A Relatively Powerful Mage

With the imminent threat of the sentinels looming, Imri was relieved to have a momentary reprieve from the constant fighting. Scouts hadn’t reported any Troglodyte activity since he had culled their numbers. They had possibly retreated, being more afraid of Imri than the sentinels, but he doubted that.

He was also relieved when Emelia didn’t insist on joining the scouting expeditions. While she had been worried about being sequestered away, she wasn’t so insistent that she would take unnecessary risks. She wouldn’t venture into a dangerous situation without Imri by her side, which made Imri swell with pride and grin from ear to ear.

During this downtime, Imri continued focusing on his enchantments. The main focus of his newer enchantments was more industrial and branched away from his typical space and time specialization. The first was a simple heat enchantment, converting magical energy into heat energy. At this level, such a simple rune was almost trivial, and most enchanters would have started with something along these lines long before some of the more complex works he had done. The downside of this was that the system agreed with his assessment and provided little experience for these enchantments.

Despite the rune being relatively simple, it had wide-ranging practical applications. Imri started with his house, working with Avery and Toby to construct a metal box with leylines. Imri’s work wasn’t trivial in this case, but it also wasn’t overly complex. He added a heat rune and a few supporting runes that could modulate and calculate the final output. Like many of his enchantments, the hardest part wasn’t the primary rune. In this case, it was finding a way to have the heat rune respond consistently, regardless of mana efficiency. It was an oven, and control was the most important function. He also needed a way for the user to define their desired temperature. Getting the temperature measurement rune working correctly also took him some time. Finally, it compared the current temperature against the desired temperature and then returned that information to the heating rune as a boolean defining whether it should be on.

Not wanting to stop there, Imri started another project. It would be even easier this time, having already completed most of the concepts needed in the oven. The house was completed with vents designed with modern central air, and the only things missing were the heating and cooling elements, which were far from being completed conventionally. So, they began to work on a furnace.

Again, Imri felt Avery had more challenging work in building the appliance’s frame. Imri’s concern was unwarranted, as Avery had just unlocked his tier 2 profession, Metal Shaper. The man was now essentially a one-man fabricator, easily shaping hunks of metal into functional pieces. He still used heat to make the metal more malleable, but it was no longer required to the same degree it had been with traditional smithing.

Avery wasn’t the only one making similar strides. He informed Imri that the prospectors, miners, and refiners all had improved their respective skills. While their tools seemed somewhat crude, their output far exceeded what anyone would expect, given their primitive methods. However, they still haven’t improved as much as Avery and the bottleneck would be more severe on the supply side. They also hadn’t found much iron or a similar metal. To compensate for the shortage, Avery had purchased various metals from the system store several times, and their prices were now exorbitant.

Once Avery had completed the furnace frame and Toby had installed the leylines, it was simple for Imri to complete the enchantment work. At a fundamental level, his portion of the work was almost identical to the oven, only scaled up. Already familiar with the concepts and the runes that would be needed, Imri had the work done in only a few hours. The only challenging portion was dispersing the heat through the vents, typically done with some sort of a fan. He considered using Spatial Expansion and Spatial Collapse to control the air pressure but quickly dismissed the idea. While it would technically work, it was far from the most efficient way to accomplish the task. Ultimately, he stuck with fans, simply using a kinetic rune to rotate it instead of electricity.

With the primary appliance built, only one more step was needed to make the furnace functional. Imri wanted the house to have the magical equivalent of a thermostat. Fortunately, he had everything he needed to complete this concept already. He had the True Temperature rune from when he enchanted the oven, and he repurposed that to measure the living room's temperature. He also defined parameters for mode and desired temperature. Finally, he had the enchantment transmit a boolean to the furnace when the temperature was below the desired temperature by more than a degree.

The next appliance was even simpler. Imri almost entirely reused the design, only incorporating it to heat water this time. This was almost trivial; he simply slapped a heating rune with a simple temperature feedback loop. Of course, he added some runes so the desired temperature parameter could be defined, but that was nothing new at this point.

With his house now having cooking and heating appliances, Imri was on a roll. The next concept to implement was cooling. Fortunately, cooling was simply an absence of heat. All Imri needed to do was modify the heating rune so that instead of spewing out heat, it absorbed it. He had hoped to convert this heat into something practical, but converting other forms of energy into mana was incredibly difficult, if not impossible. One unique aspect of magic over modern methods was that the heat could simply be removed, breaking one of the laws of thermodynamics. The entire system was simpler than the modern equivalent, with the rune absorbing heat replacing the freon that normally accomplished the same end effect.

Avery seemed almost bored at this point, as he was essentially just shaping giant metal boxes. Likewise, the runic work wasn’t too difficult for Imri. The main challenge was distributing the heat collection throughout the fridge and freezer. There were also challenges similar to those of the oven, such as measuring the temperature and moderating the effect to a constant. However, this was far easier to tackle this time, having accomplished this exact thing already.

The final major system was the air conditioning. As with everything else, this simply built on things Imri had already accomplished. Like the furnace being a scaled-up version of an oven, this was essentially a scaled-up version of the fridge and freezer he had just enchanted. The main advantage of magic was that the form of heating and cooling was less mechanically dependent; this meant he didn’t need Avery to construct a separate air conditioning housing. Instead, Imri reused the furnace, adding the cooling runes alongside the heating rune. This also saved him from having to duplicate several other supporting runes.

The last of Imri’s work was the lighting. He almost felt nostalgic as he began to utilize the first enchantment he had ever learned. He was not content with just a light and a switch; he added a brightness parameter. He also added a central rune that could conveniently turn all the lights on or off.

When he had finished his work, Toby was still creating leylines throughout the house, drawing heavily on his experience as an electrician. Zuri had cut a gem that served as the junction point for all the leylines; this was another advantage of mana and magic, how easily it could be stored. Even a moderately sized Espeonite crystal was more than enough storage for the house to run for quite some time. Imri repurposed one of his now dozen mana panels and installed it on the roof, which resembled a solar panel from a distance.

He felt slightly guilty for using the mana-generating resource that could be better used, even if he had built it himself. He rationalized it by knowing that he could always absorb excess mana from the crystal that stored it. He also would have Toby eventually connect the house to the central mana repository, allowing mana to be diverted once the house was at capacity. As the grid grew, the houses wouldn’t need to be self-sufficient. Instead, there might be a single crystal for an entire block. He didn’t want mana ever to be a ‘just-in-time’ process, relying solely on mana produced to constantly power enchantments. While that’s how most energy grids worked, Espeonite was already a more efficient storage system than even the most efficient batteries.

When all the work was complete, he tested the mana generation against the mana demands of the house. With everything in the house running, the demand for mana exceeded the effective output of the single panel, though only by a small margin. Given that only some things would run constantly, the mana capacity was more than sufficient.

Excitedly, Imri showed Emelia their combined work. The kitchen appliances had a bit of an old-time aesthetic, with Avery going for function over form. As a result, they were more solidly built and a bit on the boxy side. This aesthetic was dispelled somewhat by the strange runes purposefully etched on the outside, giving it a contrasting mystical vibe. Emelia smiled appreciatively as Imri nerded out, describing how each rune had been designed.

“You didn’t need to do all this,” she said as they finished the tour.

“Of course I did; it’s what I promised,” he said.

“Every couple of days, more refugees come to Celestia. They’re half-starved with little more than the clothes on their backs. Meanwhile, we’re living in a nicer home than I had before the integration, especially now that we have every modern convenience. It just makes me feel guilty,” she said.

“We’re working to make this a safe and prosperous place for everyone. I don’t think having air conditioning and an oven makes us spoiled nobles,” he pointed out.

“So, you’re going to keep making appliances until everyone has one?” She asked.

“I wish I could,” Imri said with regret. “I eventually plan on teaching someone else enchanting, and they could make a good living producing enchantments like these.”

It had taken him almost a week to finish all these enchantments. While he probably would shave a day or two off the time with practice, it would still require all his time and effort to keep up with demand. It had been a welcome distraction from functional tools of war, but it would soon end. The only tangible improvement he had made was a single level up in his Runic Engineer profession, and that was only because of all the new rune work. If he continued doing the same thing, it would definitely lead to stagnation.

“Don’t get me wrong, I love it,” Emelia said quickly, undoubtedly sensing his darker musings. “Just don’t spoil me any more than you already are. I love that you want to keep me safe and well cared for, but I also love that you want to make a better place for everyone.”

“I won’t,” he promised. “Good thing I didn’t use a Spatial Expansion rune to create more fridge space. That would have been wasteful.”

The next morning, Imri began working on some new spells. He had long known that his spell casting wasn’t limited to space and time spells, but he just hadn’t bothered learning them. The main downside was that they were harder to learn without the specific traits that buffed learning. However, this was largely mitigated by his understanding of how the spell worked through the runic version of it.

Over the next few hours, he learned a slew of basic spells. Create Heat and Absorb Heat were the two obvious ones, as they were fresh in his mind. He also added Create Light, True Temperature, and Create Sound to his arsenal. They didn’t give him any XP or advance his class quest like space or time spells would. The new spells had marginal utility and wouldn’t replace any of his current staples in combat. However, memorizing more spells with his high mental stats wasn’t strenuous.

He had just finished internalizing the last spell when a messenger arrived at his workshop.

“Lord Padar, the scouts have reported Troglodyte activity. They're coming toward the cave entrance,” the young man said.

“How many of them?”

“All of them, sir.”

Imri cursed. He had known this brief respite would be just that. It was time to get back to work.