of mass. The mass was artificial to begin with, sustained by an outside sourana. The mass didn't disappear, it's just that mana stopped being verted into it. As to why that mass is only temporary, I have a really, really far flung theory about it.

  Given that most of the other physical ws seem to be the same as earth, my guess is that through one meism or ahe lead doped fluorite is somehow iing with the Higgs field, and causing the particles in the area to have a heightened mass. If I bihat with retivity, an object travelling at a stant velocity is indistinguishable from ohat is stationary, so increasing the mass of the in-air projectile doesn't actually slow it down, but it does multiply its kiiergy. Though a spinning object is under acceleration, and as such, does appreciably notice a ge in force when its mass increases, causing the strings they were tied to to break.

  Beyond that, there is actually a very, very cool application for these crystals. If I cut a particur sized wafer of the crystal, and also make an equal mass terbance, I could use these crystals to make a meter that measures mana. If I mass the crystal in a mana free enviro, then I could make the meter only measure positive values of mana by measuring the dispt that a bance sees based on the increased mass of the wafer.

  Sihe testing chamber is already damaged beyond repair, I salvage a bunch of the quartz bricks to make a chamber that will be retively mana free where I try to get an accurate mass measurement the wafers to make terweights. A funal meter for reading ambient mana levels will be invaluable for a lot of projects. Especially when it es to very low values where I'd have to wait for a signifit amount of time to see how quickly I regee mana. Even then, biological processes might make my internal mana readings less accurate than an instrument that's only purpose is to measure the levels.

  So, that's what I'll try to make . It's unfortuhat a maer is a devieasuring pressure. Maer doesn't really roll of the toher. I guess I'll go with manascope for the name.