NOVEL SIMPLE Book Five: Diplomacy - Chapter Thirteen: Walking Nuclear Fission Reactors
Sighing in frustration, I feel the sense of a notification nagging at me. I dearly hope that this is something that’s going to help me since I haven’t been making nearly as much progress as I’d like. If my attempts don’t bear fruit soon, I’m going to have to do this the long way regardless of my intentions.
I’m outside ‘my’ hut with every samuran who passes by taking a few extra moments to watch what I’m doing. They don’t stop, though: it seems like offering fragments of Energy Hearts as rewards for completing tasks is just as good as food for motivating people to work. Maybe better, though it’s early days yet. It did take a lot of debate, but I’m glad the council went forward with the idea.
After all, if I just give everyone Energy Hearts, they probably won’t appreciate them as much as if they earned them. It was different in my small group, because everyone was working for the benefit of the team. With over two hundred villagers, it’s a different story here. Like the difference between a small start-up and a medium-sized company. Next step, corporate – apparently it took going to another world for me to be promoted, I can’t help saying to myself in amusement.
The incentive has been met by excitement from everyone. The resource requirements are higher to gain an Energy Heart fragment than they used to be to gain a food token, but that hasn’t deterred anyone. On River’s suggestion, we’ve also instituted a system where each samuran signs up for a task and has to return to the task-givers – the brood-mothers – to switch it to someone else.
Apparently, stronger samurans taking resources from the weak ones used to happen from time to time. Hopefully this system will at least reduce the frequency of that. The brood-mothers, who otherwise are without a role, are also keeping track of who has submitted which resource and how much of it. They’ll be earning an Energy Heart from time to time as a ‘salary’ for doing the job – it was feared that giving them as bonuses for more resources gathered among each of their charges could lead to ‘cheating’ being encouraged.
I have a feeling that we’re going to have to stress-test the system a bit, and that crafty individuals are going to find multiple loopholes as we go along which we will have to resolve. That’s what would happen with humans anyway.
For now, though, being able to delegate a whole load of resource collection to the samurans has left me with the opportunity to do two things I need to do: try to heal my Bounds’ Energy channels, and try to create metal items. I’m having more success with the latter than the former, though both are hard-going. I’m eager to give myself – and the samurans – metal tools and weaponry. I think it will be a game-changer for us all, though it’s going to take time to adapt to. But first, I need to actually make the metal.
Opening my notifications, a smile tugs at the corner of my mouth. This should help.
Congratulations!
You have advanced a Skill past Beginner. Earth-Shaping is now Novice 1. By spending time examining different elements of the earth, you have become able to identify its components and affect them individually.
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Getting from Beginner one to Novice in six days might seem to be quick progress, but when I consider just how much time I’ve dedicated to trying to get all this to work, I consider my speed of progress to be barely acceptable, really.
My first objective is, of course, to separate the metal from its impurities. Considering where I got the iron ore from, there are far more of the latter than the former. If I used a non-magical process, I’d have to crush all the ore into powder, then heat it within a furnace for a long time, before even being able to begin processing the actual iron. And I’d have to do that every time I want to process metal.
Like a machine-builder, I’m rather hoping that by spending the time on Earth-Shaping, I might find a much quicker way of doing all that which I’ll also be able to use in the future. Considering how much better using Flesh-Shaping works to make clothes than the non-magical process of transforming skins, I have hope that it will work.
I started by trying to notice what was different within the metal ore in comparison to the earth beneath my feet. When that didn’t initially show any results, I diverted onto making my equipment. After all, I will still need a furnace even if I do manage to use magic to extract the metal from the ore itself. I will need to melt it so I can cast it into hammers, axe heads, arrowheads and spear heads, and maybe even knives and swords.
Maybe not the last, actually – I’m no blacksmith so forging a decent sword is probably beyond me unless I dedicate the time to it, which I’m not inclined to do. Cast swords are probably brittle in comparison. No, arrow and spear heads are probably the best options. Plus, they won’t use nearly as much iron, and since I don’t have an unlimited supply of the stuff, it’s probably better for me to be careful with how much I use.
Forming the furnace and moulds out of the clay-like soil near my feet, I’ve managed to both increase my level in the Skill steadily and to start to recognise some of the more obvious different elements in the earth. Like the roots, and the sand particles, and the remnants of dead leaves.
The higher my Skill got, the clearer those became to my mental eyes, until the notification of the rank up came through.
Abruptly, it’s like a film has been removed from my eyes. Now, when I hold up a chunk of metal ore before my eyes, I see the different elements within them. Not elements as I might have thought of them, remembering the periodic table, but the different concentrations of things within.
It’s not like the Skill tells me what things are, either – it just enables me to see what is different. I’m going to have to use deduction and my spotty knowledge of just what is probably in whatever I’m examining to try to work out exactly what things are, just as I’ve had to do so far. Unfortunately, none of my Inspect Skills are much use for this job since it’s neither fauna nor flora, and I already know that there are useful things in the chunks of reddish rock.
Holding up a lump of iron ore before my eyes, I close my eyelids so I can focus with my magic sight. In this state, the deposits of iron ore are clear within it as small areas where a single element is present. It’s rather like spots of watercolours on a page, or droplets of dye in frozen water. The centre of the colour is fairly pure; the edges are very much mixed with the rest of the elements.
I spot some sand there too, recognisable from when I was forming the furnace out of the clay beneath my feet. There are other elements, but I see them as colours and can’t identify exactly what they are.
But my focus is on the metal anyway. Now, the notification said that I should be able to affect the elements individually. How do I do that?
Sending my own earth-aligned mana into the lump of ore through the hand holding it, I note how the elements within the ore react to it. Interestingly, they each react slightly differently. Some react faster, others react more eagerly. Some don’t react at all. Funnily enough, the iron is one of those.
Does that mean I’m not going to be able to control the metal in the way I can, say, sand? That would be annoying, but not the end of the world. After all, I can just as easily remove the impurities from the metal as I can remove the metal from the impurities. As long as the impurities aren’t other metals, of course.
To that end, I try to pull out the elements which react most eagerly to my magic. They seem to be happy to cooperate with my magic, acting almost like iron filings near a lodestone. Within a moment, I have a small handful of dark brown dust which has pulled away from the rock, though the chunk of iron ore doesn’t really look changed. Not surprising at this point.
Methodically, I pull one element out at a time, putting each of them in a separate container – who knows, I might find a use for them at some point. By the time the eagerly responding elements have been removed, the iron ore is starting to look a bit craggy and fragile. I suspect that pounding it to dust would be easy enough at this point, but that’s not what I want to do right now.
Placing the iron ore itself into a bowl in case it falls apart in my hands, I start trying to coax the less cooperative elements out of the ore. I find that I’m able to do it with a mixture of more mana and patience. The earth doesn’t like being rushed, and these elements particularly dislike it, apparently.
Finally, though, I’m left only with the pure iron ore. Well, pure except for a few small, trace elements. I have a feeling that they might also be metals of some sort since they’re just as indifferent to my earth mana as the iron ore is itself. There’s still a lot of red to the iron; it must be iron oxide rather than pure iron. It makes sense that I wouldn’t be able to separate the oxygen from the iron, though it does make me wonder whether there are people who can literally play with the building-blocks of the world like walking nuclear fission reactors.
For me, though, I can only hope that smelting it with charcoal will burn off the oxygen enough to give me the iron I need.
The iron oxide is fairly powdery from where everything else has been removed from it, though there are small sections where it’s clumped together still. A few sections are even just holding together, forming a little structure above the surface of the bowl. I poke them and they fall apart.
Satisfaction runs through me. Step one complete.
I keep working on removing all the impurities from the iron ore lumps that my Bound and I collected near Bastet’s old cave. While I do it, I consider exactly why the iron is so unresponsive to my mana.
In the end I can only conclude that it’s just not the right kind of mana. Fire and earth both have different kinds of mana which affect them; metal must as well. Unfortunately, even further observation of this ore doesn’t help: the mana already within it is faint enough to be pretty much invisible to my eyes. Without having a clue where to start, it would be a process of trial and error.
By the time everyone returns for the evening meal, I have processed more than half the lumps. Thanks to that, Inspect Environment has finally ranked up to Novice, and my Earth-Shaping has gone up by three levels. By this point, it’s not far off my Fire-Shaping, though I’m going to work on that Skill next: to smelt iron, I need carbon. To add carbon, I need to make charcoal. To make charcoal, I’m going to have to carefully burn wood so that everything but the carbon disappears.
Collecting wood for my project is something two of the Unevolved samurans have been tasked with, and they seem to be happy with the job. Whether it’s that they like collecting wood, that they’re keen to help the newest leader, or that they like the fact that every time they bring back a load of branches, they get to watch what I’m working on for a bit, I don’t know.
Either way, by using woven vines to help carry more firewood, they collect more in half a day than I could have done in a week. But I’m going to need all that they’ve collected in the three days and maybe more.
But that’s for tomorrow. My other Bound have been out in the forest working on their various tasks too. Now, with them all back, it’s a good opportunity for me to work on my other frustrating objective: healing them.