Aether Engineering

Chapter 23

Maston Academy

The Town of Maston in the Candis East District

A slab of basium sat untouched on the bench, the aether forge at their station was left cold. Myles sat with Jane at their station, planning. After their class that morning, they had resolved to create constructs that could be useful for their missions. With the armor they were all trying to master, a defensive construct seemed like it would be redundant.

Instead, they turned towards studying constructs that could be used offensively. Their professor had refused any group that asked for a blueprint of any kind to create a construct, so, they would have to create their own design.

The aether index sat before them, opened to a page filled with runes related to fire mana. The two were pondering a troublesome issue. None of the runes could be used safely without infusing them with precise amounts of mana. While the runes they had worked with to create basic batteries before had the same requirement, they had been working with pure mana. When a rune was overloaded with pure mana, the rune failed and released all the mana it had been infused with. That wasn’t a problem with pure mana, but fire mana was highly volatile.

If they infused a fire rune with too much mana, it would violently explode. If they infused it with too little, the rune wouldn’t be activated. Either way would result in the construct failing. The only way to create a working construct was to provide the exact amount of mana needed to power each rune.

Unfortunately, they had no means to measure the mana needed. While their mana wells had started off the size of one standard unit of mana, they had quickly grown. At a guess, Myles would put his current capacity somewhere around 155 units. He was far from certain on that though. By nature, delving slowly eroded away at the edges of his mana well. It wasn’t a controlled increase, and it was impossible to keep an accurate record of how much mana you had.

Myles looked to Jane who was still studying from the book. “We need to find a way to measure our mana.”

“I know, but I’m not sure how to do it.”

The pair heard the sound of footsteps approaching. Professor Hazel had a very unusual style to teaching. Instead of lecturing them, he allowed them free reign to learn and create what they pleased. On occasion, he would wander over to each workstation, asking for a progress report and usually giving a lecture on some seemingly unrelated aspect of aether engineering.

“It looks like you two are planning something. Do you mind filling me in?”

Myles nodded. It was almost always him who did the talking. Jane had a hard time talking to people she didn’t know well. “We are trying to create a construct that will be helpful for our exam at the end of the month. Since we’re working on mana armor in class, we decided that it would be best to create an offensive construct. We were looking into using fire mana, but we have no idea how to measure a precise amount of mana to infuse them with.”

Professor Hazel scratched his weathered chin. “That is a common problem, but it is also within your capability to solve. I would suggest that you look into mana capacities. That may give you a spark of inspiration.”

Myles had largely ignored mana capacities so far. The ratios determined how much mana could be stored in a cubic inch of material. As you passed certain limits, it would take progressively more mana to store the same amount in the metal. Myles started to feel the slightest bit of inspiration. “Is there a rune that can tell how efficiently mana is being passed into metal?”

Jane seemed to catch onto the idea as well and smiled.

Professor Hazel’s eyes gave the faintest look of approval from behind his spectacles. “It is possible to calculate how much mana moves through an object.”

Myles noticed that the answer the Professor had given had not lined up completely with what he had asked. He decided not to say anything about that though. The Professor was most likely giving them a hint on how to move forward.

The professor seemed to consider their conversation finished and moved onto the next pair.

As soon as he left, Jane flipped open to the page describing the mana properties of basium.

After Jane looked the passage over, she glanced at Myles. “You were planning on creating a lot of small batteries, weren’t you?”

Myles nodded. “I thought that if we limited the size of the battery and could tell the moment when it started being less mana efficient to charge, then we could know how much mana there was in it.”

“That makes sense, but the professor mentioned calculating the flow of mana.”

“I think he was giving us a hint.”

“I would agree with that. I think it would be best to focus on the battery first though.”

Myles nodded his assent.

Jane started tapping her finger against the desk in thought. “We need to be precise down to a single mana unit, so, we’ll need to make sure that the batteries are of the exact right size to hold one unit of mana with perfect efficiency.”

Myles looked at the chart for a minute, running calculations in his head. The general capacity for basium was 100 units of mana for every cubic inch, but he had to keep in mind that fire mana was a sub-type of the energy category, a point that the aether index pointed out at several points in the section on fire runes. That meant that they would need to take the capacity ratio for energy into account.

“We’ll need to make batteries that are 1/30th of a cubic inch.”

Myles nodded. He had come up with the same number.

“Can we really create a battery that small?”

It was a good question. It was easy to forget the mundane aspect of the process sometimes, but they would have to be the ones to create batteries that small. Still though, Myles thought that he could just barely manage that size. His time spent working in the job shop would come in handy there. “That should be doable.”

“Alright, if we can make batteries that small, the question is how we infuse them with mana.”

The professor had mentioned that they could calculate how much mana moved through an object. If Myles wasn’t mistaken, he had been referring to the mana flow values in the aether index. While a metal could hold a great deal of mana, only a set amount could move through it every second.

For example, if you had one cubic inch of basium, you could infuse it with any amount of pure mana you wanted albeit with reduced efficiency as the amount exceeded 100 units and even more so as you supplied more and more mana. That said, no matter how much mana you infused, if you tried moving it through another cubic inch of basium, only 25 units of mana would come out the other side for every second that passed.

That meant that they would somehow need to create a device that could both keep track of time down to the second and a construct that could bring in exactly one unit of fire mana every second.

The pair spent the rest of the class drawing up various designs to bring everything together. The task was made even more difficult by the need to constantly keep their commuted armor up. By the time they headed back to NorthLeaf hall, they were mentally exhausted, but they had the plans for the design that would allow them to convert an unknown amount of mana from a fire core into a series of tiny batteries that would each contain exactly one unit of mana.

The device started with the feeder piece. This piece would be inscribed with containment runes that could be powered by pure mana. Unlike how they used containment runes in batteries, these would only limit the direction in which mana could flow. The piece would have the volume of exactly 1/25th of a cubic inch, but it would be made to be as long as possible to keep the core’s mana from coming into contact with the rest of the device.

The feeder piece would carry the mana from the core into the first battery. All of the batteries would be housed in a long tube that was broken into cells by bits of pure mana. The idea to use pure mana to hold each battery up came from the memory of how Reah used mana to create stretchers. Oddly enough, the thought had come from Jane. She had found the story of the event to be far funnier than Myles had remembered it being. Of course, she hadn’t been the one being carried on a stretcher of pure mana.

The tube would be connected to a pendulum that swung back and forth every second. Myles had once had to create similar pieces when the job shop had been given a large order of clocks. As the pendulum reached the apex of each swing, an attached piece would be caused to move for just an instant. This piece made up half of a rune that kept the pure mana barriers that divided the cells active. Every time it moved, the rune would be temporarily broken, causing the pure mana barriers to drop and the batteries to each fall one cell down the tube with the filled battery falling out the bottom of the tube.

The design was made, but it would take them awhile to build the device. The main challenge would be the size of the components. Not only would they have to forge the tiny pieces, but they would also have to inscribe them with an intricate series of runes.

They had to do all of that, design and build the fire constructs themselves, and work with Kate to get the hunt the monster cores they would need to supply their devices. That was a lot to get done in one month, but Myles was willing to put in the work. Sitting in that wagon, he had felt helpless. Myles never wanted to feel that way again. Having a weapon that could shoot fire certainly seemed like a step in the right direction.